The Myth of Latin American Multiracialism

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Mexico, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2010-03-29 00:06Z by Steven

The Myth of Latin American Multiracialism

Daedalus
Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
Pages 82-87
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124398

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Many Latin American nations have long proudly proclaimed a multiracial ideal: unlike the United States, countries like Brazil and Mexico have celebrated the mixing of races, and claimed to extend equal rights and opportunities to all citizens, regardless of race. As a result of the region’s regnant faith in racial democracy, it has long been widely assumed that Latin American societies are nondiscriminatory and that their deep economic and social disparities have no racial or ethnic component.

Yet new statistical evidence (a byproduct of democratization) suggests that most of the region’s societies have yet to surmount racial discrimination. At the very time that some in the United States have timidly embraced multiracialism as a fitting ideal for North Americans, Latin American critics have begun to argue that multiracialism, like racial democracy, functions as an ideology that masks enduring racial injustice and thus blocks substantial political, social, and economic reform.

Latin American elites have always been deeply concerned about the racial stocks ol their populations and have always prized the European antecedents of their peoples and cultures—just like their Counterparts in the United States. But at the same time, and unlike their U.S. counterparts, Latin American political and cultural leaders in the first half of the twentieth century viewed their societies as unique products of racial intermingling. Sensing that such racial mingling might help define an emergent nationalism, intellectuals and statesmen argued that extensive racial mixture had resulted in the formation of new, characteristically ‘national’ races.

For example, the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (1882- 1959) famously celebrated the idea of racial mixture by arguing that all Latin Americans, and not just Mexicans, were a raza cósmica (cosmic race) comprised of both Spanish and indigenous peoples. But his conception of mixture left no doubt as to the…

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The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

Posted in Anthologies, Arts, Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2010-03-27 03:44Z by Steven

The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

Palgrave Macmillan
January 2005
176 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 1-4039-6708-3
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-6563-3

Edited by:

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

The Masters and the Slaves theorizes the interface of plantation relations with nationalist projects throughout the Americas. In readings that cover a wide range of genres–from essays and scientific writing to poetry, memoirs and the visual arts–this work investigates the post-slavery discourses of Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Martinique. Indebted to Orlando Patterson‘s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy‘s The Black Atlantic (1993), these essays fill a void in studies of plantation power relations for their comparative, interdisciplinary approach and their investment in reading slavery through the gaze of contemporary theory, with particularly strong ties to psychoanalytic and gender studies interrogations of desire and performativity.

Table of contents

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White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Posted in Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science on 2010-03-27 03:29Z by Steven

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2007
208 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-7595-7

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or “mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre‘s sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African “survivals” in decline. Taking Freyre’s master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean “mestizo projects.”

Table of Contents

  • Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction
  • Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima‘s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective
  • White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre
  • Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas
  • From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing
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Uma Mulata, Sim!: Araci Cortes, ‘the mulatta’ of the Teatro de Revista

Posted in Articles, Biography, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2010-03-27 03:09Z by Steven

Uma Mulata, Sim!: Araci Cortes, ‘the mulatta’ of the Teatro de Revista

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2006)
pages 7-26
DOI: 10.1080/07407700500514996

Judith Michelle Williams, Professor of African and African-American Studies
University of Kansas

Araci Cortes, a mulata assumida, rose to be one of the most successful performers in Rio de Janeiro‘s teatro de revista (revue theatre) during the 1920s and 1930s. In this essay I place her career in the context of the Afro-Brazilian artists of her generation and evaluate how her embodiment of the Brazilian mulata on and off the stage interacted with the emerging discourse of Brazil as a mulatto nation. Lauded for her distinct Brazilianness and criticized for her petulant and uncompromising personality, Cortes excelled as a singer, dancer and comic actress, most often portraying the mulatta roles that before her fame were enacted by white actresses. Cortes is a complicated figure who was able to exploit the narratives and stereotypes that surrounded her mixed-race body and gain, fame, fortune and success. Although rather than leave behind her Afro-Brazilian connections she maintained relationships with even the most militant of Brazilian blacks she spoke about race only in the vague terms of her era. Yet through her emblematic performances she reconfigured ideas of gender and race in Brazil. She provides an example of how Afro-Brazilians have used performance to create an alternative discourse of race in Brazil.

