Mixed Race Studies

“Entirely Black Verse from Him Would Succeed”: Minstrel Realism and William Dean Howells

Nineteenth-Century Literature
Volume 59, Number 4 (March 2005)
pages 494-525
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2005.59.4.494

Gene Jarrett, Associate Professor of English
Boston University

In the early months of 1896, James A. Herne returned to his hotel in Toledo, Ohio, the city where he was directing and performing in his most popular play to date, Shore Acres. The hotel clerk informed the preeminent actor and playwright that one Paul Laurence Dunbar had left him a gift. Indeed, after attending and enjoying Shore Acres, Dunbar decided to leave Herne a complimentary copy of his second and latest book, Majors and Minors (1896). Fortunately for the African American poet, Herne was well acquainted with the most authoritative literary reviewer, cultural critic, editor, and publisher at the time, the so-called Dean of American Letters, William Howells. Howells was already a household name for mentoring and helping to publish the works of such well-known writers as George Washington Cable, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain. Readers of Harper’s Weekly in particular had come to know and appreciate Howells’s columns, which for a decade had epitomized the magazine’s long-standing identification and review of instructive and entertaining literature. When Dunbar dropped off the book at Herne’s hotel, the thought that Herne would hand Majors and Minors to Howells, who would then review the book for Harper’s Weekly and thereby launch Dunbar’s literary career, was far-fetched, to say the least.

Remarkably, these events occurred in this exact way. Herne did not respond to Dunbar while Shore Acres was playing in Toledo, but he did later in Detroit, where the play relocated and from which he sent the poet a letter: “While at Toledo a copy of your poems was left at my hotel by a Mr. Childs,” Herne wrote; “I tried very hard to find Mr. Childs to learn more of you. Your poems are wonderful. I shall acquaint William Dean Howells and other literary people with them. They are new to me and may be to them.” Herne passed Majors and Minors on to Howells, who decided to review the book in the 27 June 1896 issue of Harper’s Weekly.

Majors and Minors was “new” to both Herne and Howells not because of its two main genres, British Romantic and American local-color poetry: Herne was well read in American literature, while Howells specialized in classic and contemporaneous Western literature. Actually, the frontispiece of Majors and Minors, an image of Dunbar at age eighteen, made the poems “new” (see Figure 1). Howells found the image so compelling that, for the benefit of his readers, he decided to describe Dunbar’s phenotype and physiognomy, those biological traits that affirmed the poet as a “pure African type.” So captivated was Howells by the frontispiece and its implications that, reportedly, he wrote a substantial portion of the review—the sections regarding the idea of someone like Dunbar—without yet reading all of the poems in the book. For Howells the frontispiece verified Dunbar’s identity as an African descendant born in the postbellum New World. The image influenced Howells’s encounter with Majors and Minors in much the same way that a “paratext” influences a reader’s encounter with a text, although Dunbar’s book lacks a comprehensive paratextual frame. Aside from the printer’s information (“Hadley & Hadley, Toledo, Ohio”) and the dedication to Dunbar’s mother, Majors and Minors, as Howells puts it in the review, was “dateless, placeless, without a publisher.” Initially unable to “place” the work, Howells focused on the discernibly Africanphysiognomy and dark phenotype in the frontispiece in order to “place” Dunbar and his work…

The frontispiece created certain expectations for Howells about the kind of writing that should exist in Majors and Minors Whenever Dunbar’s book defied these expectations, skepticism tempered Howells’s enthusiasm. In his review Howells suggests that, in order to assure both critical acclaim and commercial success, the poet should dedicate himself to writing verses only in “Black” dialect, similar to those filling the second and smaller section of Majors and Minors. For Dunbar is “most himself,” Howells insists, when he writes in such informal or colloquial English. Accordingly, he maintains that Dunbar should refrain from writing poems in formal or “literary” English, such as those filling the first and larger section of the book. Howells subtly reiterates this assessment one month later in a letter to Ripley Hitchcock, then serving as literary editor and adviser at D. Appleton and Company. Dated 29 July 1896, the letter belongs to a long-running conversation between Howells and Hitchcock about promising American writers, most notably Stephen Crane. After informing  Hitchcock of his laudatory review of Crane’s two books, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), in the previous Sunday’s World, Howells closes the letter with a couple of sentences about Dunbar: “Major Pond is going to platform young Dunbar next winter, and I believe a book of entirely black verse from him would succeed. My notice raised such interest.”‘

