Mixed Race Studies

Jared Sexton: People of Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery

University of Northern Arizona
Gardner Auditorium, W.A. Franke College of Business, NAU
2010-03-25, 17:30 to 19:00 CDT (Local Time)

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine
 
This lecture explores the significance of the ongoing shift in the color line from a white/non-white to black/non-black configuration in the post-civil rights era United States. It asks how we might reframe discussions of immigration, multiracialism (race mixture), and coalition-building among people of color in this context.

For more information, click here.

Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children From the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956

Journal of Social History
Volume 43, Number 3 (Spring 2010)
pages 587-613
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.0.0304

Christina Firpo, Assistant Professor of History
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

From 1890–1956, non-governmental welfare agencies worked with the French colonial government in Indochina to remove Eurasian children, who had been abandoned by their French fathers, from their Vietnamese mothers and the Vietnamese cultural environment. In an era marked by historical exigencies, perceived threats to white prestige, and inherent challenges to the colonial patriarchy, such children were believed to be a threat to colonial security and white prestige. The racial formations of abandoned Eurasian children in colonial Indochina changed repeatedly in response to these threats. Drawing from the rhetoric of racial sciences and led by anxieties over changes colonial security, French civilians increasingly and colonial government administrators increasingly made the case that these children where white and must be removed from their Vietnamese mothers’ care, using force if necessary.

Read the entire article here.

2010 Association for Asian American Studies Conference

Omni Austin Hotel Downtown
Austin, Texas
2010-04-07 through 2010-04-10

Theme: Emergent Cartographies: Asian American Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Selected programs from the conference schedule:

Panel
Transnational Perspectives on Beauty and Skin Color: China, Indonesia, and the Philippines
Friday 2010-04-09, 08:30-10:00 CDT (Local Time)

Chair: Paul Spickard, University of California, Santa Barbara

Amy Chang, Brown University
Rich and Fair: The Culture of Skin Whitening in China and Its Impact on Chinese-Americans

Joanne L. Rondilla, University of California, Berkeley
“From Ebony to Ivory”: Global Beauty, the Mixed Race Body and Cosmetics Advertising

L. Ayu Saraswati, University of Kansas
Affecting Whiteness: The Performativity of Affect in Constructing Whiteness Transnationally

Panel
Queer Takes on Asian American Culture Production
Friday 2010-04-09, 14:45-16:15 CDT (Local Time)

Chair: Victor Roman Mendoza, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Kekoa C. Kaluhiokalani, Muskingum University
Mixploitation, Counter-Apophasis, and James Duval: Mixed-Race Representation in Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy

Rick H. Lee, Rutgers University
From A to Q: Literacy, Sexuality, and Shame in the Work of Justin Chin

Martin Joseph Ponce, Ohio State University
At Sea: Traveling Desires in The Book of Salt

Panel
Re-examining Japanese America
Saturday, 2010-04-10, 08:30-10:00 CDT (Local Time)

Chair: Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania (?)

Cathleen K. Kozen, University of California, San Diego
‘Never Again!’: The Case of Japanese Latin/American Redress and the Politics of (Un)redressability

Christina Chin, University of California, Los Angeles
“Aren’t you a little short to play basketball?”: Gender roles and dynamics within Japanese American youth basketball leagues

Rachel Endo, The College of Saint Mary
Beyond Kodomo No Tame Ni: Japanese Immigrant Mothers and the Socialization of the New Nisei

Lily Anne Yumi Welty, University of California, Santa Barbara
Multiraciality and Migration: Mixed Race American Japanese 1945-1972

For more information, click here.

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2007
208 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-7595-7

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or “mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre‘s sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African “survivals” in decline. Taking Freyre’s master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean “mestizo projects.”

Table of Contents

• Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction
• Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima‘s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective
• White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre
• Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas
• From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing

The Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting 2010

81st Annual PSA Meeting
2010-04-08 through 2010-04-11
Marriott Oakland City Center
Oakland, California

Theme: Revitalizing the Sociological Imagination: Individual Troubles & Social Issues in a Turbulent World

Selected programs from the Preliminary Program Guide include:

Friday, 2010-04-09, 12:00-13:10 PDT (Local Time)

