Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture

Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United Kingdom, Women on 2009-10-12 23:07Z by Steven

Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture

Duke University Press
1998
272 pages
13 b&w photographs
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-2105-X, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-2105-7
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-2120-3, ISBN13 978-0-8223-2120-0

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor, African and African American Studies
Duke University

Using black feminist theory and African American studies to read Victorian culture, Impossible Purities looks at the construction of “Englishness” as white, masculine, and pure and “Americanness” as black, feminine, and impure. Brody’s readings of Victorian novels, plays, paintings, and science fiction reveal the impossibility of purity and the inevitability of hybridity in representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. She amasses a considerable amount of evidence to show that Victorian culture was bound inextricably to various forms and figures of blackness.

Opening with a reading of Daniel Defoe’s “A True-Born Englishman,” which posits the mixed origins of English identity, Brody goes on to analyze mulattas typified by Rhoda Swartz in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, whose mixed-race status reveals the “unseemly origins of English imperial power.” Examining Victorian stage productions from blackface minstrel shows to performances of The Octoroon and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she explains how such productions depended upon feminized, “black” figures in order to reproduce Englishmen as masculine white subjects. She also discusses H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in the context of debates about the “new woman,” slavery, and fears of the monstrous degeneration of English gentleman. Impossible Purities concludes with a discussion of Bram Stoker’s novella, “The Lair of the White Worm,” which brings together the book’s concerns with changing racial representations on both sides of the Atlantic.

This book will be of interest to scholars in Victorian studies, literary theory, African American studies, and cultural criticism.

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Recasting Race: women of mixed heritage in further education

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Teaching Resources, United Kingdom, Women on 2009-10-06 03:47Z by Steven

Recasting Race: women of mixed heritage in further education

Trentham Books
January 2008
160 pages
234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781858564050
ISBN-13: 978 1 85856 405 0

Indra Angeli Dewan
Department of Sociology
University of East London

The mixed race population has shown an unprecedented increase in Britain in the last few years, and mixed race is currently heralded as the UK’s fastest growing ethnic group. Whilst this development has been reflected in the recent rapid growth in mixed race studies, this is the first book which specifically examines the relationship between mixed heritage women and the further education sector.

Drawing on mixed race women’s narratives on identity and further education, this book challenges some of the conceptualisations of race, culture and mixed race identity in contemporary sociological literature, and critically examines government discourses around personhood and equity identifiable in post-compulsory education policy. The data reveal that competing discourses of individualism, essentialism and postmodernism are at work, and that it is necessary to understand the interplay of these discourses in order to do justice to the complexity and multiplicity of ways in which the women in the study speak about their identities and experiences.

Recasting Race is important reading for those working in the fields of sociology, sociology of education, cultural studies, and gender and feminist studies, as well as for those developing and teaching on undergraduate and graduate courses in education, and PGCE and Cert Ed. courses. It discusses some of the implications the research has for feminist politics, and provides a source for future education policy and practice recommendations which take the experiences of mixed race people into account.

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5 Shades of Pink: A Coerced Identity

Posted in Arts, Census/Demographics, History, Live Events, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2009-10-04 23:52Z by Steven

5 Shades of Pink: A Coerced Identity

In cooperation with The Graduate Association of Rhetoric and Performance Studies.
A Graduate Thesis Performance Exploring Biracial Identity in the 19th Century.

Monroe Lecture Center Theater
California Avenue, South Campus
Hofstra University
2009-03-19 19:30 (Local Time)

by Melissa J. Edwards
Hofstra University

This performance explores the influences of the 1859 play The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault, miscegenation laws, and the U.S. Census on biracial identity.  All these factors are used in the analysis of the racial identity of [“Pinky”] Sally Maria Diggs, a 9-year-old girl whose freedom was purchased by the congregation [for $900 USD on 1860-02-05] of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, through the efforts of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and his associates.  The performance is intended to educate and present the theories of social impact on racial identity while providing historical fact and content.

