Mixed Race Studies

We argue that evidence of America’s biracial heritage exists in discursive clues that always almost remind Americans that race was never as pure a distinction as the lexicographers and teachers of official language and histories once inculcated. Though recent scholarship has recovered some of this heritage, we argue that this knowledge has haunted Americans, who have always almost known about their biracial past. Double meanings, oral histories, “fictions,” fantasies, and epithets perpetuated an almost awareness of this heritage even as successive discursive formations obscured its memory.

Greg Goodale and Jeremy Engles, “Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Issue 1 (March 2010): 70-89.

CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Northwestern University
Winter 2012

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies

In this seminar we will discuss how and why late 19th-century and early 20th-century fiction often represented a crisis in models of biological reproduction. We will investigate how anxieties regarding miscegenation and degeneration impacted this three-part pattern:

(1) the “family romance” in Latin America (and elsewhere); (2) the  so-called generative crisis in the turn of the century; (3) the homosocial, “horizontal” forms of association or affiliation that were evoked to compensate the crisis in the generative model. We will also consider the meanings of the term “generation” as a form of “affiliation” in multi-racial societies such as Brazil.

Although we will focus primarily on Brazilian fiction, the approach will be comparative (hemispheric and/or transatlantic), and final papers may focus on U.S., Latin American, European, African or other post-colonial literatures (primarily from the period 1850’s-1930’s).

Class Materials:

• José de Alencar (Iracema, 1865)
• Aluísio de Azevedo (O Mulato, 1881)
• Adolfo Caminha (O Bom Crioulo, 1895)
• Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro, 1899)
• Lima Barreto (Clara dos Anjos, 1922)
• José Lins do Rego (Doidinho, 1933; Banguê, 1934)
• Graciliano Ramos (São Bernardo, 1934)
• Gilberto Freyre (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933)

ALL WORKS ARE AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

Secondary sources may include works by Doris Sommer, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago and Jacques Derrida.

The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande & senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization

University of California Press
2nd revised edition (March 1987)
(originally published in 1933)
622 pages
ISBN: 9780520056657

Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987)

Introduction by:

David H. P. Maybury-Lewis

This book is out of print, but available for on-line reading here.

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter
• Preface to the first English-Language Edition
• Preface to the Second English-language Edition
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Author’s Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• I General Characteristics of the Portuguese Colonization of Brazil: Formation of an Agrarian, Slave-Holding and Hybrid Society
• II The Native in the Formation of the Brazilian Family
• III The Portuguese Colonizer: Antecedents and Predispositions
• IV The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian
• V The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian (continued)
• Plans showing Big House of the Noruega Plantation
• Glossary of the Brazilian Terms Used
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects

Read the entire book here.

Rejoining the Parts: A Conversation with Jane Lazarre About Race, Fiction, American History and Her New Novel, Inheritance

Tenured Radical
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-11-15

Claire Potter, Professor of History and American Studies
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

Jane Lazarre is a writer of fiction, memoir and poetry who has published many books, beginning with her memoir, The Mother Knot (1976; reissued in 1997 by Duke University Press) and most recently,Inheritance, A Novel (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2011). She has taught writing and literature at New York’s City College and at Yale University; and for many years directed and taught in the undergraduate writing program at Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Tenured Radical: The title of the book — Inheritance — asks the reader to think about what is passed down, generation to generation.  But in the first chapter we are confronted with Sam’s frustration and anger that, as a young woman with a white and a black parent, she knows so little of her family history. We come to understand that our historical “inheritance” not only can’t be taken for granted and but also sometimes requires active recovery. How did you come to understand that this was the story you wanted to tell about America’s racial past?

Jane Lazarre: From my early experiences in the late 1960s as a new member, by marriage, of an African American family, and throughout the years of raising two Black sons, I became deeply aware of how much I, as an American and as a white American, did not know about African American history — which is a central, defining part of American history. At the same time, of course, I began to understand all I was unaware of about race, despite a deeply anti-racist upbringing. As a mother, a writer and teacher, I began to study the subject. I saw that I was part of a great majority of white Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, in my ignorance of the complex forces of American racism…

…TR: We’ve heard so much since 2008, and the election of Black president with a white mother, about the United States finally being “post-racial,” and a new kind of fantasy about the beneficial effects of race-mixing, or multiracialism, seems to play a big role in this. But several multiracial characters in Inheritance make the point strongly that they are not immune from racism and that not to be recognized as Black is to deprive them of an inheritance of struggle. Can you elaborate on this theme a bit?

