Mixed Race Studies

Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire Among Asian American/ White Couples

Rutgers University Press
June 2009
208 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4533-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4532-5
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-4852-4

Kumiko Nemoto, Associate Professor of Sociology
Western Kentucky University

Despite being far from the norm, interracial relationships are more popular than ever. Racing Romance sheds special light on the bonds between whites and Asian Americans, an important topic that has not garnered well-deserved attention until now. Incorporating life-history narratives and interviews with those currently or previously involved with an interracial partner, Kumiko Nemoto addresses the contradictions and tensions—a result of race, class, and gender—that Asian Americans and whites experience.

Similar to black/white relationships, stereotypes have long played crucial roles in AsianAmerican/white encounters. Partners grapple with media representations of Asian women as submissive or hypersexual and Asian men are often portrayed as weak laborers or powerful martial artists. Racing Romance reveals how allegedly progressive interracial relationships remain firmly shaped by the logic of patriarchy and gender inherent to the ideal of marriage, family, and nation in America, even as this ideal is juxtaposed with discourses of multiculturalism and color blindness.

The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930

Rutgers University Press
January 2013
240 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5462-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5463-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-5464-8

Jolie A. Sheffer, Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.

The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.

By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.

Quicksand and Passing

Rutgers University Press
1986
246 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-8135-1170-4

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Edited by

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels’ greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor’s comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Selected Bibliography
• A Note on the Texts
• Quicksand
• Passing
• Explanatory Notes

For minorities in France, Obama still casts a spell

France 24: International News
2012-08-09

Jon Frosch

Though his reputation among blacks and Arabs in France is showing ever-so-slight signs of wear and tear, US President Barack Obama remains a powerful symbol for French citizens of colour. France24.com takes a closer look.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Anthony Borval, a black Frenchman of Caribbean descent, was elated.

“It was intense, I felt almost American,” the 29-year-old office manager confided. “Obama indirectly sent us a message that anything was possible, a message of hope for minorities in France, where it’s difficult for us to succeed.”

Four years later, as Obama spends the end of his tumultuous first term fighting a tough re-election battle against Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the US president is still a hero for Borval. “His victory taught French people of colour to believe in ourselves,” he said. “Today, I still feel great pride that an African-American is running the world’s superpower.”…

…Perhaps more common than that bluntly pragmatic view is a sense among some French minorities that Obama is an admirable figure who has not fully lived up to his promise. Aziz Senni, 36, is a Moroccan-born Frenchman who founded an investment fund specialising in economic development in the “banlieue”. Like many people of colour in France, Senni says he was captivated by Obama’s rise and impressed with Americans for voting a black man into the White House just decades after the civil rights movement.

But Senni also noted that “like all new things, time goes by, the shine fades, and there are disappointments”. He cited Obama’s failure to advance the Mideast peace process, something that has tarnished the US president’s image among Arabs around the world. “We had a lot of hope after his Cairo speech, but he’s mainly been the same as his predecessors on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Senni assessed. “That’s the reality of being an American president.”…

…French mistrust of multiculturalism has deep roots: since the French Revolution, the country has clung to the notion that a common French identity could override differences in race and creed. The problem, according to Ndiaye, is that “Frenchness” has not always been as inclusive in practice as it is in principle. “After France’s colonies became independent, France thought of itself as essentially white,” the historian stated. “And many French people feared that immigration from former colonies would cause the republic to be fractured.”

The result is a theoretically colour-blind country in which close-knit ethnic and religious groups are often viewed warily, politicians avoid referring to specific communities of voters, and disdain for affirmative action (known here as “positive discrimination”) is common on both sides of the political aisle.

According to Ndiaye, however, it is affirmative action that could eventually help France create conditions from which a French Obama might one day emerge. “Obama didn’t come out of nowhere,” he explained. “There is a critical mass of 10,000 elected black officials in America, from sheriffs to mayors to Congressmen to the president. Affirmative action helped. We need that in France.”…

Read the entire article here.

Rutgers Group Brings Students Together to Explore the Complexities of Being Multiracial

Focus
Rutgers University News
September 2012

Carrie Stetler

By 2050, one in five Americans is likely to be multiracial

It’s a question Joan Gan hears a lot: “What are you?” She instantly knows what it means.

Her father is Chinese and her mother is Greek, so when people meet her for the first time, they often have trouble identifying her ethnicity.

Gan, a Rutgers junior who grew up in Parsippany, understands their curiosity, and the questions don’t really bother her. But other aspects of growing up biracial were harder to negotiate.