“Freedom Ring” by Eastman Johnson, from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1934-03-21, p. 1
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library

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Race, Mixed Race and ‘Race Work’ in Japanese American Beauty Pageants

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, United States, Women on 2009-09-30 18:13Z by Steven

Race, Mixed Race and ‘Race Work’ in Japanese American Beauty Pageants

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Montreal Convention Center
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2006-08-10

Rebecca King-O’Riain, Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland

Long-standing debates within critical race theory about the efficacy of the concept of ‘race’ have posited the mixed race experience as an illustration of the flexible and multiple nature of this socially constructed concept (Gans 2005). However, mixed race studies (Root 1996; DuBose and Winter 2002) themselves have shown that mixed race does not mean ‘no-race’.  There persists, even in mixed race research, the notion of race as a concept where racial meaning is congealed and tied through its supposed association with the body to biology.  Using ethnographic fieldwork in Japanese American beauty pageants, this paper illustrates that the mixed race body invites us to examine more carefully race work – a concept that I introduce to explain how people exert effort to try to keep their own biological notions of race (typically references to looks or physical appearance) in line with their thinking about culture (i.e. full blooded people of color have culture, whites don’t). I look at multiple levels of social interaction in order to shed light on how race is socially and politically constructed in a world where race has gone underground and is more difficult to detect and trace – a world where there can be “racial intent without race” (Ignatiev 2004).

To read the entire paper, click here.

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Women on 2009-09-27 21:05Z by Steven

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race

Routledge
2004-03-04
280 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780789021441; Hardback ISBN-10: 0789021447
Paperback ISBN: 9780789021458; Paperback ISBN-10: 0789021455

Editor: Cathy A. Thompson, Psychologist
Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)
University of California at San Diego

Editor: Angela R. Gillem, Professor & Clinical Psychologist
Arcadia University

Get a unique perspective on the female biracial experience!

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race examines how physical appearance, cultural knowledge, and cultural stereotypes affect the experience of mixed-race women in belonging to, and being accepted within, their cultures. This unique book combines empirical research, theoretical papers, and first-person narrative to address issues relevant to providing therapy to biracial women and girls, helping therapists and counselors develop a treatment framework based on sociocultural factors. Researchers, practitioners, and academics provide insight into the biracial reality, taking multiple aspects of clients’ lives into account rather than looking for simple hierarchies of well-being based on race.

Biracial Women in Therapy is a building block for mental health practitioners in the construction of theory and practice in working with biracial females. The book examines how a biracial women’s racial/ethnic identity intersects with her gender and sexual identity to affect her sense of belonging and acceptance, addressing issues of appearance, social class, disability, power and guilt, and dating and marriage. Topics addressed in the book include:

  • the complexities of multiple minority status
  • how ethnic differences affect biracial adolescents
  • issues encountered by biracial women from a sociohistorical context
  • biracial women’s attitudes toward counseling
  • stereotypes of marginalization and identity confusion
  • a multicultural feminist approach to counseling
  • and a first-person narrative of one author’s racial and sexual identity development

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race
  • From Exotic to a Dime a Dozen – Maria P. P. Root
  • Utilizing the Strengths of Our Cultures: Therapy with Biracial Women and Girls
  • Biracial (Black/White) Women: A Qualitative Study of Racial Attitudes and Beliefs and Their Implications for Therapy
  • Understanding and Assisting Black/White Biracial Women in Their Identity Development
  • Negotiating Racial Identity: Biracial Women and Interactional Validation
  • Dating Practices, Racial Identity, and Psychotherapeutic Needs of Biracial Women
  • When Face and Soul Collide: Therapeutic Concerns with Racially Ambiguous and Nonvisible Minority Women
  • Counseling Biracial Women: An Intersection of Multiculturalism and Feminism
  • Depressive Symptoms and Attitudes Toward Counseling as Predictors of Biracial College Women’s Psychological Help-Seeking Behavior
  • Biracial Lesbian and Bisexual Women: Understanding the Unique Aspects and Interactional Processes of Multiple Minority Identities
  • Conversations, Not Categories: The Intersection of Biracial and Bisexual Identities
  • Out of the Closet but Still in Hiding: Conflicts and Identity Issues for a Black-White Biracial Lesbian
  • Therapeutic Considerations in Work with Biracial Girls
  • Fitting In and Feeling Good: Patterns of Self-Evaluation and Psychological Stress Among Biracial Adolescent Girls
  • Mixed Race Women: One More Mountain to Climb
  • Index
  • Reference Notes Included
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Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance

Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, United States, Women on 2009-09-25 23:13Z by Steven

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance

Rutgers University Press
2006
224 pages
b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3977-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-3976-8

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Of all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes of black womanhood and a challenge to the color line. For others, they represented key aspects of modernity and race coding central to the New Negro Movement. Due to the mulatta’s frequent ability to pass for white, she represented a variety of contradictory meanings that often transcended racial, class, and gender boundaries.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman investigates the visual and literary images of black femininity that occurred between the two world wars. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson traces the origins and popularization of these new representations in the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance and how they became an ambiguous symbol of racial uplift constraining African American womanhood in the early twentieth century.

