Mixed Race Studies

Dreams of a Life

The Arts Desk
2011-12-14

Nick Hasted

Carol Morley’s moving documentary brings a dead woman lost in London back to life

The decontamination squad scraped the remains of 38-year-old ex-City professional Joyce Vincent from her seat, in front of a TV which had flickered unseen for three years. They took her wrapped Christmas presents too, and left unsolvable mysteries. How did she die? And how does someone become so alone that they’re left in a north-London flat above a busy shopping centre till their body melts into it?

When director Carol Morley read a Sun headline announcing the macabre discovery in 2006, she pined for those answers, putting ads in the London press, the internet and even a black cab, and working obsessively towards this documentary. It gives feature-length attention to an unknown soldier of 21st-century urban life: a woman who was ignored till she disappeared.

…Death’s tragedy, of course, is often worse for the living. From a primary schoolfriend to work colleagues, Morley’s interviewees show genuine affection, puzzlement and shock as Vincent’s jigsaw is pieced incompletely together. The most heartbreaking figure in her film, though, isn’t Vincent, but Martin, that old boyfriend, who she once asked to marry, and always dropped everything for her. Parental disapproval at her mixed race stymied the wedding but, as he finally breaks down on camera and wails, she was the love of his life. He is bereft for himself that they didn’t stick together, that he didn’t help her even more, that she’s gone…

Read the entire article here.

A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother

Riverhead an Imprint of Penguin Press
2011-05-03
384 pages
9.25 x 6.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594487972
Paperback ISBN: 9781594485596

Janny Scott

A major publishing event: an unprecedented look into the life of the woman who most singularly shaped Barack Obama—his mother.

Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, “what is best in me.” Here is the missing piece of the story.

Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham’s friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman’s inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today.

Dunham’s story moves from Kansas and Washington state to Hawaii and Indonesia. It begins in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and culminates in the present, with her son as our president- something she never got to see. It is a poignant look at how character is passed from parent to child, and offers insight into how Obama’s destiny was created early, by his mother’s extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering. Finally, it is a heartbreaking story of a woman who died at age fifty-two, before her son would go on to his greatest accomplishments and reflections of what she taught him.

The Value of Intersectional Comparative Analysis to the “Post-Racial” Future of Critical Race Theory: A Brazil-U.S. Comparative Case Study

Connecticut Law Review
Volume 43, Issue 5 (July 2011)
pages 1407-1437

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

This Commentary Article aims to illustrate the value of comparative law to the jurisprudence of Critical Race Theory (CRT), particularly with reference to the CRT project of deconstructing the mystique of “postracialism.” The central thesis of the Article is that the dangerous seductions of a U.S. ideology of “post-racialism” are more clearly identified when subject to the comparative law lens. In particular, a comparison to the Brazilian racial democracy version of “post-racialism” is an instructive platform from which to assess the advisability of promoting post-racial analyses of U.S. racial inequality. In Part I the Article introduces the value of comparative law to the future development of CRT. Part II provides an overview of Brazilian “post-racial” discourse. Part III then details the quantitative and qualitative indicators of racial discrimination and intersectional race and gender discrimination in Brazil. Part IV focuses upon the Brazilian legal opposition to post-racialism as evidenced by a recent intersectional anti-discrimination case. The Article then concludes that the critical comparative examination of the Brazilian version of “post-racialism” assists in elucidating the concrete counterintuitive harms of a “post-racial” perspective in the United States.

ARTICLE CONTENTS

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. BRAZILIAN “POST-RACIAL” RACIAL DISCOURSE
• III. QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE INDICATORS OF DISCRIMINATION IN BRAZIL
• IV. THE INTERSECTIONAL POSITION OF AFRO-BRAZILIAN WOMEN
• V. THE INTERSECTIONAL CASE OF TIRIRICA

I. INTRODUCTION

In her article in this volume, Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw turns her attention to considering the “contemporary significance of CRT’s trajectory in light of today’s ‘post-racial’ milieu.” Post-racialism is characterized by a public policy agenda of colorblind universalism rooted in the assertion that society has transcended racism. Post-racialism incorporates colorblindness but is distinct in extending beyond the colorblindness retreat from race as primarily an aspiration for eliminating racism. In contrast, the rhetoric of post-racialism contends that racism has already been largely transcended.

