Mixed Race Studies

Marcia Dawkins to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #217 – Marcia Dawkins
When: Wednesday, 2011-07-27 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D., is a blogger, professor and communication researcher in Los Angeles. Her interests are mixed race identification, politics, popular culture and new media. Her new book, Clearly Invisible:  Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, looks at racial passing as a viable form of communication. She lectures and consults on these issues at conferences worldwide.

Critical Narrative of Multiracial Women’s Personal Journey: Negotiating the Intersectionallity of Race and Gender Issues in a Monoracial Paradigm

Georgia Southern University
June 2011
264 pages

Geralda Silva Nelson

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Education

The aim of this study was to examine how three women of color, mothers of Multiracial children, experience gender and racial identity issues in the context of United States; explore their choice of racial indicator for their children and the impact that raising multiracial children would have on their own racial identity. This study was informed by critical race feminist thought, framed by qualitative inquiry and oral history as research methodology. Throughout this study I have attempted to demonstrate that gender and race are significant factors in these three women’s lived experiences. The participants’ accounts revealed how different aspects of sexism, racism, heritage pride, and racial invisibility have been a part of their lives, and influenced the choices of racial indicators for their multiracial children. There was ample evidence from the stories of these three participants that the racial identity indicator of their multiracial children and the consequences of these choices, provided a more significant set of apprehensions than the concerns these three women had for their own gender and racial identity issues. Data was collected through semi-structured open ended interviews.

Table of Contents

• 1. INTRODUCTION
  • Multiracial Individuals in the United States
  • Exploring Adequate Racial Identity
  • Educational Significance of the Study
• 2. LITERATURE REVIEW
  • Racism as a Factor in the U.S. Society
  • Gender as a Determinant Factor
  • Gender and Race Intersection
  • Study Framework: Critical Race Feminism
  • Issues of Ethnic Identity
  • White Mothers of Multiracial Children
  • Racial Labeling
  • Children‟s Perception of Their Racial Identity
  • Racial Identity via Peer Pressure
  • Social and Racial Power
  • Racial Categorization
  • Politics of Education and Language
  • Literacy and the Development of Identity
  • Themes Presented in the Literature Reviewed
• 3. METHODOLOGY
  • Oral History
  • Oral History Interviews
  • Listening to One Story at a Time
  • Context of Research
  • History of Turmoil
  • Narratives
  • Researcher/participants‟ Roles
  • Participant Selection
  • The Rules of Disclosure
  • Data Analysis
  • Synthesized Dominant Themes
  • Dominant Interview Themes
  • Recurrent Themes
  • Ethical Consideration and Possible Limitations of this Study
  • Conclusion
• 4. NARRATIVES
  • Maria
  • Jane
  • Sonia
• 5. RACISM
  • The Impact of Racism in the Lives of the Participants
  • Situated Race Relations in Country of Origin
  • Racial Awareness Before Relocating to the U.S.
  • Dealing with Racial Constructs Upon Arriving in the United States
  • Navigating the Complex Racial Landscape of the United States
  • Racial Interaction and Group Membership
  • Racism in the Form of Invisibility
  • Race as a Confounding Issue
  • Contesting Static Racial Construct
  • Breaking the Racial Conventions and Rethinking the Color Line
  • Exploring Racial Interactions
  • Situated Racial Awareness and the Construction of Difference
  • Becoming Aware of Multiraciality
• 6. THE IMPACT OF SEXISM IN THE LIVES OF THE PARTICIPANTS
  • Sexism as it Relates to the Oppression of Women of Color
  • Sexism in the Form of Patriarchy
• 7. FACTORS INFLUENCING THE PARTICIPANTS‟ DECISION TO CHOOSE A PARTICULAR RACE INDICATOR FOR THEIR CHILDREN
  • Responding to Institutions‟ Request for Racial Labels for Multiracial Children
  • Cultural Currency as a Factor
  • Checking Monoracial Boxes for Multiracial Children
  • Racial Heritage Pride as a Racial Identity Determinant
  • The Impact of Racial Indicators on the Educational Experience of Multiracial Children
  • Awareness of Self Racial Identity as Result of Having Multiracial Children
• 8. DISCUSSION
  • A Final Consideration
  • Recommendations for Further Scholarship
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
  • A Summary of Respondents‟ Information
  • B Participant Data Sheet
  • C Survey
  • D Interview Procedure
  • E Interview guide – English
  • F Interview Guide –Spanish
  • G Participant Informed Consent

Read the entire dissertation here.

Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home

Wiley-Blackwell
August 2005
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4051-0054-0
Papeback ISBN: 978-1-4051-0055-7
E-book ISBN: 978-1-4051-4130-7

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

Domicile and Diaspora investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.

• The first book to study the Anglo-Indian community past and present, in India, Britain and Australia.
• The first book by a geographer to focus on a community of mixed descent.
• Investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.
• Draws on interviews and focus groups with over 150 Anglo-Indians, as well as archival research.
• Makes a distinctive contribution to debates about home, identity, hybridity, migration and diaspora.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures.
• Series Editors’ Preface.
• Acknowledgements.
• 1. Domicile and Diaspora: An Introduction.
• 2. At Home in British India: Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 3. Home, Community and Nation: Domesticating Identity and Embodying Modernity.
• 4. Colonization and Settlement: Anglo-Indian Homelands.
• 5. Independence and Decolonization: Anglo-Indian Resettlement in Britain.
• 6. Mixed Descent, Migration and Multiculturalism: Anglo-Indians in Australia since 1947.
• 7. At Home in Independent India: Post-Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 8. Domicile and Diaspora: Conclusions.
• Bibliography.
• Appendix 1 Archival Sources.
• Appendix 2 Interviews and Focus Groups.
• Index

Read chapter one here.

Negotiating Honor: Women and Slavery in Caracas, 1750-1854

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
May 2011
214 pages

Sue E. Taylor

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

This study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

Each group of women had a concept of what honor meant for them and each sought to preserve honor by demanding fair and humane treatment, to be treated with respect and dignity, and to protect their reputations. They also expected those people who had control over them to behave with honor. Sometimes honor, as seen in the cases and as demanded by slave and free black women, corresponded to traditional concepts of honor as birthright as defined by elite members of society and other times not. In other examples, women of color used honor along the lines of Stewart’s concept of honor as the entitlement of treatment as a worthwhile person. By looking beyond honor as birthright, the women in my study also invoked honor in their expectation that they be treated with dignity and respect and be able to preserve their reputations in society and with their peers. Slave owners, on the other hand, were sensitive to accusations of being overly harsh in their treatment of their human possessions. Their good reputation required both paternalism and firm control. Slave litigants tested the boundaries of appropriate coercion and restraint in their suits against abusive or unreasonable slave owners. They also showed a sophisticated understanding of legal codes and institutions.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Introduction
  • Honor, women, and slavery
  • Historiography
  • Literature on gender and slave women
  • Literature on Honor
  • Honor in Latin America
  • Methodology and Sources
  • Organization of Chapters
• Part I: Redefining Honor
  • Chapter 2: Mistreatment as an indicator of dishonor
    • Protecting honor through the court
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 3: Redefining Sexual Honor: Broken Promises and Respectable Work
    • Broken Promises
    • Respectable Work and Honor
    • Conclusion
• Part II: The slave family
  • Chapter 4: Slave and free black families as seen through Church documentation
    • The Parish of San Pablo
    • Marriage
    • Baptisms
    • Matriculas
  • Chapter 5: Preserving the Family
    • Children and Childhood
    • Enslaved Children: Achieving Freedom
    • The death of an owner
    • Marriage and Honor
    • Families and use of the law
• Part III: Slavery, freedom, and emancipation in the post-independence Liberal State
  • Chapter 6: Slavery and Independence
    • Venezuela moves toward revolution
    • The Junta de Secuestros
    • Revolution, slaves, and free blacks
    • Slavery in the republic of Venezuela
    • Freedom in the post-independence state
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Tables

• Table 1: Slave and Free Black Marriages, San Pablo Parish
• Table 2: Slave Marriages
• Table 3: Free Black and slave/manumiso baptisms by year
• Table 4: Slave and Manumiso Baptisms
• Table 5: Slave and manumiso baptisms 1752-1852 by gender and status
• Table 6: Godparents
• Table 7: Heads of Household by race & marital status
• Table 8: Single heads of household
• Table 9: Slave Ownership
• Table 10: Slave Distribution
• Table 11: Slave Statistics
• Table 12: Overview of San Pablo Parish

Chapter 1: Introduction

Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

My study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. This study aids in our understanding of gender and power relations within late colonial Venezuela and beyond, and will contribute to our knowledge of slavery in Latin America more broadly. The intersection of power, gender, race, and sexuality is especially important to this study. By power, I mean the socially sanctioned coercion of one category of person over another that permitted domination of masters over slaves, men over women, etc. Gender refers to socially constructed assumptions regarding behaviors, values, and societal roles assigned to men and women; it serves as a lens through which we can study the experiences and actions of historical actors. How power was mediated between masters and slaves and men and women, including female slave owners is a central concern of this study…