These words are remarkable for three reasons. First, Howells is referring to Major James A. Pond, a prestigious literary agent who had previously directed the lecture tours of Twain and Cable, among other popular American writers. Dunbar had secured Major Pond as an agent by the time he decided to travel to England in February 1897 to lecture and recite his poems.  Second, the reason that Dunbar interested Major Pond in the first place had much to do with that “notice”—Howells’s term for his review of Majors and Minors in Harper’s Weekly. Third, and most important, Howells’s assertion that “a book of entirely black verse from [Dunbar] would succeed” values the racial authenticity of African American literature, particularly the orthography of dialect that came from the pen of a “pure African type.” This appreciation, I argue, belongs to a larger critical and commercial demand for what I call “minstrel realism” in postbellum nineteenth-century American culture.

Although “minstrel realism” sounds oxymoronic, it makes sense when placed within the proper context of how certain ideologies of race (racialism) and realism interacted in the nineteenth century. In this essay I intend to show that the racialism of blackface minstrelsy, performed by individuals darkened usually by burnt cork, created a cultural precondition in which postbellum audiences regarded Black minstrelsy (that is, minstrelsy performed by Blacks) as realistic. This reaction resulted from the commercialization of Black minstrelsy in American culture as an avant-garde cultural performance of racial authenticity. An analogous reaction occurred upon the publication of Majors and Minors in 1896. Howells and other reviewers, editors, and publishers appreciated the particular section “Humor and Dialect” for what happened to be the protocols of minstrel realism: the humor and dialect of African American culture. My argument has several implications. Minstrel realism united realism with what George M. Fredrickson calls “romantic racialism,”” a relationship that flies in the face of the historical conflict between these genres in American culture. While characterizing Anglo-American literary realism as the eschewal of romance and sentiment, Howells in particular defined African American literary realism in these very terms. This apparent inconsistency points to the racialism that helped to perpetuate this definition in the dramatic and literary cultures of minstrelsy.

In this essay I urge another re-categorization of American literary realism. Elizabeth Ammons has already recommended an expansion of this genre to include a variety of realisms, to move beyond the “white, middle-class ideas” of Howells, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton, among others, and accommodate the diverse approaches of African American, Native American, and Chinese American authors. But Howells’s notion of literary realism included Dunbar as well as other “ethnic minority” writers, such as Charles Chesnutt and Abraham Cahan. In order to explain, then, the fact that Howells cites both Crane and Dunbar in the same letter to Hitchcock as the avant-garde of American literary realism, I suggest that, for Howells and his contemporaries, racial authenticity determined the aesthetic value of literary realism. The contrasting racial identities of Crane and Dunbar, for example, created different sets of expectations for the kinds of realism that they could and should have produced…

…Of all these writers, only Douglass, Chesnutt, Dumas, and Pushkin appeared in essays that Howells wrote elsewhere. None, as we shall soon see, could match Dunbar’s literary potential in Howells’s eyes-not even Chesnutt. Though Chesnutt was a writer who was well respected for publishing in the Atlantic Monthly several Black-dialect short stories (which he would later compile for his first book, The Conjure Woman [1899]), he did not appear as racially authentic as he sounded in these volumes. In a to November 1901 letter to Henry Black [Blake?] Fuller, a Chicago novelist, Howells suggests that Chesnutt could pass for White: “You know he is a negro, though you wouldn’t know it from seeing him.” Thinking similarly, anthologists in the early twentieth century tended to omit Chesnutt from the African American canon, due to his ostensible lack of Black authenticity (see Figure 2). Thus, Dunbar’s impact on African American canon formation at the turn of the century-a period spanning from his rise to prominence in 1896 to the eventual disappearance of his work from national periodicals and from anthologized canons of American literature by World War I-exceeded Chesnutt’s, insofar as Dunbar’s perceived racial “purity” enabled critics and publishers to authenticate his dialect writing in ways initially inapplicable to the dialect writing of Chesnutt and other African American authors of ostensibly mixed racial ancestry.