In Crenshaw’s consideration of post-racialism she notes that the present challenge to Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to preclude an “overinvestment in the symbolic significance” of post-racialism as a racial frame that disregards manifestations of racial inequality in its celebration of formal equality and a colorblindness that equates the articulation of racial concerns with an act of racism. Crenshaw convincingly demonstrates the fallacy of post-racialism and the simultaneous difficulty in dispelling it, given the contemporary racial fatigue and public desire to foreclose any discussions of race. To combat the Obama mania that Crenshaw notes sanctions all talk of racism as a racial grievance itself, Crenshaw urges CRT to develop a broader project “to remap the racial contours in the way that people see the world that we live in—then in so doing . . . create a new set of possibilities for racial-justice advocates.” Crenshaw urges that the “next turn in CRT should be decidedly interdisciplinary, intersectional and cross-institutional.” In this Commentary Article, I would like to suggest that the next turn in CRT also focus more deeply on comparative law.

Because the post-racialism racial frame casts a veil which hinders the ability to see racial disparities and understand them as connected to various forms of racial discrimination, what is needed is a mechanism for refocusing the U.S. racial lens. Comparative law can make a useful contribution in the effort to refocus the racial lens. A key insight from comparative law is its “potential for sharpening, deepening and expanding the lenses through which one perceives law,” because of its ability to “challenge entrenched categorizations and fundamental assumptions in one’s own and others’ legal cultures.” Indeed, anthropologists have long noted that we cannot fully see and appreciate our own “culture” until we have compared it to that of another. A number of CRT scholars and related LatCrit [Latino Critical Race Studies] scholars have started the project of incorporating a comparative law component into CRT and the associated endeavor of applying CRT to non-U.S. legal jurisdictions. What I am underscoring in this Article is the particular usefulness that comparative law presents for the specific project of combating the post-racialism racial frame. This is because contemporary U.S. CRT scholars can only set forth conjectures about the future long-term dangers of post-racial rhetoric (such as hindering the pursuit of racial equality by shutting down any discussion of race in favor of equating racial disparities with cultural deficiencies and socio-economic disadvantages). In contrast, a comparative consideration of another region in which a form of post-racialism has long existed provides the opportunity to examine the actual adverse consequences of post-racial rhetoric.

As a vehicle for illustrating the value of comparative law to the CRT project of dismantling the post-racialism racial frame, I shall provide a comparative analysis of an instructive Brazilian intersectionality case. Because Brazil is a country that has long claimed that all racial distinctions were abandoned with the abolition of slavery, it is an instructive platform from which to assess the viability of contemporary assertions of postracialism in the United States. Yet, as shall be discussed below, growing discrimination jurisprudence in Brazil shows the longstanding post-racial assertion to be false. To the extent that a century-old claim to a form of post-racialism in Brazil is shown to be a fallacy, the many parallels that exist between Brazil and the United States enable a salient critique of U.S. post-racialism. In particular, because of their objectified and denigrated status, examining the treatment of Black women as an intersectional matter, helps to demystify the barriers to productive transnational comparisons of racial ideologies between the United States and Latin America. In order to be concrete, I shall focus on a recent intersectional discrimination case that was litigated in Brazil. But before discussing the case, it will be helpful to first explain the contours of the “post-racial” Brazilian racial ideology.

