The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania on 2012-08-13 15:41Z by Steven

The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840

Aukland University Press
May/June 2012
320 pages
228 x 148 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978 1 86940 594 6

Vincent O’Malley, Research Director
HistoryWorks Ltd., Wellington, New Zealand

How did Māori and Pākehā negotiate a meeting place? Would Māori observe the Sabbath? Should Pākehā fear the power of tapu? Whose view of land ownership and control would prevail? How would Māori rangatira and Pākehā leaders establish the rules of political engagement? Around such considerations about how the world would work, Māori and Pākehā in early New Zealand defined a way of being together. This is a book about that meeting time and place, about a process of mutual discovery, contact and encounter — meeting, greeting and seeing — between Māori and Pākehā from 1642 to about 1840.

After introducing the brief encounters and misunderstandings between European visitors and Māori before 1814, O’Malley focuses his study on the period between 1814 and 1840 when he argues that both peoples inhabited a ‘middle ground’ meeting place in which neither could dictate the political, economic or cultural rules of engagement.  By looking at economic, religious, political and sexual encounters, O’Malley offers a strikingly different picture to traditional accounts of imperial Pākehā power over a static, resistant Māori society.

In this meeting place, O’Malley shows, Māori and Europeans re-evaluated cultural priorities, adapted the customs of the other people that they found useful and sometimes ‘went native’ as they fell over into the other culture. O’Malley concludes with an analysis of how the middle ground gave way around 1840 to a world in which Pākehā had enough power largely to dictate terms.

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Black into White in Nineteenth Century Spanish America: Afro-American Assimilation in Argentina and Costa Rica

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2012-08-09 01:45Z by Steven

Black into White in Nineteenth Century Spanish America: Afro-American Assimilation in Argentina and Costa Rica

Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Volume 5, Number 1 (May 1984)
pages 34-49
DOI: 10.1080/01440398408574864

Lowell Gudmundson, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
Mout Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts

In his masterful study of racial attitudes in Brazil, Thomas Skidmore has shown how the Brazilian elite consciously preferred, and pursued through the foment of European immigration after 1850, a “whitened” society in which the African element would be progressively reduced. Given the historical realities of Brazilian society such a policy could perhaps be implemented, but only with great regional variability and never fully eradicating what the elite saw as the “inferior” African element represented by Negro and colored (mulatto) Brazilians.

Such a semi-official policy of whitening was common to both Luso– and Hispanoamerican elites of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the curious symbiosis of a paternalistic acceptance of race mixture and its “beneficial” impact (unlike segregationist or apartheid views in the United States and South Africa at that time), and a belief in the innate inferiority of those of African descent (in this they shared the basic racism of the abovementioned societies). However, most Spanish American societies, just as northeastern Brazil, would not receive the mass of European immigrants who inundated the Brazilian southwest, or such Spanish American nations as Cuba, Uruguay, and Argentina. And yet, except for those areas continuing the African slave trade (Cuba and Brazil in particular) nearly everywhere there was a long term proportional decline, over the nineteenth century, of the Afro-American population, whether through race mixture and “passing“, or simply as a result of a decreasing Afro-American biological component within the general population. Thus, the desired goal of the Brazilian and Spanish American elites – “whitening” or bleaching” of the population—did not always require massive European immigration for its realization.

While modern Spanish American society was whitened in general, regional experience was extremely diverse. The Indo-American areas of Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andean republics produced a mestizo more often than a mulatto population, with all such admixtures coming to be referred to as “casta”, “ladino”, or simply “mestizo”, with some mention of phenotype appended for clarification if need be. In these Indo-American areas the numerical predominance of the Indian population during colonial times, especially in the Guatemalan and Andean countrysides, meant that whitening of the general population would proceed very slowly there if at all during the nineteenth century, although Afro-American assimilation took place much more rapidly…

…Race Mixture

While miscegenation has been characteristic of all multiracial societies to one degree or another, Latin American experience has been notable in both the pervasiveness of this phenomenon and, more importantly, in the position accorded to those of mixed origin. Hoetink most clearly expressed this point, regarding the dual features of widespread “passing” across an ill-defined “color line” and the social acceptance of those of light color by local Iberoamerican whites as marriage partners. In these societies the local defmition of whiteness tended to include many of those of light color and, just as importantly, marriage or long term common-law unions (as distinct from more informal or surreptitious concubinates and liaisons) across what in other contexts would be perceived as racial lines (white vs. colored) was far more frequent.

