Mixed Race Studies

Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition

Rodopi
2007
330 pages
Hardback: 978-90-420-2141-9 / 90-420-2141-1

Edited by:

Joel Kuortti, Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Culture
University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Jopi Nyman, Acting Professor of English
University of Joensuu, Finland

This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.

Table of Contents

• Contributors
• Joel KUORTTI and Jopi NYMAN: Introduction: Hybridity Today
• Part One: Reconstructing Theories of Hybridity
• • David HUDDART: Hybridity and Cultural Rights: Inventing Global Citizenship
  • Sabine BROECK: White Fatigue, or, Supplementary Notes on Hybridity
  • Dimple GODIWALA: Postcolonial Desire: Mimicry, Hegemony, Hybridity
  • Jeroen DEWULF: As a Tupi-Indian, Playing the Lute: Hybridity as Anthropophagy
  • Paul SHARRAD: Strategic Hybridity: Some Pacific Takes on Postcolonial Theory
  • Andrew BLAKE: From Nostalgia to Postalgia: Hybridity and Its Discontents in the Work of Paul Gilroy and the Wachowski Brothers
• Part Two: Reading Hybridity
  • Zoe TRODD: Hybrid Constructions: Native Autobiography and the Open Curves of Cultural Hybridity
  • Sheng-Mei MA : The Necessity and Impossibility of Being Mixed-Race in Asian American Literature
  • Jopi NYMAN: The Hybridity of the Asian American Subject in Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World
  • Joel KUORTTI: Problematic Hybrid Identity in the Diasporic Writings of Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Andrew HAMMOND: The Hybrid State: Hanif Kureishi and Thatcher’s Britain
  • Valerie KANEKO LUCAS: Performing British Identity: Fix Up and Fragile Land
  • Samir DAYAL: Subaltern Envy? Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh
  • Mita BANERJEE: Postethnicity and Postcommunism in Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift and Salman Rushdie’s Fury
  • Index

Sociohistorical Constructions of Race and Language: Impacting Biracial Identity

A chapter in The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination. By Jean Lau Chin (Editor). (Santa Barbara, California. Praeger Publishers, 2004. 1,000 pages. ISBN: 0-275-98234-3, ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98234-8)

Matthew J. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Historically, race has been constructed within the American psyche as a dichotomous variable–and either-or proposition.  Moreover, our construction and use of language have developed to mirror the is reality, which ultimately aids in its perception.  Has this divergent approach to race outlived its usefulness and applicability?  Is it realistic, given the face of today’s changing demographic landscape?  At present, there remain cultural and linguistic disconnects between the phenomenological experience of the biracial individual and the expectations of the dualistic society within whichthey reside.  On the individual level, there are implications for psychosocial development (Hall, 2001; Root, 1995).  More broadly speaking, what will develop from the resolution of the dilemma is a new paradigm impacting how the citizens of this country view race and racial identity.  This paper explores the impact that the sociohistorical constructions to race and language have on the lives of biracial individuals.  To this end, the author, who is biracial, will blend sociohistorical conceptions of race and linguistic philosophy with personal narrative components and conclude with implications for multiracial identity development…

Read the entire chapter here.

Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Review)

William and Mary Quarterly
Volume LX, Number 1 (January 2003)
Reviews of Books

Richard Godbeer, Professor of History
University of Miami

Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina. By Kirsten Fischer. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 265.)

Kirsten Fischer’s compelling new book explores the interplay between sexual relations and racial attitudes in colonial North Carolina. In common with other recent scholars, Fischer sees evolving conceptions of race, sex, gender, and social status as closely intertwined in the early South. Unlike those who argue for a shift in emphasis from gender or class to race, Fischer stresses instead “the continual contestation, reassertion, and reconfiguration” of these categories as “assumptions of gender, race, and class difference propped each other up in the developing social hierarchy” (p. 5). Fischer identifies a gradual movement away from somewhat fluid notions of race toward an ideology in which racial difference figured as permanent and inherent. Sexual regulation played a crucial role in official attempts to affirm and police racial boundaries in southern society. This in turn “made race seem as corporeal as sex” and so “bolstered the notion that race was a physical fact” (pp. 10-11).

