Mixed Race Studies

Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted

1893
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Project Gutenberg EBook
2004-05-14
#12352

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

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PSU MFA Monday Lecture Series: Laylah Ali

Portland State University Campus (at the corner of SW Broadway & Hall)
Shattuck Hall Annex
1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198
Portland, Oregon
2011-01-31, 19:30-20:30 PST (Local Time)

Laylah Ali, Associate Professor of Art
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Free to the public

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and a MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Laylah Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).

PSUs Art Dept. offers free public Art lectures almost every Monday night of the school year. Local, National and International, interdisciplinary artists visit Portland to speak about their work.

The PMMNLS is supported in part by: PICA, Portland Center for Public Humanities, Wealth Underground Farm, Bear Deluxe Magazine, Northwest Film Center. If you or your organization is interested in becoming supporters of the PMMNLS please contact the art department.

For a complete list of MFA Monday Night Lectures please click here.

Kelly Jackson: Faculty spotlight

Arizona State University
College of Public Programs
2011-01-14

Dr. Kelly Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Social Work in the College of Public Programs.

Before coming to the College four years ago, she earned her Masters in Social Work from the University at Albany, and her PhD in Social Welfare from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Kelly’s research focuses on the cultural identity development of persons of mixed racial and ethnic heritage. She is also interested in developing and evaluating strength-based interventions for at-risk multiracial and multicultural youth.

She says her work is very personal to her.  “As a social worker and a person of mixed race heritage, I am committed to expanding the current knowledge base of multiracial identity development by conducting and disseminating empirical research that utilizes ecological and strength-based conceptualizations of the multiracial experience.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 124, Number 491 (Winter 2011)
pages 120-121
E-ISSN: 1535-1882 Print ISSN: 0021-8715

Sharon Downey Varner
Department of English
University of South Alabama

Hodes, Martha. A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2007.

This meticulously researched historical narrative is reconstructed from letters written by the subject and her family members. In A Sea Captain’s Wife, historian Martha Hodes brings to life the story of an obscure New England woman who marries a black man after the Civil War and takes up residence in the Cayman Islands. Hodes is a professor of history at New York University and the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South.

Eunice Richardson, the subject of this book, was born a white, working-class woman in New England in 1831. She was first married to William Stone, a fellow New Englander, with whom she moved to Mobile, Alabama, for a period of time. Hodes speculates that it was in Mobile that Eunice first became acquainted with Smiley Connolly, an African American who would become her second husband.

Hodes leaves no stone unturned and no document undogged. Her storyteller’s bent, her understanding of the complex racial climate of the late 1800s, and her extensive historical knowledge combine to produce an engaging historical document that reads like a novel…

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Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”

Callaloo
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer, 2004)
pages 768-787
E-ISSN: 1080-6512, Print ISSN: 0161-2492
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2004.0136

Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) and Julie Dash’s feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) are singular texts that use historical frameworks to comment upon post Civil-Rights- era race and gender relations and identity formations. Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film written and directed by Dash, was also the first film by an African-American woman to receive widespread theatrical distribution. Daughters is an independent work that resists and contests many aspects of the Hollywood film. Corregidora was the first novel by Gayl Jones, a reclusive figure with a small but striking literary output. Both the novel and the film call attention to understudied aspects of the African diaspora. In Corregiilora, Jones creates an unusual migration circuit that links mid-to-late twentieth-century African Americans living in Kentucky to their slave ancestors in Brazil. In Daughters of the Dust, the plot concerns the persistence of African traditions among black people at the turn of the century living on the Sea Islands. located off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Both works also highlight the crucial role of women in maintaining cultural memory for black communities. This essay concerns the ways in which Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust make compelling interventions that transform mulatto characters—“racially mixed” women of African descent who bear the phenotypical (physical) markers of “race mixing”—into figures that help us to understand new things about sexual and racial normativity. Both texts effect a surprising deployment of a figure that has been symbolic of repressed histories and regressive discourses.

