Mixed Race Studies

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana

University of Pennsylvania Press
November 2012
384 pages
6 x 9 | 33 color, 17 b/w
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4437-3

Sophie White, Associate Professor of American Studies; Associate Professor of Africana Studies; Associate Professor of History
University of Notre Dame

Based on a sweeping range of archival, visual, and material evidence, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians examines perceptions of Indians in French colonial Louisiana and demonstrates that material culture—especially dress—was central to the elaboration of discourses about race.

At the heart of France’s seventeenth-century plans for colonizing New France was a formal policy—Frenchification. Intended to turn Indians into Catholic subjects of the king, it also carried with it the belief that Indians could become French through religion, language, and culture. This fluid and mutable conception of identity carried a risk: while Indians had the potential to become French, the French could themselves be transformed into Indians. French officials had effectively admitted defeat of their policy by the time Louisiana became a province of New France in 1682. But it was here, in Upper Louisiana, that proponents of French-Indian intermarriage finally claimed some success with Frenchification. For supporters, proof of the policy’s success lay in the appearance and material possessions of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen.

Through a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to the material sources, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians offers a distinctive and original reading of the contours and chronology of racialization in early America. While focused on Louisiana, the methodological model offered in this innovative book shows that dress can take center stage in the investigation of colonial societies—for the process of colonization was built on encounters mediated by appearance.

Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier

University of Nebraska Press
2005
202 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2016-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6841-8

Andrew K. Frank, Allen Morris Associate Professor of History
Florida Atlantic University

Creeks and Southerners examines the families created by the hundreds of intermarriages between Creek Indian women and European American men in the southeastern United States during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Called “Indian countrymen” at the time, these intermarried white men moved into their wives’ villages in what is now Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. By doing so, they obtained new homes, familial obligations, occupations, and identities. At the same time, however, they maintained many of their ties to white American society and as a result entered the historical record in large numbers.

Creeks and Southerners studies the ways in which many children of these relationships lived both as Creek Indians and white Southerners. By carefully altering their physical appearances, choosing appropriate clothing, learning multiple languages, embracing maternal and paternal kinsmen and kinswomen, and balancing their loyalties, the children of intermarriages found ways to bridge what seemed to be an unbridgeable divide. Many became prominent Creek political leaders and warriors, played central roles in the lucrative deerskin trade, built inns and taverns to cater to the needs of European American travelers, frequently moved between colonial American and Native communities, and served both European American and Creek officials as interpreters, assistants, and travel escorts. The fortunes of these bicultural children reflect the changing nature of Creek-white relations, which became less flexible and increasingly contentious throughout the nineteenth century as both Creeks and Americans accepted a more rigid biological concept of race, forcing their bicultural children to choose between identities.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction: The Problem of Identity in the Early American Southeast
• Chapter 1: The Invitation Within
• Chapter 2: “This Asylum of Liberty”
• Chapter 3: Kin and Strangers
• Chapter 4: Parenting and Practice
• Chapter 5: In TwoWorlds
• Chapter 6: Tustunnuggee Hutkee and the Limits of Dual Identities
• Chapter 7: The Insistence of Race
• Epilogue: Race, Clan, and Creek
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

‘Yo, Jose Dupard, Pardo Libre Natural Y Vecino De Esta Ciudad’: Masculinity, Race and Respectability in Spanish New Orleans/Jose Dupard, A Free Man of Color in Spanish New Orleans

Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal of African Migration
Issue 5 (December 2011)
31 pages

Megan Kareithi, ABD History
Tulane University, Louisiana

This paper explores the methods free men of color used to assert their masculinity in Spanish New Orleans.  Jose and Carlos Dupard were free, mulatto brothers living in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century, at a time when Spanish officials attempted to force new laws, like coartación, on resistant French masters.  Coartación was a Spanish law that allowed for slaves to buy their freedom or self-purchase and views on the French population. Thus at the same time that new opportunities opened up for free people of color, challenges appeared as French masters attempted to enforce their hegemony by limiting the social and economic aspirations of New Orleans’ free people of color.  Free men of color like the Dupard brothers fought against this and solidified their claims to masculinity and respectability through land ownership, slave ownership, patronage, and participation in the colonial militias.

