Mixed Race Studies

Cosmopolitan or mongrel? Créolité, hybridity and ‘douglarisation’ in Trinidad

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (September 1999)
pages 331-353
DOI: 10.1177/136754949900200303

Eve Stoddard, Dana Professor of Global Studies
St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York

Grant H. Cornwell, President
College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio

The article examines a Trinidadian calypso and its reception as a case study to weigh the discourses of hybridity, creolisation, and a local variant, ‘douglarisation’. In cultural studies discourse, ‘creolisation’ is often used synonymously with hybridization. However, it is a different metaphor, with a different genealogy, and is much more grounded in specific histories and places, namely the New World sites of plantation slavery. In Trinidad, the pejorative term ‘dougla‘ sigmfies the offspring of a union between persons of African and Indian ancestry, while ‘douglarisation’ denotes the contested processes of Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian interculturation. ‘Douglarisation’ can be read as a particular instance of both hybridity and creolisation, but with very different implications. We argue that hybridity and creolisation advance different political agendas, the former attentive to multiple roots and the latter to new connections.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brooklyn Museum Acquires Eighteenth-Century Painting by Agostino Brunias Depicting Dominica Mixed Race Colonial Elite

The Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
T(718) 638-5000, F(718) 501-6134
January 2011

Agostino Brunias (Italian, ca. 1730-1796), Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape, ca. 1764-1796, Oil on canvas, 2010.59, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange.

The Brooklyn Museum has acquired, by purchase from the London Gallery Robilant + Voena, Agostino Brunias’s (1730–96) painting Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape (circa 1764–96), a portrait of the eighteenth-century mixed-race colonial elite of the island of Dominica in the West Indies. Brunias, a London-based Italian painter, left England at the height of his career to chronicle Dominica, then one of Britain’s newest colonies in the Lesser Antilles.

The painting depicts two richly dressed mixed-race women, one of whom was possibly the wife of the artist’s patron. They are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with eight African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation, one of the agricultural estates that were Dominica’s chief source of wealth. Brunias documented colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants by their fitted European dresses.

The painting is a Caribbean version of contemporaneous English works made popular by artists such as William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough, whose art often depicts the landed gentry engaged in leisurely pursuits. Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape and other Caribbean paintings by Brunias celebrate the diversity of European, Caribbean, and African influences in the region.

Although Brunias was originally commissioned to promote upper-class plantation life, his works soon assumed a more subversive, political role throughout the Caribbean as endorsements of a free, anti-slavery society, exposing the artificialities of racial hierarchies in the West Indies. Among his supporters was Haiti’s liberator, François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, who wore on his waistcoat eighteen buttons decorated with reproductions of Brunias’s paintings.

Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape will go on view on March 7, 2011, in the European galleries, on the portraiture wall between contemporaneous female Spanish colonial and French subjects.

Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas

Ashgate Publishing
July 2007
218 pages
219 x 153 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-5189-5

Edited by

Nora E. Jaffary, Associate Professor of History
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

When Europe introduced mechanisms to control New World territories, resources and populations, women-whether African, indigenous, mixed race, or European-responded and participated in multiple ways. By adopting a comprehensive view of female agency, the essays in this collection reveal the varied implications of women’s experiences in colonialism in North and South America.

Although the Spanish American context receives particular attention here, the volume contrasts the context of both colonial Mexico and Peru to every other major geographic region that became a focus of European imperialism in the early modern period: the Caribbean, Brazil, English America, and New France. The chapters provide a coherent perspective on the comparative history of European colonialism in the Americas through their united treatment of four central themes: the gendered implications of life on colonial frontiers; non-European women’s relationships to Christian institutions; the implications of race-mixing; and social networks established by women of various ethnicities in the colonial context.