II. BRAZILIAN “POST-RACIAL” RACIAL DISCOURSE

Like the United States, Brazil is a racially diverse nation with a significant number of persons of African descent stemming from the country’s history of slavery. Yet Brazil’s involvement in the African slave trade was even longer and more intense than that of the United States. This accounts for the fact that, aside from Nigeria, Brazil is the nation with the largest number of people of African descent in the world. After emancipation, Brazil continued to be a racially divided nation, but occasionally provided social mobility for a few light-skinned mixed-race individuals. This social mobility was directly tied to the racist nationbuilding concepts of branqueamento (whitening) and mestiçagem (racial mixing/miscegenation), which can best be described as campaigns to whiten the population through a combination of European immigration incentives and the encouraging of racial mixture in order to diminish over time the visible number of persons of African decent. Indeed, the social recognition of the racially-mixed racial identity of mulato/pardo was a mechanism for buffering the numerical minority of white-identified elite Brazilians from the discontent of the vast majority of persons of African descent. Greater symbolic social status and occasional economic privilege were accorded based on one’s light skin color and approximation of a European phenotype, which simultaneously denigrated Blackness and encouraged individuals to disassociate from their African ancestry. It should be noted that in terms of concrete economic benefits, few mulattoes radically superseded the status of those Afro-descendants viewed as “Black.” Rather, the recognition of mulattoes as racially distinctive from Blacks served primarily as a kind of “psychological wage” associated with the prestige of approximating whiteness without any significant groupwide monetary benefit for such status. As a result, Brazil was able to maintain a rigid racial hierarchy that served white supremacy in a demographically-patterned society where people of African descent approximated and sometimes even outnumbered the white elite. This is in marked contrast to the demographic pattern in the United States, where, with just a few exceptions, Blacks have always been a numerical minority and have thus been more vulnerable to the white majority’s enforcement of Jim Crow racial segregation after emancipation from slavery. In Brazil, with its greater population of people of African descent, the ideological use of the “mulatto escape hatch” was such an effective tool of racial subordination that Jim Crow legal segregation was never needed and all racial justice movements were efficiently hindered. But it was the absence of Jim Crow in Brazil that later enabled the nation to promote itself as a country in which racial mixture had created a racially harmonious society. In fact, until recently, it has been a firmly entrenched notion that Brazil was a model of race relations that could be described as a “racial democracy” exemplified by racial fluidity in its racial classification practices. Hence, post-racialism in Brazil, and much of Latin America is characterized by a negation that racism exists after the abolition of slavery. The denial of racism is justified by the racial mixture of the population which has presumably “transcended” racism. Existing racial disparities are instead attributed to the cultural deficiencies and socio-economic disadvantages of Afro-Brazilians. As a result, those who raise the issue of racial discrimination are viewed as racist themselves. These facets of Brazilian post-racialism closely parallel the rhetoric of post-racialism in the United States and the related fascination with racial mixture as emblematic of racial harmony…

Read the entire article here.

Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity

University of Manitoba
2004
450 pages

Sherry Farrell Racette, Professor of Native Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Manitoba

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

When I was a university student, I worked at a summer education program in The Pas in northern Manitoba. There I met three women from the Manitoba Métis Federation who had obtained a grant to teach people who worked with their children. Tired of requests to come into classrooms to teach children beadwork, they had decided that the best use of their time and skills was to “teach the teachers” with the expectation that beadwork would be incorporated into the curriculum. The women seemed to take special care that I learned what they had to teach. Maybe it was because I was the only aboriginal woman in the workshop; maybe it was because I was interested. Kathleen Delaronde, a traditional artist of the highest caliber, was one of those women. I got to know her and her family and during another northern summer, I stayed at their home and learned at her kitchen table. Nobody in my family did beadwork but I felt an immediate connection with beads and leather.

Although beadwork and traditional arts were new to me, sewing clothes and making decorative objects for the home were not. Both my parents had been poor as children and took tremendous pleasure in dressing well. My grandmother always dressed up to go to town, and tortured my uncles by dressing them in little matching suits and hats. One summer while we were visiting my grandmother in Quebec, she sat me down at her treadle sewing machine and helped me sew a dress for my doll. At home I started sewing by helping my mother who was always making something. My job was to rip her mistakes while she forged ahead and to do hand sewing which she still loathes. In addition to what she had learned from my grandmother, my mother had taken a tailoring course that was offered by the Singer sewing machine company, and she sent me off to take a similar course when I was a teenager. Now she helps me when I embark on projects that involve sewing. For an art exhibit, Dolls for Big Girls, I merged what I knew about Métis and First Nations history and traditional arts and clothing. While I made little moccasins, my mother dressed the old woman for a piece entitled Flight based on her memories of clothing worn by my great-grandmother, Annie Poison King.

When I began my journey into traditional arts, my mother brought me a birch bark basket that belonged to my grandmother, Helen King Hanbury. Disappointed that, in a fit of creativity, my grandmother had painted it with green boat paint, I put the basket aside. I didn’t open it until shortly after my grandmother died. One day I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed with the basket in my lap. When I took off the lid, I found moccasin patterns, a piece of embroidery, assorted odds and ends, and a handmade needle case with a simple flower embroidered on the cover. I realized that I had unknowingly picked up a needle to an aesthetic tradition that my grandmother had put down. Since that time I have taken opportunities to learn from elder artists, such as the late Margaret McAuley of Cumberland House, and struggled on by myself. I have also thought a great deal about what it means when we wrap ourselves up and present ourselves to the world in a certain way and what it means when we stop. This study is an extension of the journey that began when Kathleen Delaronde helped me pick up the needle. It has been done with the greatest respect for the women who have taught me and the artists from long ago, who I am sure have been standing beside me guiding my research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PREFACE: Picking Up the Needle
  • Acknowledgements
  • Glossary
  • Abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE: Métis and Half Breed Clothing and Decorative Arts
• CHAPTER TWO: Métis, Half Breed and Mixed Blood: Identifying Self and Group
• CHAPTER THREE: The Métis Space of New Possibilities: Elements of Hybrid Style
• CHAPTER FOUR: “After the Half Breed Fashion”: Reconstructing 19th Century Métis and Half Breed Dress
• CHAPTER FIVE: Tent Pegs: Material Evidence
• CHAPTER SIX: Spirit and Function: Symbolic Aspects of Occupational Dress
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Clothing in Action: the Expressive Properties Of Dress
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Sewing for a Living: the Commodification of Women’s Artistic Production
• CHAPTER NINE: Artists, Making and Meaning
• CHAPTER TEN: Half Breed, but not Métis: Lakota and Dakota Mixed Bloods
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Final Thoughts and Conclusions
  • Sewing Ourselves Together
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PLATE GALLERY