Introduction

From its beginning in 1718, New Orleans was filled with a mix of people of European, Indian, and African descent, some free and some enslaved.  Due to the heterogeneous nature of the settlement, the small number of settlers, and the myriad potential threats the frontier settlement faced, a complex racial hierarchy developed over the years.  This was further complicated by the transition from French to Spanish control in 1768.  The social ideal the French ruling elite planter class envisioned and enforced had the white male patriarch at the top and the slave of African descent at the bottom.  The complex relationships that developed between people of different races meant that reality often challenged this ideal.  And while the upper and lower echelons of this hierarchy were firmly established, the place of free people of color in society was much more ambiguous.  Throughout the era of Spanish control in New Orleans, the community of free people of color continually tested and negotiated its place in society.  This was especially true of the free men of color, whose claims to full citizenship, masculinity and social respectability were often challenged by the ruling class.  Two men who embodied this struggle in Spanish New Orleans were Jose and Carlos Dupard, two mulatto brothers who both typified the successes and struggles of the free community of color.  Free men of color like the Dupard brothers solidified their claims to masculinity and respectability in the same way that white men of Spanish New Orleans did: through land ownership, slave ownership, patronage, and participation in the colonial militias.

Jose and Carlos Dupard, living in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century, were descended from Pedro Delille Dupard, a French patriarch and plantation owner. In the mid-eighteenth century, Pedro Delille Dupard lived with his wife Jacquelina Michel and their children on St. Anne Street in New Orleans.  His brother, Pierre Joseph Delille Dupard, was also a prominent landowner in New Orleans and lived with his wife and children at their large cattle ranch at Cannes Brulées above Tchoupitoulas.  Both the Delille Dupard men owned slaves and the cattle ranch at Cannes Brulées was home to 69 slaves by 1763.  As the patriarchs of elite wealthy Creole families Pedro and Pierre Delille Dupard embodied the ideals of masculinity in colonial Louisiana.  They had all the necessary titles, possessions and duties that made a man honorable and respected in colonial Louisiana: they were vecinos, or citizens of the city of New Orleans, owned large properties, served in the militia, were the masters of numerous slaves, and heads of their families. 

Land and slaves were concrete markers of wealth and prosperity in colonial New Orleans.  But illegitimate mulatto sons of respected white men, such as Pedro Delille Dupard’s sons Jose and Carlos, faced great challenges in establishing and maintaining their masculinity.  While some mulatto sons inherited homes or slaves from their white fathers, most had to start from scratch in their accumulation of wealth.  In their business dealings and in society in general, mulatto and Black men faced the racism of a slaveholding society that equated darker skin with slavery.  Society viewed the masculinity of these free men of color as a threat and a challenge to the traditional patriarchy of white men.  Despite these challenging social conditions, Jose and Carlos Dupard were able to accrue many of the markers of masculinity and respect, such as land ownership and slaves, and proudly called themselves vecinos of New Orleans.

Much has been made of Louisiana’s French colonial heritage in both academic scholarship and popular culture.  The American antebellum period from 1803-1860 has also been intensely studied as well, but the period of Spanish rule over New Orleans, 1763 –1803, and its influence on the city is often ignored, despite the fact that this era was a crucial time in the development of New Orleans’ distinctive society.  The city grew from 6,375 people in 1766 to 12,000 total residents in the beginning of the nineteenth century.  At the close of the French period there were about 200 free people of color.  By the end of the Spanish era, there were around 1,355 were free persons of color, roughly one-fifth of the city’s population.  In fact, recently scholars such as Jennifer M. Spear, in her comprehensive and groundbreaking work, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, have shown that the introduction of Spanish slave laws and attitude helped strengthen and solidify the position of free people of color in New Orleans.

Interracial sexual relationships and the system of plaçage in colonial New Orleans are aspects of New Orleans’s history that have received much attention from both scholars and popular media, but the focus of most of this scholarship is on the mulatto or quadroon woman, her relationship with white men, and her place in society.  On the other hand, the history of the sociological status of free men of color has often been overlooked.  Comparing and contrasting the lives of the Dupard men and the white Delille Dupards can illuminate the ambiguous and multifaceted roles that free men of color played in Spanish New Orleans society…

Read the entire article here.