Mulatta characters have long been controversial figures for scholars of African-American literature. In novels such as Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States (William Wells Brown, 1867), lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1892), Megda (Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, 1891), and Contending Forces: A Romance lllustrative of Negro Life North and South (Pauline Hopkins, 1900), mulatta characters are symbolic of traumatic histories of enslavement. In novels of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those associated with Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and Jessie Fauset There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy American Style ( 1933). mulatta characters represented access to class mobility and the possibility of escaping the stigma of blackness altogether through “racial passing.”…

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The Other Hafu of Japan

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanses Daily News
2011-01-14

Brett Fujioka, Rafu Intern

A new documentary examines the lives of racially mixed individuals as they explore their own identities.

Is a ship the same if you take it apart piece by piece and replace its frame? No simple answer exists, as anyone who has tackled this philosophical Rubik’s cube knows.

The ethno-national equivalent to this riddle grows exceedingly more complicated with the swelling number of international unions each year. Statistics in 2004 chart that 1 in 15 marriages in Japan were international and that 1 in 30 children born there possesses a parent of non-Japanese descent. Japan’s ethnic constituency is rapidly changing and its people may need to rethink what it means to be Japanese in a country where blood and national identity are considered one and the same.

The same applies for the hafu (mixed Japanese) community. The lives for each individual half-Japanese vary from person to person and the filmmakers for the upcoming documentary, “Hafu,” and their subjects best represent this.

“Hafu” is the tentative title for an upcoming documentary in Japan following the lives of several half-Japanese individuals as they explore their identities.

Both Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi spent most of their lives away from Japan. Takagi is half Spanish and stayed in Madrid, Sydney, Washington D.C., and Ottowa due to her diplomat father’s itinerant career. She eventually completed her higher education at the Francisco de Vitoria, Complutense and Waseda Universities before finally returning to Japan.

Nishikura, likewise, lived her childhood spread throughout the world. She stayed in Beijing, Manila, Honolulu, DC, Berlin, London, and Los Angeles and graduated from New York University.

“Lara and I have unusual stories and come from international backgrounds,” said Nishikura in an interview with the Rafu. “I don’t know if that’s representative of a lot of the mixed Japanese community.”

There’s a reason why they’re so hesitant to pinpoint a grand narrative for the hafu experience. There is no all-encompassing hafu story and the eclectic subjects of the documentary are indicative of this…

Read the entire article here.

Thoroughly Modern Mulatta: Rethinking “Old World” Stereotypes in a “New World” Setting

Biography
Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
pages 104-116
E-ISSN: 1529-1456, Print ISSN: 0162-4962
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2005.0034

Maureen Perkins, Associate Professor of Sociology
Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

This paper examines the role of racial stereotypes in the life narratives of several women of color living in Australia. While coming from very different parts of the world, all show an awareness of popular images of the mixed race woman. Their sensitivity on this issue points to the continuing effects of past racism and the globalization of colonial discourse, as well as hints at a sense of community based on color which crosses established “ethnic” boundaries.

In 2001 I interviewed seven women “of color” who had come to Australia from different countries and cultures. I talked with each of them about their childhoods and their experiences of growing up. Although interviewers have often used life stories to understand the collective, (1) the purpose of my interviews was not to construct a picture of Australian society. I was more interested in what could be called transcultural commonality, ways in which these women, while coming from different linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds, felt that they could identify with “color” as a shorthand for certain types of understanding. I wanted to pursue the question of whether being a woman “of color” in a country which did not usually recognize this term in its lexicon of race and ethnicity actually provided a form of community that cut across more established “ethnic” identities. If it did so, it seemed to me that it would be the globalized nature of colonial discourse that created such a common understanding. It was, then, the points of intersection in these life stories that I set out to trace, rather than the specific context of individual narratives.

