Mixed Race Studies

Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century

Cambridge University Press
January 2009
348 pages
228 x 152 mm; 0.6kg
Hardback ISBN: 9780521884655

Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Professor of Modern History
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

Júnia Ferreira Furtado offers a fascinating study of the world of a freed woman of color in a small Brazilian town where itinerant merchants, former slaves, Portuguese administrators and concubines interact across social and cultural lines. The child of an African slave and a Brazilian military nobleman of Portuguese descent, Chica da Silva won her freedom using social and matrimonial strategies. But her story is not merely the personal history of a woman, or the social history of a colonial Brazilian town. Rather, it provides a historical perspective on the cultural universe she inhabited, and the myths that were created around her in subsequent centuries, as Chica de Silva came to symbolize both an example of racial democracy and the stereotype of licentiousness and sensuality always attributed to the black or mulatta female in the Brazilian popular imagination.

• Explores issues of slavery, racial distinction, gender, social mobility, and local colonial policy
• Draws on a wide range of sources, including major archives in Brazil and Portugal, as well as literature on the colonial period in Portuguese and English
• For scholars in Atlantic history, African diaspora, slavery, gender, and Latin American history

Read the beginning of the introduction here.

The Creole Elite and the Rise of Angolan Proto-Nationalism, 1870–1920

Cambria Press
2008-09-08
340 pages
ISBN: 9781604975291

Jacopo Corrado

This book is about Angolan literature and culture. It investigates a segment of Angolan history and literature, with which even Portuguese-speaking readers are generally not familiar. Its main purpose is to define the features and the literary production of the so-called ‘creole elite’, as well as its contribution to the early manifestations of dissatisfaction towards colonial rule patent during a period of renewed Portuguese commitment to its African colonies, but also of unrealised ambitions, economic crisis, and socio-political upheaval in Angola and in Portugal itself.

Nineteenth-century Angolan society was characterised by the presence of a semi-urbanised commercial and administrative elite of Portuguese-speaking creole families––white, black, some of mixed race, some Catholic and others Protestant, some old established and others cosmopolitan––who were based in the main coastal towns.

As well as their wealth, derived from the functions performed in the colonial administrative, commercial and customs apparatus, their European-influenced culture and habits clearly distinguished them from the broad native population of black peasants and farm workers. In order to expand its control over the region, Portugal desperately needed the support of this kind of non-coloniser urban elite, which was also used as an assimilating force, or better as a source of dissemination of a relevant model of social behaviour. Thus, until the 1850s great creole merchants and inland chiefs dealt in captive slaves, bound for export to Brazil via Cape Verde and São Tomé: the tribal aristocracy and the creole bourgeoisie thrived on the profits of overseas trade and lived in style, consuming imported alcoholic beverages and wearing European clothes.

After the abolition, however, their social and economic position was eroded by an influx of petty merchants and bureaucrats from Portugal who wished to grasp the commercial and employment opportunities created by a new and modern colonial order, anxious to keep up with other European colonial powers engaged in the partition of the African continent.

This book thus considers the first intellectuals, the early printed publications in the country, and the pioneers of Angolan literature who felt the need to raise their roots to higher dignity. Thus, they wrote grammar, dictionaries, poetry, fiction, and of course, incendiary articles denouncing exploitation, racism, and the different treatment afforded by the colonial authorities to Portuguese expatriates and natives.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Cherished Myths
  • The greatest and most Portuguese overseas possession
  • Lusotropicalism
• Chapter 2: The Intellectual Setting
  • The Luso-Atlantic cultural triangle
  • Brazil
  • Portugal
  • The literary and cultural influences
  • Diffusion
  • Association
• Chapter 3: Luanda
  • The advent of modernity
  • Between journalism and literature
  • The new century: Hope and failure
• Chapter 4: The ‘Creole’ Elite and Early ‘Nationalism’
  • The term ‘Creole’
  • The term ‘Nationalism’
• References
• Index

The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesis in Context

Cambria Press
2010-08-08
360 pages
ISBN: 9781604977042

Antonio Olliz-Boyd, Emeritus Professor of Latin American Literature
Temple University

Just beneath the surface of most scholars’ research on the ethno-racial composition of Spanish-speaking America lies a definitive connection between the African Diaspora and the Latin American identity. Although to a lesser extent, this is also true of Portuguese-speaking Brazil—the existence of African-related people and their role as an integral part of the total Latin ethnicity currently appears to be more readily accepted and discussed in Brazil than in other Latin American countries. Afro-Peruvians, Afro-Colombians, Afro-Venezuelans, Afro-Uruguayans, or Afro-Mexicans—to name just a few—are rarely openly acknowledged in most of Spanish-speaking Latin America. However, one cannot deny that African slavery was a fact of life in all the territories colonized and settled by Spain and Portugal in the Americas, and with this, of course, came widespread miscegenation between the European male and the subjugated African female.