…Winthrop Wright’s monograph on race and class in Venezuela studies the changes in racial attitudes from the colonial period through the first half of the twentieth-century. Wright argues that the cash crop economy and resultant labor arrangements determined the nature of Venezuela’s colonial two-tiered society. The nature of colonial society in Venezuela—relatively under-populated, rural, at the fringe of the empire, with a majority of the population of African descent – mandated racial mixing, according to Wright. However, because miscegenation did not break down the barriers between the elite and the lower classes, race became a “systemic factor in the division of colonial society into distinct castes.” This colonial order persisted until black and mixed race troops were included in the independence movement.

A useful gender study that transcends race and class boundaries is Verena Stolcke’s (Martinez-Alier) 1974 monograph, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. She uses marriage, specifically deviations from the norm, as a lens to assess nineteenth-century Cuban society. Stolcke examines cases of parents opposed to their child’s marriage, cases of elopement, and instances of interracial marriage, arguing that these deviations not only highlight conflicts within the system, but more importantly, make the norms even more apparent. This book deals specifically with interracial marriage within a slave-owning society. The fact that a large portion of the Cuban population were slaves, ex-slaves, or descendants of slaves is crucial to her argument. Her work raises important issues to colonial Cuban society and gender that are applicable to my case.

Finally, my study examines free African and mixed-race women living during the era of slavery to discover how their lives, occupations, opportunities, religious practices, and family relationships may have differed from those of their enslaved counterparts. Because slavery continued to expand in Venezuela through the end of the eighteenth century, the free population of color was sizeable, numbering nearly 200,000 free people of color, or forty-six percent of the population, by the end of the century…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Cambridge University Press (available in the United States at University of Michigan Press here.)
August 1974
224 pages
216 x 140 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780521098465

Verena Martinez-Alier (a.k.a. Verena Stolcke), Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology
Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

An analysis of marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Cuba, a society with a large black population the majority of which was held in slavery but which also included considerable numbers of freedmen. Dr Martinez-Alier uses as her main source of evidence the records in Havana of administrative and judicial proceedings of cases in which parents opposed a marriage, of cases involving elopement, and of cases of interracial marriage. Dr Martinez-Alier develops a model of the relation between sexual values and social inequality. She considers the importance of the value of virginity in supporting the hierarchy of Cuban society, based on ascription rather than achievement. As a consequence of the high evaluation of virginity, elopement was often a successful means of overcoming parental dissent to an unequal marriage. However, in cases of interracial elopement, the seduced coloured woman had little chance of redress through marriage. In this battle of the sexes and the races, the free coloured women and men played roles and acquired values which explain why matrifocality became characteristic of black free families.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I. Interracial Marriage:
  • 1. Intermarriage and family honour
  • 2. Intermarriage and politics
  • 3. Intermarriage and Catholic doctrine
  • 4. The white man’s view
  • 5. Colour as a symbol of social status
  • 6. Intraracial marriage
• Part II. Honour and Class:
  • 7. Elopement and seduction
  • 8. Conclusion: Some analytical comparisons.

Read the introduction here.

…Nineteenth-century Cuba cannot be treated as a historical and geographical isolate. Political factors outside Cuba were significant in shaping interracial marriage policy. The cultural tradition of Spain which during three centuries had espoused ‘purity of blood’ as the essential requisite of Spanishness must also be taken into consideration. Racism antedates slavery in the Americas and, as W. Jordan has proposed, the question would be to explain why African negroes (and not for instance the American Indians) were enslaved in the first place. To establish, therefore, a direct causal link between slavery as a highly exploitative system of production and racism would be too simple…

The Love Story That Made Marriage a Fundamental Right

Color Lines
2011-04-27

Asraa Mustufa

The Tribeca Film Festival is under way in New York, and one featured documentary delves into the story behind the landmark civil rights case Loving vs. Virginia, which struck down Jim Crow laws meant to prevent people from openly building families across racial lines. 

Mildred and Richard Loving were an interracial couple that married in Washington, D.C., in 1958. Shortly after re-entering their hometown in Virginia, the pair was arrested in their bedroom and banished from the state for 25 years. The Lovings would spend the next nine years in exile, surreptitiously visiting family and friends back home in Virginia—and fighting for the right to return legally. Their case wound its way to the Supreme Court and, in 1967, the Court condemned Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act as a measure “designed to maintain white supremacy” that violated due process and equal protection. The ruling deemed the anti-miscegenation laws in effect in 16 states at the time unconstitutional. However, it took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until the year 2000 to officially remove language prohibiting interracial marriage from their state constitutions.

