Mixed Race Studies

Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation and Beauty Competitions, 1929–70

Manchester University Press
October 2013
192 pages
216 x 138 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7190-8867-4

Rochelle Rowe
University of Exeter

Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation.

The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that femininity was used to shape ideas about Caribbean modernity, citizenship, and political and economic freedom. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ‘race’ and racism studies and studies of the body.

Contents

• Introduction: Caribbean beauty competitions in context
• 1. The early ‘Miss Jamaica’ competition: cultural revolution and feminist voices, 1929–1950
• 2. Cleaning up carnival: race, culture and power in the Trinidad ‘Carnival Queen’ beauty competition, 1946–1959
• 3. Parading the ‘crème de la crème’: constructing the contest in Barbados, 1958–1966
• 4. Fashioning ‘Ebony Cinderellas’ and brown icons: Jamaican beauty competitions and the myth of racial democracy, 1955–1964
• 5. ‘Colonisation in reverse’: Claudia Jones, the West Indian Gazette and the ‘Carnival Queen’ contest in London, 1959–1964
• Afterword: a Grenadian ‘Miss World’, 1970
• Bibliography
• Index

Review of Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy by Samantha Nogueira Joyce

TriQuarterly: a journal of writing, art, and cultural inquiry from Northwestern University
Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
2013-10-01

Reighan Gillam, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

Telenovelas, or soap operas, are the main staple of television entertainment throughout Brazil and in many other Latin American countries. Unlike in the United States, where soap operas can run for decades, in Brazil telenovelas end after presenting their storyline over a six- to eight-month period. They are designed to attract men, women, and children as viewers and have dominated in television’s primetime slots for the last thirty years. Although the plotlines, characters, and settings are fleeting, telenovelas have remained Brazilians’ favorite form of primetime entertainment.

Often Latin American telenovelas have served as vehicles to introduce social issues by depicting a common problem, such as gender inequality or limited access for the disabled, in order to raise awareness and stimulate discussion. In Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy, Samantha Nogueira Joyce takes one particular telenovela, Duas Caras (Two Faces), as her subject of study. Running for eight months in 2007–8, this telenovela deserves particular scrutiny because it was the first to include an Afro-Brazilian actor as the lead character and the first to make race relations and racism a constant theme. Joyce uses this telenovela as an opportunity to examine the role of television in contemporary currents of social change in Brazil. Through her analysis of Duas Caras, Joyce aims to demonstrate how “telenovelas are a powerful tool for introducing topics for debate and pro-social change, such as the instances where the dialogues openly challenge previously ingrained racist ideas in Brazilian society.”

The myth of racial democracy to which Joyce’s title refers is the Brazilian national narrative that defines the country’s citizens and identity as racially mixed. Put simply, it is generally thought that the Brazilian populace and culture emerged from a mixing of European, indigenous, and African people. Many believe that because there are no rigid racial lines that delineate black from white in Brazil, racism and racial discrimination do not exist there. In contrast to the “one-drop rule” of the United States, where “one drop of black blood” renders a person black, in Brazil, Joyce explains, “the racial blending has been validated not into a binary, but a ternary racial classification that differentiates the population into brancos (whites), pardos (multiracial individuals, also popularly known as mulatos), and pretos (blacks).”…

Read the entire review here.

Subjecting Pleasure: Claude McKay’s Narratives of Transracial Desire

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 44, Number 7 (October 2013)
pages 706-724
DOI: 10.1177/0021934713507579

Smita Das, 2012-2013 Dissertation Fellow
University of Illinois, Chicago

This article explores the threat posed by the Afro-Asian body in Claude McKay’s novels, Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo’s narrative of transracial alliances converges onto the body of the Afro-Asian prostitute, whose positioning as a “conjunction” exposes contradictions surrounding immigration within French liberalism. Banana Bottom also maps a conflictual relationship between a licentious Afro-Asian coolie woman, and a Black subject who both wrestle with attaining national belonging within an idyllic Jamaica. While Banjo reveals McKay’s yearnings for transnational Black affiliations without the Afro-Asian woman, Banana Bottom reconciles the wrought relations between Black middle-class Jamaicans and the bastardized “coolie gal.”