William W. Warren: The Life, Letters, and Times of an Ojibwe Leader

University of Nebraska Press
2007
212 pages
9 photographs, 2 maps, figure, index, 2 appendixes
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-4327-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2498-8

Theresa M. Schenck, Associate Professor of Life Sciences Communications and American Indian Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

This is the first full-length biography of William W. Warren (1825–53), an Ojibwe interpreter, historian, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. Devoted to the interests of the Ojibwe at a time of government attempts at removal, Warren lives on in his influential book History of the Ojibway, still the most widely read and cited source on the Ojibwe people. The son of a Yankee fur trader and an Ojibwe-French mother, Warren grew up in a frontier community of mixed cultures. Warren’s loyalty to government Indian policies was challenged, but never his loyalty to the Ojibwe people. In his short life the issues with which he was concerned included land rights, treaties, Indian removal, mixed-blood politics, and state and federal Indian policy.
 
Theresa M. Schenck has assembled a remarkable collection of newly discovered documents. Dozens of letters and other writings illuminate not only Warren’s heart and mind  but also a time of radical change in American Indian history. These documents, combined with Schenck’s commentary, provide historical and contextual perspective on Warren’s life, on the breadth of his activities, and on the complexity of the man himself; as such they offer a useful and long-awaited companion to Warren’s History of the Ojibway.

Miscegenation, a story of racial intimacy!

African American Registry
2012-07-20

On this date, the African American Registry discusses miscegantion.

Reference: The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage

Susan Altman

Shortly before Christmas in 1863 a 72-page pamphlet appeared for sale on newsstands in New York City. It was titled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” The pamphlet began with details of its title. “Miscegenation” was a word that the author had created and he explained that he had invented it by combining two Latin words: miscere (to mix) and genus (race). The authors intended to replace the word “amalgamation,” which they felt was not scientific enough.

The pamphlet went on to give a social philosophy that by the racist standards of 1863 was highly inflammatory.

The authors wanted to promote the practice of miscegenation and encourage white and black people to have children with each other. The real authors were David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a staunchly Democratic paper, and George Wakeman, a World reporter. Within months, two Democrats in the presidential election campaign of 1864 anonymously issued the same pamphlet, which appeared in the New York Times. During this time, sex across the color line was an obsession of white America, particularly the stereotype of black men’s alleged craving for white women, along with believers in Anglo-Saxon “racial” superiority who feared that “mongrelization” was degenerative.

It is a fact that black-white sex existed from the beginning of the slave trade in the 16th century, virtually always on the initiative of Europeans who held Africans in their total control. During the infamous Middle Passage between Africa and the New World, black women and children were allowed mobility on board ship so that white sailors could have unlimited sexual access to them. Sex played a role in the gradual separation of Africans from other indentured servants in Virginia upon arrival with the unique North American reality of chattel slavery, by which people were legally defined as property. The very first case in this chain was a sexual one: In 1630 Hugh Davis was sentenced by the Virginia court to a whipping “for defiling his body in lying with a Negro.” Although it was a white man who was convicted and punished for the act, the case shows the early eroticisation of racial differences…

Read the entire article here.

The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
Volume 7, Number 2 (2010)
pages 205-216
DOI: 10.1007/s11673-010-9224-8

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

In this paper I investigate a largely untold chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern Europe and North America: the transition from the form of racism that was used to justify a race-based system of slavery to the medicalising racism which called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and, eventually, sterilization and the holocaust. In constructing this history I will employ the notion of biopower introduced by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s account of biopower has received a great deal of attention recently, but because what he actually has to say about race tends to be vague and radically incomplete, many race theorists have been critical of his contribution. However, even if the account of the holocaust in terms of biopower is incomplete, there is still a great deal to be learned from Foucault’s identification of this biologizing, or medicalising racism.

Read or purchase the article here.

Meet Steve Riley—Creator of Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Radio
Wednesday, 2012-07-18, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT, 17:00 BST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us as we meet Steven Riley, creator of MixedRaceStudies.org which is a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism. The site has nearly 4,500 posts which consists of links to over +2,400 articles, ≈800 books, 500 dissertations/papers/reports, ≈200 multimedia items, 200 quotes/excerpts, etc. The site has been called the “most comprehensive and objective clearinghouse for scholarly publications related to critical mixed-race theory” by a leading scholar in the field.

