Mixed Race Studies

JS-44.12: A Global Look at Mixed Marriage

XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology: Facing an Unequal Word: Challenges for Global Sociology
International Sociological Association
Yokohama, Japan
2014-07-13 through 2014-07-19

Wednesday, 2014-07-16, 18:00 JST (Local Time)
Room: 315

Erica Chito Childs, Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

Mapping attitudes toward intermarriage—who is and who is not an acceptable mate—offers an incisive means through which imaginings of belonging—race, ethnicity, nationhood, citizenship and culture—can be critically evaluated.  In particular, social constructions of race and difference involve discussions of purity, race identity and taboos against interracial sex and marriage. Drawing from qualitative interviews and ethnographic research in six countries on attitudes toward intermarriage, this paper explores these issues of intermarriage in a global context.  Through a comparison of qualitative data I collected in Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Portugal, South Africa and the United States, I offer a theoretical framework and provide an empirical basis, to understand the concept of intermarriage and what it tells us about racial boundaries in a global context. For example, in the United States, the issue of intermarriage is discussed as interracial with less attention paid to inter-religious or inter-ethnic, to the point that those concepts are rarely used.  Similarly in South Africa, despite the end of apartheid decades ago, marriage across racial categories is still highly problematized and uncommon.  Yet globally there is less consensus of what constitutes intermarriage—sometimes intercultural, interethnic, or any number of words with localized meanings.  In South America and Australia, the debate seems to revolve more around indigenous status, citizenship and national identity such as who is Australian or who is Ecuadoran?  As indigenous populations rally for rights and representation how does this change the discourse on what intermarriage mean?  Looking globally, what differences matter? What boundaries are most salient in determining the attitudes of different groups toward intermarriage?  How are various communities responding to intermarriage, particularly if there are a growing number of “mixed” families? This research on attitudes toward intermarriage adds to our understanding of constructions of race, racism and racialized, gendered and sexualized beliefs and practices globally.

For more information, click here.

Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century

University of Virginia Press
October 2013
224 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780813934884
Paper ISBN: 9780813934891
Ebook ISBN: 9780813934907

Colleen C. O’Brien, Associate Professor of English
University of South Carolina, Upstate

As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen O’Brien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child—O’Brien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources—fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises—to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation.

Presentation on ‘African Heritage in Classical Music’ followed by the screening of ‘The Black Mozart in Cuba’

Marcus Garvey Library
Tottenham Green Centre
1 Phillip Lane
Tottenham, London N15 4JA
Saturday, 2014-06-14, 17:00-20:00 BST (Local Time)

Black History Studies in association with the Marcus Garvey Library presents ‘Sankofa Saturdays’

African Heritage in Classical Music

Music is an important part of our cultural heritage. In this presentation, Black History Studies will uncover the hidden contributions of musicians and composers of African descent to the genre of classical music.

The Black Mozart in Cuba

Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier de St George, was a Black classical composer and violin virtuoso born in Guadeloupe in the mid 18th century. The son of a Senegalese enslaved African and a French nobleman, he achieved enormous success as a musician, fencer, and military man. Yet, when he died in 1799, he was all but erased from history due in part to Napoleon’s efforts.

The Black Mozart in Cuba is the latest act in the rehabilitation of the memory of this extraordinary human being. The film skillfully combines biographical information with performances of his works. In this documentary, Cuba dedicates a week of cultural activities to his memory and welcomes Saint Georges as “a great hero of the Caribbean.”

In French, English and Spanish with English subtitles…

For more information, click here.

The Color Of Health: Skin Color, Ethnoracial Classification, And Discrimination In The Health Of Latin Americans

Social Science & Medicine
Available online: 2014-06-01
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.05.054

Krista M. Perreira, Professor of Public Policy and Associate Dean Office for Undergraduate Research
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Highlights

• Uses newly collected data on 4921 adults from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru
• Examines multiple measures of race/ethnicity and their associations with health
• Finds significant skin-color gradients in self-reported health.
• Finds significant skin-color gradients in class-based discrimination and low SES.
• SES and class-based discrimination largely account for disparities in health by skin color.