The meetings were, no doubt, greatly influenced by what I thought I shared with these women, and it would be no exaggeration to say that in some ways I was consciously learning about myself in the process. In asking specifically whether their skin color had been an issue in their childhoods, and whether they had felt it marked them out as different, I was using my own memories of growing up as a brown-skinned immigrant in 1950s London. Nevertheless, I tried to treat each contact as a conversation rather than a formal interview with specific questions. At no point did I introduce the term “mulatta” or “half-caste,” or even “mixed race,” but I did raise the question of whether they had experienced racism. Despite their very different backgrounds, all had experienced racism of some kind, and were acutely aware of its presence in Australian society. The history of colonialism was something that each referred to, though all were conscious of living much more liberated lives, in racial terms, than their parents had done.

Two historians of colonialism, Catherine Hall and Robert Young, have disagreed about whether the racial language of the past can change its meaning. Young writes that however many new meanings of “race” there are, the old refuse to die: “They rather accumulate in clusters of ever-increasing power, resonance and persuasion.” “So what,” is Hall’s reaction: “the origin of a word cannot determine its meanings across time” (127). The one key word about which they most disagree is “hybridity.” Young uses it in the subtitle of his influential book, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. He believes that, while given different inflections, the word cannot stand outside the past, and in fact “reinvokes it” (“Response” 146). Hall, on the other hand, writes about the possibility of re-articulating meanings, and the need to consider the historical context in which people make new meanings from old words.

This debate between Hall and Young is central to understanding the role of color in modern Western societies. Race theory developed by Europeans in the nineteenth century placed a high value on purity. Miscegenation, or breeding between races, was seen as a “mis” take, and like all “mis” words would have a sorry outcome. The legacy of this period of history has been to render all of the terms describing mixed race offensive and painful to some people. Australian Aboriginal communities, for example, reject the term “half-caste” because of its connotations of “part” Aboriginality and its association with the removal of the stolen generations. (2) Werner Sollors writes of the difficulty of describing a condition which in its very conceptualization necessitates thinking racially. Julian Murphet calls the “mulatto” an “unspeakable concept.” In a British context, the distinguished sociologist of race Michael Banton wrote in 2001: “The use of race in English to identify certain kinds of groups sometimes leads to use of the expression ‘mixed-race,’ which is objectionable because of its implication that there are pure races” (185). Banton would not be alone in thinking the term “mixed race” offensive.

Yet Banton’s comments were going to press at the same time as the English census forms for 2001 were becoming available, with their whole new category of “mixed.” Similarly, in the United States, the 2000 census allowed citizens to identify as mixed race for the first time. In both countries, people of “mixed race” themselves have been amongst those agitating for the recognition that such a census category would give them. At the same time, “mixed race studies,” using postcolonial hybridity theory, have become increasingly influential. (3) Can the connotations of a word change, so that its historical traces no longer impact in new contexts?…

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Dominica in Brooklyn

The New York Times
2011-01-13

Carol Vogel, Art Reporter

The Brooklyn Museum has acquired an 18th-century painting by Agostino Brunias, a little-known London-based Italian artist. Around 1764 the British government sent Brunias to the West Indies to document one of that empire’s newest colonies, Dominica. Depicting two richly dressed mulatto women on a walk accompanied by their mother and children—all members of the island’s colonial elite—the painting also shows eight African servants on a sugar plantation.

“We have a large West Indian community,” said Richard Aste, the museum’s curator of European art. “When I saw it, it just screamed Brooklyn. We were looking for something from the 18th century, and we didn’t have anything like this.”

Mr. Aste first saw the painting in Paris in September at the booth of the London gallery Robilant & Voena at the Biennale des Antiquaires. The dealers had bought it from Sotheby’s after the painting failed to sell at auction a year ago. It had belonged to Jayne Wrightsman, a collector and a longtime trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While the Brooklyn Museum will not say what it paid for the painting, Sotheby’s was estimating it would bring $200,000 to $300,000. The museum has titled the canvas “Free Women of Color With Their Children and Servants in a Landscape,” and it will go on view on March 7.