Thus, added to the quite requent extramarital unions spanning racial lines, Latin American societies also witnessed the growth of a significant population born to both Church-sanctioned and common-law unions between Afro-Americans and the non-colored. The frequency of this latter phenomenon varied widely by time and place perhaps, but it was an ubiquitous feature of Latin American societies and could reach quite substantial levels in some cases, as we shall see below.

In both Argentina and Costa Rica there is abundant evidence of the existence of such a relatively flexible “color line”, subject to surprisingly rapid redefinition over time, even in the case of individual lifetimes. Moreover, it is worth noting that exactly the same terminology is used to describe cases and individuals in Argentina and Costa Rica in the freeing of “white slaves” or in describing the physical appearance of these individuals when still enslaved. Andrews notes the use of terms such as “white mulatto, white, white slave” in manumission documents, as well as descriptions emphasizing “blond” or “straight” hair and white color. In Costa Rica references were repeatedly made to “whiteness” or “amber” coloration (“trigueño”, exactly as in Buenos Aires and other Spanish American countries somewhat later) as well as “burnt blond hair”, etc. Moreover, the use of color identification as a means of implicitly raising or lowering an individual’s social rank was also a common feature of contemporary discourse, in reference to those of high and humble social, albeit racially suspect background.

Perhaps one of the clearest possible indications of the decided tendency of Iberoamerican society to classify light-coloreds as white can be found in the late colonial Costa Rican censuses. Therein the population is divided and enumerated as “Spanish”, “Mestizo”, or “Mulatto and Negro”. However, no clear and binding descent rule is used in order to assign the children of mixed unions. Most often, when the mother was “mestiza” or Spanish and the father Afro-American, the children would be registered in the mother’s racial category, although there were exceptions to this rule as well. In the case of Afro-American women married to or living with Indian, mestizo or Spanish males their children would usually be listed with them as “mulatos y negros”, but even here exceptions could be found, logically enough since their listing as mestizos could have been socially and administratively advantageous for them.

Miscegenation may have been most common outside of formal unions such as these, but more stable, recognized relationships were very frequent as well, involving all racial groups in Spanish American society. As we shall see below, Afro-Americans’ urban location and the feminine predominance which resulted from this fact, when added to pervasive racial preferences in the selection of marriage partners, assured that this group would have the most difficult and delayed access to marriage. In societies in which concubinage was the rule rather than the exception at all social levels, this could only foment extramarital miscegenation as well. Indeed, nearly all of the studies of Afro-Americans in urban Latin America would indicate “whitening” in the selection of both marriage and liaison partners to have been the norm.” In Costa Rica illegitimacy among the Afro-American population was approximately double the average, reaching the level of a third to a half of all Afro-Americans baptized and a fifth to a quarter of all illegitimate baptisms at the end of the colonial period; this without taking into account those children not baptized and likely illegitimate as well. Important here too was the urban location of Afro-Americans, raising illegitimacy levels regardless of race, contributing to the differentiation of the community from mestizo villagers and lowering its replacement capacity. Presumably, a large number of these illegitimate children were the result of race mixture tending toward whitening…

Read the entire article here.

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Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders

Posted in Biography, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States, Women on 2012-08-06 22:26Z by Steven

Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders

Penguin Press
December 2002
432 pages
Paperback ISBN 9780142001035

Mark Perry

A story of race consciousness and the fight for equality told through the lives of one extraordinary American family

In the late 1820s Sarah and Angelina Grimké traded their elite position as daughters of a prominent white slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, for a life dedicated to abolitionism and advocacy of women’s rights in the North. After the Civil War, discovering that their late brother had had children with one of his slaves, the Grimké sisters helped to educate their nephews and gave them the means to start a new life in postbellum America. The nephews, Archibald and Francis, went on to become well-known African American activists in the burgeoning civil rights movement and the founding of the NAACP. Spanning 150 eventful years, this is an inspiring tale of a remarkable family that transformed itself and America.

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Who Is Jamaica?

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2012-08-06 17:25Z by Steven

Who Is Jamaica?