Latin America is one of the most ethnoracially heterogeneous regions of the world. Despite this, health disparities research in Latin America tends to focus on gender, class and regional health differences while downplaying ethnoracial differences. Few scholars have conducted studies of ethnoracial identification and health disparities in Latin America. Research that examines multiple measures of ethnoracial identification is rarer still. Official data on race/ethnicity in Latin America are based on self-identification which can differ from interviewer-ascribed or phenotypic classification based on skin color. We use data from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru to examine associations of interviewer-ascribed skin color, interviewer-ascribed race/ethnicity, and self-reported race/ethnicity with self-rated health among Latin American adults (ages 18-65). We also examine associations of observer-ascribed skin color with three additional correlates of health – skin color discrimination, class discrimination, and socio-economic status. We find a significant gradient in self-rated health by skin color. Those with darker skin colors report poorer health. Darker skin color influences self-rated health primarily by increasing exposure to class discrimination and low socio-economic status.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Black Atlantic’ Cultural Politics as Reflected in Panamanian Literature

University of Tennesee, Knoxville
August 2005
256 pages

Sonja Stephenson Watson

A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree

The diaspora experience is characterized by hybridity, diversity and above all, difference. The nature of the diaspora experience therefore precludes an exclusive articulation of identity. Black identity in Panama is one characterized by this same multiplicity. My dissertation examines race, culture, and ethnicity in the development of Panamanian national identity and is informed by the critical theories of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Frantz Fanon. The articulation of Afro-Panamanian identity is both intriguing and complex because there are two groups of blacks on the Isthmus: Spanish speaking blacks who arrived as a result of slavery (15th -18th centuries) and English speaking blacks who migrated from the West Indies to construct the Trans-isthmian Railroad (1850-1855) and Panama Canal (1904-1914).

The country’s cultural and linguistic heterogeneity not only enriches the study of Panama and illustrates that it is a nation characterized by multiplicity, but it also captures the complexity of the African Diaspora in the Americas. This plurality is evidenced in Afro-Panamanian literary discourse from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present. This study analyzes the representation of Afro-Hispanics and Afro-Antilleans during different time periods in Panamanian literature, the literature written by Afro-Hispanics, and the literature written by Afro-Antilleans which emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, I address how the discourse of both groups of blacks converge and diverge.

Panamanian literature has been grossly understudied. While its history, geography, and political ties to the United States have been examined extensively by intellectuals from the United States and Latin America, with the exception of a few studies, its literature has been virtually ignored by the Hispanic literary canon. Within the field of Afro-Hispanic literature, black Panamanian literature has also been understudied. With the exception of works published about Gaspar Octavio Hernández, Carlos Guillermo Wilson, and Gerardo Maloney, Afro-Panamanian literature has not been examined comprehensively. My dissertation seeks to fill this void in the field of Afro-Hispanic literature and, hopefully, it will enrich the field of Latin and Central American literature and literary criticism.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter one: The Rhetoric of Nation and the Invisibility of Blackness in the New Republic of Panama
• Chapter two: The Black Image in Early Twentieth-Century Panamanian Literature
• Chapter three: The Social Protest Novels of Joaquín Beleño Cedeño: A Study of the Inherent Conflicts and Contradictions of Anti-imperialism and Negritude in the Canal Zone
• Chapter four: The Afro-Caribbean Works of Carlos “Cubena” Guillermo Wilson and his (Re) Vision of Panamanian History
• Chapter five: Race, Language, and Nation in the Works of Three Contemporary Panamanian West Indian Writers: Gerardo Maloney, Melva Lowe de Goodin, and Carlos E. Russell
• Conclusion: Afro-Panamanian Discourse: From Invisibility to Visibility
• List of References
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

But your hair is so beautiful…

Black Women of Brazil
2014-05-08

Stephanie Paes (orginally published on 2013-06-12 as “Mas seu cabelo é tão bonito…” in Falando sem permissão)

I know that it is. And only I understand the time I needed to take account of this (1).

My hair is crespo (curly/kinky). It has gone through several phases (natural and later chemical changes), but it never stopped being crespo. When I was a kid it had little curls and was huge, until the sad night in which my mother, tired after a day of work and not managing to detangle my ends, silently took scissors and cut my curls without telling me. After that my hair started to change, I don’t know if it was because of cutting it or because hormonal influences, but it never ceased to be what it is: Crespo…

…What I hear now, with one or another variation is the following sentence: “Your hair is so beautiful! It’s a little cacheadinho (curly), not those ugly naps.”

What is the problem with this sentence?