In colonial society, the establishment of slavery and racial subordination required careful regulation of European as well as African residents and especially of white women. Legislation that prohibited marriage between servants, outlawed interracial sex, and prescribed lengthy apprenticeships for the mixed-race children of white women made marriage and sex integral to the imposition of racial as well as class and gender ideologies. Yet sexual unions in North Carolina embodied the contestedness of racial relations in the early South: as “men and women made personal choices based on many contingencies, of which racial or ethnic identity was only one” (p. 7), they often challenged emerging proscriptive codes. The widespread incidence of unauthorized unions bespoke the resilience of alternative popular codes and the willingness of ordinary colonists, women and men, to ignore or self-consciously resist official norms….

Read the entire review here.

I’m Color-blind But What Are You, Anyway?

Electronic Journal of Sociology (2007)
ISSN: 1198 3655

Kathleen Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University

Eileen O’Brien, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Christopher Newport University

Using primary data from interviews conducted with 1) close black-white friends and 2) biracial Americans, we examine the relationship between the traditional fixation on racial categorizations and the current emphasis on color-blindness. In doing so, we reveal that, instead of indicating a decline in the importance of race, the color-blind ideology acts as both a cover for the obsession with race in U.S. society and a subtle but effective reinforcement for it.

Read the entire article here.

Tiger Woods Is Not the End of History: or, Why Sex across the Color Line Won’t Save Us All

The American Historical Review
Volume 108, Number 5
December 2003

Henry Yu, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

In December 1996, several months after Tiger Woods left Stanford University to become a professional golfer, a Sports Illustrated story entitled “The Chosen One” quoted Tiger’s father, Earl, claiming that his son was “qualified through his ethnicity” to “do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.” Tiger’s mother, Kultida, agreed, asserting that, because Tiger had “Thai, African, Chinese, American Indian and European blood,” he could “hold everyone together. He is the Universal Child.” The story’s author concluded that, “when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow … hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face; that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Woods’ face.” Building on the interest in Tiger Woods, stories about mixed-race children and intermarriage proliferated. In January 2000, both Newsweek and Time opened the millennium with cover art speculating on the multi-racial faces of America’s future. 

The celebration of Tiger Woods’ mixed descent and his widespread popularity would seem to support David Hollinger‘s argument that the history of the United States has been a successful (albeit episodic) history of “amalgamation” overcoming group differences. With Woods as a prominent example, we might even be “crazy enough to believe” the idea that eventually “racism can be ended by wholesale intermarriage,” as Hollinger hints in his concluding paragraph.  However, I would argue that focusing on “intermarriage” and “race-mixing” should bring us to a different conclusion about U.S. history, and Woods might serve as a useful prism for separating out some other important aspects of the encounter of the United States with Asia and the Pacific…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
Volume 39, No. 3/4

Guest Editors:

Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
University of Washington

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

Table of Contents

• Introduction to “The Politics of Biracialism” / Laura Chrisman
• Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism / Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Review Essay: Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobioraphy of Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker / Ralina Joseph
• Toward Black and Multiracial “Kinship” After 1997, or How a Race Man Became “Cablinasian” / Habiba Ibrahim
• Poetry: “The Art of Loving” / Madeleine Clifford
• Baby janay and Naomi Pabst: Negotiating Race Mixing, Adoption, and Transnationality / Naomi Pabst
• Reframing the National Family: Race Mixing and Re-telling American History / Catherine Squires
• Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union? / G. Reginald Daniel
• Books Reviews
  • Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton / LeiLani Nishime
  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America  by Catherine R. Squires / Manoucheka Celeste
  • Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon by Jane Rhodes / Madhavi Murty
  • Mixed Race Hollywood Edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas / Sarita Cannon

Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era

Univerisity of Illinois Press
October 2003
256 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 in. 
Illustrations: 11 Line Drawings, 11 Tables
Paper ISBN: 978-1-929011-26-1

Edited by:

Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Illinois, Chicago

Verna M. Keith, Professor of Socilology
Florida State University

Hayward Derrick Horton, Professor of Sociology
State University of New York, Albany

A collection of essays questioning the truth of American’s color-blind society from outside and inside communities of color.