Read or purchase the article here.

Biracial Costa Ricans worse off than black Ticos, says UNPD report

The Tico Times
San José, Costa Rica
2013-10-30

Zach Dyer

Fewer than 10 percent of Ticos with one white and one black parent attend university, compared to more than 17 percent of self-identified black Costa Ricans.

Biracial Costa Ricans struggle with higher rates of high school desertion and unemployment than self-identified black Ticos, according to a new report from the United Nations Development Program.

The report, presented to black Costa Rican community leaders and the public in San José Tuesday morning, stressed the economic and educational gaps experienced by the country’s Afro-descendent population, especially between urban and rural groups.

“If you’re mulatto, living in the countryside in Costa Rica, you’re much more likely to be poor, have problems dealing with education and unemployment, or employment of poor quality,” said Silvia García, regional coordinator for the project…

Read the entire article here.

Unbecoming blackness: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America [Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 5, 2014
pages 889-890
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.847200

Nora Gámez Torres, Visiting scholar
Cuban Research Institute
Florida International University, Miami

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America, by Antonio López, New York, New York University Press, 2012, xi + 272 pp., (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8147-6547-0.

Unbecoming Blackness poses directly the question of an underdiscussed afrolatinidad in Cuban American Studies. The book opens up by analysing the lives and performances of key figures in the Afro-Cuban diaspora in the USA during the first half of the twentieth century: Alberto O’Farrill, a writer and blackface actor in the teatro bufo a theatrical Cuban genre he helped to export to New York: and Eusebia Cosme, a renowned performer of poesía negra (black poetry) and actress. This is the first significant accomplishment of the book, since these histories had to be carefully recovered and reconstructed by collecting disperse information, the ‘fragments attaches’ (14) common to black diasporas in the Americas.

The third chapter, examining the afrolatinidad and specific Puerto Rican identifications in the work of Cuban-born anthropologist Rómulo Lachatañeré and Cuban-descendent writer Piri Thomas, continues building the main theme of the book: how Afro-Cubans actively negotiate their racialization in the USA, by cither asserting or concealing their ‘Hispanic’ heritage through linguistic choices, or by forging alliances with black Americans and other Latin/o groups. In so doing, they enact an afrolatinidad that is malleable and transnational, and thus, unsettling for hegemonic Cuban and Cuban American identities, rooted in nationalism and whiteness. That performers such as Cosme and O’Farrill and scholars such as Lachatañeré travelled to the USA looking for better professional opportunities and decided to associate to ‘subaltern’ subjects such as black Americans and other Latino groups, generated an anxiety among Cuban writers and intellectuals of the time who defended the idea of mestizaje, as López shows in these chapters. The point of conflict is brilliantly captured in the following passage by Lopez: (the implication) ‘that Afro-Cubans are somehow ‘better off’ being in and belonging to an explicitly racist US nation rather than, it turns out, Cuba. This being and belonging is asserted against ‘the best interests’ of a postracial, mestizo, even negro island-Cuban nation—indeed, against the ‘best interests’ of Afro-Cubans themselves’ (9). To speak of an afrolatinidad in this context disrupts both Cuban American and Cuban fictions of national identity. Precisely due to the implications of the book for a critical debate on Cuban racial identities on and off the island, it would have been very useful for the leader to have a contextual analysis of what was happening in Cuba in different moments and in the different fields the author explores.

Less accomplished is the following chapter, in which López lacks the clarity to successfully connect ‘texts around 1979 in Miami and the overlapping histories of the illicit drug trade. African American uprising, Mariel migration‘ (16), to Cuban American reactions to the ‘blackening’ of their community after Mariel and the African Americans…

Read or purchase the article here.

Who is Black?

The Final Call
2001-07-10

Rosa Clemente, Guest Columnist

Rosa Clemente

Yesterday, an interesting thing happened to me. I was told I am not Black.