More than likely, because of the diversity of racial features, most non-natives do not see the extent to which Latin America’s genetic amalgam can often mask the phenotypic effects of race-mixing. As a result, many researchers and scholars of the area are reluctant to divulge that someone is a descendant of African forebears because doing so might run the risk of one being considered politically incorrect or having debased that person’s character. Whereas in the United States there is little to no stigma attached to the president’s African ancestry, for any president of a Latin American country, one cannot overtly attribute a genetic link to African heritage.

There is extensive research found both in books and articles on the various topics of Afro Latinism/Afro Hispanism that is directed mainly at the non-native. Nonetheless, one still notices either cultural confusion or political reluctance to accept the identity of Blackness that the Latin American native lives with—for himself or for others—on a daily basis. For the average Cuban, Venezuelan, Peruvian, and so forth, along with their Latin counterparts, Blackness in racial terms surfaces as a matter of degrees of African-relatedness that is then counterbalanced by degrees of European and/or Amerindian genomic components. It is only in non-native cultures that one encounters such disparate comparisons as “statistics for Hispanics versus statistics for Blacks.” But is it not possible to find persons that are ethnoracially Black included in the demographics for Hispanics?

The overarching aim of this book, then, is to determine whether it is possible to perceive a constituency within the Latin American whole who is also an integral part of the African Diaspora. It examines the concept of African-relatedness within the totality of the Latin American sphere—not just in one isolated country or region—through a careful process of literary analysis. By exploring the works of Latin American novelists, poets, and lyricists, this study shows how they creatively expose their most intimate feelings on ethnic Blackness through a semiotic reliance on the inner voice. At the same time, the reader becomes a witness to the writers’ associations with a sense of Africanness as it artistically affects them and their communities in their formulations of self-identity.

Unique to this volume is the scholarly presentation of the presence of a group of people in Ghana, West Africa, who owe their raison d’être as a clan to their ancestral origins in Brazil. Having been accepted and received by an endemic tribe of what was called the Gold Coast at an historical moment in the nineteenth century, a community of escaped slaves and deported ex-slaves from Brazilian bondage regrouped as an ethnic whole. The reality of their existence gives new meaning to the term African Diaspora. To this day, their descendants identify themselves as displaced Latin Americans in Africa. Undoubtedly, both this surprising feature of Latin Americans returning to the African continent and the book as a whole will stimulate further discussion on the issue of who is Black and who is Hispanic as well as generate continued, in-depth research on the relationship between two continents and their shared genotypology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Essay I: Aesthetic Blackness in the Creative Literature of the Latin/Hispanic Reality
• Essay II: The Aesthetics of Language as an Experience of the Afro Latin/Afro Hispanic Reality
• Essay III: An Aesthetic Experience: The Reality of Phenotypes and Racial Awareness in Dominican Literature (Julia Alvarez and Loida Maritza Pérez)
• Introduction to Essay IV
• Essay IV: A Latin Identity, An African Experience: The Tabom Brazilians of Ghana
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index

In/visible Sight: The Mixed-Descent Families of Southern New Zealand

Bridget Williams Books also Athabasca University Press
June 2009
220 pages
ISBN: 978-1-877242-43-4

Angela Wanhalla, Lecturer in History
University of Otago, New Zealand

Angela Wanhalla starts her story with the mixed-descent community at Maitapapa, Taieri, where her great-grandparents, John Brown and Mabel Smith, were born. As the book took shape, a community emerged from the records, re-casting history and identity in the present.

Drawing on the experiences of mixed-descent families, In/visible Sight examines the early history of cross-cultural encounter and colonisation in southern New Zealand. There Ngäi Tahu engaged with the European newcomers on a sustained scale from the 1820s, encountering systematic settlement from the 1840s and fighting land alienation from the 1850s. The evolving social world was one framed by marriage, kinship networks and cultural practices – a world in which inter-racial intimacy played a formative role.

In exploring this history through a particular group of family networks, In/visible Sight offers new insights into New Zealand’s colonial past. Marriage as a fundamental social institution in the nineteenth century takes on a different shape when seen through the lens of cross-cultural encounters. The book also outlines some of the contours and ambiguities involved in living as mixed descent in colonial New Zealand.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.

Download the entire book here (9.13 MB).

• Front Matter
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Maps of Key Locations
• Chapter 1. Intimate Histories
• Chapter 2. Pátahi’s Story
• Chapter 3. Interracial Families and Communities
• Chapter 4. Boundary Crossings
• Chapter 5. Fears and Anxieties
• Chapter 6. Racial Categories and Lived Identities
• Chapter 7. Migration Stories
• Chapter 8. In/visible Sight
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index

White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP

The New Press
Fall 2002
496 pages
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-56584-773-6

Kenneth R. Janken, Professor, African and Afro-American Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

A publishing landmark, the first biography of the man who brought the NAACP to national prominence

From his earliest years, Walter White was determined to transcend the rigid boundaries of segregation-era America. An African American of exceptionally light complexion, White went undercover as a young man to expose the depredations of Southern lynch mobs. As executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 until his death in 1955, White was among the nation’s preeminent champions of civil rights, leading influential national campaigns against lynching, segregation in the military, and racism in Hollywood movies.