In Howells’s eyes, the sort of interracial complexion that characterized not only Chesnutt, but also Dumas and Pushkin, disqualified them from the tradition of authentic African American literature. In his introduction to Dunbar’s third book of poems, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)-an introduction that incorporates but also modifies his review of Majors and Minors—Howells argues that though Dumas and Pushkin antedated Dunbar as renowned writers of African descent, “these were both mulattoes, who might have been supposed to derive their qualities from white blood … and who were the creatures of an environment more favorable to their literary development.” Dunbar, by contrast, was more authentic:

the father and mother of the first poet of his race in our language were negroes without admixture of white blood….

… Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically….

… There is a precious difference of temperament between the races which it would be a great pity ever to lose, and … this is best preserved and most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his where he studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our English.

(“Introduction,” pp. vii-ix)

Howells’s investment in the discourse of blood in his introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life followed in the wake of the Supreme Court decision for Plessy v. Ferguson,  which legalized the biological discourse of interracialism and supported public notions that one could subject racial identity to biological measurement. This discourse both pervaded the literary criticism and art of African American authors and determined the politics of  racial representation. By the time that Howells wrote his introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life between September and December 1896, the biological language of Plessy v. Ferguson had already seeped into American popular consciousness for close to half a year. For Howells one drop of “Black blood” did not so much detract from the intellectual potency of “White blood”; rather, this drop became, in its “unmixed” state, a racial virtue—just as it was in the minstrel industry…

Read the entire article here.

TV Review: Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BioNews
Number 630 (2011-10-24)

Anoushka Shepherd

Mixed Race Britain: Mixed Britannia, BBC2, 6-20 October 2011, Presented by George Alagiah

I am mixed race, and thereby a member the fastest growing ethnic minority in the UK. My British dad met my Sri Lankan mum while travelling in the 1970s. They married and settled in Manchester where I grew up. And although I was definitely alive to the fact that their marriage was a joining of two very different cultures, I had no idea of the deep and contentious history of mixed relationships in this country.

In this three-part documentary, George Alagiah recounts the largely untold story of mixed race Britain and the many love stories that overcame extreme social hardship to create it…

…In summary, all three programmes are packed with interviews and are rich in photographs and footage from the archives. This is a very real and intimate recollection of the history of this country told in the refreshingly honest words of those who were there. All the stories told are different, interesting and moving in their own ways…

Read the entire review here.

An art history mystery at Worcester Art Museum

Metrowest Daily News
Framingham, Massachusetts
2011-12-12

Chris Bergeron, Daily News Staff

WORCESTER—Forget the da Vinci Code. There’s no Knight Templars or murderous albinos, but the life and death of Julien Hudson and the whereabouts of his paintings is a fascinating “art historical mystery’’ waiting to be solved.

The second-earliest documented painter of African descent in the U.S. [after Joshua Johnson (see article “The Mysterious Portraitist Joshua Johnson”)], Hudson was making his mark as a portraitist in New Orleans in the early 1800s before dying of unknown causes, leaving behind just six canvases.

Who was the man with searching eyes in one of his remaining paintings? Did he kill himself, as some suspect? With his sixth painting discovered by a New England collector, can more of Hudson’s valuable works be found in area shops, flea markets or your attic?

An intriguing exhibit, “In Search of Julien Hudson,” at the Worcester Art Museum, offers the first retrospective about the man and the artist whose enigmatic career casts light on the lives of free blacks and mixed race people in Louisiana before the Civil War?

Organizer William Keyse Rudolph said, “The search for Julien Hudson isn’t over.”…

…For many New Englanders, “In Search of Julien Hudson’’ will provide an exciting opportunity to learn about a vital subculture of the pre-Civil War South that belies some stereotypes and confirms others.

Rudolph explained that Hudson was the mixed-race grandson of a woman who been freed from slavery and the oldest of four children born from the union of Desiree Marcos and Thomas Hudson, an English merchant and ship’s chandler.

From its founding in 1718 to its sale in 1803 to the U.S. as part of the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans maintained a class of free people of color who were regarded as a “third caste,’’ with a legal and social status that positioned them between the enslaved and free whites.