86) Roundtables

Table 3: Mixed Race & Identity: The Social Construction of Race
Organizers: Michael McKail & Joanna Norton, UCR [University of California, Riverside]
Krystale Littlejohn, Stanford Univ.: Interracial Dating & Endogamy among Mixed race Youth in the U.S.
Charlene Johnson, Univ. of New Mexico: “Brokers” of Culture: Hearing Children of Deaf Adults at the Interchange of Ethnic Identity

Saturday, 2010-04-10, 15:30-17:00 PDT (Local Time)

192) Multi-Racial & Multi-Ethnic Identity: Contemporary Trends in Research
Organizer: Shigueru Tshua, UCR & Reginald Daniel, UCSB
Adam Louis Horowitz, Stanford Univ.: Don’t Hate on the Halfies: Religious Identity Formation Among Children of Inter-Religious Couples
Shigueru, Tshua, UCR: The Stacked Bar Model of Ethnic Identity: Peruvian Nikkei’s Shifting Identities from Peru to California
Rebecca Romo, UCSB: Between Black & Brown: Blaxican Identity in the United States
Reginald Daniel, UCSB: Hypocritical Hybridity & the Critical Difference: Postraciality in the Age of Obama

Sunday, 2010-04-11, 11:15-11:45 PDT (Local Time)

220) Minority Experiences
Organizer: Aya Kimura Ida, CSU Sacramento
Sabeen Sandhu, Santa Clara Univ.: Migration & Medical Degrees: U.S. Born Foreign Medical Graduates
Sarah Schlabach, UCLA: Family, Race & Gender: What Does It Mean To Be Multiracial?
Aya Kimura Ida, CSU Sacramento: Coping with Discrimination: Role of Self-Esteem for African Americans, Caribbean Americans & European Americans

For more information, click here.

Assessing Shifting Racial Boundaries: Racial Classification of Biracial Asian Children in the 2000 Census

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2009-12-07
77 pages

Sara Megan McDonough

Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Sociology.

This study examined the racial identification of biracial Asian children by their parents, in a sample (n=9,513) drawn from 2000 Public Use Microdata Series Census data (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series 2009). I used competing theories of Asian assimilation to examine how characteristics of the child, the Asian parent, the non-Asian parent, and the local Asian community influenced the likelihood of a child′s being identified as Asian, non-Asian, or biracial. Findings showed that child′s, both parents′, and community characteristics significantly influenced the child′s racial classification. While the effects of greater assimilation significantly increased the likelihood of an Asian classification for third-generation children, in contrast, it decreased the likelihood of an Asian identification for first- and second-generation children. Findings showed that children with a black parent were less likely than children with a white parent to be identified as Asian instead of non-Asian. However, inconsistent with past findings, children with a Hispanic parent were more likely than those with a white parent to be identified as Asian rather than non-Asian. Exploratory analyses concerning a biracial classification indicate significant relationships with factors previously found to increase the likelihood of an Asian identification, including the effects of greater Asian assimilation and size of the local Asian community. Moreover, the relationship between parent‟s and child′s gender on the child‟s racial classification may be more complicated than previously theorized, as I found evidence of “gender-matching” which meant that boys were more likely to be identified like their fathers, and girls more like their mothers.

Read the entire thesis here.

DEEP: A Photo-Essay by Clement Cooper

Clement Cooper

DEEP explores the contentious issue surrounding British Mixed-Race identity through image & oral testimony.

From 1992 to 1997, Clement Cooper journeyed to and lived in several port cities throughout the UK. Locations where: Toxteth, Liverpool, St Paul’s, Bristol; Butetown, Cardiff & Manchester.

Using available natural light and shooting for the first time on medium format, Clement Cooper explored the possibilities of portraiture to reveal a powerful and deeply moving monograph—the very first of it’s kind.  From a personal perspective, Clement Cooper was particularly keen to emphasize that behind all notions, concepts and constructs of racial stereotyping there lies one fact.  That there is no such thing as a “race”, there is only the human race.  DEEP celebrates this undeniable truth by revealing the common humanity of all those photographed explicitly.

A humanity that unites us all regardless.

View the photo-essay here.

The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity

Goldsmiths College, University of London
2006

Monica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

The thesis analyses the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mestizaje in Mexico. It focuses on the qualities of women’s experiences of racism and explores the significance of mestizaje in relation to Mexican discourses of race and nation. It provides a historical revision of the ways in which such discourses have developed in Mexico, emphasising the cultural conditions that make it possible to ‘think’ the nation, and relating them to the ways in which systems of differentiation amongst the population have operated. The thesis assesses the politics of difference in Mexico in relation to the ways in which notions of race and practices of racism have been detached from each other. For this, I analyse the historical development of the notion of mestizaje and the mestiza identity, and consider its impact and relevance in contemporary Mexico, calling into question official policies and public discourses that support the idea of the mestiza as the subject of national identity.

