Mixed Race Studies

Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800

Mia L. Bagneris, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

This dissertation explores interracial themes in the work of Agostino Brunias, a little known but fascinating Italian artist who painted for British patrons in the late-eighteenth-century colonial Caribbean. Brunias came to the Caribbean around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, a British aristocrat who had recently been appointed governor of the West Indian islands ceded to Britain from France at the conclusion of the Seven Years War. For the next twenty-five years the prolific artist created romanticized images of communities of color including native Caribs, enslaved Africans, and free mulattoes that obscured the horrors of colonial domination and plantation slavery. Instead of slave markets or sugar plantations, Brunias’s canvases offered picturesque market scenes, lively dances, and outdoor fantasies tinged with rococo naughtiness that selectively recorded the life of the colonized for the eye of the colonizer. Local Colors explores Brunias’s use of interracial sexuality, mixed-race bodies, and racial ambiguity in creating this selective visual record, aiming to discover why the bodies of mixed-race women in particular made such perfect canvases for mapping out the colonial desires of British patriarchs. The project also explores how Brunias’s work might be understood as simultaneously participating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling the solidification of racial classification of the eighteenth-century.

Comments by Steven F. Riley

Read a excellent essay about the life of Agostino Brunias by Dr. Lennox Honychurch at his website here.

Art Showcase Seeks to Study Racial Identity

Daily Nexus
University of California, Santa Barbara
2010-02-02
Issue 70, Volume 90

Julie Epstein, Staff Writer

The UCSB Women’s Center is currently hosting a multicultural art exhibit featuring work from students and professional artists.

The art on display ranges from paintings to photography, and even includes a work consisting of human hair on canvas. The show, entitled “Mixed Like Me,” will run until April 16. Third-year art major and show curator Lillian Edwards said the exhibit explores racial identity through an artistic lens.

“The theme of the show is to explore what it means to have a multiracial background,” Edwards said. “The goal is to bring an awareness and discussion about race through art.”

Read the entire article here.

Jean Toomer and Cane: “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Volume 64, Number 4, Winter 2008
E-ISSN: 1558-9595, Print ISSN: 0004-1610
DOI: 10.1353/arq.0.0025

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Even though Jean Toomer was black and white, his fascination with miscegenation in his hybrid short-story cycle Cane (1923) was puzzling and untimely. Joel Williamson writes that by 1915 the one-drop rule had been accepted by both blacks and whites in the North and South (109). Hence, mixed bloods with visible traces of blackness, including members of the former mulatto elite, would be judged as black by both blacks and whites. At best, they could be “in some way, satisfyingly black”. In this article, I put forward a reading of Toomer and Cane that explains his fascination with miscegenation in terms of his hope for what was possible in America. Specifically, his unique and solitary position vis-à-vis the New Negro in Black Washington and the Young American in White Manhattan provided him with the reasons, models, and ideals to believe that, in Cane, he could effectively voice and sketch out a mixed race sensibility and community that would be grasped and appreciated by the American public. However, in the process of writing Cane, he came face to face with the rigid categories and limits of the black-white color line in the Jim Crow era, which rendered unintelligible and unsustainable in the culture at large the mixed race sensibility and community he sought to express and develop. In other words, we see in Cane the ultimately futile clash of Toomer’s Young American ideals with the socio-political realities of the black-white color line. Cane reveals the pain and frustration of this clash through muffled and ambivalent narrative voices, and through sketches of unacknowledged, crippled, misunderstood, and lost mixed race protagonists…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993) In: Martin McLoone & Kevin Rockett, eds. Irish Films, Global Cinema, Studies in Irish Film 4.

Four Courts Press
2007
176 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84682-081-6

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

The chapter analyses the positionalities of the mixed-race female protagonists of each film and the visualisation of their mixed-race identity.  It considers aspects of their struggle for self-definition against the director’s visual clues about their ‘true’ racial space.  It also explores the possibility in these films for a representation of mixed identity that surpasses the stereotypes of the ‘tragic mulatto’ torn between black and white worlds (as represented by mothers in the American films and lovers/parents in the French film).  Finally the article – as with my thesis – considers the limitations of American cinema in transcending binaried representations of race and the alternatives which French cinema offers, in order to consider the possibility for a mixed-race representative model which would visualise the multiplicity and ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha put it, of mixed-race identity.

Africanastudies: YouTube Channel

First Documentary Posted: 2008-03-27

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

Reconstructs the involuntary planetary dispersion of African populations, with their millenary cultural capitals, between the 15th and 19th centuries; and analyses the africanization of the places of arrival through their ethnic contributions.

Reconstruye la dispersión planetaria involuntaria de poblaciones africanas, con sus capitales culturales milenarios, entre los siglos XV y XIX; y analiza la africanización, mediante sus aportaciones étnicas, de los lugares de llegada.

View all of the documentaries here.
Also visit the blog here.