JL: I wrote extensively about this subject in my memoir, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness, a title that is a take on Ralph Ellison’s famous exploration, in Invisible Man (1952) of “the blackness of blackness.” I disagree strongly with the idea that the election of President Obama is the signal and sign of our “post-racialism.” I know that people of color, including people with one white parent, experience racism every day, even if there have been significant changes in our legal, and even social, attitudes. I believe that all of us, as Americans, are inheritors of the struggle of African Americans to both liberate and recreate themselves, and we deny this connection at our peril and to our great loss. Samantha Reed, the daughter of a (half) black father and a (Jewish) white mother, knows at a very early age that her identity, her history, her future, and even her unconscious (shown in the “white dream” she inherits in the Prologue of the novel,) are profoundly affected by, laced with, absorbed in, her heritage and her life as a Black woman in America. That does not mean she rejects or dismisses her other ethnic histories, nor that she does not love “the three white women whose histories flow into [her] own,” as she says in the early pages of the book. But I am saying, in this novel, as in other works, the lessons I have learned from my life as a mother, now a grandmother, as a teacher of African American literature and a writer about race: that so-called mixedness means little in American history. As I said above, many enslaved Americans, including the great Frederick Douglass, were “mixed” due to rape or forced sexual unions, and nevertheless remained enslaved. Racism in this country is not unchanged from previous centuries, or even previous decades, but as many cultural theorists have written, our educational and prison systems are evidence to the ongoing racism still permeating much of our lives…

Read the entire interview here.

Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Volume 7, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 70-89
DOI: 10.1080/14791420903511255

Greg Goodale, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Northeastern University

Jeremy Engels, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences
Pennsylvania State University

The authors argue that the application of critical methods to fragments in successive discursive formations, including oral traditions, double meanings, epithets, fictions, and fantasies, reveal that Americans have always almost known of their biracial heritage. This re-examination of archival evidence in conjunction with critiques of novels, neologisms, and epithets enables the authors to reinterpret narratives of whiteness, particularly those surrounding Jane McCrea, America’s first national martyr. Though claimed as a pure, white woman, we argue that underground traditions and a succession of discursive formations lend credence to the possibility that she exemplifies America’s biracial past.

Why are reports of America’s biracial heritage, like Thomas Jefferson’s black descendents and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s biracial child, met with a shrug? (NB: The terms “white” and “black” are problematic because they essentialize. In this essay, we gradually de-essentialize the terms even as we use them.) Given America’s history of racism, one might expect this news to be controversial. Yet illustrating a strikingly blasé attitude toward America’s biracial past, in 2008 Illinois Senator Barack Obama used stump speeches to respond to reports that he was related to the unpopular sitting Vice President: “Dick Cheney is the black sheep of my family.” The line drew laughter because successive discursive formations have perpetuated knowledge about America’s biracial heritage, even as these formations have attempted to deny this memory. Thus Americans have always almost been conscious of their biracial heritage, a near-consciousness that is responsible for both current shrugs and past violence. During the early years of the republic, the identity “American” was made white. As evidenced by Noah Webster’s first American Dictionary, after the Revolutionary War the concept African American became unthinkable to Euro-Americans. Webster defined “American” as “a native of America; originally applied to the aboriginals, or copper-colored races, found here by the Europeans; but now applied to the descendants of Europeans born in America.” In his dictionary, Webster represented “American” as white and explicitly excluded Indians while ignoring Americans of African descent. The Revolution had forced former subjects of the British Empire to rethink their identities. Those who published dictionaries, constituted a government, and constructed schools nearly effaced racial mixture by imposing their self-representation—whiteness—on the inchoate nation. As rhetorical scholars, we are deeply interested in representations, and in particular in how these shape our understanding of history. For Roger Chartier, “a double meaning and a double function are thus assigned to representation: to make an absence present, but also to exhibit its own presence as image.” Representation performed two critical functions after the Revolutionary War: it invented a reality by making an absence in the form of white American-ness present, and it exhibited the no-longer absent as reality by deifying a pantheon of exemplary “white” Americans like George Washington and Jane McCrea. The double meaning thus constituted identities while underpinning regimes of representation that almost hid such constructions.