The landmark case has returned to popular consciousness in recent years as states have debated same-sex marriage rights. Marriage equality advocates have pointed to the Lovings’ fight as a foundational part of American history, establishing marriage as a basic civil right. But for decades it was left to the footnotes of civil rights history, overshadowed by blockbuster cases like Brown vs. Board of Education.

Director Nancy Buirski’s “The Loving Story” aims to deepen public understanding of not just the case but the Loving family itself. The filmmakers recreate their story through interviews with their friends, community members and the attorneys fighting their case. Buirski and her team revived unused footage of the Lovings from 45 years ago, including home movies, and dug up old photographs to bring the couple to life. As a result, the film is as much an engaging love story as it is a history of racist lawmaking. 

“The Loving Story” is making the film festival rounds this year and will air on HBO in February 2012. I spoke with Buirski after the film’s Tribeca screening this week…

Read the entire article here.

Gender, Mixed Race Relations and Dougla Identities in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Fiction

6th International Conference of Caribbean Women’s Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations
Goldsmiths, University of London
Centre for Caribbean Studies
2011-06-24 through 2011-06-25

Christine Vogt-William
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

Once a pejorative term in Hindi meaning ‘bastard’, dougla is used nowadays to designate those of African and Indian parentage in the Caribbean. Relations between African and Indian communities in the Caribbean have been fraught, due to the divide-and-rule policies implemented by the colonial plantocracy, missionaries and state regimes, in order to discourage interracial solidarity and cooperation. Vijay Prashad observes: “the descendants of the coolies and the slaves have struggled against the legacy of both social fractures and of the mobility of some at the expense of others“ (Prashad, 2001: 95). Yet, despite this there were transcultural alliances between Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans. However the figure of the dougla was considered by many middle class Indians as a potential threat to Indian cultural coherence and by extension to a powerful political lobby under the demographic category of “East Indian” (Prashad, 2001: 83). Indo-Caribbean culture, history and literature cannot be examined without acknowledging the transcultural aspects of dougla heritages.

The focus of my paper will be on how gender and mixed race relations are addressed in novels by Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writers Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo. The genre of the novel could be read as an adequate site to address the interrogation of hybrid identities with a view to engendering a Caribbean feminist dougla poetics, since literature is “a medium that is not understood to be exclusively the cultural capital of Indo- or Afro-Trinidadians” (Puri, 2004: 206). Gender roles and expectations from both Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean communities inform and complicate racial relations—factors which are rendered even more complex due to the histories of slavery and indentured labour and how these served to shape Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean women’s self-perceptions. In view of these histories, I read The Swinging Bridge (Espinet) and He Drown She in the Sea (Mootoo) with the aim of charting spaces to articulate alternative perspectives normally disallowed by hegemonic racial representations (Afro-Creole and Indian “Mother Culture”), which also repress the gender and class inequalities within Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities. These spaces then might provide the dougla potential of disrupting dominant racial and gendered stereotypes, thus allowing for specifically transcultural feminist interventions in prevalent gender and race imagery.

For more information, click here.

A New Branch of the United States’ Miscegenated Family Tree: Lynn Nottage’s “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark”

The Feminist Wire
2011-04-29

Soyica Colbert, Assistant Professor of English
Dartmouth College

Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s new play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark opened at the Second Stage Theatre on April 6, 2011 to guffaws and robust applause. The play puts a playful twist on what Daphne Brooks calls “America’s miscegenated history” in order to recuperate the story of a forgotten black actress. Fittingly a comedy, Nottage’s play calls to mind the ongoing melodrama that is race relations in the United States. From the saga that Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings has become to the ongoing and offensive questions regarding President Barack Obama’s citizenship, the popular conversation about race seems to leap in the blink of an eye from the postracial world of the twenty-first century as Hortense Spillers describes in her provocative piece “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Too” to the scientific racism of the nineteenth century epitomized in a racist email Tea Party activist Marilyn Davenport sent to her constituency, picturing Obama’s parents as chimpanzees.