Read the entire dissertation here.

Mixed-Race Identity in a Nineteenth-Century Family: The Schoolcrafts of Sault Ste. Marie, 1824-27

Michigan Historical Review
Volume 25, Number 1 (Spring, 1999)
pages 1-23

Jeremy Mumford, Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Brown University

In the autumn of 1824 the Schoolcraft family set out from Sault Ste. Marie, at the mouth of Lake Superior in northern Michigan Territory, to visit New York City. For Jane, who had seldom left the remote village where she was born, this was her first visit. It was the first time Henry had returned to his home state since his appointment as federal Indian Agent in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822 and his marriage a year later. And everything was new, of course, for their son Willy who was only four months old.

The Schoolcrafts were apprehensive about the reception they would meet in the metropolis. Jane was the daughter of Oshauguscodaywayqua, a Chippewa woman from an influential lakeshore family, and John Johnston, an Irish gentleman and fur trader. In the language of her time, both Jane and her child were half-breeds.  To her relief, Jane and Willy received only friendly attention on this visit. When Henry left to do some business in Washington, some friends, Mr. and Mrs. Conant, invited Jane to leave her lodging house and stay with them. She wrote to Henry of repeated visits, interesting conversation, and “marked kindness” from many acquaintances.  The strongest impression the Schoolcrafts took away from their visit was of kindly interest in Jane and Willy, who were received as “another Pocahontas” and her “bright American boy.”

In making a family excursion to the great eastern city, the Schoolcrafts signaled ambitions within a wider arena beyond their village. One purpose of the visit was to discuss a book of Indian oratory on which Henry intended to collaborate with Samuel Conant and in which Jane may have been involved. The other was to improve Henry’s political contacts in Washington. Henry was ambitious for both literary and political fame, as well as for the prospects of his first child, William Henry Schoolcraft, the bright American boy.

For both parents, their sojourn in the East prompted reflection on their responsibilities and their future. Sick in bed, Jane wrote from New York to Henry in Washington that she was unused to being separated from him and missed him. He wrote to her of his prayer that their “sweet, interesting little boy [would] be permitted to grow up to man’s estate, and that his mother may be spared to nurture him up.” He mused: “What an interesting chain of thought is connected with the idea of a home, and a wife, and a child.”

Inevitably, this chain of thought had to take account of the meaning of Jane’s and Willy’s mixed race. The Schoolcrafts were starting their family in the shadow of a very different model of family-building: what was called in the upper Great Lakes la facon du pays or “the custom of the country.” Traditionally, white men lived with and had children by Indian or mixed-blood women, only to leave their families behind when they returned east, entrusting them to other men’s protection or abandoning them altogether. Jane’s parents were unusual in the permanence of their relationship, but even they did not formalize their marriage until she was twenty.  In visiting the East together as a family, Jane and Henry (who were properly married by a visiting clergyman) broke the custom of the country and expressed their determination to start a family that was just as legitimate in New York as it was in Sault Ste. Marie.

They were opposing not only the custom of the country but also the direction of educated opinion. Jane’s and her children’s mixed ethnicity, while not uncommon, was a subject of increasing distrust. When Jane was three years old, President Jefferson predicted that white and Indian people would “blend together, … intermix, and become one people.” But during her lifetime Americans moved toward a harsher theory of racial boundaries. By the 1840s some scientists argued that a mixed-race person was a “hybrid” of biologically separate species, “a degenerate, unnatural offspring, doomed by nature to work out its own destruction.” During the years of Henry’s and Jane’s marriage, mixed-race families became ever more suspect.

