Mixed Race Studies

Recasting Race: women of mixed heritage in further education

Trentham Books
January 2008
160 pages
234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781858564050
ISBN-13: 978 1 85856 405 0

Indra Angeli Dewan
Department of Sociology
University of East London

The mixed race population has shown an unprecedented increase in Britain in the last few years, and mixed race is currently heralded as the UK’s fastest growing ethnic group. Whilst this development has been reflected in the recent rapid growth in mixed race studies, this is the first book which specifically examines the relationship between mixed heritage women and the further education sector.

Drawing on mixed race women’s narratives on identity and further education, this book challenges some of the conceptualisations of race, culture and mixed race identity in contemporary sociological literature, and critically examines government discourses around personhood and equity identifiable in post-compulsory education policy. The data reveal that competing discourses of individualism, essentialism and postmodernism are at work, and that it is necessary to understand the interplay of these discourses in order to do justice to the complexity and multiplicity of ways in which the women in the study speak about their identities and experiences.

Recasting Race is important reading for those working in the fields of sociology, sociology of education, cultural studies, and gender and feminist studies, as well as for those developing and teaching on undergraduate and graduate courses in education, and PGCE and Cert Ed. courses. It discusses some of the implications the research has for feminist politics, and provides a source for future education policy and practice recommendations which take the experiences of mixed race people into account.

Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America

University of Michigan Press
2006
208 pages
6 x 9; 11 Tables & 8 Figures.
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-03280-8

Kim M. Williams, Associate Professor of Political Science; Academic Director of the Center for Women, Politics & Policy at the Hatfield School of Government
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

The little-known story of the struggle to include a multiracial category on the U.S. census, and the profound changes it wrought in the American political landscape.

Mark One or More tells the little-known story of the struggle to include a multiracial category on the U.S. census, and the profound changes it wrought in the American political landscape.

The movement to add a multiracial category to the 2000 U.S. Census provoked unprecedented debates about race. The effort made for strange bedfellows.  Republicans like House Speaker Newt Gingrich and affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly took up the multiracial cause. Civil rights leaders opposed the movement on the premise that it had the potential to dilute the census count of traditional minority groups. The activists themselves—a loose confederation of organizations, many led by the white mothers of interracial children—wanted recognition. What they got was the transformation of racial politics in America.

Mark One or More is the compelling account of how this small movement sparked a big change, and a moving call to reassess the meaning of racial identity in American life.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance

Rutgers University Press
2006
224 pages
b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3977-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-3976-8

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Of all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes of black womanhood and a challenge to the color line. For others, they represented key aspects of modernity and race coding central to the New Negro Movement. Due to the mulatta’s frequent ability to pass for white, she represented a variety of contradictory meanings that often transcended racial, class, and gender boundaries.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman investigates the visual and literary images of black femininity that occurred between the two world wars. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson traces the origins and popularization of these new representations in the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance and how they became an ambiguous symbol of racial uplift constraining African American womanhood in the early twentieth century.

In this engaging narrative, the author uses the writings of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as well as the work of artists like Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson to illuminate the centrality of the mulatta by examining a variety of competing arguments about race in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

Duke University Press
1997
232 pages
Cloth – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1975-7
Paperback – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1971-9

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Professor
Anthropology and American Studies
Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa

How do adult children of interracial parents—where one parent is Jewish and one is Black—think about personal identity?  This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay’s Black, Jewish, and Interracial.  Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities.

Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson, the Leo Frank case, “passing,” intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness.  Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.

Spurious Issues: Race And Multiracial Identity Politics In The United States

Westview Press
1999-08-12
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0813336775; ISBN-13: 978-0813336770

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Recent times have seen the rise of a movement lobbying for explicit recognition of multiracial identity as separate from any other racial category. Factions in this movement have petitioned the government for the addition of a federal multiracial category to the census and to other official forms. While these attempts have as yet been unsuccessful, the potential impact of such a change cannot be overstated. Rainier Spencer takes up the claims of multiracial activists, subjecting their arguments to a level of scholarly rigor they have heretofore not been required to meet. Demonstrating that the twin justifications for a federal multiracial category—accuracy and self-esteem—are inherently contradictory, Spencer presents an absorbing analysis of race, multirace, and categorization that shakes the very foundations of racial identity on all sides. Spurious Issues is a critical examination of multiracial identity politics in the United States, and of the specific issues surrounding federal racial classification. It is also a book about race generally, an extended argument that invites and challenges its readers to assume a skeptical position in regard to one of the most widely accepted but rarely analyzed components of life in the United States.