Like the Christian God, educated “whites” made Americans in their own image, a vision that attempted to and always almost effaced racial mixture. Chartier’s colleague Pierre Bourdieu described the effects of representation: “What is at stake here is the power of imposing a vision of the social world through principles of de-vision which, when they are imposed on a whole group, establish meaning and a consensus about meaning, and in particular about the identity and unity of the group, which creates the reality of the unity and reality of the group.” To represent, Chartier and Bourdieu argue, is to define and constitute. Yet all representations, insofar as they attempt to make an absence present, are necessarily imperfect. The double meaning retains a pre-history of the representation’s construction. In constituting a reality and a social unity predicated upon a re-presentation of history, educated whites in the founding period were unable to erase fragments of Americans’ biracial heritage that remained in the discursive formation; vestiges that have remained in the succession of discursive formations from the founding to today. When a purist vision of the social world like Webster’s is imposed, hints of diversity linger, always almost reappearing to re-present the constructed nature of the representation

We argue that evidence of America’s biracial heritage exists in discursive clues that always almost remind Americans that race was never as pure a distinction as the lexicographers and teachers of official language and histories once inculcated. Though recent scholarship has recovered some of this heritage, we argue that this knowledge has haunted Americans, who have always almost known about their biracial past. Double meanings, oral histories, “fictions,” fantasies, and epithets perpetuated an almost awareness of this heritage even as successive discursive formations obscured its memory. Discursive formations are not monolithic. Even as they influence and to a degree determine what we take to be true and hence our ability to think, to understand, and to name, our current truths must necessarily emerge out of older regimes of representation. Truth does not spring sui generis on the scene, like Athena from Zeus’s head. Truth is made out of old truths and even older rules. Thus, each new discursive formation contains vestiges of prior knowledges and epistemologies…

…When whites participated in lynch mobs or volunteered for black-voter registration drives, their decisions were rooted, in part, in insecurities about the purity of whiteness or an awareness of brotherhood. These reactions should be partially attributed to discursive fragments that always almost threaten to re-present America’s biracial heritage. In this essay, we offer an exploration of a few vestiges that have preserved knowledge of America’s integrated past. Beginning with double meanings that hide and betray biracial truths, we find that a close study of this unofficial history uncovers America’s biracial heritage at the same time that it reveals clues that illustrate the imperfect racial purification of America by white lexicographers and teachers. Then we turn to a sustained analysis of a popular nineteenth-century story. This critical reading of the biography of Jane McCrea exemplifies efforts to proclaim the purity of race while revealing a discursive formation that recalls Americans are not simply white or black. We are both…

Read or purchase the article here.

‘The rivers of Zimbabwe will run red with blood’: Enoch Powell and the Post-Imperial Nostalgia of the Monday Club

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 37, Issue 4 (December 2011)
pages 731-745
DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2011.613691

Daniel McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

In his influential account of post-colonial melancholia, Paul Gilroy suggests that contemporary reports of violence in Southern Africa reveal Britain’s inability to work through its grim history of imperialism and colonialism. Gilroy’s study links recent discussions of tragic Southern African themes to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968. However, it does not mention Powell’s critique of Britain’s ‘post-imperial nostalgia’ in a speech about Rhodesia later that year. This is not entirely surprising – the Conservative Central Office did not disseminate Powell’s call for Britons to move beyond sentimental attachment to ‘kith and kin’ in Rhodesia, and Rhodesian sympathisers in the Conservative Monday Club attempted to work around Powell’s refusal to support the ‘White Commonwealth’. Moreover, Powell opposed non-white ‘communalism’ whether he was emphasising the importance of the British Empire to English identity or challenging the ‘harmful myth’ of empire as an English nationalist. Consequently, this article uses archival material relating to the Monday Club and the Rhodesian Ministry of Information in order to document three of the main strands of post-colonial melancholia that apply to Powellite figures on the right who defended (white) minority rule in Rhodesia and/or demonised (non-white) minority cultures in the United Kingdom. The first main strand of post-colonial melancholia involves the belief that racial intermixture will lead to violence and economic instability. The second emphasises the importance of strong white rule to limit racial violence and industrial retardation. The third attempts to contest and then seize the position of victim, alleging one set of standards for the ‘civilised’ West and another set of standards for ‘failed, incompetent and pre-modern states.’

Read or purchase the article here.

Race as a social question in Brazil

The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Volume 27, Number 4 (October 1940)
pages 218-241

Carlos M. Delgado de Carvalho (1884-1990)

I. ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF THE BRAZILIAN POPULATION

At first sight, it seems that race could be considered as the capital element of the biological aspect of society. Race is a very common and vague term, freely used in human affairs, but with no precise meaning at all. It stands probably for zoological comparisons, but its chief virtue is to be a powerful appeal to feelings and passion; its value, therefore, is pseudo-scientific.