Brooklyn Museum Acquires 18th Century Painting by Agostino Brunias Depicting Colonial Elite

artdaily.org: The First Art Newspaper on the Net
2011-01-18

Agostino Brunias (Italian, ca. 1730-1796), Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape, ca. 1764-1796, Oil on canvas, 2010.59, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange.

BROOKLYN, NY.—The Brooklyn Museum has acquired, by purchase from the London gallery Robilant + Voena, Agostino Brunias’s (1730-1796) painting Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, (circa 1764-96), a portrait of the eighteenth-century mixed-race colonial elite of the island of Dominica in the West Indies. Brunias, a London-based Italian painter, left England at the height of his career to chronicle Dominica, then one of Britain’s newest colonies in the Lesser Antilles. [The painting will go on view 2001-03-07.]

The painting depicts two richly dressed mixed race women, one of whom was possibly the wife of the artist’s patron. They are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with eight African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation, one of the agricultural estates that were Dominica’s chief source of wealth. Brunias documents colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants by their fitted European dresses…

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Mapping the liminal identities of mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean literatures

Pennsylvania State University
December 2006
285 pages
AAT: 3343682
ISBN: 9780549992738

Khadidiatou Gueye

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2006

In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial hybridity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of liminality, this study investigates how mulattas negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural environments, times, and places. Four writers of African descent and dissimilar socio-historical backgrounds are studied: Abdoulaye Sadji from Senegal, Bessie Head from South Africa, Mayotte Capécia from Martinique, and Nella Larsen from the United States.

The study is divided into five chapters that deal with the experiences of mulattas in autobiographical writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and expatriation. Thematic and stylistic discrepancies in the works examined are ancillary to the common liminal strategies of de-marginalization and self-reconstruction of female heroines. Their attempts at self-assertion appear in the ways in which they resist the constrictions of patriarchal and racist regimes. Their construction of spaces of agency is interwoven with ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions, which are emblematic of the discontinuities of their lives and paradigmatic of their intricate search for identity. In the works, the liminal experiences of mulattas are framed within the quests for social visibility, the affirmation of humanity, the renegotiation of space, and the anomic straddling between oppositional boundaries and statuses. Through their striving to rise above the limitations imposed on their gender and race, mulattas commit acts of transgression and dissemblance, and disrupt racial taxonomy. I demonstrate that liminality is a major unifying thread that runs through all the narratives and argue that it creates alternative existential paradigms for mixed-blood women. Liminality is an appropriate tool that challenges monolithic views of identities through the re-articulation of cultural meanings.

My main contribution is twofold. First, I extend the traditional cartography of liminality, which is usually based on small-scale societies where individuals have loyalty to their primary communities. Second, I suggest new vistas for race criticism in diasporic studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One
  • Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux
  • Introduction
  • Black/White Polarization
  • Racial Hybridity
  • Betwixt and Between: The Ambiguity of Liminality
• Chapter Two
  • Liminal Psychoautobiographies: Rites and Routes
  • Autobiography as Autrebiographie: Je-Jeu in Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise
  • Internal Drama: Spectralized Presences in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
• Chapter Three
  • The Liminal Experience of Sexuality and the Problematic of Respectability
  • Sexuality at Point Zero in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Sexuality and Normative Illegitimacy in Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal: Between Sexual Empowerment and Disempowerment
• Chapter Four
  • Herspace: Liminal Madness and Racial Passing of the Mulatta
  • I am Mad But I am Not Mad: Shuttling Between Seamless Identities in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
  • Telling a New Story: Racial Performance and Ambiguity in Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Chapter Five
  • The Limen of Journeys: Mulattas and Colonial Paris
  • The French Métropole: Interior Landscapes in Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal
  • Migration and Trans-Caribbean Identity in Je suis martiniquaise and La négresse blanche
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.