Hudson’s life reveals many of the possibilities and limitations experienced by free blacks in New Orleans…

Read the entire article here.

African-American Reflections on Brazil’s Racial Paradise

Temple University Press
February 1992
276 pages
5.5 x 8.25
Cloth ISBN: 0-87722-892-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-59213-104-4

Edited by

David J. Hellwig, Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Studies
St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota

Essays that focus on the authors’ observations of race relations in Brazil from the first decade of the century through the 1980s

At the turn of the twentieth century, the popular image of Brazil was that of a tropical utopia for people of color, and it was looked upon as a beacon of hope by African Americans. Reports of this racial paradise were affirmed by notable black observers until the middle of this century, when the myth began to be challenged by North American blacks whose attitudes were influenced by the civil rights movement and burgeoning black militancy. The debate continued and the myth of the racial paradise was eventually rejected as black Americans began to see the contradictions of Brazilian society as well as the dangers for people of color.

David Hellwig has assembled numerous observations of race relations in Brazil from the first decade of the century through the 1980s. Originally published in newspapers and magazines, the selected commentaries are written by a wide range of African-American scholars, journalists, and educators, and are addressed to a general audience.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introcution: The Myth of the Racial Paradise
• Part I: The Myth Affirmed (1900-1940)
  • 1. “Brazilian Visitors in Norfolk”
  • 2. “Brazil vs. United States”
  • 3. “Brazil and the Black Race”
  • 4. “Brazil” – W.E.B. Du Bois
  • 5. “Opportunities in Brazil: South American Country Offers First Hand Knowledge of the Solving of the Race Question”
  • 6. “Brazil” – Cyril V. Briggs
  • 7. “Wonderful Opportunities Offered in Brazil for Thrifty People of All Races” – Associated Negro Press
  • 8. “South America and Its Prospects in 1920” – L. H. Stinson
  • 9. “Brazil as I Found It” – E.R. James
  • 10. “Sidelights on Brazil Racial Conditions” – Frank St. Claire
  • 11. “My Trip Through South America” – Robert S. Abbott
  • 12. “Sightseeing in South America” – William Pickens
• Part II: The Myth Debated (1940-1965)
  • 13. “The Color Line in South America’s Largest Republic” – Ollie Stewart
  • 14. “Stewart in Error – No Color Line in Brazil” – James W. Ivy
  • 15. Letter by W.E.B. Du Bois to Edward Weeks, Atlanta, Georgia, October 2, 1941
  • 16. “Brazil Has No Race Problem” – E. Franklin Frazier
  • 17. “A Comparison of Negro-White Relations in Brazil and the United States” – E. Franklin Frazier
  • 18. Excerpt from Quest for Dignity: An Autobiography of a Negro Doctor – Thomas Roy Peyton
  • 19. “Brazilian Color Bias Growing More Rampant” – George S. Schuyler
  • 20. “The Negro in Brazil” – Lorenzo D. Turner
• Part III: The Myth Rejected (1965-)
  • 21. “From Roxbury to Rio-and Back in a Hurry” – Angela M. Gilliam
  • 22. “Brazil: Study in Black, Brown and Beige” – Leslie B. Rout, Jr.
  • 23. “Equality in Brazil: Confronting Reality” – Cleveland Donald, Jr.
  • 24. “‘Mestizaje’ vs. Black Identity: The Color Crisis in Latin America” – Richard L. Jackson
  • 25. “Black Consciousness vs. Racism in Brazil” – Niani (Dee Brown)
  • 26. “Brazil and the Blacks of South America” – Gloria Calomee
  • 27. “In Harmony with Brazil’s African Pulse” – Rachel Jackson Christmas

Racial Paradise or Run-around? Afro-North American Views of Race Relations in Brazil

American Studies
Volume 46, Number 1 (Spring 2005)
pages 43-60

David J. Hellwig, Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Studies
St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota

North American students of slavery and race relations have long used comparative approaches to examine the troubling phenomena of racial discrimination and violence in a society committed to democratic processes and equality. Implicit in these studies is the idea that understanding gained through a comparative perspective will facilitate action to reduce the gap between the ideals and the reality of North American life. Two societies in particular have been studied: South Africa and Brazil. While the example of South Africa has provided insight into aspects of North American culture deplored by most Americans, the example of Brazil has traditionally offered a positive model, one worthy of emulation.