To build a secure foundation for their family, the Schoolcrafts used whatever resources they could find. They looked hopefully to Jane’s Chippewa connections, which promised substantial support. Her dowry of 2,000 pounds (about $10,000) came from her parents’ business in Chippewa furs. She and Henry stood to enlarge it through gifts of land made by the tribe to Jane and Willy as mixed-blood Chippewa. Jane also contributed to her family’s fortunes in another way: by teaching Henry about Chippewa culture and folktales, she laid the foundation for Henry’s later fame as an writer about Indians.

This essay will trace two attempts the Schoolcrafts made, in the first years of their marriage, to turn Jane’s Chippewa inheritance into a family asset. These attempts were quite different, one in the realm of literature, the other in real estate. In each case, however, the nature of the inheritance made its use problematic. For Jane, her connection to the Chippewa culture she recorded undermined her position as a genteel woman of letters. For Willy, his connection to the Chippewa lands he stood to receive undermined his future as a citizen and a man of property. For the Schoolcrafts, mother and son, Indian legacies had apparent advantages but hidden liabilities. To follow them is to begin to unravel the question of race, and of mixed-race identity, in one American family…

Read the entire article here.

Professor Alcira Dueñas: Illuminating the Andes: Indigenous and Mestizo Intellectuals in Colonial Peru

¿Qué Pasa, OSU?
Ohio State University
Autumn 2009

Michael J. Alarid

A citizen of Colombia, Professor Alcira Dueñas is a historian who conducts research on the cultural and intellectual history of Amerindians and other subordinated groups of the Peruvian Andes during the colonial era. Professor Dueñas earned her Bachelor of Arts from Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Economics, and her Master of Art and Doctorate in History from The Ohio State University, where she focused on the history of Latin America. For more than twenty years, professor Dueñas has taught courses on Colonial and Modern Latin America, Women’s history of Latin America, and modern World History. Professor Dueñas has had a distinguished career: she is a Fulbright scholar, recipient of the OSU Graduate School Alumni Research Award, and, along with a group of faculty of color from the History Department, she has recently been honored with the Distinguished University Diversity Enhancement Award from the University Senate, as well as with an equivalent distinction from the College of Humanities. …

…Professor Dueñas continues to feel indebted to OSU for her intellectual flowering, and through her OSU education she has infused an interdisciplinary approach into her historical methodology as well. Her first book, which hits shelves in the spring of 2010, utilizes tools of literary criticism and ethnohistory to highlight the presence and practices of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in colonial Peru. She develops a textual analysis of Andean manifestos, memoriales (petitions), reports, and letters to identify the rhetorical strategies these intellectuals utilized to reach out to the royal powers. Dueñas explains, “I place such analysis in the historical context of the major critical conjunctures of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, particularly the insurrections that intersected with some of the writings under study. I apply anthropological methods, as I examine issues of identity, religion, and Andean political culture.”

Professor Dueñas’ creative approach to research has resulted in her manuscript being picked up by a major academic press; the book is complete and in production with the University Press of Colorado. Her book reconstructs the history of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in mid and late colonial Peru, illuminating the writing practices and social agency of Andeans in their quest for social change. Dueñas elucidates, “I conclude that Andean scholarship from mid-and-late colonial Peru reflects the cultural changes of the colonized ethnic elites at the outset of modernity in Latin America. Their intellectual and political struggles reveal them as autonomous subjects, moving forward to undo their colonial condition of “Indians,” while expanding the intellectual sphere of colonial Peru to educated ‘Indios ladinos.’ They used writing, Transatlantic traveling, legal action, and even subtle support to rebellions, as means to improve their social standing and foster their ethnic autonomy under Spanish rule.” Dueñas concludes, “They attempted to participate in the administration of justice for Indians and seized every opportunity to occupy positions in the ecclesiastical and state bureaucracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Playing in the dark/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zoë Wicomb

Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
Volume 20, Issue 1, 2008
pages 1-15
DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2008.9678286

J. U. Jacobs, Senior Professor of English and Fellow
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Zoë Wicomb’s three fictional works—You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006)—all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the post apartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb’s writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall has defined: an essential cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity. The politics of South African ‘coloured’ identity in Wicomb’s works reveals a tension between, on the one hand, acceptance of the complex discourse of colouredness with all its historical discontinuities, and, on the other, the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity, drawn from a collective narrative of the past. In David’s Story the possibility of an essential cultural identity as an alternative to the unstable coloured one is considered with reference to the history of the Griqua ‘nation’ in the nineteenth century. And in Playing in the Light the alternative to colouredness is examined with reference to those coloured people under apartheid who were light enough to pass for white and crossed over, reinventing themselves as white South Africans. The essay approaches coloured identity through the lens of postcolonial diaspora theory, and more specifically, diasporic chaos theory.