The kicker for me was when my friend stated that the island of Puerto Rico was not a part of the African Diaspora. I wanted to go back to the old skool playground days and yell: “You said what about my momma?!” But after speaking to several friends, I found out that many Black Americans and Latinos agree with him. The miseducation of the Negro is still in effect!

I am so tired of having to prove to others that I am Black, that my peoples are from the Motherland, that Puerto Rico, along with Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic, are part of the African Diaspora. Do we forget that the slave ships dropped off our people all over the world, hence the word Diaspora?…

Read the entire article here.

Cuba is White, Black and Mixed Race Because it is Diverse

Havana Times: open-minded writing from Cuba
2013-10-22

Dmitri Prieto
Agrarian University of Havana

HAVANA TIMES — Recently, on the eve of October 10, a Cuban national holiday commemorating the date (in 1868) in which Cuban landowner Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and his retinue of (former) slaves took up arms against Spanish colonial domination, a Round Table program bearing the controversial title of “Neither Black Nor White: Cuba is Mixed Race” was aired on television.

During the Round Table discussion, Cuban scientists presented valuable and interesting evidence showing that our population’s gene pool combines the DNA of African, European and Asian / Indo-American peoples, concluding that, therefore, it would be impossible to define any Cuban “races” on the basis of genetics as such.

On the basis of this accurate insight, however, they also suggested something that I consider dangerously dubious: the notion that Cuba is a “mixed race” country…

Read the entire article here.

‘Longing for Oneself’: Hybridism and Miscegenation in Colonial and Postcolonial Portugal

Etnográfica
Volume VI, Number 1 (2002)
pages 181-200

Miguel Vale de Almeida, Professor of Anthropology
Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa

This essay acknowledges that hybridism, in a troubling reminiscence of the 19th century debate on race and the hybrids is a central issue of debate in the social sciences today. The Portuguese case is one of the most complex and intriguing: if Brazil has been systematically praised as the example of the humanistic and miscegenating characteristic of Portuguese expansion, it has also been used as an argument for the legitimization of later colonialism in Africa, as well as for the construction of a self-representation of Portuguese as non-racists. The Portuguese nation, however, has seldom been described as a miscigenated nation and mestiça itself. Contemporary rhetoric on hybridity – as part of globalization, transnationality, postcolonial diasporas, and multiculturalism – clashes with the reality of the return of ‘race’ within a cultural fundamentalism. This paper focuses on discourses and modes of classification as the starting point for discussing specific practices and processes of Miguel Vale de Almeida identity dispute in the ‘Lusophone’ space.

This is an essay–not a research paper–that acknowledges that, in a troubling reminiscence of the 19th century debate on race and the hybrids, hybridism is a central issue of debate in the social sciences today. The term ‘hybrid’  was applied from botany to anthropology and was associated with both political and scientific speculations on ‘races’ as species or subspecies. The acknowledgment of the common humanity of all ‘races’ strengthened the separation between culture and nature as part and parcel of the project of Modernity (cf. Latour 1994); but it also diverted attention from hybridism to the field of miscegenation and mestiçagem – i.e., ‘racial’ and cultural mixing. Hybridism – and mixing in general – was condemned by some for its impurity and praised by others for its humanism. The result of the century-long debate is, however, much more hybrid itself than a clear opposition. Discourses on miscegenation and mestiçagem tended to be used as ideological masks for relations of power and domination. They were also used as central elements in national, colonial and imperial narratives. The Brazilian case is well known. The Portuguese case is one of the most complex and intriguing: if Brazil has been systematically praised as the example of  the humanistic and miscegenating characteristic of Portuguese expansion, it has also been used as an argument for the legitimization of later colonialism in Africa, as well as for the construction of a self-representation of the Portuguese as non-racists. The Portuguese nation, however, has seldom been described as a miscigenated nation and mestiça itself. In the discourses of national identity, emphasis has been placed upon what the Portuguese have given to the others–a gift of ‘blood’ and culture–and not on what they have received from the others. Present rhetoric on hybridity – as part of globalization, transnationality, postcolonial diasporas, and multiculturalism – clashes with the reality of the return of ‘race’ in cultural fundamentalism, policies of nationality and citizenship, and in the politics of representation. This paper will focus on discourses and modes of classification as the starting point for discussing specific practices and processes of identity dispute in the ‘Lusophone’ space. Three periods in the Portuguese production around miscegenation and hybridism will be analysed: a period marked by racist theories; a period marked by luso-tropicalism; and the present period marked by discussions of multiculturalism. Finally, the acknowledgment of creolized social formations as both the outcome of colonialism and the possible examples for thinking of new, less racist societies, closes this exploratory essay…

Read the entire article here.