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Indians and Mestizos: Identity and Urban Popular Culture in Andean Peru

Posted in Anthropology, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2010-03-27 02:51Z by Steven

Indians and Mestizos: Identity and Urban Popular Culture in Andean Peru

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 26, Issue 2 (June 2000)
pages 239 – 253
DOI: 10.1080/03057070050010093

Fiona Wilson

The article begins with a discussion of the chronology of conquest and liberation in Peru and reflects on the changing meanings given to the racial categories of Indian and mestizo (half-caste) in colonial and post-colonial periods. Using popular culture as a lens, the transformations taking place in images of race and urban social identities are analysed, using as a case study a provincial town in the Andean highlands in the course of the twentieth century. Through changing forms of street theatre urban groups worked out new identities by weaving together, juxtaposing and contesting different cultural forms. The article explores in detail two manifestations of street theatre that predominated. These are the Dance of the Inca in the 1900s that addressed Indian/white relations, and carnaval where relations between mestizo and white were played out for much of the twentieth century.

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Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Family/Parenting, History, Media Archive, Slavery, Women on 2010-03-26 21:58Z by Steven

Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 31, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 29-55
DOI: 10.1080/01440390903481647

Karen Y. Morrison, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This paper outlines the mechanisms used to position the offspring of slave women and white men at various points within late nineteenth-century Cuba’s racial hierarchy. The reproductive choices available to these parents allowed for small, but significant, transformations to the existing patterns of race and challenged the social separation that typically under girded African slavery in the Americas. As white men mated with black and mulatta women, they were critical agents in the initial determination of their children’s status-as slave, free, mulatto, or even white. This definitional flexibility fostered an unintended corruption of the very meaning of whiteness. Similarly, through mating with white men, enslaved women exercised a degree of procreative choice, despite their subjugated condition. In acknowledging the range of rape, concubinage, and marriage exercised between slave women and white men, this paper highlights the important links between reproductive practices and the social construction of race.

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The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity

Posted in Anthropology, Caribbean/Latin America, Dissertations, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Mexico, Social Science, Women on 2010-03-25 17:47Z by Steven

The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity

Goldsmiths College, University of London
2006

Monica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

The thesis analyses the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mestizaje in Mexico. It focuses on the qualities of women’s experiences of racism and explores the significance of mestizaje in relation to Mexican discourses of race and nation. It provides a historical revision of the ways in which such discourses have developed in Mexico, emphasising the cultural conditions that make it possible to ‘think’ the nation, and relating them to the ways in which systems of differentiation amongst the population have operated. The thesis assesses the politics of difference in Mexico in relation to the ways in which notions of race and practices of racism have been detached from each other. For this, I analyse the historical development of the notion of mestizaje and the mestiza identity, and consider its impact and relevance in contemporary Mexico, calling into question official policies and public discourses that support the idea of the mestiza as the subject of national identity.

Through focus group discussions and life-story interviews based on family photographic albums, I explore how the women who participated in this study understand and experience their racialised, gendered and classed bodies and national identity, in a context where racism has been rendered invisible. The thesis then looks at the specificity of the participants’ social location and analyses how these women today in Mexico think through the notions of racism, mestizaje, and national identity. The focus on the qualities of their everyday experience of racism led me to explore the significance of the role of emotions in revealing the lived experience of racism. In this way, my analysis associates racial and class displacement with inadequacy; beauty, ugliness and ordinariness with shame; and the anxiety about family belonging with slightedness; and exposes the contradictory and ambivalent ways in which the experiences of racism are lived and understood. The experience of racism is explored from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically looking at the relationship between visual representations of identities and racist practices, and in this context the ways in which women see themselves and perceive how they are seen by others: the meanings and metaphors of their own image.

Read this thesis at the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library here.