Signs of Race in Poststructuralism: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race

University Press of America, Inc.
March 2009
176 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7618-4505-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7618-4506-5

Robert Young, Associate Professor of English
University of Alabama

This book presents a class-based analysis of poststructuralism and race.  The author positions this fundamental question at the heart of his project: why does race still work if it is commonly misunderstood to be a social construct?  The answer is that race works because it operates like a commodity, and like any commodity, as long as it generates value (understood in the widest possible sense: economic, political, and cultural-ideological value), it will remain in circulation.  This study should contribute to our understanding of race by linking questions of use value to exchange value.

Robert Young is associate professor of English at University of Alabama.  He specializes in African-American literary and cultural theory.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Race as Commodity Fetish
• Chapter 2: Putting Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race
• Chapter 3: The Linguistic Turn, Materialism, and Race: The Postmodern Crisis in African-American Literary Theory and Richard Wright‘s Critique of Ideology
• Chapter 4: The Politics of Race and Psychoanalysis: Richard Wright’s Critique of Bourgeois Subjectivity in Savage Holiday
• Chapter 5: Oral Textualities, Oral (Blues) Poetics, and Oral Erotics: Disabling the Exchange Economy in Gayl Jones‘ Corregidora
• Bibliography

Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Indiana University Press
2004-10-12
160 pages
1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21733-2; ISBN: 0-253-21733-4

Cassandra Jackson, Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

This provocative book examines the representation of characters of mixed African and European descent in the works of African American and European American writers of the 19th century.  The importance of mulatto figures as agents of ideological exchange in the American literary tradition has yet to receive sustained critical attention. Going beyond Sterling Brown’s melodramatic stereotype of the mulatto as “tragic figure,” Cassandra Jackson’s close study of nine works of fiction shows how the mulatto trope reveals the social, cultural, and political ideas of the period. Jackson uncovers a vigorous discussion in 19th-century fiction about the role of racial ideology in the creation of an American identity.  She analyzes the themes of race-mixing, the “mulatto,” nation building, and the social fluidity of race (and its imagined biological rigidity) in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Hildreth, Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Thomas Detter, George Washington Cable, and Charles Chesnutt.

The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States

State University of New York (SUNY) Press
August 2009
323 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2753-9
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2754-6

Sally L. Kitch, Distinguished Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Arizona State University

Genealogy of the formation of race and gender hierarchies in the U.S.

Theories of intersectionality have fundamentally transformed how feminists and critical race scholars understand the relationship between race and gender, but are often limited in their focus on contemporary experiences of interlocking oppressions. In The Specter of Sex, Sally L. Kitch explores the “backstory” of intersectionality theory—the historical formation of the racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to structure U.S. culture today. Kitch uses a genealogical approach to explore how a world already divided by gender ideology became one simultaneously obsessed with judgmental ideas about race, starting in Europe and the English colonies in the late seventeenth century. Through an examination of religious, political, and scientific narratives, public policies and testimonies, laws, court cases, and newspaper accounts, The Specter of Sex provides a rare comparative study of the racial formation of five groups—American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and European whites—and reveals gendered patterns that have served white racial dominance and repeated themselves with variations over a two-hundred-year period.

“This gracefully written synthesis of existing historical scholarship advances a position that both asserts distinction between ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as categories and privileges the gendered process of racial formation as key to understanding power and hierarchy in the United States. It is perfect for the classroom and will serve as a guide for theorists who need grounding in history.