Although people of African descent constitute a minority of the population, more Africans were brought to Brazil as slaves, slavery lasted longer, and today more black and brown people reside there than in any other Western Hemisphere nation. Despite the heritage of slavery, Brazil has traditionally been perceived by North Americans and white Brazilians as a social or racial democracy. According to the myth of the racial paradise, slavery was relatively mild in Brazil, relations between masters and bondsmen were softened by extensive miscegenation, slavery was ended without bloodshed, and since abolition in 1888, skin color has played little if any part in social stratification since. If there are relatively few dark-skinned Brazilians at the higher levels of society, it simply reflects disadvantages rooted in slavery. Above all, one finds no tradition of racial violence or of Jim Crow.

While the image of Brazil as a social democracy is still common in North America and even more so in Brazil, it has been seriously challenged since the end of World War II. In the 1950s UNESCO sponsored a thorough re-examination of Brazilian race relations by international teams of scholars. Though such international recognition reinforced the Brazilian elite’s belief in their racial democracy, in fact the studies did as much to undermine as to affirm the traditional image of Brazilian society. Studies done in the 1960s and 1970s by Brazilian scholars such as Florestan Fernandes, the Argentine-Brazilian Carlos Hasenbalg and the French sociologist Roger Bastide were even more critical of Brazil’s reputation as a society remarkably free of racism.

Black North Americans participated in the affirmation of the racial paradise myth until the mid-twentieth century, and in the contemporary attack upon it. Their critique was a product of the scholars’ re-examination of Brazil and reflected the greater knowledge of Latin America acquired through enhanced opportunities for formal study and travel there. More important, however, were black Americans’ domestic experiences following the gradual dissolution of Jim Crow after World War II and the resurgence of black nationalism in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Black Americans have observed that in contemporary Brazil, as in the U.S., dark-skinned people continue to constitute a disproportionate percentage of the poor and dispossessed despite repeated assurances by dominant groups of acceptance and advancement based on individual merit. Black people in both societies have been victims of arun-around: made promises and guaranteed rights but at the same time denied the education and financial resources needed to transform rights and opportunities into better jobs, housing and health care. Furthermore, given the low level of racial identity and unity among Afro-Brazilians, the likelihood of them altering their status within Brazilian society appears, if anything, even less likely than for black North Americans.

…The growing involvement of the United States in the world, along with the expansion of international trade and travel in the twentieth century, made black and white Americans more aware of Brazil and Latin America in general. One visit to South America, that of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt in 1913, was widely reported in the black and white press. The article Roosevelt wrote on “The Negro in Brazil” for the popular weekly Outlook in February, 1914, reinforced the prevalent image of race relations in Brazil. The Philadelphia Tribune was pleased to note that Roosevelt found colored professors in the state-supported schools, black and mulatto judges, extensive miscegenation, and no segregation or lynchings. His findings, it commented, were “of more than passing interest to us as a race” in highlighting the different treatment of the black race in Brazil and many other societies and in the United States. If wise, the United States would adopt the racial pattern existing in Brazil and avoid racial polarization and violence, the paper warned. A Chicago Defender editorial also praised Roosevelt’s article, telling readers “There is little or no prejudice in Brazil, therefore the problem, as we term it, is being solved in the only possible and effective way of solving it, by absorption, the intermarriage of the races a common occurrence, a man or woman being solely judged on their individual merit, upon their standing in life, the color of their skin playing little part.”