1. Slandering a phenotypic characteristic of my race, you are slandering me. It doesn’t matter if you think that because my hair has a looser curl that it automatically ceases to be crespo. In fact, even if my hair was naturally straight, I don’t cease being black, and you would still be slandering me.
2. By exalting a feature that makes clear my miscegenation (racial mixture) and not allowing the black phenotype to be manifested completely, you are valuing my embranquecimento (white attributes). I’m not saying it’s bad to have a non-black feature, I’m saying that when you use it to say that my hair is better than another more genuinely kinky, you’re being racist…

Read the entire article here.

Stunning Self-Portraits Make You Think Twice About Interracial Identity In South America

The Huffington Post
2014-04-25

Katherine Brooks, Arts & Culture Editor

Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão has been exploring themes of interracial identity through an unlikely medium—self-portraits. To confront and challenge concepts like colonialism and miscegenation in her home country, she turns her own visage into a canvas and translates the many skin colors that populate Brazil into a palette of paint. The result, “Polvo,” presents racial diversity through the face of one woman, daring the viewer to lose themselves in her nebulous color wheels.

Varejão sought inspiration from the 17th and 18th century practice of Spanish casta paintings, portraits that aimed to document the variety of skin colors in Latin America and reframe them in ways that sliced and diced mixed-race ethnicities into far more than black and white. “Mixing was the norm,” The Economist asserted in 2012, referencing the interracial mixing that occurred even during Brazil’s days of slavery. “The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.”

Defining the spectrum was a Euro-centric obsession, one that resulted in an elaborate system of castes—white Spanish at one end and those of African or indigenous descent at the other—that had social, cultural and economic implications. The lighter skinned individuals existed at the top of the socio-economic pyramid, with better jobs and higher standards of living, while their darker skinned counterparts sank to the bottom.

The legacy of this classification persists in Brazil, a country seen less as a “racial democracy” and more as a purveyor of segregation. And interracial identity remains a potent issue, particularly since black and mixed-race people officially outnumber white citizens, according to a 2010 census. “Brazil is a country where non-whites now make up a majority of the population,” NPR’s Melissa Block reiterated in a 2013 story. “It’s one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world; home to 97 million African descendants—the largest number of blacks outside Africa…

Read the entire article here.

For dark-skinned Mexicans, taint of discrimination lingers

McClatchy DC: Watching Washington and the World
2013-08-22

Tim Johnson, McClatchy Foreign Staff

MEXICO CITY — Flip through the print publications exalting the activities of Mexico’s high society and there’s one thing you rarely find: dark-skinned people.

No matter that nearly two-thirds of Mexicans consider themselves moreno, the Spanish word for dark.

Mexico has strong laws barring discrimination based on skin color or ethnicity, but the practices of public relations firms and news media lag behind, promoting the perception that light skin is desirable and dark skin unappealing.

The issue came to the fore this month when a casting call for a television spot for Mexico’s largest airline stated flatly that it wanted “no one dark,” sparking outrage on social media and, ultimately, embarrassed apologies.

“I’d never seen anything that aggressive and that clear, all in capital letters: ‘NO ONE DARK,’” said Tamara de Anda, a magazine editor. “I decided to go with it.”…

…But the distance between legalities and practice is substantial, said Mario Arriagada Cuadriello, a doctoral candidate in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He is an editor at Nexos, a leading cultural and political magazine.

When Arriagada published an article in this month’s issue about widespread discrimination in Mexico, he received a flurry of responses.

“People wrote to say that if you are light-skinned, you get better treatment in restaurants,” he said. One person told him that in an exclusive area of the capital, residents ask that their dark-skinned domestic servants not walk in the common gardens “because it is anti-aesthetic and makes the areas ugly.”

One of Mexico’s most prominent intellectuals from the early 20th century, Jose Vasconcelos, held up the mestizo, or person of mixed Indian and European blood, as part of a superior “cosmic race” with greater spiritual values…

Read the entire article here.

This assimilationist ideology, commonly called “whitening” by the elite after 1890 (Skidmore 1974), had taken hold by the early twentieth century, and continues to be Brazil’s predominant racial ideology today. In effect, the Brazilian elite argued that Brazil, unlike the U.S. to which they frequently (and unfavorably) compared it, had no racial problem: no U.S. phenomena of race hatred (the logical product of the white supremacy doctrine), racial segregation and, most important, racial discrimination. In a word, Brazil had escaped racism. It was on the path to producing a single race through the benign process of miscegenation. The unrestrained libido of the Portuguese, along with his cultural “plasticity,” had produced a fortuitous racial harmony. Brazil, thanks to historical forces of which it had not even been conscious, had been saved from the ugly stain of racism (DaMatta 1987).