This volume adds a new dimension to current scholarship in Atlantic history through its emphasis on culture, gender and race, and through its explicit effort to link religion to the broader imperial framework of economic extraction and political domination.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Contextualizing race, gender, and religion in the New World Nora E. Jaffary
• Part 1: Frontiers
  • 2. Women as go-betweens? Patterns in 16th-century Brazil Alida C. Metcalf
  • 3. Gender and violence: conquest, conversion, and culture on new Spain’s imperial frontier Bruce A. Erickson
  • 4. The very sinews of a new Colony: demographic determinism and the history of early Georgia women, 1732–52 Ben Marsh
• Part 2: Female Religious
  • 5. The convent as missionary in 17th-century France Susan Broomhall
  • 6. ‘Although I am black, I am beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla Joan C. Bristol
  • 7. Andean women in religion: Beatas, ‘decency’, and the defense of honour in colonial Cuzco Kathryn Burns
• Part 3: Race Mixing
  • 8. Incest, sexual virtue, and social mobility in late colonial Mexico Nora E. Jaffary
  • 9. ‘An empire founded on libertinage’: The mulâtresse and colonial anxiety in Saint Domingue
    Yvonne Fabella
  • 10. Mediating Mackinac: métis women’s cultural persistence in the Upper Great Lakes Bethany Fleming
• Part 4: Networks
  • 11. Circuits of knowledge among women in early-17th-century Lima Nancy E. van Deusen
  • 12. Waters of faith, currents of freedom: gender, religion, and ethnicity in inter-imperial trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme Linda M. Rupert
• Afterword
  • Women in the Atlantic world
  • Patricia Seed
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the introduction here.

Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiah [Amaye Review]

New Black Arts Alliance
2011-02-18

Muli Amaye, Part 1 Tutor, Creative Writing
Lancaster University

Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. London: Routledge, 2009, 186 pp. Hardback ISBN 978-0-415-87226-3, Paperback ISBN 978-0-415-89391-6, eBook ISBN 978-0-203-85736-6.

As a part of the Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora this book is a necessary and useful addition. The fact that it brings a lot of research and theory together makes it a good starting point for information on an important part of the Diaspora that is often overlooked, other than with curiosity or somewhat derogatory terms.

Overall the book is informative and provides the reader with extensive notes at the end broken down by chapters and a thorough bibliography. McNeil has linked theories and philosophies to literature and contemporary TV/film in a way that provides the reader with understandable examples and brings the text to life. The writing is accessible and readable using language in a way that opens the book up from pure academia and puts it into the public sphere.

The book is split into 6 main chapters plus a preface and a conclusion. The headings for the chapters do not give a lot on information for the reader looking for specific information, however, the short preface deals with this. Each chapter draws on what has been written previously i.e. Schulyer, Rank and Du Bois are used comparatively throughout, which gives the book coherence.

Overall this book is a comprehensive look at the mixed race population bringing the debate right up to date and offering a fresh look at theories and philosophies by introducing creative expression into the forum. By challenging what has been written and debated before McNeil encourages the reader to think beyond what has always been on offer by leading theorists and to question whether it is time for a fresh look.

The following is a very brief overview of each chapter.

Preface

The preface introduces the book immediately by offering opening literary credits followed by a personal anecdote. This promises a fresh look at theory and literature offering grounded in reality. It gives a brief outline of each chapter, which is a useful for research purposes, although the length and accessibility of the text makes reading the whole book easy.

McNeil begins his acknowledgement outlining his reasons for writing this book, which once more added a personal touch for the reader particularly when he explains that the text was born from anger. The reading belies this emotion because it is offered as a scholarly text and fits well within that remit.

Chapter 1 – New People?

Starting with a quote from Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden (1899) ending with the line ‘Half devil and half child’ McNeill sets up the tone of the chapter and alerts the reader to his critique of what has gone before. The title indicates that McNeill is not making a judgment with what is to come but is questioning and enquiring through the literature that has gone before.

This chapter, as expected, is a literature review and offers the reader an in depth insight into the literature that has gone before and gives a historical account of the ‘half-caste’ and ‘mulatto’ from colonization onwards. This is very informative and gives the reader the opportunity to research further from Du Bois, Schulyer and Rogers to the novel Quicksand by Nella Larsen. McNeill refers to philosophers such as Rank and Freud, Fanon and introduces lesser-known theorists as well as making reference to modern day mixed race celebrities.

This chapter is American-centric although there are a few references to the UK. What stands out immediately is the reference to female writers and actors, which makes a welcome change.

Chapter 2 – An Individualistic Age?

