Mixed Race Studies

Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the “South,” and American Bodies

Southern Quarterly
Volume 41, Number 1 (Fall 2003)
pages 39-52

Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor of English
University of Florida

In the paper I investigate a certain kind of imaginative response, especially on the part of mixed-race artists, to the prevalence of racialized discourses of modernity and nationalism in the Americas. Such discourses often dominated public thought in the Americas in general; more specifically for my purposes, I will be looking at the work of two artists, in Harlem and Mexico City, between the 1920s and the 1940s. In negotiating their own sense of a particularly mixed-race and thoroughly modern American nationalism, the United States mulatto writer Jean Toomer (1895-1967) and the Mexican mestiza painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) each would try to imagine an organic fusion-one which saw the fusion presumably inherent in race-mixing as a practice of hybridization and/ or grafting. Such a fusion was, further, imagined as a coming together of a (largely imaginary) time and space of primitive energies with the energies of modernity. As William Carlos Williams conceived it, to hybridize or to marry, as he put it in his 1925 In the American Grain, would be the only “moral” way to “fertilize . . . to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize” (121). For artists and intellectuals in the United States who saw that the 1920s presented a crossroads in how the US would define itself as “American,” people like Williams, the writer Waldo Frank, and even many intellectuals of color such as Toomer felt indeed that cultural, if not also racial, fusion might be the “crosspollenizing” way out of the seeming sterility of an ever-deepening divide along the color line. For Mexican artists and intellectuals at a time of intense nation building, given that race and cultural mixing in Mexico were already an unavoidable fact, the idea of hybridity, that is mestizaje (Indo-Hispanic mixing), of necessity became the watchword for a new and unified Mexican nation. At a time when eugenics science generally characterized race-mixing as productive only of degenerate or sterile offspring, Kahlo and Toomer, and others like them, would effect this imaginative unification, fusion, and cross-pollenization by means of a eugenic counter-discourse which privileged race (and cultural) mixing as productive of hybrid, and therefore stronger, cultures and, ultimately, nations. If we remember the fascination that genetic, eugenic, and evolutionary theories held for both North and South Americans in the earlier part of the twentieth century, it begins to make sense that such an idea of cultural and racial hybridity ultimately would give rise to a very general notion that North must fuse in some way with South, given the tendency to divide the United States and Mexico into “North” and “South,” a division which often imaginatively paralleled the industrial/agricultural divide assigned to these same regions in the United States itself. For Toomer in the United States, this fusion would involve a literally organic connection between the urban North and the agrarian South. For Kahlo and her husband, the artist and muralist Diego Rivera, the fusion would often be envisioned in terms of an agrarian Mexico (South) with an industrial United States (North)…

Read the entire article here.

The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil

Temple University Press
November 2006
336 pages
6×9
6 tables
Paper EAN: 978-1-59213-351-2; ISBN: 1-59213-351-7
Cloth EAN: 978-1-59213-350-5; ISBN: 1-59213-350-9
Electronic Book EAN: 978-1-59213-352-9

Elisa Larkin Nascimento, Director
IPEAFRO Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Originally published in 2003 in Portuguese, The Sorcery of Color argues that there are longstanding and deeply-rooted relationships between racial and gender inequalities in Brazil. In this pioneering book, Elisa Larkin Nascimento examines the social and cultural movements that have attempted, since the early twentieth century, to challenge and eradicate these conjoined inequalities.

The book’s title describes the social sleight-of-hand that disguises the realities of Brazilian racial inequity. According to Nascimento, anyone who speaks of racism—or merely refers to another person as black—traditionally is seen as racist. The only acceptably non-racist attitude is silence. At the same time, Afro-Brazilian culture and history have been so overshadowed by the idea of a general “Brazilian identity” that to call attention to them is also to risk being labeled racist.

Incorporating leading international scholarship on Pan Africanism and Afrocentric philosophy with the writing of Brazilian scholars, Nascimento presents a compelling feminist argument against the prevailing policy that denies the importance of race in favor of a purposefully vague concept of ethnicity confused with color.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction to the English Edition
• Preface – Kabengele Munanga
• Introduction
• 1. Identity, Race, and Gender
• 2. Brazil and the Making of “Virtual Whiteness”
• 3. Constructing and Desconstructing the “Crazy Creole”
• 4. Another History: Afro-Brazilian Agency (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1914-1960)
• 5. The Black Experimental Theater: Plots, Texts, and Actors
• Glossary of Brazilian Words
• Bibliographical References

…The second obstacle to the discussion of race in Brazil is resistance to the idea that African populations in different parts of the world share a common experience. The presumption is that blacks in Brazil are in a unique situation determined solely by the circumstances of their society and have little or nothing in common with black populations in other parts of the world. Critics have frequently accused the black social movement in Brazil of attempting to import foreign standards and raising a problem that has never existed before. On the other hand, the concerns of the black movement often revolve around issues specific to Brazil rather than racism as a world phenomenon.