Rethinking race, racism, identity and ideology in Latin America

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36,  Issue 10, 2013 (Special Issue: Rethinking Race, Racism, Identity, and Ideology in Latin America)
pages 1485-1489
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.808357

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

This special issue explores ideas of race and racial hierarchy in Latin America in the twenty-first century. By examining the intersection between racialization and processes of identity formation, political struggle, as well as intimate social and economic relations, these essays question how and to what extent traditional racial ideologies continue to hold true. In so doing, we consider the implications of such ideologies for anti-racism struggles. This collection of articles provides a unique insight into the everyday lived experiences of racism, how racial inequalities are reproduced, and the rise of ethnic-based social movements in Latin America. The qualitative nature of the projects allows the authors to advance our understanding of how racial ideologies operate on the ground level. The geographic diversity of the articles – focusing on Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica and Cuba – enables a greater understanding of the distinct ways that racial ideologies play out across different settings.

Race and national ideologies in the Americas are inextricable. The ideas and practices of race were essential to the conquest and colonization of the Americas (Smedley 2007). As European colonizers and settlers shaped the western hemisphere into nations, distinct racial ideologies emerged alongside national ideologies. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies provides us with new insights into how race and national ideologies continue to shift in Latin America, in the context of a globalizing world.

During the nineteenth century, Latin American countries began to break away from their colonial past and form independent states. Intellectual and political elites across Latin America preoccupied themselves with building national unity (Knight 1990). In these nation-building projects, national leaders had to contend with European scholars who denounced their racial degeneracy due to extensive racial mixing (Stepan 1991). Latin Americans could not simply ignore European arguments about racial inferiority as these arguments were central to scientific and medical discourses. Thus, they chose to counter European intellectuals’ claims about their inferiority and argue that racial mixture was not only beneficial, it was the hallmark of Latin American nations. During the twentieth century, ideologies of whitening, mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), blackness, indigeneity and racial democracy informed national ideologies across Latin America. Instead of countering ideas of white supremacy espoused by European intellectuals, Latin American intellectuals and political leaders embraced white supremacy and worked to facilitate and justify a system of pervasive race and colour stratification whereby darker-skinned people, typically with more notable indigenous and African features, occupy the lower rungs of the racial ladder, and those of primarily European descent are at the top…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “From the Conservation of Races to the Cosmic Race”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-10-23, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Juliet Hooker, Associate Professor of Government
University of Texas, Austin

The Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos [1882-1959] and the African American political thinker W.E.B. DuBois [1868-1963] are viewed as having developed conceptions of race and racial identity that are quintessentially Latin American and U.S. American respectively.  Vasconcelos is one of Latin America’s foremost advocates of mestizaje; his notion of the Cosmic Race is generally viewed as articulating a more complex approach to race that sought to dismantle specific racial group identities and reformulate hybrid subjectivities. This approach is often contrasted to the binary, static conceptions of race developed in the U.S., including by African-American thinkers. This paper analyzes this characterization of Latin American and African American political thought by comparing Vasconcelos and DuBois’ arguments about race, especially racial identity. In particular, I will analyze DuBois’ discussion of racial mixing in the U.S. and the motivations behind Vasconcelos’ account of mestizaje in order to complicate the comparison between supposedly static, biologically grounded accounts of race and flexible notions of race that are able to acknowledge processes of racial mixing.  The aim of this juxtaposition is to stage a hemispheric dialogue about race between these two towering American pensadores, in order to show the surprising points of convergence and divergence between U.S. and Latin American ideas about race.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.