This chapter begins with a quote from Otto Rank making reference to Freud and opens with a reference to both Marx and Freud dreaming about ‘grotesque racial hybrids’. This sets the tone for the chapter, which then goes on to give a brief history of Otto Rank and his ‘psychoanalytic study of the artist’. McNeil covers Du Bois and Fanon in separate headed sections that are informative and turns up some little known information that questions the male orientated view of these well-known philosophers, particularly around light skinned females.

What is interesting is the references McNeil makes throughout to females rather than males, which is a refreshing change.

Chapter 3 – Je suis metisse

This chapter begins with two quotes, one from The Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1939 and one from Nancy Cunard’s Negro (1970) both of which make reference to Harlem.

The chapter focuses on the female and American culture. It gives an insight into the life of concert pianist and composer, Philippa Schuyler and her denial of her racial background in the 1950s.

McNeil explores this fully with referencing and quotes that shows his extensive research. He offers a fully complex character who does not conform to what is expected either of a female or a person of colour and it is this thorough investigation and reference to the philosophies that have gone before that make it interesting and thought provoking.

Chapter 4 – “I. Am. A Light Grey Canadian.”

This chapter begins with quotes by Marx and Rank. As the title suggests it is an exploration of the mixed race Canadian and introduces the work of Lawrence Hill who is also a novelist and is described by McNeil as ‘probably the most famous name in Canadian Studies of mixed race.’

The chapter quickly moves on to Dr Daniel Hill’s studies and after thorough and comparative investigation concludes that the writer does not necessarily agree with other scholars who claim his work updates Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, but as his final sentence in this chapter states it is about adding ‘context and understanding…in the study of mixed-race identities.’

Chapter 5 “I’m Black. Not Mixed. Not Canadian. Not African. Just Black.”

This chapter begins with quotes from Fanon and Rosa Emilia Warder.

The focus is once more on Canada and the ‘Altantic thinkers’ but is informative and explores Fanon and James then moves onto Merseyside, which brings the text to the UK and McNeil’s personal interest. This is once more well researched and is thorough in its approach looking at both male and female perspectives as it moves from Nova Scotia to Merseyside and incorporates Hollywood stars and TV personalities.

Chapter 6 “Yes, We’re All Individuals!” “I’m Not.”

This chapter begins with a long quote from Maria P. Root, “Multiracial Bill of Rights” and a further quote from Siobhan Somerville.

The whole chapter is dedicated to mixed race celebrities and explores and examines through film and books and reference to philosophies and theories. This chapter incorporates sexuality, which the quote from Somerville suggests. McNeil uses contemporary films such as “Walking Tall” (2004) which stars ‘The Rock’ to illustrate his points. He ends the chapter in discussion of footballs Stan Collymore and referring to Rank and bringing the discussion back to Liverpool and the UK.

Conclusion

The short conclusion starts with a quote by SuAndi and a short paragraph outlines her stance with regard to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.

McNeil does not offer the usual summing up within his conclusion but offers an in-depth look into the British comedy, The Office and makes reference to Star Trek. This does not detract from the book as an excellent source of information but reiterates the fresh eye with which he has surveyed the literature and film that has gone before and offered it to the reader with a new and clear perspective.

Mixed-Race Celebrities on Race, in their Own Words

Time Magazine: Healthland
2011-02-15

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

Who Are You?

If biracial and multiracial celebrities have anything in common, it is that they are often asked to explain themselves. That may sound familiar to any person of mixed ancestry for whom questions like “What are you?” and the slightly more delicate “Where are your parents from?” are the norm.

“Historically, racism is equated with segregation, separating people,” says Marcia Alesan Dawkins, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. “In turn, we think racial progress is racial mixing. But the problem is, [that progress is] still based on appearance.”

People who embody racial diversity can’t be expected to explain the concept to everybody else, but their thoughts on the matter are often illuminating. As Dawkins said, “It’s still important to bring issues of multiracial identity to the public’s attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas [Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 92, Issue 3 (2005)
pages 974-975
DOI: 10.2307/3660015

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, isbn 0-252-02939-9. Paper, isbn 0-252-07194-8.)

Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women’s economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections…

…Virtually all the authors cite light skin and similar economic occupations as characteristic of free women of color. Félix V. Matos Rodréguez, for example, describes various food-selling establishments operated by free women of color, who made up the majority of street vendors in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the United States as well, Loren Schweninger and Wilma King cite free women who earned their living as “laundresses, maids, seamstresses, cooks, midwives, venders, and servants” (p. 107) and a few who managed to own substantial property or small businesses.

Another common experience that connected the lives of free nonwhite women across national borders was the exploitive sexual system that permeated slave societies. Negative racial and gender stereotypes encouraged the rape and sexual degradation of relatively powerless enslaved and free women of color. There was another side to sexual exploitation, however. Many women of color manipulated the practice of concubinage (which often began with rape) to their advantage. Trevor Burnard tells the story of Phibbah, a Jamaican slave who gained social authority among slaves, profitable employment, property ownership, and ultimately freedom as a result of becoming the concubine of her powerful overseer. Virginia Meacham Gould similarly traces the freedom and prosperity of Henriette Delille of New Orleans, a proper Catholic Creole of color, to maternal African ancestors who escaped slavery on account of their descent from one of Louisiana’s wealthiest white colonists…

Read the entire review here.

Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States

Michigan Journal of Race & Law
Volume 14, Issue 2 (Spring 2009)
pages 143-195

D. Wendy Greene, Assistant Professor of Law
Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

Recently, the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Mato Grasso du Sol have implemented race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education. These states have established admissions quotas in public universities for Afro-Brazilians or afrodescendentes. As a result, determining “who is Black” has become a complex yet important undertaking in Brazil. Contrary to many scholars’ advancements race in Brazil is skin color or physical appearance, whereas in the United States race is based on ancestry, this Article advances the notion that in both American countries one’s physical appearance is the primary determinant of Blackness. Furthermore, when U.S. courts have been charged with determining Blackness, racial constructs based on physical appearance—not the rule of hypodescent—have steered their legal pronouncement of race. This Article first offers a necessary survey of African slavery in Brazil and the United States. This Article demonstrates that despite the contrasts in demography, slave law, and ensuing racial ideology—“racial democracy” in Brazil and “racial purity” in the United States—the enslavement and subordination of Africans and their descendants spawned a common racial hierarchy and assembly of phenotypes designating Blackness and whiteness. Moreover, this Article surveys historical and contemporary racial determination cases which demonstrate the salience of physical appearance in determining race in the United States and debunks the notion that the hypodescent rule is applied to determine “Blackness”. These cases additionally illuminate the paradoxical nature of race—specifically Blackness and whiteness—in the Americas; race is contextual, subjective, and malleable yet simultaneously fixed, as physical constructs of Blackness and whiteness have transcended geography, time, ideology, and demography. Ultimately, this exploration of racial determination cases imparts insight and guidance to Brazilian arbiters currently determining who is Afro-Brazilian for affirmative action purposes.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. Slavery, Race, and Racial Ideology in Brazil and the United States Settlement, Slavery, and Demography
  • A. Race, Racial Ideology, and Racial Hierarchy
  • B. Brazil: A “Racial Democracy”
  • C. The United States: A “Racially Pure” Nation
  • D. Brazil and the United States: A Transnational Concept of Race and Racial Hierarchy
• II. Constructing Race: The Role of U.S. Courts
  • A. Race as Physical Appearance and Beyond in the Nineteenth Century: Hudgins v. Wright and White v. Tax Collector
  • B. Racial Determination in the Early Twentieth Century: In Re Cruz
  • C. Moving Toward a New Millennium Yet Mired in the Past: The Malone and Perkins Cases
• III. The Application of U.S. Racial Determination Methods to the Brazilian Case
• CONCLUSION

On January 20, 2009 Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. Throughout President Obama’s candidacy and after his victory, one of the primary queries raised by the media revolved around his race: is America “ready” for a Black president? Even though it is publicly known that Obama’s mother is a white American from the Midwest and his father is a native of Kenya, the press as well as most Americans would describe Senator Obama as the first Black president of the United States, rather than the first mixed-race president. The general depiction and acceptance of Senator Obama as Black rather than multiracial generates important questions related to America’s common understanding of race. In the United States, is Obama deemed Black because he has self-identified as Black? Is Obama defined as Black due to his known African ancestry? Or is Obama generally regarded as Black in the United States, despite his known white parentage, because of his physical appearance—one which conforms to a socially constructed image of Blackness?