But racist domination is worldwide in scope. It derives from the historical imposition of Western hegemony over non-Western peoples and its essence is expressed in the ideology of white supremacy. The standard of whiteness affects the identity constructs of all dominated peoples, making the issue of identity crucial, but oftentimes, it is expressed in specific local terms. In Brazil, the sorcery of color transforms mixed-race identity into a permanent search for the simulation of whiteness…

Kilombismo, Virtual Whiteness, and the Sorcery of Color

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 34, Number 6 (2004)
pages 861-880
DOI: 10.1177/0021934704264009

Elisa Larkin Nascimento
Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute

This article explores the legacy and current presence of racism in Brazil, particularly their unique expression in the juxtaposition of the miscegenation ideology of nonracism with the living legacy of Lombrosian criminology. The author proposes the Sorcery of Color as a metaphor for the Brazilian standard of race relations, which transforms a perverse system of racial domination into a pretense of antiracist ideals and establishes what the author describes as the category of virtual whiteness, a fulcrum of identity intrinsically intermeshed with issues of gender and patriarchy. The groundings of Afrocentric thought can be found in the writings and actions of African Brazilian intellectuals of the 20th century, and its most articulated expression is the thesis of Kilombismo, developed by Abdias do Nascimento in the context of his work in Pan-African affairs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Chinese in the Caribbean

Markus Wiener Publishers
November 2004
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-55876-314-7; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-314-2
Paperback ISBN 10: 1-55876-315-5; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-315-9

Edited by

Andrew R. Wilson, Professor
Strategy and Policy Department
United States Naval War College

The history of the Caribbean is a history of migrations. The peoples of the region came as conquerors and planters, slaves and indentured laborers from all parts of the globe. Each group contributed to the social fabric, culture, and commerce of the region. The Chinese diaspora has spread Chinese people and culture around the world, including to the Caribbean, where Chinese exist both as distinct ethnic groups within Caribbean societies and as shapers of unique Caribbean cultures.

The book describes not merely the arrival and experience of Chinese in the Caribbean but also the ways in which Chinese have adapted to and altered the region. Included are the histories of Chinese people in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, and the British West Indies, and overcame, their slow rise to economic independence and success, their contribution to art, theater, cuisine, and literature, their roles in the region’s national revolutions, their place in post-colonial politics, and the subsequent remigrations of individuals, families, and entire communitites to North America.

Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No hay Sangre Negra, so there is no Blackness

Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal
Volume 15, Number 2 (Spring 2006)
Pages 199-234

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

Many legal scholars who write about Mexican mestizaje omit references to Afromexicans, Mexico’s African roots, and contemporary anti-black sentiments in the Mexican and Mexican American communities. The reasons for the erasure or invisibility of Mexico’s African roots are complex. It argues that post-colonial officials and theorists in shaping Mexico’s national image were influenced two factors: the Spanish colonial legacy and the complex set of rules creating a race-like caste system with a distinct anti-black bias reinforced through art; and the negative images of Mexico and Mexicans articulated in the United States during the early nineteenth century. The post-colonial Mexican becomes mestiza/o, defined as European and Indian, with an emphasis on the European roots. Thus contemporary anti-black bias in Mexico is a vestige of Spanish colonialism and nationalism that must be acknowledged, but is often lost in the uncritical celebration of Latina/o mestizaje when advanced as a unifying principle that moves beyond the conventional binary (black-white) discussions of race. This uncritical and ahistorical invocation of mestizaje has serious implications for race relations in the United States given the growing presence and political power of Mexican Americans because substituting mestizaje for racial binarism when discussing race in the United States reinforces rather than diminishes notions of white racial superiority and dominance. Therefore legal scholars who write about Latina/o issues should replace their uncritical celebration of mestizaje with a focus on colonialism and capitalism, the twin isms that influenced ideological theories and racial formation from the late fifteenth through the twentieth century in the Americas.

Read the entire article here.

The African Presence in Mexico

A Symposium Presented by
Callaloo – A Journal of African Diapora Arts and Letters and
The Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University
2008-10-22 through 2008-10-23
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas

Sessions

• The Road to Blackness: A Search for Identity Within the Afro-Mexican Community (audio, photographs)
• Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Mexico (audio, photographs)
• “Where did the Blacks Go?” Post-Slavery Mexico (audio, photographs)
• Contemporary Afro-Mexicans (audio, photographs)
• “Blacks in the State of Veracrus, Mexico” (A Photographic Exhibition by Marcus D. Jones) (photographs)

For more details, click here.