Through focus group discussions and life-story interviews based on family photographic albums, I explore how the women who participated in this study understand and experience their racialised, gendered and classed bodies and national identity, in a context where racism has been rendered invisible. The thesis then looks at the specificity of the participants’ social location and analyses how these women today in Mexico think through the notions of racism, mestizaje, and national identity. The focus on the qualities of their everyday experience of racism led me to explore the significance of the role of emotions in revealing the lived experience of racism. In this way, my analysis associates racial and class displacement with inadequacy; beauty, ugliness and ordinariness with shame; and the anxiety about family belonging with slightedness; and exposes the contradictory and ambivalent ways in which the experiences of racism are lived and understood. The experience of racism is explored from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically looking at the relationship between visual representations of identities and racist practices, and in this context the ways in which women see themselves and perceive how they are seen by others: the meanings and metaphors of their own image.

Read this thesis at the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library here.

“They Call It Marriage”: the Louisiana Interracial Family and the Making of American Legitimacy

Book Manuscript In Progress

Diana Irene Williams, Assistant Professor of History, Law and Gender Studies
University of Southern California

Winner of the 2008 William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize in Legal History.

“They Call it Marriage” examines interracial marriage between black women and white men in nineteenth-century Louisiana. It explores how broad political and social struggles affected the ways white men and black women related to each other. And it considers why mid-nineteenth-century Louisiana was such an important setting for national struggles over race, gender, legitimacy, and power.

After the Civil War, Louisiana authorities repealed the interracial marriage prohibition and permitted retroactive legitimation of “private religious” marriages. In doing so, they exposed an obscure past in which many had refused to submit to the law as authoritatively given. Some people laid claim to the language of legitimate matrimony in defiance of state law, demanding justice on their own terms and with a keen awareness of competing regional, religious, and civil jurisdictions. In highlighting the perspective of those outside the legal profession, I focus on law as a terrain of struggle rather than a fixed set of rules.

The use of interracial marriage laws to regulate the inheritance of both property and social status dated back to Louisiana’s earliest French colonial government. Mandating that mixed-race children inherit the status of their (black) mother only, these regulations established the parameters of enslaved and racialized populations. Because legal kinship affected titles to household property in Louisiana, these laws encouraged distant kin and creditors to monitor interracial families’ internal affairs…

…The disputed illegitimate past of Louisiana interracial families had significance beyond the state’s borders. This manuscript traces the rhetoric of interracial genealogy and racial indeterminacy in antecedents of Plessy v. Ferguson. Louisiana authorities’ persistence in invoking racial fluidity well into the 1890s complicates historians’ efforts to locate a transition point at which the region exchanged a fluid Latin racial system for a strictly binary American one. In this regard, “They Call it Marriage” explores the gendered history of private life in order to offer a means of reconsidering the nature of Jim Crow segregation.

Chapters

1. Licensing Marriage in Early Louisiana
2. “Religion Law” vs. Civil Law
3. Quadroon Balls, Plaçage, and Consensus Narratives
4. Concubinage and Legal Narratives
5. Forced Heirs and Family Drama
6. Interracial Marriage and the Law in Post-emancipation Louisiana
7. “Bastards Begat by their Masters”

Read the entire description here.

Professor G. Reginald Daniel 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: #146 – Professor G. Reginald Daniel
When: Wednesday, 2010-03-24 22:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Key Publications: Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006); “Multiracial Identity in Global Perspective: The United States, Brazil, and South Africa,” New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (2002); More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2001); “Black and White Identity in the New Millennium: Unsevering the Ties That Bind,” The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (1996); “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide,” Racially Mixed People in America (1992).

Most Recent Publications:

• “Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union?” Ed. Laura Chrisman, Habiba Ibrahim and Ralina L Joseph.  The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research. Volume 39, No. 3/4 (Fall 2009).
• “Race, Class, and Power: The Politcs of Multiraciality in Brazil” Ed. Julius O. Adekunle and Hettie V. Williams.  Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2010.

From February 2003: G. Reginald Daniel discusses his book, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order.