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“Assimilating the Primitive”: Parallel Dialogues on Racial Miscegenation in Revolutionary Mexico

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Mexico, Monographs on 2010-03-23 20:17Z by Steven

“Assimilating the Primitive”: Parallel Dialogues on Racial Miscegenation in Revolutionary Mexico

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2004
179 pages, 4 tables
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8204-6322-3

Kelley R. Swarthout, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
Colgate University, New York

This book examines the Mexican nationalist rhetoric that promoted race mixing as a cultural ideal, placing it within its broader contemporary polemic between vitalist and scientific thought. Part of its analysis compares the attitudes of anthropologist Manuel Gamio and educator José Vasconcelos with those of the European primitivist D. H. Lawrence, and concludes that although Gamio and Vasconcelos made lasting contributions to the construction of popular notions of mexicanidad, their paradigms were fatally flawed because they followed European prescriptions for the development of national identity. This ultimately reinforced the belief that indigenous cultural expression must be assimilated into the dominant mestizo culture in order for Mexico to progress. Consequently, these thinkers were unsuccessful in resolving the cultural dilemma Mexico suffered in the years immediately following the Revolution.

Table of Contents

  • List of Tables
  • Acknowledgments
  • Chapter 1: Theory
    • Primitive as a Western Construct
    • Science, Race, and the Nation
    • The Vitalist Opposition to Science
  • Chapter 2: The History
    • Mestizaje: Mexico’s National Myth
    • The Emergence of Racial Hybridity
    • Envisioning a Mestizo Middle Class
    • The Birth of Mexican Cultural Nationalism
  • Chapter 3: The Dialogue
    • Scientificism vs. Vitalism in Revolutionary Mexico
    • Manuel Gamio and Scientific Indigenism
    • Jose Vasconcelos and the Spiritual Renovation of Mexican Culture
    • D.H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Pilgrimage to the “Indian Source”
  • Epilogue: Toward a Postmodern Mexican Identity
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Law, Media Archive, Mexico, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2010-03-12 02:50Z by Steven

The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940

University of Texas Press
1990
143 pages
10 b&w illus.
6 x 9 in.
ISBN: 978-0-292-73857-7

Edited by

Richard Graham, Emeritus Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

With chapters by Thomas E. Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight

From the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s, many Latin American leaders faced a difficult dilemma regarding the idea of race. On the one hand, they aspired to an ever-closer connection to Europe and North America, where, during much of this period, “scientific” thought condemned nonwhite races to an inferior category. Yet, with the heterogeneous racial makeup of their societies clearly before them and a growing sense of national identity impelling consideration of national futures, Latin American leaders hesitated. What to do? Whom to believe?

Latin American political and intellectual leaders’ sometimes anguished responses to these dilemmas form the subject of The Idea of Race in Latin America. Thomas Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight have each contributed chapters that succinctly explore various aspects of the story in Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico. While keenly alert to the social and economic differences that distinguish one Latin American society from another, each author has also addressed common issues that Richard Graham ably draws together in a brief introduction. Written in a style that will make it accessible to the undergraduate, this book will appeal as well to the sophisticated scholar.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • 1. Introduction (Richard Graham)
  • 2. Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-1940 (Thomas E. Skidmore)
  • 3. Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular Reaction (Aline Helg)
  • 4. Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940 (Alan Knight)
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Read the intrduction here.

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Through Russwurm’s Eyes: ‘The Conditions and Prospects of Haiti’

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, New Media, United States on 2010-03-07 03:58Z by Steven

Through Russwurm’s Eyes: ‘The Conditions and Prospects of Haiti’

Campus News
Bowdoin College
2010-03-01

John B. Russwurm, the College’s first African-American graduate and thought to be the third African-American to graduate from an American college, delivered a commencement address in 1826 that resonates nearly 184 years later.

The speech, “The Condition and Prospects of Haiti,” was delivered 22 years after Haiti won independence from France

About John B. Russwurm

Russwurm was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, the illegitimate son of a white planter and a black slave. His father, John Russwurm, of a wealthy Virginia family, went to Jamaica after completing his education in England. He sent his son, John Brown Russwurm, to Quebec at age eight so that he might receive a good education. Soon after moving to Maine, his father married Susan Blanchard. Russwurm then came to live with his father’s family, where he was accepted by his step-mother as one of her own. Russwurm stayed with the family even after his father died, continuing his education at Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine. His step-mother and her new husband helped him to enroll at Bowdoin in 1824….

Read the entire article here.
Read Russwurm’s entire speech here.

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