Table Of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The “Purloined Letter” of Gendered Race
• Part I: Roots As the Twig is Bent
  • 1. “Women are a Huge Natural Calamity”: The Roots of Western Gender Ideology
  • 2. The First Races in Society: Gendered Roots of Race Formation
  • 3. Gendered Racial Institutions: World Slavery and Nationhood
  • Conclusion: From Gender to Race
• Part II: Bodies Whose Too, Too Solid Flesh?
  • 4. The American “Body Shop”: Gendered Racial Formation in the Colonies and New Republic
  • 5. Enslaved Bodies and Gendered Race
  • 6. Sexual Projection and Race: Science, Politics, and Lust
  • Conclusion: Embodying Race
• Part III: Blood “Off Women Com Owre Manhed”
  • 7. Defining, Measuring, and Ranking Racial Blood: The Ungendered Surface
  • 8. Hardly Gender Neutral
  • 9. Gendered Anti-Miscegenation: Laws and Their Interpretation
  • 10. Preserving White Racial Blood: Rape Accusations and Motherhood
  • Conclusion: Miscegenation as Racial Reconciliation?
• Part IV: Citizenship “My Folks Fought for This Country”
  • 11. What is Citizenship?: Gender and Race
  • 12. Engendering Citizenship: Dependency and Sex
  • 13. “No Can Do” Men and Their Others: Dependency and Inappropriate Gender
  • 14. Mixed Race, Suspect Gender: Both White and . . . Whatever
  • Conclusion: Homosexual Citizenship: A Gendered Racial Oxymoron
• Part V: Implications Patterns for a New Bridge
  • 15. Implications for Feminist Theories of Racial Difference and Antisubordination Politics
  • 16. Gender Implications for Theories of Racial Formation
• Conclusion: Interdependence
• Notes
• Index

Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937

University of Nebraska Press
2006
278 pages
Illus.
hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-1829-1
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2487-2

Katherine Ellinghaus
University of Melbourne

Taking Assimilation to Heart examines marriages between white women and indigenous men in Australia and the United States between 1887 and 1937.  In these settler societies, white women were expected to reproduce white children to keep the white race “pure”–hence special anxieties were associated with their sexuality, and marriages with indigenous men were rare events. As such, these interracial marriages illuminate the complicated social, racial, and national contexts in which they occurred.

This study of the ideological and political context of marriages between white women and indigenous men uncovers striking differences between the policies of assimilation endorsed by Australia and those encouraged by the United States. White Australians emphasized biological absorption, in which indigenous identity would be dissolved through interracial relationships, while white Americans promoted cultural assimilation, attempting to alter the lifestyles of indigenous people rather than their physical appearance. This disparity led, in turn, to differing emphases on humanitarian reforms, education policies, and social mobility, which affected the social status of the white women and indigenous men who married each other.

Shifting from the personal to the local to the transnational, Taking Assimilation to Heart extends our understanding of the ways in which individual lives have been part of the culture of colonialism.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race

University Press of Mississippi
2004
272 pages
bibliography, index
ISBN: 157806676X (9781578066766)

Teresa C. Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

An analysis of how black women used the mulatta figure to contest racial barriers.

From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle for racial justice.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race traces many key instances in which black women have wielded the image of a racially mixed woman to assault the color line.  In the oratory and fiction of black women from the late 1840s through the 1950s, Teresa C. Zackodnik finds the mulatta to be a metaphor of increasing potency.

Before the Civil War white female abolitionists created the image of the “tragic mulatta,” caught between races, rejected by all. African American women put the mulatta to diverse political use.  Black women used the mulatta figure to invoke and manage American and British abolitionist empathy and to contest racial stereotypes of womanhood in the postbellum United States.  The mulatta aided writers in critiquing the “New Negro Renaissance” and gave writers leverage to subvert the aims of mid-twentieth-century mainstream American culture.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race focuses on the antislavery lectures and appearances of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond, the domestic fiction of Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper, the Harlem Renaissance novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and the little-known 1950s texts of Dorothy Lee Dickens and Reba Lee.  Throughout, the author discovers the especially valuable and as yet unexplored contributions of these black women and their uses of the mulatta in prose and speech.