The New York Times
2012-08-05

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

DURING last week’s independence festivities, I took out my prized commemorative plate. It was a gift from the mother of a long-ago boyfriend who, incomprehensibly, complained constantly that his mother loved me more than him. Needless to say, he didn’t last.


Source: Wikipedia

The plate has a little chip, but it’s the spirit that counts: a little bit of tactile history. It features the Jamaican coat of arms. There is an Amerindian woman bearing a basket of pineapples and a man holding a bow. At school we were taught they were Arawak. These days, they are called Taino. But the distinction is academic.

The native people of Xaymaca, as the island was once called, are extinct. In their culture, the pineapple symbolized hospitality. Genocide was their reward for the welcome they gave Christopher Columbus. They survive only in the coat of arms and in the modest museum that is dedicated to their history. Perched above the man and woman is a crocodile. The reptile has fared better; its descendants live on.

Jamaica was one of the first British colonies to receive its own coat of arms, in 1661. The Latin motto grandly declaimed: “Indus uterque serviet uni” (Both Indies will serve one). From East to mythic West, colonial relations of domination were inscribed in heraldry. When we gained our independence from Britain, 50 years ago today, the motto was changed to “Out of many, one people.”

Though this might appear to be a vast improvement on the servile Indies, the new motto encodes its own problematic contradictions. It marginalizes the nation’s black majority by asserting that the idealized face of the Jamaican nation is multiracial. In actuality, only about 7 percent of the population is mixed-race; 3 percent is European, Chinese or East Indian, and 90 percent is of African origin.

It was my high school English teacher, Miss Julie Thorne, who first brought the fraudulence of the motto’s homogenizing racial myth to my attention. “Out of many, one people?” she asked the class. “Which one?”

In the highly stratified Jamaica of the 1960s, the white and mixed-race elite were the “one” who ruled the “many.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

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Far Corner Of The Strange Empire Central Alberta On The Eve Of Homestead Settlement

Posted in Articles, Canada, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2012-08-06 01:14Z by Steven

Far Corner Of The Strange Empire Central Alberta On The Eve Of Homestead Settlement

Great Plains Quarterly
Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 1983
pages 92-108

William C. Wonders
University of Alberta

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, what is now central Alberta was a region in transition. For centuries the area had been inhabited by native Indian peoples, but with the advance of homestead settlement, it became a marginal part of what Joseph Howard has called the “strange empire,” a portion of the northern Great Plains that was marked by unrest at the end of one era and the beginning of another. The changes that affected the Red River Valley and later the Saskatchewan Valley had significant local repercussions in this far corner of the “empire,” the valley of the upper Battle River immediately south and east of Edmonton.

The fur trade provided the initial and dominant economic base for the European presence in the Canadian Northwest. It also contributed to the appearance of the mixed-blood people variously known as the métis, half-breeds, or country-born who played such an important role in it. Though they were soon submerged by the flood of incoming settlers, for a few decades in the late nineteenth century the metis made a distinctive but short-lived impact on the northern Great Plains. The focus here is on this transitional period between fur trade and homestead settlement in central Alberta, an area that is also transitional in its geographic character.

Read the entire article here.

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The Free Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins Before the Civil War

Posted in Anthropology, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2012-08-05 22:12Z by Steven

The Free Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins Before the Civil War

Fisk University Press
1932
72 pages
E185.86 .F84
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), Professor of Sociology
Fisk University

CONTENTS

  1. Origin, Growth, and Distribution of the Free Negroes
  2. Character of the Free Negro Communities
  3. The Free Negro Family
    • Selected Bibliography

TABLES

  1. Growth of the Slave and Free Negro Population in the United States: 1790-1860
  2. Distribution of the Free Negro Population According to States in 1830 and 1860
  3. Number of Slaves and Free Negroes in the Total Population of Four Leading Cities in 1790
  4. School Attendance and Adult Illiteracy Among the Free Negro Population in 16 Cities: 1850

MAPS

  1. Percentage of the Negro Population Free in the Counties of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia: 1860
  2. Distribution of Free Negro Families: 1830

CHAPTER I: ORIGIN, GROWTH, AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE FREE NEGROES