Using the temporal confusion race triggers in the twenty-first century to her dramaturgical advantage, Nottage’s play, directed by Jo Bonney, shuttles the viewer seamlessly through different time periods in the twentieth century, from 1933 to 1973 to 2003. The play offers an uproarious insight into the life of Vera Stark (Sanaa Lathan), an African American woman striving to become a Hollywood actress while working as the maid of a famous purportedly white actress Gloria Mitchell (Stephanie J. Block). By the end of a play that focuses on how the choices we make determine who we will become, we learn that Gloria is Vera’s cousin and that Gloria is passing for white. Laugh out loud funny, innovative in its staging and powerful in its organization, Nottage’s new play, playfully reveals the way that U.S. racial mixtries— a term used in Langston Hughes’ Broadway play Mulatto (1935) that communicates mixtures that are mysteries—create lines of contentious affiliation among women…

Read the entire article here.

Mediating Blackness: Afro Puerto Rican Women and Popular Culture

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2011-06-14
145 pages

Maritza Quiñones-Rivera

A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In my dissertation I discuss how blackness, femaleness and Puerto Ricanness (national identity) is presented in commercial media in Puerto Rico. National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, “roots,” tradition, and descent. In the western world, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of “race.” In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taíno Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional stock out of which “the nation” is constructed, defended, and naturalized. This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the predecessors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican people. In their portrayals of black women, figures as Mama Inés (the mammy) and fritoleras (women who cook and sell codfish fritters), Caribbean Negras (Black Caribbean women) contemporary media draw upon familiar representations to make black women bodies intelligible to Puerto Rican audiences. In this dissertation I argue that black women are challenging these images as sites for mediating blackness, femaleness, and Puerto Ricanness where hegemony and resistance are dialectical. I integrate a text-based analysis of media images with an audience ethnographic study to fully explore these processes of racial and gender representation. Ultimately, my project is to detail the ways in which Black women respond to folklorized representations and mediate their Blackness by adopting the cultural identity of Trigueñidad in order to establish a respectful place for themselves within the Puerto Rican national identity. The contributions from the participants of my audience ethnography, as well as my own experiences as a Trigueña woman, demonstrate how Black women are contesting local representations and practices that have folklorized their bodies. The women who form part of this study also responded to the pressures of a nation whose official stance is that race and racism do not exist. In addition, I present global and local forces—and in particular commercial media—as means for creating contemporary Black identities that speak to a global economy. By placing media images in dialogue with the lived experiences of Black-Puerto Rican women, my research addresses the multiple ways in which Black identities are (re)constituted vis-à-vis these forces.

CHAPTER 1 “MISSING IN ACTION” RACE, GENDER AND PUERTO RICAN COMMERCIALIZ MEDIA RESEARCH LANDSCAPE

Media and popular culture are powerful venues in which women assert and communicate national and social identities.1 In this light, I contend that Black Puerto Rican women mediate their Blackness by challenging folklorized representations of themselves that are perpetuated in local commercial media and advertising. In the face of a society whose media presents “race” as part of the nation’s past, a fokloric identity, many women adopt a new language of Trigueñidad in order to find a place for themselves within the national landscape. Before I begin this line of research, it is vital to first review representations of race and gender in commercial television and other media in the island…

…Theoretical Framework

Overall, the process of mediating blackness in Puerto Rico is one caught in the dual tensions between the local media‘s inscriptions of black women as folklorized on the one hand, and the influences of U.S. popular culture and additional transnational media on the other. What is crucial here is the understanding that media messages and their representations do not work in a vacuum but form part of a broader social and cultural network, and that media itself is not a monolithic body that operates as a single, unified, controlling entity. Instead, media compose a complex set of production and consumption practices. In the case of Puerto Rico from 2003 to 2006, for instance, the influence of localized media began to dwindle following their purchase by American media conglomerates. A vast majority of television programming now comes from off-shore corporations (for example, telenovelas produced in Latin America) and U.S.-based, Spanish language commercial media. In spite of this narrowing of diversity, it is important to compare Black women‘s representation in one media to racial and gender representations in another. Approaching media from this standpoint allows me to critically combine elements of existing theories in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between various media, Puerto Rican cultural identity, and black identity at the collective and individual levels. More specifically, my work is centrally interested in advertising and the way black women are represented in the Citibank advertisement mentioned above. It will be crucial not to examine advertising in insolation, however, but to also explore the representations of black women in different mass media forms, such as newspapers, television, radio, and Internet. The images of advertisements operate in a system of sign that can never work in isolation from other signs or cultural factors.