Steve has been an Information Technology professional for 25 years in the D.C. area and is currently Director of Database Development and Design at a trade association in Washington D.C.  His areas of expertise are application programming, database and website development.

When he is not developing software applications, he spends his time at home in Silver Spring, Maryland with his artist wife Julia of 25 years (the best thing that ever happened to him) working on his photography and reading books on history and sociology.

Download the episode here (00:45:05).

Obama and Race: History, Culture, Politics

Routledge
2011-11-10
200 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-68678-5

Edited by

Richard H. King, Professor Emeritus of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

In this collection, academics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze the confluence of a politician, a process, and a problem—Barack Obama, the 2008 US presidential election, and the ‘problem’ of race in contemporary America. The special focus falls upon Barack Obama himself, who appears in many guises: as an individual from biracial and transnational backgrounds; a skilled, urban African-American organizer and then politician; and as intellectual and author of a bestselling autobiographical exploration.

There is a certain representative quality about Obama that makes him a convenient way into the labyrinth of American race relations, national and regional politics (including the South and Hawaii), and past history (particularly from the 1960s to the present). Contributors also explore the role Michelle Obama has played in this process, both separately from and together with her husband, while one theme running through many chapters concerns the myriad ways that the American left, right and centre differ on the nature and future of race in a country that daily becomes more mixed in ethnic and racial terms. Race is everywhere; race is nowhere. The essays are grouped by their approach to the topic of Obama and race: via historical analysis, cultural studies, political science and sociology, as well as pedagogy. The result is an exciting mix of perspectives on one of the most fascinating phenomena of our time.
 
This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice.

Contents

1. Obama and race: culture, history, politics Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
2. The riddle of race Emily Bernard, University of Vermont, USA
3. ‘A curious relationship’: Barack Obama, the 1960s and the election of 2008 Brian Ward, University of Manchester, UK
4. Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president George Lewis, University of Leicester, UK
5. Becoming black, becoming president Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
6. Two great days in Harlem Carmel King, freelance photographer, UK
7. How to read Michelle Obama Maria Lauret, Sussex University, UK
8. Barack Obama and the American island of the colour blind Peter Kuryla, Belmont University, USA
9. Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawaii Jonathan Y. Okamura, University of Hawaii, USA
10. Barack Obama and the South: demography as electoral opportunity Donald W. Beachler, Ithaca College, USA
11. Teaching Obama: history, critical race theory and social work education Damon Freeman, University of Pennsylvania, USA

HIST 1133-Mongrel America: Miscegenation, Passing, and the Myth of Racial Purity

Cornell University
Fall 2012

Racial divisions have served as potent tools for consolidating power, upholding unjust practices, and shaping the American historical imagination. Whether in the form of slavery, segregation, extralegal violence, or the one-drop rule, the insistence on preserving racial distinctions reflects a desire among some Americans to cling to a myth of racial purity. Despite persistent efforts to enforce these boundaries, other Americans have consistently blurred, transgressed, and undermined these seemingly rigid racial categories. Drawing on texts by Thomas Jefferson, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and others, this class will explore the quixotic desire for white racial purity, the reality of ‘amalgamation,’ and the relationship between the two. Ultimately, students will analyze the impact of ‘Mongrel America’ on the ways in which Americans understand citizenship and their history.

Honoring Robert Lee Vann

The State of Things
WUNC 91.5, North Carolina Public Radio
2012-07-10

Frank Stasio, Host

Sarah Edwards, Co-Host

Guests

Marvin Jones
Chowan Discovery Group

Cash Michaels, Editor, Chief Reporter/Photographer and Columnist
The Carolinian

North Carolina native Robert Lee Vann was a pioneer of journalism during his lifetime. He served as editor of “The Pittsburgh Courier” which was the largest black newspaper in circulation until Vann’s death in 1940. He was recently commemorated in his hometown of Ahoskie, NC with a long-earned historical marker. Marvin Jones of the Chowan Discovery Group and Cash Michaels, editor of The Carolinian, join host Frank Stasio to talk about both Vann’s legacy and the legacy of the black press.

Listen to interview here. Download the interview here.