In this engaging narrative, the author uses the writings of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as well as the work of artists like Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson to illuminate the centrality of the mulatta by examining a variety of competing arguments about race in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

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Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Women on 2009-09-24 04:29Z by Steven

Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 30, Issue 5 (September-October 2007)
Pages 391-403
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2007.07.003

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

This qualitative analysis of interviews with women of Thai and non-Thai parentage throws into question the current celebration of Eur/asianness and multiraciality.  The study describes multiracialisation as an ambivalent and differential process of categorisation which mobilises essentialist ideas of ‘stock’ and ‘breeding’.  A far cry from historical notions of ‘mixed-race degeneracy’, interviewees emerged from this process the ‘best of both worlds’. However, beside the ‘good mix’ there ran the spectre of the ‘bad mix’, and some had more access to celebratory identities than others. Celebratory notions of Eur/asian femininity were further qualified by the competing discourse of the ‘Thai prostitute’.  The precariousness with which interviewees could access normative ideals of desirability was especially visible in narratives of masculinity, non-white parentage, gender variance and childhood.  The article ends by advocating, in the place of a power-evasive celebration, challenges to the multiple overlapping power relations which underlie all acts of evaluation.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

Posted in Articles, Canada, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, Women on 2009-09-24 03:39Z by Steven

Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 8, Number 1, 2002
pages 67-90

Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor
Department of Geography & Planning
University Toronto

This paper examines the ways ‘mixed race’ women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of ‘mixed race’ contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of ‘mixed race’ develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identifed ‘mixed race’ bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically ‘multicultural’.  The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some ‘mixed race’ women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.

Read the entire article here.

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Metisse Narratives

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United Kingdom, Women on 2009-09-24 03:14Z by Steven

Metisse Narratives

Soundings: A journal of politics and culture
Issue 5, Spring 1997

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Jayne Ifekwunigwe discusses the testimonies of women of ‘mixed race’ parentage in the English-African diaspora.

Rather than representing a portrait of metisse (‘mixed race’) girls as unruly, at age six Sandra and Aneya have exposed the major problematic of ‘race’.  Their discussion highlights the cultural paradoxes of ‘race’ and colour which multiple generations of women, men and children in England silently negotiate in their everyday lives.  These individuals descend from lineages which cut across so-called different ‘black and white’ ‘races’, ethnicities, cultures, and classes. Their roots are both endogenous and exogenous.

In varied cultural and historical contexts, countless terms are employed to name such individuals – mixed ‘race’, mixed heritage, mixed parentage, mestizo, mestiza, mulatto, mulatta, Creole, coloured, mixed racial descent, etc. I deploy the terms metisse (f), metis (m), metissage which more appropriately describe generations of individuals who by virtue of birth and lineage do not fit neatly into preordained sociological and anthropological categories.  In England, at the moment, there are a multitude of terms in circulation which describe individuals who straddle racial borders.  More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being metis (se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘black’/’white’ racial categories and the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and over-lapping historical traditions.  The lack of consensus as to which term to use, as well as the limitations of this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to metis(se) and metissage…

…Gettin’ into me late teens, I didn’t think much about meself because of all these conflicts that were startin’ to come up from the past. Also new ones that were comin’ in from other communities – black communities – that were really shockin’ me. I mean there were times when I wouldn’t show me legs. I’d go through the summer wearing tights and socks. Cause I thought they were too light and too white-lookin’. There was a lot of pressure. I remember one day I was leanin’ up somewhere and this guy said to me, ‘Boy, aren’t your legs white.’ I just looked in horror, and felt really sick and wanted to just run away. I was thinkin’, God why didn’t you make me a bit darker? Why did you make me so light? It took me years to reconcile that…

Read the entire article here.

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Experiences of racism and the changing nature of white privilege among lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children in the UK

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United Kingdom, Women on 2009-09-03 19:41Z by Steven

Experiences of racism and the changing nature of white privilege among lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children in the UK

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 33, Issue 2 (February 2010)
pages 176-194
DOI: 10.1080/01419870903023652

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociology
Royal Holloway, University of London

In a context where mixed relationships are often seen as a visible indicator of increased tolerance, this paper holds up a lens to the particular experiences of racism negotiated by lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children. Based on qualitative interviews with thirty mothers, this paper illustrates how, through their parenting, racism and racial injustice became more visible to the mothers in the study.  It is argued that, as well as experiencing racism directed at their children in a range of contexts (including the extended family, school and the local area), lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children are frequently facing social disapproval themselves.  Drawing on the notion of whiteness as a seemingly unmarked and invisible category, this paper argues that mothers’ experiences can challenge and complicate dominant conceptualizations of white privilege.

Read or purchase the article here.

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