White is portrayed here for the first time in his full complexity, a man whose physical appearance enabled him to negotiate two very different worlds in segregated America, yet who saw himself above all as an organization man, “Mr. NAACP.” Deeply researched and richly documented, White’s biography provides a revealing vantage point from which to view the leading political and cultural figures of his time—including W.E.B. DuBois, Eleanor Roosevelt, and James Weldon Johnson—and an unrivaled glimpse into the contentious world of civil rights politics and activism in the pre–civil rights era.

But Don’t Call Me White: Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics

Sense Publishers
September 2011
258 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-94-6091-692-2
Paperback ISBN 978-94-6091-691-5

Silvia Cristina Bettez, Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations
School of Education
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Highlighting the words and experiences of 16 mixed race women (who have one white parent and one parent who is a person of color), Silvia Bettez exposes hidden nuances of privilege and oppression related to multiple positionalites associated with race, class, gender and sexuality. These women are “secret agent insiders” to cultural Whiteness who provide unique insights and perspectives that emerge through their mixed race lenses.  Much of what the participants share is never revealed in mixed—White/of color—company.  Although critical of racial power politics and hierarchies, these women were invested in cross-cultural connections and revealed key insights that can aid all in understanding how to better communicate across lines of cultural difference.

This book is an invaluable resource for a wide range of activists, scholars and general readers, including sociologists, sociologists of education, feminists, anti-oppression/social justice scholars, critical multicultural educators, and qualitative researchers who are interested in mixed race issues, cross cultural communication, social justice work, or who simply wish to minimize racial conflict and other forms of oppression.

The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood

Hachette Book Group
2001
368 pages
5-1/2″ x 8-1/4″
Paperback ISBN:9780316284615

Kien Nguyen

A story of hope, a story of survival, and an incredible journey of escape, ‘The Unwanted’ is the only memoir by an Amerasian who stayed behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and who is now living in America.

Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Fourth Edition)

Westview Press
July 2011
400 pages
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780813345543

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Brian D. Smedley, Vice President and Director
Health Policy Institute
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race for more than three centuries, Audrey Smedley shows that “race” is a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Race, in its origin, was not a product of science but of a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.

New coauthor Brian Smedley joins Audrey Smedley in updating this renowned and groundbreaking text. The fourth edition includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and the evolving role of race in American political history. This edition also incorporates recent findings on the human genome and the implications of genomics. Drawing on new understandings of DNA expression, the authors scrutinize the positions of contemporary race scientists who maintain that race is a valid biological concept.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. Etymology of the Term “Race”
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of The Racial Worldview in 19th Century Science
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the US
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: The Election of Barack Obama and the Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• References
• Index

Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

University Press of Florida
2001-01-18
320 pages
6 x 9
ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1835-5; ISBN 10: 0-8130-1835-8

H. Adlai Murdoch, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Adlai Murdoch offers a detailed rereading of five major contemporary French Caribbean writers–Glissant, Condé, Maximin, Dracius-Pinalie, and Chamoiseau. Emphasizing the role of narrative in fashioning the cultural and political doubleness of Caribbean Creole identity, Murdoch shows how these authors actively rewrite their own colonially driven history.

Murdoch maintains that the culture of the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique is less homogeneous and more creatively fragmented than is commonly supposed. Promoting a new vision of this multifaceted region, he challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be both French and West Indian. The author’s own West Indian origin provides him with intimate, firsthand knowledge of the nuances of day-to-day Caribbean life.

While invaluable to students of Caribbean literature, this work will also appeal to those interested in the African diaspora, French and postcolonial studies, and literary theory.

Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California

University of Oklahoma Press
2010
256 pages
5.5″ x 8.5″, Illustrations: 7 B&W Illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806140902
Paperback ISBN: 9780806142371

Carlos Manuel Salomon, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
California State University, East Bay

The first biography of a politically savvy Californio who straddled three eras

Two-time governor of Alta California and prominent businessman after the U.S. annexation, Pío de Jesus Pico was a politically savvy Californio who thrived in both the Mexican and the American periods. This is the first biography of Pico, whose life vibrantly illustrates the opportunities and risks faced by Mexican Americans in those transitional years.

Carlos Manuel Salomon breathes life into the story of Pico, who—despite his mestizo-black heritage—became one of the wealthiest men in California thanks to real estate holdings and who was the last major Californio political figure with economic clout. Salomon traces Pico’s complicated political rise during the Mexican era, leading a revolt against the governor in 1831 that swept him into that office. During his second governorship in 1845 Pico fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States.

Pico faced complex legal and financial problems under the American regime. Salomon argues that it was Pico’s legal struggles with political rivals and land-hungry swindlers that ultimately resulted in the loss of Pico’s entire fortune. Yet as the most litigious Californio of his time, he consistently demonstrated his refusal to become a victim.

Pico is an important transitional figure whose name still resonates in many Southern California locales. His story offers a new view of California history that anticipates a new perspective on the multicultural fabric of the state.