Read or purchase the article here.

Stuck at the border of the reserve: Self-identity and authentic identity amongst mixed race First Nations women

University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
January 2010
330 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR64501
ISBN: 9780494645017

Jaime Mishibinijima Miller

A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Guelph by for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The lowered self-esteem of First Nations people is evident in the disparities in health that exist in comparison with the rest of the Canadian population. High risk behaviors such as alcohol and drug use, and poor decisions relating to health and wellness are the outcome of decades of negative perceptions of self brought on by the lateral violence of colonialism. This research demonstrates how different determinants of First Nations identity (legal and policy based, social and culturally based definitions, and the self-identification ideology) interplay and influence a sense of authenticity which informs self-worth and the ability to realize health and wellness for twelve First Nations women on Manitoulin Island. First Nations identity is multi-layered and for women who only have one First Nations parent, and who often have Bill C-31 Indian status, identity becomes complicated and painful. Using life histories, the research participants demonstrate that an authentic identity is difficult to navigate because of the stigmatization they feel by non First Nations people for being a First Nations woman, and also the lateral violence they experience in their communities for being “bi-racial”, not growing up on their reserve, not knowing language and culture, and often having either Bill C-31 Indian status or no status at all. The medicine wheel is used to explore this topic and a Nanabush story provides the context to understand it.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Le métissage dans l’œuvre indochinoise de Marguerite Duras

McGill University, Montreal
2006
106 pages

Elisabeth Desaulniers

Mémoire soumis à l’Université McGill en vue de l’obtention du grade de Maître ès arts (MA) en langue et littérature françaises

This dissertation focuses on the issue of hybridity in Marguerite Duras’ corpus of Indochinese texts, as well as on the meeting of identities in the colonial realm. In order to identify the problematics of colonial coexistence, we will address the themes of the encounter between the Orient and the Occident, the use of hybrid discourse and the role of memory in the process of rewriting. Edward Said’s Orientalism theory as well as Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence in colonial discourse will serve as the basis for the analysis of the Indochinese cycle. Far from being a totalizing experience, hybridity will reveal itself as being a harrowing dichotomy.

Read the entire thesis (in French) here.

From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper

Kendall Blog
Kendall College of Art and Design
Ferris State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan
2011-11-07

Pamela Patton, Editor
Kendall Portfolio

Margaret Garner or The Modern Medea (1867)

I always find lectures by visiting art historians fascinating. Looking at works of art in historical context, examining the details, and hearing the backstories leaves me hungry to learn more. Such was the case on Wednesday, November 2 when I attended a lecture by Jo-Ann Morgan describing cultural history from the 19th century…
 
…Morgan’s lecture was titled “From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper: Mulatto Women in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture.” “Mulatto” isn’t a word heard often these days, and is defined as, “the first general offspring of a Black and White parent; or, an individual with both White and Black ancestors. Generally, Mulattoes are light-skinned, though dark enough to be excluded from the White race.”

“Maggie the Ripper” is Margaret Garner, a 23-year-old enslaved Black woman in pre-Civil War America. She and her family had escaped in January 1856 across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but were captured. When she was apprehended, she had cut the throat of her youngest daughter, and was attempting to kill her other children and presumably herself, rather than be returned to slavery. Margaret Garner’s defense attorney moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, in order to get a trial in a free state as well as to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law as well…

Garner was described in newspapers as mulatto with “white blood,” and “delicate” and “intelligent” eyes. By the time Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907), son of a slaveholder, and former Confederate soldier, chose, in 1867, to paint the famous slave fugitive, Garner’s case had all but faded from memory, but perceptions of mixed-race women had changed markedly from gentle, light-skinned madonnas, often painted cradling a babe and wearing a shawl draped about them, reminiscent of images of Mary (as shown in the painting, “The Last Slave Auction in St. Louis”). Gone were Garner’s delicate features, and instead, the frantic woman has the face of a cornered animal, teeth bared and holding a knife dripping with blood, while her dead daughter lay at her feet.

In her lecture, Morgan reminded the audience that prior to the Civil War, Black and Mulatto women were considered nothing more than breeding stock, and the children they bore, whether Black or mixed-race, were little more than property to be sold for profit. After the War, as abolition spread across the country, the same women and children were a guilty reminder of the indiscretion of slave owners, and the image of Mulatto women began to change…

Read the entire article here.