Shattering the myth of the color-blind society, the essays in Skin Deep examine skin tone stratification in America, which affects relations not only among different races and ethnic groups but also among members of individual ethnicities. Written by some of the nation’s leading thinkers on race and colorism, these essays ask whether skin tone differentiation is imposed upon communities of color from the outside or is an internally-driven process aided and abetted by community members themselves. They also question whether the stratification process is the same for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Skin Deep addresses such issues as the relationship between skin tone and self esteem, marital patterns, interracial relationships, socioeconomic attainment, and family racial identity and composition. The essays also grapple with emerging issues such as biracialism, color-blind racism, and 21st century notions of race.

In the Mix: Issue of Mixed Race Stirs Controversy for Census [Interview with Ralina L. Joseph]

International Examiner
Volume 32, Number 2
2010-01-21

Yayoi Lena Winfrey

A highly anticipated event for mixed-race people takes place this year. Although it may seem officious and routine for most, the upcoming U.S. Census is actually an exciting undertaking for those considering themselves multiethnic. That’s because for only the second time in history, there will be an opportunity to select more than one race on Census forms. Those who don’t claim a multiracial identity may not get why that’s so important. But for anyone who’s ever been forced to pick only one parent’s ethnic heritage as her own, it’s a major feat.

Ralina L. Joseph’s interest in multiethnic identity began with her undergraduate studies at Brown University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington. Discovering that her own personal mixed race experience was what others were discussing as a collective experience, she began exploring the subject.

“I think that the first generation of scholarship, of literary and cultural production of activism on mixed race and trying to articulate a mixed race identity, is very much about a coming out moment; the naming and claiming of being mixed,” says Joseph.

But by the time she was ready to graduate, Joseph was “suspicious” of the way multiracial activism was pushing multiracial categories in the Census, and longed to produce work that looked at the multiracial experience in regard to other groups of color…

…Further, what constitutes a mixed race heritage is debatable. Recently, a group called Multi Generation Multiracials (MGM’s) challenged First Generation Multiracials (FGM’s). Although both groups have mixed ancestry, FGM’s have one white and one black parent while MGM’s may have two parents, or even grandparents, that are mixed. MGM’s, who aren’t able to ‘officially’ claim a biracial heritage, argue that they are often more mixed looking than FGM’s who, because of their parents’ visibility, can automatically declare a dual ethnicity….

Read the entire article here.

Also, see Dr. Joseph’s lecture series, Mixed Race in the United States running through 2010-03-03.

Multiracial Identity and Affirmative Action

Asian Pacific American Law Journal
University of California, Los Angeles
Volume 12, Fall 2006 – Spring 2007
32 pages

Nancy Leong, Assistant Professor of Law
Sturm College of Law, Denver University

The classification of multiracial individuals has long posed a challenge in a number of legal contexts, and the affirmative action debate highlights the difficulty of such classification. Should multiracial individuals be categorized according to how they view themselves, how society tends to view them, by some ostensibly objective formula based on their parents’ ancestry, or in some other fashion?

My article draws on sociological research to demonstrate that there are no easy answers to this question. The way multiracial individuals view themselves varies among individuals and, moreover, may vary at different times for the same individual. Society often lacks consensus on an individual’s racial status, and examining a person’s ancestry simply removes the question of categorization to prior generations. Although my article does not attempt to propose a better way to take race into account in the affirmative action context, I strive to raise the issues that must be confronted in developing a coherent system that furthers the goal of affirmative action.

Read the entire article here.

Mike Peden, a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a degree in journalism and minor in communication studies and an employee of the St. Paul Neighborhood Network is currently working on a second documentary about multiracial identity that will air on the station and online.  This is the second part in a series of shows about mixed race.  The original documentary was featured in the 2009 Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival in Los Angeles.

You can watch the original documentary, What Are You? A Dialogue on Mixed Race, by following the link here.

Mike is looking for men and women in the Twin Cities [Minneapolis/St. Paul] area of any age who are of multiracial heritage.  If you or someone you know has researched or participated in scholarly studies on multiracial identity, feel free to share those stories.  He believes the best way to educate others on the facets of multiracial identity is having his subjects guide the storytelling, so the show will be presented from a journalistic perspective with minimal input from him during the program.  His goal is to share professional and anecdotal stories with scientific research to provide a well-rounded forum.

If you would like to share your story, Mike can be reached by phone at 651-468-5451, or by e-mail at sportsbrain2005@aol.com.