The Africanization of Mexico from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

Edwin Mellen Press
2010
212 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-3781-9; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-3781-4

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

This work is an Afrocentric analysis that subscribes to the notion that there is one human race of multiple ethnicities. It acknowledges Mexico’s African, Amerindian (herein after called First Nations), Asian, and European ethnic heritages. Contrary to the African-disappearance-by-miscegenation-hypothesis-turned-ideology, it introduces the theory of the widespread Africanization of Mexico from the sixteenth century onward.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Álvaro Ochoa Serrano
Introduction
1. African National Names as Denigrating, Obscene and Scatological Language in Mexican Spanish
2. The Colors of Mexican Racism
3. The Africans and Afrodescendants who Constructed Veracruz and the Jarocho Ethos 1521-1778
4. The African Sahelo-Sudanic Belt in the Birth of Mexican Vaqueros and Vaquero Culture in the Veracruz Lowlands
5. Tracing the Afro-Mexican Path: 1813-1910
6. Mexican Food is Soul Food: A Medicine for National Amnesia
7. The Africanness of Mexican Traditional Medicine
8. Memín Pinguín, Hermelinda Linda and Andanzas de Aniceto: The Dark Side of “Light-Reading”
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

Mixed Race Hollywood (review) [Emily D. Edwards]

Journal of Film and Video
Volume 61, Number 4 (Winter 2009)
E-ISSN: 1934-6018
Print ISSN: 0742-4671
DOI: 10.1353/jfv.0.0051

Emily D. Edwards, Professor of Broadcasting and Cinema
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Mixed Race Hollywood is a collection of essays that could not be timelier. As popular media, journalists, and citizen bloggers actively dispute the impact of President Barack Obama’s election on attitudes toward race, editors Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas have compiled a series of essays that explore ways popular media and celebrity have presented miscegenation and racial identity for Americans. These historical and critical essays analyze specific films, television programs, Internet sites, and the appearance of celebrity image to help explain the ways popular media presentations of race correspond with the development of social behaviors and attitudes. Though some might credit “liberal Hollywood” for ushering America into the “mulatto millennium,” it is obvious from the collection of essays in this book that Hollywood is not always the leader of public opinion but often takes the more conservative approach, lagging behind fairly widespread social attitudes.

The editors divide the book into four sections: themes of mixed race representation, miscegenation and romance, genre and mixed race characters, and finally, a section that examines the shift in media presentation of mixed race characters from tragic to heroic. The introduction by Beltrán and Fojas helps set the background and the overall argument that media presentations reveal a cultural shift in American attitudes toward mixed race characters. The introduction also provides some useful notes on terminology.

The essays begin, appropriately, with J. E. Smyth’s chapter, “Classical Hollywood and the Filmic Writing of Interracial History, 1931–1939.” This chapter examines films such as Cimarron (1931), Ramona (1936), Show Boat (1936), Jezebel (1938)…

Read the entire review here.

Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music

Temple University Press
December 2009
238 pp
6×9
1 figure 5 halftones
Paper EAN: 978-1-43990-090-1; ISBN: 1-4399-0090-6
Cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-089-5; ISBN: 1-4399-0089-2

Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Tufts University

Listen Up! When the New York-born Tito Puente composed “Oye Como Va!” in the 1960s, his popular song was called “Latin” even though it was a fusion of Afro-Cuban and New York Latino musical influences. A decade later, Carlos Santana, a Mexican immigrant, blended Puente’s tune with rock and roll, which brought it to the attention of national audiences. Like Puente and Santana, Latino/a musicians have always blended musics from their homelands with other sounds in our multicultural society, challenging ideas of what “Latin” music is or ought to be. Waves of immigrants further complicate the picture as they continue to bring their distinctive musical styles to the U.S.—from merengue and bachata to cumbia and reggaeton.

In Oye Como Va!, Deborah Pacini Hernandez traces the trajectories of various U.S. Latino musical forms in a globalizing world, examining how the blending of Latin music reflects Latino/a American lives connecting across nations. Exploring the simultaneously powerful, vexing, and stimulating relationship between hybridity, music, and identity, Oye Como Va! asserts that this potent combination is a signature of the U.S. Latino/a experience.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Hybridity, Identity, and Latino Popular Music
• 2. Historical Perpectives on Latinos and the Latin Music Industry
• 3. To Rock or Not to Rock: Cultural Nationalism and Latino Engagement with Rock ‘n’ Roll
• 4. Turning the Tables: Musical Mixings, Border Crossings and new Sonic Circuitries
• 5. New Immigrants, New Layerings: Tradition and Transnationalism in the U.S. Dominican Popular Music
• 6. From Cumbia Colombiana to Cumbia Cosmopolatina: Roots, Routes, Race, and Mestizaje
• 7. Marketing Latinidad in a Global Era
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Reloaded: Representing Asian Women Beyond Hollywood

Thursday, 2010-01-28, 16:00-17:30 PST (Local Time)
University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender
691 Barrows Hall

Elaine H. Kim, Professor of Asian American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Join Prof. Elaine Kim for a screening and discussion of the new 30 minute documentary film, Reloaded: Representing Asian Women Beyond Hollywood (working title), a sequel to the 1988 documentary, Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and Film.

Over the past two decades, the world has changed dramatically as global capitalism moves production, people, technologies, and ideas over borders around the globe. New formations and new communities have emerged everywhere. Now there are many more Asians from diverse backgrounds living all over the world, including in the U.S. American people are becoming more racially mixed than ever, and old notions of race, gender, and identity have been called into question. How does today’s Hollywood reflect these changes? What is new and what’s been recycled? What interventions are being made in Asian American independent films and new media?

View the PDF flyer here.

Writing in 2010 about the Idea of Racial Identity

The 17th Annual Oxford Conference for the Book (2010-03-04 through 2010-03-06)
2010-03-05, 13:30 – 15:00 EST (Local Time)
Overby Center for Southern Journalism
University of Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi

Ted Ownby, Professor History and Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
University of Mississippi

Bliss Broyard

W. Ralph Eubanks

Danzy Senna