Throughout the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s the black American press continued to endorse a highly flattering assessment of race relations in Brazil. Leaders such as Booker T. Washington, Kelly Miller, W.E.B. DuBois and William Pickens agreed that Brazil offered people of color opportunities denied in the United States. J. A. Rogers in his classic 1924 history, From “Superman” to Man, also confirmed the traditional view. “In Brazil., .the Negro is taught not only to regard himself the equal of the white man, but he is given an opportunity to prove it. There is no walk of Brazilian life, official or unofficial, where he is not welcome and which he has not filled.” Rogers added that more than one Brazilian president had been of Negro descent, an observation often included in references to Afro- Brazilians. At least two articles published in the Journal of Negro History, Herbert B. Alexander’s “Brazilian and U.S. Slavery Compared” in 1922 and Mary W. Williams’ “The Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Brazilian Empire” in 1930, developed the thesis Frank Tannenbaum later popularized in his influential work Slave and Citizen that the status of Negroes in Brazil differed dramatically from the United States in large part because of the marked difference in the institution of slavery in the two societies…

…Nowhere was the trend of black Americans in the 1940s to question the existence of racial democracy in Latin America as apparent as in the comments of the premier black intellectual of the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois. His observations are especially instructive not only because of his status as a scholar and activist but because of the sharp change in his assessment of Brazilian race relations over the years. In the 1910s and 1920s DuBois expressed opinions shared by others regarding Brazil. The absence of a color bar and the absorption of the Negro race into the larger society without tension and violence testified to the baselessness of North American fears regarding race. It was important, he felt, for North Americans to challenge the view implicit in most books on Brazil that it was a white country and to read books such as The Conquest of Brazil by Roy Nash, a former Executive Secretary of the NAACP. This work, published in 1926, stressed both the presence of blacks in the nation’s history and the acceptability of race mixture in Brazil, DuBois noted.

In the 1930s DuBois said little if anything about Brazil. Early in the next decade, however, he reversed his previous position and presented a hard-hitting critique of Brazilian race relations and ideology. North American blacks “long pretended to see a possible solution in the gradual amalgamation of whites, Indians and blacks” in South America, he remarked. They “have grown used to being told the settlement of the Negro problem in Brazil is merely a matter of time and absorption: that if we shut our eyes long enough, a white Brazil. . . will emerge and Africa in South America disappear.” Such a belief was both unfounded and dangerous, DuBois now insisted. Racial amalgamation had meant neither “social uplift” nor greater power and prestige for mulattoes and mestizos in Latin America. While “dark blood” ran through the veins of many whites, dark people continued to experience social barriers, economic exploitation and political disfranchisement. White immigration was encouraged at all costs.

One deplorable consequence of the ideology of whitening was that many Afro-Brazilians no longer identified with their African ancestry. “Despite facts, no Brazilian… dare boast of his black fathers,” DuBois observed. The tendency of the “darker people” of the West Indies and South America to “think white” was so ingrained that they were losing awareness of their cultural patterns. In Brazil as elsewhere, people who knew themselves to be of Negro and Indian descent consented to their government presenting the nation to the world as “white” by appointing only Caucasians to diplomatic posts. To DuBois such behavior was a “tragic mistake” that would “tend to eliminate the darker races from the world because of a concerted rush and scramble on their part to become white.” In short, absorption of the Negro was not only biologically difficult, it was culturally and politically damaging for African people in South America and the world asa whole…

Read the entire article here.

Brazilian Racial Democracy, 1900-90: An American Counterpoint

Journal of Contemporary History
Volume 31, Number 3 (July 1996)
pages 483-507
DOI: 10.1177/002200949603100303

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Brazil is one of the largest multi-racial societies in the world, and the home of the largest single component of the overseas African diaspora. During the first half of the 1900s, it was frequently described, both by native-born and foreign observers, as a ‘racial democracy‘, in which blacks, mulattoes, and whites lived under conditions of juridical and, to a large degree, social equality. During the second half of the century, however, that description has been sharply revised. From 1940 to the present, national censuses have documented persistent disparities between the white and non-white populations in education, vocational achievement, earnings, and life expectancy. Survey research has shown racist attitudes and stereotypes concerning blacks and mulattoes to be widely diffused throughout Brazilian society, and Afro-Brazilians report being the victims of subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, racism and discrimination. Thus while observers writing in the 1930s and 1940s focused on the harmonious, egalitarian quality of racial interaction in Brazil, similar discussions in the 1980s and 1990s have emphasized ‘the perception, ever more widespread, that [the concept of] “racial democracy”, in its official and semi-official versions, does not reflect Brazilian reality’. ‘The myth of racial democracy appears to be definitively in its grave’, observed the news-magazine Istoé during the celebrations marking the centennial of the abolition of slavery, in 1988; ‘racial discrimination’, not racial democracy, ‘is the basis of Brazilian culture’, argued historian Décio Freitas.