Since the era of Jim Crow, the rule of hypodescent—the presence of one ancestor of African descent makes an individual’s race Black—has been articulated as the guiding principle for determining one’s “Blackness” and “whiteness” in the United States. Accordingly, ancestry allegedly determines Blackness in the United States dissimilarly to Brazil, where one’s physical appearance is determinative. In Brazil it is widely acknowledged that most Brazilians are descendants of Africans in light of the pervasive miscegenation that occurred during and after the Portuguese and Brazilian enslavement of Africans. Therefore, one’s physical appearance—hair texture, skin color, nose size, eye shape, etc.—determines one’s race in Brazil. Contrary to scholarly opinion “[u]nlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry” and public adherence to this idea, one’s physical appearance is the primary determinant of Blackness in both American countries. Indeed, an individual’s ancestry is necessarily implicated in determining race based on his or her physical appearance, as this method of classifying race is grounded in socially mediated presumptions concerning how an individual’s physical appearance denotes his or her genetic makeup…

…This Article examines the alleged complexity of determining who is Black or Afro-Brazilian for affirmative action purposes in higher education while surveying United States racial determination jurisprudence. This Article is not intended to serve as a dissertation on the legality of race-conscious affirmative action or the efficacy of these programs in the United States and Brazil. Since the United States is considered a global forerunner in the implementation of race-conscious affirmative action in higher education and employment, numerous scholars have debated the validity, constitutionality, and utility of race-conscious affirmative action in Brazil through a U.S./Brazil comparative lens. However, there is a paucity of literature exploring fundamental issues in facilitating race-conscious programs: specifically, who is the proper beneficiary; how should this determination be made; and can Brazilian arbiters adopt U.S. judicial modes of determining race to effectuate their raceconscious affirmative action programs? The objective of this Article is to mitigate this void in comparative scholarship by demonstrating the universality of race and the law’s role in constructing race, racial ideology, and racial hierarchy.

First, this Article discusses African slavery in Brazil and the United States, which is crucial to the understanding of race, racial ideology, and racial hierarchy in the two nations. Part I explores the differences and similarities between the conception of race in Brazil and the United States, specifically focusing on the construction of Black, white, and multi-racial classifications. Part I also considers the influence of slavery and settlement patterns on the contrasting racial ideologies in both American nations—“racial democracy” in Brazil and “racial purity” in the United States. Additionally, this section illustrates that a mutual racial hierarchy constructed around physical appearance developed and endures despite the divergent racial ideologies, settlement patterns and slavery law in Brazil and the United States.

Next, Part II examines a series of racial determination cases decided by American courts historically and contemporarily and the various methods these courts appropriated to determine an individual’s race. This survey of racial determination cases illuminates the salience of physical appearance in determining race as well as the paradoxical nature of race—specifically Blackness and whiteness—in the Americas; race is contextual, subjective, and malleable yet simultaneously fixed, as physical constructs of Blackness and whiteness have transcended geography, time, ideology, and demography. Part III concludes with a consideration of Brazilian arbiters adopting American judicial modes of determining race and the potential consequences of doing so…

Read the entire article here.

All Things Being Equal: The Promise of Affirmative Efforts to Eradicate Color-Coded Inequality in the United States and Brazil

National Black Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 3 (2009)
41 pages

Tanya M. Washington, Associate Professor of Law
Georgia State University

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society . . . ?” A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.

Introduction

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society… ?”1 A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.  This conclusion, in turn, would inform a judgment as to the relative necessity and efficacy of the administration of affirmative action in both nations. Instead of using the apparent differences between legal definitions of race and color in the two countries as a reference point for comparing the utility of affirmative action as a means of eradicating color-coded inequality, this article uses as its point of departure, the similar ways that racial and color-based inequality have been manufactured in the United States and Brazil.4 “Because they share the same battle against insidious systems of racial hierarchy, it is sensible for both Americas to… focus upon the commonality of the historical legacy of slavery and its outgrowth in the continuing societal efforts to maintain privilege…” “North and South America… share a societal use of segregation for the promotion of supremacy. The segregation of education has been a key to this agenda of privilege.” Within the context of education, this piece treats affirmative action as a crucible, revealing racialized narratives, polarities, hierarchies and constructs, which have created and maintained the color-coded inequality that characterizes both American and Brazilian social, political, and economic realities…