Mediating blackness is also a process that necessarily interacts with the commonly-held beliefs and daily practices of racially mixed populations in Puerto Rico and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. My dissertation thus explores the production, representation, and consumption of media by populations, and incorporates academic arguments on the shifting roles and boundaries of media in daily life. My central discussion of media accordingly draws upon several fields of academic inquiry, among them media studies, black feminism, body politics, and the study of racial blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, though it is ultimately grounded in cultural studies approaches to media studies.

Among these common conceptions that must be addressed is the dominant notion of Puerto Rico as a culturally unified nation that has produced a racially mixed, democratic society. Representations of this unified Puerto Rican culture are presented in such institutions as museums, the government, the education system and other “official” cultural sites. In response to this collective Puerto Rican cultural identity, forming a racial identity is often a struggle for some non-white Puerto Ricans (See: my autoethnography in Chapter 3), especially when Puerto Rican blackness is represented as folklorized, and when racism is a tacit component of official culture (Warren-Colón, 2003, p.664). Scholars have given only minimal attention to this phenomenon, and to the dismissive or stereotypical treatment of black women‘s bodies through their folklorized representations in popular culture and other media…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Crossing Over: Racial Passing and Racial Uplift in Nella Larsen’s Fiction

University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
2009
34 pages

Karly D. Beavers

Senior Honors Thesis in American Studies

Fundamental to the American myth is a juxtaposition of the “civilized” or “superior” majority with the “inferior” other. By classifying African Americans as inherently different from and inferior to whites, the white majority justified the enslavement and, later, the political and social oppression of black Americans. Our concept of race relies heavily on the visible differences between whites and African Americans. Interracial couples posed a threat to the socially constructed color line almost immediately, producing offspring who did not fit under the simple label of black or white. Although legally considered African American because of their “Negro blood,” some individuals found it possible to pass for white. Passing began long before emancipation, but it became a prevalent topic in African American fiction during the early twentieth century. Nella Larsen in particular explores the idea of passing in her two novels Quicksand and Passing. As her main female protagonists search for their true identity within a racist and patriarchal society, they struggle with DuBois’s idea of “double consciousness.” Within the African American community during the early twentieth century, middle class blacks sought to uplift the race through upholding and exemplifying white middle class values. Larsen’s characters are thus trapped in a complicated system that rails against social inequality while it espouses the oppressive structures of the dominant white culture. From various newspaper articles and book reviews, one sees a varied reaction to passing within the African American community. For men, racial passing rendered them more effeminate in the eyes of black Americans. Larsen focuses more on the experiences of black women, who found themselves forced into an oppressive domestic role in an effort to uplift the race and reaffirm the masculinity of black men.

An attractive young woman sits on a train destined for New York. Leaving behind the remnants of her oppressive past, she begins to make plans for the future—a bright future bursting with opportunity and adventure. Pain, isolation, shame—all fade into the distance. Surely New York will be the answer. Surely the happiness that has eluded her for so long awaits her there. She. Helga Crane, will no longer be the illegitimate daughter of a Danish runaway and an African American gambler. She will simply become another young woman trying to make a life for herself in the city. A remark from her new employer interrupts Helga’s pleasant thoughts. “How is it that a nice girl like you can rush off on a wild goose chase like this at a moment’s notice. I should think your people’d object, or’d make inquiries, or something.’ In an instant. Helga’s excitement gives way to embarrassment. After the young woman admits to a less than ideal parentage, her employer replies coldly. “I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it. and after all it’s your own business.”

So begins Helga Crane’s journey to New York in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Published in 1928. Larsen’s debut novel tells the story of a mixed race woman searching for a stable identity within a racist and unstable society. The daughter of a white woman and a black man. Helga constantly reminds herself and others of the threat lurking beneath America’s strict racial code. When her employer discovers Helga’s heritage, Larsen writes. “The woman felt that the story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion. For among black people, as among white people, it is tacitly understood that these things are not mentioned—and therefore they do not exist.” Helga is thus robbed of her true identity. Because she threatens the strict “color line” that guides all of American life, the mixed race Helga—the real Helga—cannot exist. According to Martha J. Cutter. “Helga Crane attempts to use ‘passing’ as a way of finding a unitary sense of identity—a sense of identity structured around one role, a role that somehow corresponds to her ‘essential self.'” Although Helga’s dark skin prevents her from passing for white, she in a sense passes for black by denying, or at least omitting, her white ancestry. Instead, she finds solace in a number of different identities. In Cutter’s words, she passes as “an exotic Other, a committed teacher, an art object, a devout Christian, a proponent of racial uplift, [and] a dutiful mother.”…

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