A class of free Negroes existed in America almost from the time that they were first introduced into the Virginia colony in 1619. Contrary to popular belief, the free class may even be said to be prior in origin to the slave class, since the first Negroes brought to America, did not have the status of slaves, but of indentured servants. Contracts of indentured Negro servants indicate that the status of the first Negroes was the same as that of the white servants. Moreover, court records show that Negroes were released originally upon the completion of a term of servitude. The slave status, for which the white colonists had no model in England, “developed in customary law, and was legally sanctioned at first by court decisions.” Although it was not until 1662 that the first act of the Virginia slave code was passed, slavery by this time had apparently become established in practice. As early as 1651 we find a Negro, Anthony Johnson, who was probably enumerated among the indentured servants in the census of 1624, having assigned to him in fee simple a land patent for two hundred and fifty acres of land. Two years later this same man was the defendant in a suit brought against him by another Negro for his freedom from servitude, after having served “seaven or eight years of Indenture.” According to Russell, “The upper limit of the period in which it was possible for negroes to come to Virginia as servants and to acquire freedom after a limited period is the year 1682” Nevertheless, the free class continued to grow until the Civil War.

The free Negro population was increased through five sources: (1) children born of free colored persons; (2) mulatto children born of free colored mothers; (3) mulatto children born of white servants or free women; (4) children of free Negro and Indian parentage; (5) manumitted slaves. The increase in the free Negro population through the offspring of free colored parents, though difficult to estimate, contributed to the growth of this class until Emancipation. Likewise, the numerous cases of offsprings from white fathers and free colored mothers would indicate that from this source the free Negro population was constantly enlarged. Mulattoes born of white servant women and free white women were also a significant factor, for it was soon the cause for special legislative action. Virginia, in 1691, passed a law prescribing that “any white woman marrying a negro or mulatto, bond or free,” should be banished. Maryland, in 1681, provided in an act that children born of white servant women and Negroes were free. Eleven years later any white woman who married or became the mother of a child by either a slave or free Negro became a servant for seven years. Pennsylvania found it necessary to restrict the intermarriage of Negroes and whites through legislative action in 1725-1726, after having punished a woman for “abetting a clandestine marriage between a white woman and a negro” in 1722. This restriction was swept away, as well as the other restrictions upon the Negro, in 1780. Seemingly, mixed marriages became common, for Thomas Branagan complained:

There are many, very many blacks who . . . begin to feel themselves consequential . . . will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances … I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by Negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the Southern States). I know a black man who seducted a young white girl. . . who soon after married him, and died with a broken heart. On her death he said that he would not disgrace himself to have a Negro wife and acted accordingly, for he soon after married a white woman . . . There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city, and there are thousands of black children by them at present.

It is difficult to determine to what extent the intermixture of free Negroes and Indians contributed to the growth of the free colored population. There was always considerable association between the Indian and Negro, both in areas given up to Indians and outside of these areas…

Read the entire book here.

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Shades of Passing (AAS 340 / ENG 391 / AMS 340)

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Course Offerings, History, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, Social Science, United States on 2012-08-05 04:12Z by Steven

Shades of Passing (AAS 340 / ENG 391 / AMS 340)

Princeton University
Fall 2012-2013

Anne A. Cheng, Professor of English and African American Studies

This course studies the trope of passing in 20th century American literary and cinematic narratives in an effort to re-examine the crisis of identity that both produces and confounds acts of passing. We will examine how American novelists and filmmakers have portrayed and responded to this social phenomenon, not as merely a social performance but as a profound intersubjective process embedded within history, law, and culture. We will focus on narratives of passing across axes of difference, invoking questions such as: To what extent does the act of passing reinforce or unhinge seemingly natural categories of race, gender, and sexuality?

Sample reading list:
William Faulkner, Light in August
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Nella Larsen, Passing
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
Douglas Sirk (director), Imitation of Life (film, 1959)
Woody Allen (director), Zelig (film, 1983)

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Mississippi Black Code (1865)

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Mississippi, United States on 2012-08-02 21:41Z by Steven

Mississippi Black Code (1865)

America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After The Civil War
Digital History: using new technologies to enhance teaching and research
2011

The Civil Rights of Freedmen in Mississippi (Approved November 25, 1865)

Section 1. Be it enacted by the legislature of the State of Mississippi, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the courts of law and equity of this state, and may acquire personal property and choses in action, by descent or purchase, any may dispose of the same, in the same manner, and to the same extent that white persons may: Provided that the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements, except in incorporated town or cities in which places the corporate authorities shall control the same.

Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may intermarry with each other, in the same manner and under the same regulations that are provided by law for white persons: Provided, that the clerk of probate shall keep separate records of the same.

Sec. 3. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes, who do now and have heretofore lived and cohabited together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes. That it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto; any person who shall so intermarry shall be deemed guilty of felony and, on conviction thereof, shall be confined in the state penitentiary for life; and those shall be deemed freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes who are of pure Negro blood, and those descended from a Negro to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person…

Read the entire code here.

Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, History, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2012-08-02 01:09Z by Steven

Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities

Law & Society Review
Volume 41, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 587–618
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2007.00315.x

Deenesh Sohoni, Associate Professor of Sociology
The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

In this article, I use state-level anti-miscegenation legislation to examine how Asian ethnic groups became categorized within the American racial system in the period between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I show how the labels used to describe Asian ethnic groups at the state level reflected and were constrained by national-level debates regarding the groups eligible for U.S. citizenship. My main point is that Asian ethnic groups originally were viewed as legally distinct—racially and ethnically, and that members of these groups recognized and used these distinctions to seek social rights and privileges. The construction of “Asian” as a social category resulted primarily from congressional legislation and judicial rulings that linked immigration with naturalization regulations. Anti-miscegenation laws further contributed to the social exclusion of those of Asian ancestry by grouping together U.S.-born and foreign-born Asians.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Obama is a Descendant of Nefertiti & Confucius Too

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Barack Obama, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2012-08-01 22:11Z by Steven

Obama is a Descendant of Nefertiti & Confucius Too

Dominion of New York
2012-07-31

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

There was breaking news yesterday in the lively world of presidential genealogy. Barack Obama–who is regarded as an inauthentic African-American by some because his late mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, was a white woman and his father’s ancestry traced to Kenya rather than Kentucky or the Carolinas–was suggested to be descended on his maternal side from John Punch, a black man.

Researchers at Ancestry.com, the online root-seeking company, derived Obama’s relationship to Punch using a combination of standard genealogical research and Y-chromosome genetic analysis. (Y-DNA is passed essentially unchanged from fathers to sons to grandsons to great-grandsons, etc.) The timing of this announcement could not be better for the Provo, Utah company that just reported booming fourth quarter profits and is rumored to be seeking a buyer.

An indentured servant in 17th century Virginia, Punch would earn the lamentable designation of “the first documented African enslaved for life in American history” when he was reduced to chattel as punishment for his attempt to escape servitude. Punch, like Obama the elder, was an African; tragically, what makes Punch “African-American” is his slave status. With rebellious, freedom-loving roots firmly planted in the New World, our nation’s first president of African descent —Punch’s 11th great grandson–may just be “black enough” after all…

…We have a high threshold for political gossip and, in the digital age, genealogy is a fast fad that shows no sign of passing out of vogue. But the primary reason these ancestry stories entrance us is because they bring us face-to-face with our national fascination with and anxieties about racial miscegenation. Take, for example, the minor controversy over Rachel L. Swarns recently published American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multicultural Ancestors of Michelle Obama. Megan Smolenyak, the prominent genealogist who conducted the research for Swarns’ widely-read 2007 co-authored article that revealed Michelle Obama’s white slavery-era ancestors, critiqued it in the Huffington Post. Smolenyak was stunned that:

the maternal half of the first lady’s family tree — her mother Marian (Shields) Robinson’s side [was] overlooked. Though Michelle Obama has classic Great Migration roots winding their way back to at least eleven states, southern Virginia — and especially Henry and Pittsylvania counties — can claim more of her heritage than any other location. Fully a quarter of her ancestry traces to this area on the North Carolina border, but inexplicably, it’s this portion of her family tree that’s given short-shrift.

Smolenyak further complained that “the ‘revelation’ of the white ancestor via DNA testing” wasn’t unexpected; “the only true surprise in the book” she concluded, was “the absence of over a third of Mrs. Obama’s known ancestors.”…

Read the entire article here.

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