…A substantively different construction of affirmative action, called by the same name, is being implemented in Brazil. Brazil has historically been described as a Racial Democracy, a national ideology that shares with colorblindness a resistance to the legal relevance of race. As this ideology yields to a national narrative that recognizes color-coded realities,16 the Brazilian government is utilizing the most aggressive form of affirmative action, quotas, to both remedy significant racialized social, economic and political disparities and to achieve substantive economic, social and political equality for its citizens. Brazilians opposed to affirmative action practices and policies, echoing objections raised by affirmative action detractors in the United States, charge that racial assignment and classification for the purpose of including some and excluding others (i.e., the legalization of racial classifications) is divisive,17 destabilizing, and impossible in a nation that has existed without categorical racial identities. This article considers whether a diversity focused affirmative action policy would provide a more politically palatable framework for race-conscious governmental action, and offer a justification that is more concentric with the Brazilian orientation towards difference, than a remediation focused policy.

The growing awareness of racial disparities as a catalyst to and justification for efforts to achieve substantive equality in Brazil and the growing reticence in the United States to the use of race conscious means of facilitating substantive equality, provide a unique opportunity for a comparative analysis of the ways in which racism and colorism construct social, economic and political inequality for Afro- Brazilians and Black Americans and the extent to which affirmative action can provide an effective vehicle for reform in both nations. Part I of this article begins with an examination of the history and evolution of the significance and uses of race and color that have informed the current climate of raceblindness in the face of racial inequality in both nations. This section explores the ways in which the legend of Racial Democracy continues to pervade perceptions of race and challenge efforts to remedy racial inequities in Brazil and the ways in which the ideology of colorblindness has provided a jurisprudential framework inherently hostile to race-conscious efforts to achieve substantive equality in America.

Part II of this article highlights racial disparities in both nations and identifies racial polarity, which expresses fixed and diametrically opposed valuations of whiteness and blackness, reflected in white-to-black color hierarchies that operate in both the United States and Brazil, as their chief article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil architect. In keeping with this theme, race and color are considered throughout this piece within a binary (black/white) framework, which underscores the central thesis that black-white racial polarities, in concert with normative whiteness, create substantive social, economic, and political inequality in both countries.

Part III of this article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil and addresses how racial and color-based inequality are both masked and manufactured at the intersection of racial polarity and resistance to an acknowledgement of the legal relevance of race in both nations. This section of the article then focuses on the prospects of a Brazilian affirmative action project based on educational diversity and its transformative possibilities for creating substantive equality. It highlights how Brazil’s Constitution and its affirmative action legislation accommodate and instigate responses to racial inequality that challenge normative whiteness. This article ends on an optimistic note, concluding that an educational diversity focused affirmative action project may be a more effective tool with which to disrupt racial polarity in Brazil and dismantle the consequent color hierarchy that creates and perpetuates substantive inequality.

…The prospect of freedom for the slaves inspired insecurity among white Brazilians, and created the need for structures and policies that would maintain their status as the ruling elite. Responding to this exigency, the Brazilian government engaged in large scale immigration of European whites and encouraged miscegenation in order to improve the racial balance between blacks and whites. The “whitening” of the Brazilian population, through miscegenation, was believed to have a civilizing effect on the Brazilian population of observable African ancestry and reinforced normative whiteness (i.e., whiteness as the value standard). A popular slogan of the day, “Marry White to Improve the Race,” captured the pervasive sentiment.

Gilberto Freyre, credited with popularizing the idea of Racial Democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, studied at Baylor University in Texas in the early 1900s and reacted with horror to the Jim Crow institutions and practices he witnessed during his visit, including a lynching.