What accounts for this transformation in characterizations of Brazilian race relations? I have argued elsewhere that the disagreements and debates surrounding the concept of racial democracy in Brazil are closely tied to the tensions surrounding the theory and practice of political democracy in that country. Racial democracy was originally conceived as part of a larger ideological…

Read the entire article here.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Rutgers University Press
2012-03-15
368 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5255-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5254-5

Keith Wailoo, Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

Catherine Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Faculty Associate
Institute for Health
Rutgers University

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

In this interview for Dalton Conley’s book, You May Ask Yourself, Alondra Nelson describes her research on genetic testing and how it is changing the way people think about race.

Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America

Rutgers University Press
2012-03-27
288 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5270-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5269-9

David Leverenz, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Florida

As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, “The divide of race has been America’s constant curse.” In Honor Bound, David Leverenz explores the past to the present of that divide. He argues that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honor. “White skin” and “black skin” are fictions of honor and shame. Americans have lived those fictions for over four hundred years.

To make his argument, Leverenz casts an unusually wide net, from ancient and modern cultures of honor to social, political, and military history to American literature and popular culture.

He highlights the convergence of whiteness and honor in the United States from the antebellum period to the present. The Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the election of Barack Obama represent racial progress; the Tea Party movement represents the latest recoil.

From exploring African American narratives to examining a 2009 episode of Hardball—in which two white commentators restore their honor by mocking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder after he called Americans “cowards” for not talking more about race—Leverenz illustrates how white honor has prompted racial shaming and humiliation. The United States became a nation-state in which light-skinned people declared themselves white. The fear masked by white honor surfaces in such classics of American literature as The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in the U.S. wars against the Barbary pirates from 1783 to 1815 and the Iraqi insurgents from 2003 to the present. John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers is used to frame the 2008 presidential campaign as white honor’s last national stand.

Honor Bound concludes by probing the endless attempts in 2009 and 2010 to preserve white honor through racial shaming, from the “birthers” and Tea Party protests to Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” in Congress and the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the front door of his own home. Leverenz is optimistic that, in the twenty-first century, racial shaming is itself becoming shameful.

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965

Duke University Press
1998
336 pages
11 b&w photographs, 2 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2098-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2084-5

Jeffrey L. Gould, Rudy Professor of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

Challenging the widely held belief that Nicaragua has been ethnically homogeneous since the nineteenth century, To Die in This Way reveals the continued existence and importance of an officially “forgotten” indigenous culture. Jeffrey L. Gould argues that mestizaje—a cultural homogeneity that has been hailed as a cornerstone of Nicaraguan national identity—involved a decades-long process of myth building.

Through interviews with indigenous peoples and records of the elite discourse that suppressed the expression of cultural differences and rationalized the destruction of Indian communities, Gould tells a story of cultural loss. Land expropriation and coerced labor led to cultural alienation that shamed the indigenous population into shedding their language, religion, and dress. Beginning with the 1870s, Gould historicizes the forces that prompted a collective movement away from a strong identification with indigenous cultural heritage to an “acceptance” of a national mixed-race identity.

By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from the national memory, To Die in This Way critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and thus marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history that will also interest anthropologists and students of social and cultural historians.

Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil

Rutgers University Press
1997-10-01
192 pages
20 b & w photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2364-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8135-2365-1

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

This groundbreaking ethnographic study analyzes everyday practices that leave intact the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil’s “racial democracy” in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy.

This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Vasalia: The Research Site
• 3. Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Racism: The Social, Sexual, Socioeconomic, and Semiotic Contours
• 4. Discourses in Defense of the Racial Democracy
• 5. Embranquecimento: Aesthetic Ideals and Resistance to Mestiçagem
• 6. Memory: White Inflation and Willful Forgetting
• 7. Strategic Responses to Racism: Preserving White Supremacy
• Appendix A: Interview Schedule
• Appendix B: Biographical Data on Interviewees
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index