The only proof that race exists is that we find, nearly everywhere, racial problems, race questions, racial minorities, and so on. It is especially the revision of the European political map in the nineteenth century on the lines of nationality politics and in the twentieth century by the ethnic realities of the Treaties of 1919-1920, that has impressed on our minds the concept of race.

Some people are satisfied with races as major divisions of mankind: black, yellow, brown, white. Others have in view a nation or a country. Some mystics believe in a hypothetical pure race,” that has existed according to a subjective ideal of which they are possibly the prototype. An isolated group with uniform and stable physical aspects is sometimes called a “race.” It happens also that race is mistaken for language; for instance, we hear that South America has populations of the Latin race…

Read the entire article here.

By obscuring the historic dimensions of American multiraciality—emphasizing its newness but not its oldness—we may run the risk of ignoring lessons that past racial stratification offers for understanding today’s outcomes. For one thing, older social norms still make themselves felt in contemporary discussion of mixed-race identity (Davis, 1991; Waters, 1991; Wilson, 1992). In addition, history reminds us that these attitudes toward multiraciality were embedded in complex webs of social, political, economic, and cultural premises and objectives, thereby suggesting that the same holds true today. Finally, turning to the past highlights how malleable racial concepts have proved to be over time despite the permanence and universality we often ascribe to them. Given the United States’ history, the extent to which public attitudes toward mixed-race unions and ancestry have changed is remarkable. Perhaps the real new people today are not just those of multiracial heritage but also Americans in general who now conceptualize, tolerate, or embrace multiple-race identities in ways that were unacceptable in the past.

Ann Morning, “New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population Past and Present,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century, edited by Loretta I. Winters, Herman L. DeBose, Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications USA, 2002.

Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings

University of Texas Press
2003
216 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.
12 color and 60 b&w illus., 4 tables
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-292-71245-4

Magali M. Carrera, Professor of Art History
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad (status) and raza (lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of casta paintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies—elite and non-elite—as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Visual Practices in Late-Colonial Mexico
• Chapter One: Identity by Appearance, Judgment, and Circumstances: Race as Lineage and Calidad
• Chapter Two: The Faces and Bodies of Eighteenth-Century Metropolitan Mexico: An Overview of Social Context
• Chapter Three: Envisioning the Colonial Body
• Chapter Four: Regulating and Narrating the Colonial Body
• Chapter Five: From Popolacho to Citizen: The Re-vision of the Colonial Body
• Epilogue: Dreams of Order
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
November 2005
288 pages
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4229-0

John Bailey

It is a bright, spring morning in New Orleans, 1843. In the Spanish Quarter, on a street lined with flophouses and gambling dens, Madame Carl Rouff recognizes a face from her past. It is the face of Salomé Müller, her best friend’s daughter who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. But the young olive-skinned woman claims her name is Mary Miller—she is the property of a Frenchman who owns a nearby cabaret. She is a slave, with no memory of a “white” past, or of the Müller family’s perilous journey from its German village to New Orleans. And yet her resemblance to her mother is striking, and she bears two telltale birthmarks. Had a defenseless European orphan been callously and illegally enslaved, or was she an imposter? So began one of the most celebrated and sensational trials of nineteenth-century America.

In brilliant novelistic detail, award-winning historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, an “infernal motley crew” of cotton kings, decadent river workers, immigrants, and slaves. Miller’s dramatic trial offers an eye into the fascinating laws and customs surrounding slavery, immigration, and racial mixing. Did Miller, as her relatives sought to prove, arrive from Germany under perilous circumstances as an indentured servant or was she, as her master claimed, part African and a slave for life? The trial pits a humble community of German immigrants against Mary’s previous owner, John Fitz Miller, a hardened capitalist who is as respected by the community for his wealth and power as he is feared and distrusted, and his attorney, John Randolph Grymes, one of the brashest and most flamboyant lawyers of his time. Was Sally Miller’s licentious lifestyle proof that she was part African, as the defense argued? Or was she the victim of a terrible injustice? Bailey follows the case’s incredible twists and turns all the way to the Supreme Court, and comes to a shocking conclusion.

A tour de force of investigative history that reads like a suspense novel, The Lost German Slave Girl is a fascinating exploration of slavery and its laws, a brilliant reconstruction of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, and a riveting courtroom drama. It is also an unforgettable portrait of a young woman in pursuit of freedom.