The shock of Freyre’s encounter with the racial hostility and segregation of the United States led him to construct a vision of Brazil’s past (and, by extension, its present and future) that proved deeply appealing to many Brazilians. Scientific racism and its Brazilian variant, the whitening thesis, had viewed Brazil’s history of slavery and miscegenation, and the racially mixed population which was its legacy, as shameful obstacles that had to be overcome if Brazil were to enter the community of civilized nations. Freyre… rehabilitated that past, recasting it as the basis of a new national identity independent, for the first time in Brazilian history, of European norms and models…. Freyre’s writings thus became the basis of a new, semi-official ideology propagated in public proclamations, schools, universities, and the national media…

Read the entire article here.

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity [Review]

H-Net Reviews
February 2010

Lorenzo Veracini

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond. White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Cloth ISBN 978-1-4039-7595-9.

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond has published a persuasive outline and contextualization of Brazilian “Race Democracy” advocate Gilberto Freyre. In a forthcoming book, I argue that settler projects use a variety of “transfers” in order to manage indigenous and exogenous alterity in their respective population economies, and that “transfer” does not apply only to people pushed across borders. This review of White Negritude contends that Freyre was indeed a master (discursive) transferist.

Casa Grande e Senzala (1933) proposed a reading of Brazilian race relations that in many ways remains paradigmatic. The specific conditions afforded by a tropical environment and the encounter between Portuguese colonizers and African slaves had produced a uniquely Brazilian synthesis. The master/slave dialectic had been upturned; the inherent antagonism and violence that should have accompanied that relation had been defused. This synthesis, Freyre argued, demonstrated among other things Brazil’s superiority to the United States. While this stance contributed to Casa Grande e Senzala’s reception and career, Isfahani-Hammond suggests that it may also have prevented scrutiny—Brazilian race relations are still routinely construed—both in Brazil and in the US—as primarily an “antithesis” of something else. Freyre, the generally accepted reading goes, made the Afro-Brazilian a central character of the national narrative, recognized that the slaves were the true colonizers, framed senzala and Casa Grande in the same interpretative frame, and proposed a consistently non-eugenicist reading of Brazilian society and culture. Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond successfully problematises this interpretation.

The main point in Freyre’s argument is that Brazilian slave masters identify with their slaves and, having assimilated their cultural traits, can therefore genuinely and authentically represent them. This identification is acquired, for example, via sexual (non reproductive and noncoercive) intercourse with black women. Afro-Brazilian “atmospheric” influences are thus transferred to the white masters in the unique context of the northeastern Brazilian plantation complex (a self-contained social microcosm that is presented as the epicentre of the Brazilian cultural experience). Isfahani-Hammond insists on Freyre’s strategic disavowal of genetic hybridisation. Branquemento (“whitening”) was one available possibility, an approach that advocated the progressive elimination of black genes through miscegenation and immigration policies that favoured Europeans. Freyre, on the other hand, developed more effective discursive strategies. This is where Isfahani-Hammond’s argument is most convincing, and Freyre’s “celebration” of Afro-Brazilian cultural traits is shown as ultimately seeking to “replace sociohistorical blackness with a discourse about blackness” (p. 7). In this way, a potentially destabilising oppositional agency is expropriated and circumvented. Despite its ostensibly non-racial determinants, Freyre’s reasoning is shown to actually culminate in the “exclusionary resolution of Brazilian heterogeneity” (p. 14)…

Read the entire review here

The Planter’s Fictions: Identity, Intimacy, and the Negotiations of Power in Colonial Jamaica

University of Victoria, Canada
2010
127 pages

Meleisa Ono-George

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art In the Department of History

By the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as the movement against the slave trade increased in Britain, Creoles, those of British ancestry born in the West Indies, were increasingly criticized for their involvement in slavery. Simon Taylor, a Jamaican-born planter of Scottish ancestry who lived most of his life in the colony, attempted to negotiate competing and often contradictory sensibilities and subject positions as both British and Creole.

One of the central challenges to Taylor’s negotiation of identity was his long-term relationship with Grace Donne, a free mixed-race woman of colour. An examination of their relationship highlights the ways binary discourses and exclusionary practices devised to create and reinforce rigid racial boundaries were regularly crossed and blurred, even by an individual like Simon Taylor, a person well placed to benefit from the policing and maintenance of those boundaries.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. IDENTITY, INTIMACY AND PERFORMANCE
• 2. SIMON TAYLOR AND HIS WORLD.
• 3. A RELATIVELY PRECARIOUS POSITION
• 4. “WASHING THE BLACKMOOR WHITE”: INTIMACY AND POWER
• 5. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction: Identity, Intimacy and Performance

Here lie the remains of the Honorable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man. Who after an active live, during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island, died.
—Inscription on Simon Taylor’s gravestone, Lyssons, Jamaica.