Representing gods in a mixed-race society: Images, rituals and politics in María Lionza’s cult (Venezuela)

University of St. Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom
Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CAS)
Social Anthropology Seminar Room (Room 50, St Salvator’s Building)
2010-03-17, 15:00Z to 17:00Z

Roger Canals
University of Barcelona

Roger Canals, University of Barcelona, will speak on ‘Representing gods in a mixed-race society. Images, rituals and politics in María Lionza‘s cult (Venezuela)’.

Written Out of History

Pomona College Magazine
Pomona College, Claremont, California
Fall 2002
Volume 39, Number 1

Michael Balchunas

Spurred by a glimpse of family history, Professor Sid Lemelle is bringing to light a little-known aspect of the African Diaspora.

When the new people moved in, all eyes were upon them. There were comments about the way they looked, how much money they might have, what kind of work they did, their morals, their customs and their character. At first, it was all good. The newcomers, who were farmers, engineers, mechanics and other workers, wrote to friends left behind and extolled the virtues of their new home. That stirred pangs of fear among some residents, and a newspaper ran an editorial. More of these people might come, it said, and “since the Negro is a creature of imitation and not invention…they will degenerate…and [become] vicious…a nuisance and pest to society.”

The year was 1857, and the newcomers, from Louisiana, had settled near Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, about 50 miles inland from the Caribbean port of Veracruz. Their history, like much of the history of the African Diaspora, is virtually unknown.

Sidney Lemelle is working to change that…

…Another misperception is that the U.S. South was a strictly bipolar society of white masters and black slaves, he says. In antebellum Louisiana, a significant number of white planters, businessmen and government officials fathered mixed-race offspring, who became part of a stratum more privileged than slaves, other free blacks or poorer white residents, according to Lemelle. He is particularly intrigued by how race and racial identity issues were connected to property rights and ownership in Louisiana and Mexico in the 19th century. Building on the theories of UCLA legal scholar Cheryl Harris, he believes that “whiteness” was constructed by mixed-blood people and became the basis of racialized privilege; that “whiteness” was legitimized as a form of status property, which gave some individuals rights over others, even though both possessed African blood…

Read the entire article here.

Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico

Stanford University Press
2008
424 pages
13 illustrations, 2 maps.
ISBN-10: 0804756481; ISBN-13: 9780804756488

María Elena Martínez (1966-2014), Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

María Elena Martínez’s Genealogical Fictions is the first in-depth study of the relationship between the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and colonial Mexico’s sistema de castas, a hierarchical system of social classification based primarily on ancestry. Specifically, it explains how this notion surfaced amid socio-religious tensions in early modern Spain, and was initially used against Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity. It was then transplanted to the Americas, adapted to colonial conditions, and employed to create and reproduce identity categories according to descent. Martínez also examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the notion of purity of blood over time, arguing that the concept’s enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings and the archival practices it promoted came to shape the region’s patriotic and racial ideologies.

The erasure of the Afro element of mestizaje in modern Mexico: the coding of visibly black mestizos according to a white aesthetic in and through the discourse on nation during the cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968

University of British Columbia
September 2001
166 pages

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Associate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Faculty of Graduate Studies.

“The Erasure of the Essential Afro Element of Mestizaje in Modern Mexico: The Coding of Visibly Black Mestizos According to a White Aesthetic In and Through the Discourse on Nation During the Cultural Phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968″ examines how the Afro elements of Mexican mestizaje were erased from the ideal image of the Mexican mestizo and how the Afro ethnic contributions were plagiarized in modern Mexico. It explores part of the discourse on nation in the narrative produced by authors who subscribed to the belief that only white was beautiful, between 1920 and 1968, during a period herein identified as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.” It looks at the coding and distortion of the image of visibly black Mexicans in and through literature and film, and unveils how the Afro element “disappeared” from some of the most popular images, tastes in music, dance, song, food, and speech forms viewed as cultural texts that, by way of official intervention, were made “badges” of Mexican national identity.

The premise of this study is that the criollo elite and their allies, through government, disenfranchised Mexicans as a whole by institutionalizing a magic mirror—materialized in the narrative of nation—where mestizos can “see” only a partial reflection of themselves. The black African characteristics of Mexican mestizaje were totally removed from the ideal image of “Mexican-ness” disseminated in and out of the country. During this period, and in the material selected for study, wherever Afro-Mexicans—visibly Afro or not—are mentioned, they appear as “mestizos” oblivious of their African heritage and willingly moving toward becoming white.

The analysis adopts as critical foundation two essays: “Black Phobia and the White Aesthetic in Spanish American Literature,” by Richard L. Jackson; and “Mass Visual Productions,” by James Snead. In “Black Phobia…” Jackson explains that, to define “superior and inferior as well as the concept of beauty” according to how white a person is perceived to be, is a “tradition dramatized in Hispanic Literature from Lope de Rueda’s Eufemia (1576) to the present” (467). For Snead, “the coding of blacks in film, as in the wider society, involves a history of images and signs associating black skin color with servile behavior and marginal status” (142).

Read the entire thesis here.