Thomas Skidmore, “Fact and Myth: Discovering a Racial Problem in Brazil,” Kellogg Institute (Working Paper #173, April 1992): 6. http://kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/173.pdf.

Chinese Cubans: A transnational history by Kathleen Lopez (review) [Roopnarine]

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2014
DOI: 10.1353/cch.2014.0018

Lomarsh Roopnarine, Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History
Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi

López, Kathleen, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Without a doubt, the literature on Cuba since the mid-nineteenth century to contemporary times has primarily focused on Cuban wars of independence, the abolition of slavery, the United States of America’s involvement and domination and Fidel Castro’s revolution and socialism. Spanish Whites, Black Africans and Mulattos have been the main ethnic groups discussed. Cuban Chinese have largely been unexplored, save for the period 1847–74, when they were introduced as indentured “Coolies.” Kathleen López tries to rescue Cuban Chinese from their marginalization in Cuba’s national discourse by examining and expanding on their history. She takes a transnational approach and shows how Chinese in Cuba have maintained meaningful connections with their homeland and other Chinese in the United States and Peru. She also demonstrates how racial ideologies, class stratification, gender imbalance among the Chinese and Castro’s socialist doctrines converged to shape Chinese presence in Cuba. The end result is a rich narrative of Chinese struggle, participation, and contributions to Cuba.

López divides her book into three neat sections. The first section, “From Indentured to Free,” is really a journey of why and how the Chinese were brought to Cuba and their subsequent treatment on the sugar plantations. Lopez paints a sad picture of how Chinese were manipulated and deceived into leaving their homeland and worked as indentured laborers in Cuba. The Chinese were told that they would be wage-laborers, but in reality their employers treated them like African slaves. Some Chinese resisted their deplorable working and living conditions, but a majority of them served out their contracts, drifted into noncontractual plantation employment and became fruit and vegetable vendors. As they earned wages, they also “participated in the social and cultural life of the towns and helped to build the foundations for Chinese communities in Cuba” (81). However, the “planting of their roots” in Cuba was not without challenges. The Chinese were exposed to bouts of discrimination and cultural ridicule from the wider Cuban society and suffered from internal schisms within their own society, particularly between the second wave of business elites and the former indentured “coolies.” Yet, they persevered.

The second section, “Migrants between Empires and Nations,” is an analysis of how Chinese Cubans gradually practiced selective assimilation within a class- and race-conscious plantation society, while simultaneously maintaining their own culture and identity. They formed a series of international and national associations, which they used as a base to build solidarity and to participate in Cuban society. The result was impressive. Chinese Cubans were involved in the building of modern Cuba. They fought in many wars and sided with and supported the independence movement. Readers may be surprised at the magnitude of Chinese participation in Cuba from the 1890s to 1959. Their participation might have emanated from their desire to be Chinese Cuban, but anti-immigration laws and anti-Chinese sentiments in Cuba and the Western Hemisphere as well as political turbulence in their homeland might have also pushed them to be more proactive in their new homeland. Whatever the reasons for their participation might have been, Lopez provides an excellent narrative of Chinese Cubans as freedom fighters, rebels and nation-builders as never depicted before.

The third section, “Transnational and National Belonging,” describes a dramatic turn in the general welfare of Chinese in Cuba, precipitated by the overthrow of the nationalist government in China (1949) and the introduction of socialism in Cuba (1959). Both events affected the Chinese community in Cuba. Many Chinese fled the new communist government in China, and relations between China and Cuban Chinese broke down. Ten years later, Fidel Castro toppled the US-backed regime in Cuba and embarked on a socialist journey for Cuba. However, communist China and socialist Cuba were at odds with each other since Cuba leaned towards the Soviet Union. These complex international events had an enormous impact on the Chinese in Cuba. Castro nationalized and disallowed private businesses, and as a consequence, almost all aspects of Chinese life deteriorated and declined, including their businesses, their associations, and their numbers—the latter through mass migration. However, efforts have been made to restore Chinatown and other Chinese communities in Cuba.

The strength of this book lies…