Shortly after his death in the summer of 1813, the body of Simon Taylor was exhumed from its burial place at his Prospect Pen estate near Kingston, Jamaica, and moved sixty kilometers away to another family estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East. The means by which his body was carried to St. Thomas created a stir in the sugar colony. The body of Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica’s wealthiest settler at the time of his death, was moved to its final resting place on the back of a mule-drawn cart. The Lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Edward Morrison, wrote in a local newspaper that the whole process “was done in not a very decent manner.” It was an insult to the memory of Simon Taylor, a leading figure and planter in the colony, for his body to be carried to its final burial on a “common mule cart.” During his life, Taylor had worked to embody the very definition of respectability in the colony. The son of a Scottish merchant and Jamaica-born mother of British ancestry, Taylor was born in St. Andrews parish, Jamaica on December 23, 1738. Besides a short period when he attended Eton College in England as a child and studied business in Holland, Taylor spent most of his life in Jamaica where he worked his way up the ladder of colonial society from an estate attorney to the owner of several plantations and over two thousand slaves. From custos and head of the militia to his involvement in the Jamaican House of Assembly, his administrative roles in Jamaica established him firmly within the plantocracy, a small group of large plantation owners who controlled most of the wealth and political life in Jamaica. To many of the colonial elite Taylor was, as his gravestone reads, “a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man.” The focus of this study however is not Taylor’s embodiment of colonial respectability, but rather the ways in which his life reflected the conflicts and complexities of eighteenth century Jamaican slave society. Using the letters of Simon Taylor written to his family, friends, and business associates from 1779 until his death in 1813 as my principal primary source, this thesis will explore colonial identities and the place of interracial intimacy in slave society. I begin this project by setting out the main theoretical arguments that frame and inspire my work. These arguments revolve around three main ideas—the precarious nature of racial and national identity formation in the colony; the colonial anxieties that developed in Jamaica; and the importance of examining social performance and intimacy in order to understand representations of identity and claims of power and cohesion. These are the themes woven throughout this chapter and the focus of this project…

…The multiple and conflicting understandings of difference that proliferated in the late eighteenth century suggest the need to move away from a binary model of analysis of race to one that engages with the spaces in-between—the “uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” that occurred in Jamaica, and the contradictions and anxieties that emerged from this crossing. Boundaries established in racial discourse that separated the “races,” although at times firm, were incomplete and routinely crossed in day-to-day interactions between individuals. The large number of mixed-race people in Jamaica by the end of the eighteenth century and the substantial amount of property bequeathed to them by their white fathers attests to how frequently racial divisions were blurred. As Catherine Hall argues, “it is not possible to make sense of empire either theoretically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking. Although the language of self/other and master/slave is very useful in understanding national and racial identity formation and power, such dichotomies cannot fully capture the complex and nuanced interactions of people, especially in colonial “contact zones” like Jamaica. “Cross-cutting ways of thinking” are needed in the examination of Jamaican slave society in order to understand the detailed hierarchies of race and difference and the complicated movements and exchanges between individuals in the colony…

…Chapter three examines Simon Taylor’s relationship with his housekeeper, Grace Donne. The framework of intimacy will allow me to explore and illuminate the contradictions between the ideals of British respectability that Simon Taylor attempted to maintain, especially under a metropolitan gaze, and his feelings of affection towards Grace Donne and his mixed-race family. In addition, I will attempt to situate Grace Donne, a free woman of colour who lived with Simon Taylor for thirty-six years, as a central actor in his life, despite her conspicuous absence from his letters. I use the story of Simon Taylor and Grace Donne as a case study to show the ambiguities inherent in Jamaican slave society and to highlight the ways in which intimate interracial relationships threatened to undermine the hierarchies needed to maintain slave society. On occasion, sentiment as much as skin colour or class was the basis on which alliances were fashioned, boundaries crossed, and power negotiated…

Read the entire thesis here.