“In high school I saw lots of ethnic clubs, and at colleges, too, and I didn’t really know which one to join,” says Gan, an environmental science major. “Even though I’m technically Asian, people don’t consider me one of them and technically I’m white, but people don’t always consider me that, either.”

During her first year at Rutgers, Gan discovered Fusion: Rutgers Union of Mixed People, which gives her and other students an opportunity to come together and explore the challenges and complexities of being multiracial…

…Fusion began seven years ago when Rutgers psychology professor Diana Sanchez, who is now the club’s adviser, started researching biracial and multiracial identity.

“As a way of connection multiracial students and getting participants for my research, I asked a student I knew to start an organization and he did,’’ says Sanchez, an an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, in the School of Arts and Sciences.. “Multiracial people hold a unique view of race; they’ve questioned it in a very different way. If you feel ‘in between’ communities, there is another identity you form that has to do with the merging of both those identities.”

Phillip Handy, who graduated in 2009, was one of the co-founders of Fusion. He is half European and half African American. “Racial conversations at Rutgers … often viewed race in a very categorical way,” says Handy, who grew up in Howell and now lives in California.“I thought the discussions would be enhanced by a multiracial student group.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race teen in the middle: who will she choose?

Tampa Bay Times
St. Petersburg, Florida
2012-09-23

Leonora LaPeter Anton, Times Staff Writer

Her dark eyes scanned the fluorescent-lit lunchroom, locking onto her friends in the center of the chaos. Her thoughts sprayed in many directions: the upcoming eighth-grade formal, a surprisingly bad grade she recently got on an English paper, her role in the school play.

She passed a table full of white girls and one of them high-fived her. She passed a table full of white boys and one of them called her name. She arrived at a table full of black girls — the table where she sits almost every day. As she set her notebook down, one of her best girlfriends ignored her and moved to another table.

Asianna Williams, 14, wanted to ignore the drama. She is a light-skinned mixed-race girl trying to discover who she is in a society that still carves up territory by race. Nowhere was this more evident than in the lunchroom at Thurgood Marshall Fundamental Middle School. Table after table, as far as the eye could see, white faces congregated around one table, black faces around another.

Asianna’s father is black and her mother is white. Years ago, this might have relegated her to a no-man’s land, not fully welcomed by either blacks or whites. Now, thanks in part to sheer numbers (last year, there were 42 other mixed-race students at Thurgood Marshall), Asianna doesn’t feel ostracism. But she does feel pressure.

Pressure to choose black kids. Pressure to choose white kids. Like the tables in the lunchroom, nearly everything Asianna does — and she does a lot of things — comes with an overlay of race.

But what if you were someone who didn’t want to choose?…

…There have always been people of mixed race in American society. Cultural taboos and prejudice often meant they simply identified themselves as black, or if their skin was sufficiently light-colored, tried to pass as white…

Read the entire article here.

Assimilating Hawai‘i: Racial Science in a Colonial “Laboratory,” 1919-1939

University of Minnesota
July 2012
322 pages

Christine Leah Manganaro

A DISSERTATION IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation demonstrates how American physical anthropologists and sociologists working in Hawai‘i framed the biological and cultural assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into Americanness as natural rather than ideological, thus naturalizing the islands’ incorporation into the United States as a story about integration rather than colonization. Scientists argued that mixing in this “racial laboratory” improved the quality of the majority non-white population, that migration and colonization were features of a natural historical trajectory of Americanization, and that race relations in the islands were the product of a human ecology that went hand in hand with capitalist development. All of these ideas became the racial common sense that traveled to the continental U.S. and perpetuated American amnesia about empire.

This project revisits the historiography of the supposed retreat of scientific racism and, by closely examining the methods, actual data, and conclusions of scientists whose work shaped their disciplines, demonstrates how racialist thinking persisted in work that has been characterized as either questioning the race concept, as politically progressive, or both. Taking cues from studies of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and recent debate about the actuality of a retreat of scientific racism in the United States, this dissertation demonstrates how treating assimilation as a natural process that needed to be better understood, rather than a discursive project of colonial governance, legitimated American power in the islands.

During a period when scientists and politicians alike were interested in fitness, degeneracy, and the consequences of immigration and miscegenation as part of debates about national progress, scientists viewed Hawai‘i as a laboratory where they could conduct research on heredity and cultural change that was difficult or impossible to do in the continental United States. American social scientists working in Hawai‘i framed the processes they studied, particularly the assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into American culture and identity, as natural rather than ideological. American scientists with sometimes opposing political orientations such as Louis R. Sullivan and L.C. Dunn concluded that, unlike mixed race people generally and especially “mulattoes,” Chinese-Hawaiian “hybrids” were actually improvements on their supposedly pure parents (chapter 1).

Physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, in his study of racial plasticity among migrants in a changed environment, developed few concrete findings, but helped establish Hawai‘i as a long-term human research site. Sociologist Romanzo Adams, who was trained at the University of Chicago, produced the history of Hawai‘i as a history of admixture that exaggerated the degree of interracial reproduction and suggested that the territorial population was well on its way to complete biological amalgamation (chapter 3).

Through a series of interviews with couples in interracial marriages and the collection of student papers about identity and racial prejudice, many of which contradicted Adams’ findings and predictions, graduate researcher Margaret M. Lam recorded the testimony of residents who both resisted certain types of racialization as they also participated in the construction and maintenance of racial boundaries and meanings (chapter 4).

Finally, sociologist Andrew Lind, framed social inequality and tense race relations in the territory as a product of competition for jobs and housing, a “natural” feature of “human ecology,” rather than a product of intentional labor control and government decisions (chapter 5). This advanced the idea that social conditions in Hawai‘i were a natural product of modernization rather colonization.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Biologically Better” Studies and Hybrids: The Persistence of Racialism in Studies of Race Mixing in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1916-1932
• Chapter 2: A Racial Laboratory for the World: Establishing Studies of Race Mixing, Migration, and Environment in the 1930s
• Chapter 3: Turning a Colony into a Melting Pot: Romanzo Adams’ Interracial Marriage in Hawaii and the Natural History of Hawai‘i’s Americanization, 1919-1937
• Chapter 4: Narrating Colonial Racial Formation: Race Consciousness and Identity in the Vernacular, 1928-1936
• Chapter 5: Defining an “Island Community”: Race Relations as Ecological Succession, 1927-1939
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Poet to discuss biracialism during UHV/ABR Fall Reading Series

University of Houston-Victoria Newswire
Victoria, Texas
2012-09-20

Born to a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father, award-winning author Paisley Rekdal’s mixed heritage often influences her poetry and essay writing.

She will share her insights about biracialism on Sept. 27 as the second speaker in the University of Houston-Victoria/American Book Review Fall Reading Series. Rekdal also will give a reading of her poetry.

The event will begin at noon in the Alcorn Auditorium of UHV University West, 3007 N. Ben Wilson St. It is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

“Rekdal’s interesting mix of style and subject matter is a great addition to our reading series,” said Jeffrey Di Leo, ABR editor and publisher, and dean of the UHV School of Arts & Sciences. “As an Asian American, she gives a voice to a part of biracialism that is underrepresented and continues that theme to other subjects that are often overlooked.”

During the event, Rekdal plans on reading and sharing photographs from her latest book, “Intimate: An American Family Album.” The book is a hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, fiction and nonfiction with photography from Edward S. Curtis, a famous photographer of the American West and Native American people.

The book explores her father’s mixed-race marriage to her mother while paralleling it with stories about Curtis and his Indian guide, Alexander Upshaw. Rekdal found inspiration by looking at photographs from Curtis and imagined his life.

“It’s a memoir about my family, but it also talks about representation of mixed-race people or how they are not represented,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Intimate: An American Family Photo Album

Tupelo Press
April 2012
300 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-932195-96-5
Clothbound ISBN: 978-1-936797-08-0

Paisley Rekdal, Professor of English
University of Utah

Intimate is a hybrid memoir and “photo album” that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, Intimate creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal’s Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis’s murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

‘The Black Count,’ A Hero On The Field, And The Page

Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2012-09-15

Scott Simon, Host

Tom Reiss, Author

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. By Tom Reiss, 432 pp. Crown Publishers. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7.

Gen. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was one of the heroes of the French Revolution — but you won’t find a statue of him in Paris today.

He led armies of thousands in triumph through treacherous territory, from the snows of the Alps to the sands of Egypt, and his true life stories inspired his son, Alexandre Dumas, to write The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

How did the son of a Haitian slave and a French nobleman become Napoleon’s leading swordsman of the Revolution, then a prisoner, and finally almost forgotten — except in the stories of a son who was not even 4 years old when his father died?

“I like to think of him as history’s ultimate underdog,” says author Tom Reiss. His new book, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, uncovers the real life that inspired so many fictional heroes.

“He’s a black man, born into slavery, and then he rises higher than any black man rose in a white society before our own time,” Reiss tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “He became a four-star general and challenges Napoleon, and he did it all 200 years ago, at the height of slavery.”…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:06:56) here.