Mixed Race Studies

Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity

Duke University Press
2008
264 pages
5 photographs, 2 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4058-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4058-4

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Wesleyan University

In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined “native Hawaiians” as those people “with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” This “blood logic” has since become an entrenched part of the legal system in Hawai‘i. Hawaiian Blood is the first comprehensive history and analysis of this federal law that equates Hawaiian cultural identity with a quantifiable amount of blood. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains how blood quantum classification emerged as a way to undermine Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) sovereignty. Within the framework of the 50-percent rule, intermarriage “dilutes” the number of state-recognized Native Hawaiians. Thus, rather than support Native claims to the Hawaiian islands, blood quantum reduces Hawaiians to a racial minority, reinforcing a system of white racial privilege bound to property ownership.

Kauanui provides an impassioned assessment of how the arbitrary correlation of ancestry and race imposed by the U.S. government on the indigenous people of Hawai‘i has had far-reaching legal and cultural effects. With the HHCA, the federal government explicitly limited the number of Hawaiians included in land provisions, and it recast Hawaiians’ land claims in terms of colonial welfare rather than collective entitlement. Moreover, the exclusionary logic of blood quantum has profoundly affected cultural definitions of indigeneity by undermining more inclusive Kanaka Maoli notions of kinship and belonging. Kauanui also addresses the ongoing significance of the 50-percent rule: Its criteria underlie recent court decisions that have subverted the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and brought to the fore charged questions about who counts as Hawaiian.

Table of Contents

A Note to Readers
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Got Blood?

1. Racialized Beneficiaries and Genealogical Descendants
2. “Can you wonder that the Hawaiians did not get more?” Historical Context for the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act
3. Under the Guise of Hawaiian Rehabilitation
4. The Virile, Prolific, and Enterprising: Part-Hawaiians and the Problem with Rehabilitation
5. Limiting Hawaiians, Limiting the Bill: Rehabilitation Recoded
6. Sovereignty Struggles and the Legacy of the 50-Percent Rule

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reading between the (Blood) Lines

Southern California Law Review
Volume 83, Number 3 (2010)
pages 473-494

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
Hofstra University School of Law

Legal scholars and historians have depicted the rule of hypodescent—that “one drop” of African blood categorized one as Black—as one of the powerful ways that law and society deployed to construct racial identities and deny equal citizenship. Ariela J. Gross’s new book, “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” boldly complicates the dominant narrative about hypodescent rules in legal scholarship. On the one hand, “What Blood Won’t Tell” argues that the legal and social construction of race was far more complex, flexible and subject to manipulation than the scholarship regarding the rules about blood distinctions has suggested. On the other hand, “What Blood Won’t Tell” highlights circumstances, both historically and in recent memory, of the ways in which blood distinctions played crucial roles in shaping the identity of people of color, including indigenous peoples. Importantly, “What Blood Won’t Tell” also examines how blood quantum rules relate to contemporary efforts to reassert indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and claims to lands.

This Review highlights the important contributions of “What Blood Won’t Tell” to our understanding of the racial experience of indigenous peoples and the contemporary methods used to remedy the present-day effects of indigenous peoples’ colonial experience. “What Blood Won’t Tell” advances a more robust account of the racialization of people of color through rules about blood differences in at least three ways. First, it places the colonial experience of indigenous peoples within the larger historical contexts of racial subordination and efforts to promote White domination and privilege. Second, it underscores the federal government’s ongoing responsibility to counteract the long-standing effects of its past misdeeds by addressing indigenous peoples’ unresolved claims to lands that have been stolen from them. Third, it allows us to take a careful look at the relationship between blood quantum rules and the right of indigenous peoples to exercise self-determination. Taken together, these three perspectives reveal the immense challenges inherent to remedying the long-term effects of the racialization and colonization of indigenous peoples.

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Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

New York University Press
2010-04-23
304 pages
13 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814791325
Paperback ISBN: 9780814791332

Leslie Bow, Professor of English and Asian American Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?

By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.

Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Thinking Interstitially

1. Coloring between the Lines: Historiographies of Southern Anomaly
2. The Interstitial Indian: The Lumbee and Segregation’s Middle Caste
3. White Is and White Ain’t: Failed Approximation and Eruptions of Funk in Representations of the Chinese in the South
4. Anxieties of the ‘Partly Colored’
5. Productive Estrangement: Racial-Sexual Continuums in Asian American as Southern Literature
6. Transracial/Transgender: Analogies of Difference in Mai’s America

Afterword: Continuums, Mobility, Places on the Train
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Read the introduction here.

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (review)

Canadian Journal of Law and Society
Volume 25, Number 1, 2010
E-ISSN: 1911-0227 Print ISSN: 0829-3201
DOI: 10.1353/jls.0.0104

Eve Darian-Smith, Professor of Law and Society
University of California, Santa Barbara

Colonial Proximities is a scholarly, innovative, and illuminating exploration of law, race, and society in the British Columbian colonial periphery. It makes a significant contribution to postcolonial studies in its exploration of the complexities of British settler societies’ engagement with racial differences and of the managing of such differences through a range of laws, strategies of governance, and bio-political techniques. Its singular contribution is to bring together colonial histories of European–Native contact and European dealings with the increasing presence of Chinese immigrant populations, along with the growing and unruly classes of “half-breeds.” Because the author links Native studies with migrant studies and reads these two sites of racial engagement as interconnected and mutually constitutive, the analysis presented is rich and deep, filled with the narratives, constructions, and often conflicting ambiguities of race that preoccupied colonial administrators, missionaries, and legal agents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Building upon Mary Louise Pratt’s conceptualization of the “contact zone,” where peoples geographically and historically separated are brought into the same social space and forced to confront their mutual relations, Renisa Mawani underscores the interracial and cross-racial dimensions of the contact zone in British Columbia.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War [Book Review]

H-Net Reviews
2002-01-23

Ethan S. Rafuse, Associate Professor of Military History
United States Military Academy

Victoria E. Bynum.“The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”.  The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies.  Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.  xvi + 316 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. (hardcover).  ISBN 0-878-2636-7.

Race, Gender, and the Contested Memory of the Free State of Jones

In her new book, Victoria E. Bynum demonstrates that our knowledge of Mississippi’s legendary Free State of Jones, like so much else associated with the Civil War that has inspired contention and controversy, has been shaped as much by the agenda of those who have attempted to tell the story as by actual events.  This much is known: in the fall of 1863, in the Piney Woods region of southern Mississippi, Confederate deserters led by Newton Knight organized an anti-Confederate guerrilla band that eventually dominated its community and, according to legend, proclaimed Jones County’s independence from the Confederacy.  To deal with the Jones County rebellion, Confederate authorities dispatched two cavalry expeditions into the region that launched devastating attacks upon, but were unable to completely quell, Knight’s band of deserters.  After the war, members of the Knight Company participated in Reconstruction politics and a mixed-race community emerged with Captain Knight as the focal point…

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Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849–1893

University of Georgia Press
1996
248 pages
Illustrated
Trim size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8203-1871-4

Kent Anderson Leslie

The true story of a slave who became the wealthiest black woman in the South

This fascinating story of Amanda America Dickson, born the privileged daughter of a white planter and an unconsenting slave in antebellum Georgia, shows how strong-willed individuals defied racial strictures for the sake of family. Kent Anderson Leslie uses the events of Dickson’s life to explore the forces driving southern race and gender relations from the days of King Cotton through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and New South eras.

Although legally a slave herself well into her adolescence, Dickson was much favored by her father and lived comfortably in his house, receiving a genteel upbringing and education. After her father died in 1885 Dickson inherited most of his half-million dollar estate, sparking off two years of legal battles with white relatives. When the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the will, Dickson became the largest landowner in Hancock County, Georgia, and the wealthiest black woman in the post-Civil War South.

Kent Anderson Leslie’s portrayal of Dickson is enhanced by a wealth of details about plantation life; the elaborate codes of behavior for men and women, blacks and whites in the South; and the equally complicated circumstances under which racial transgressions were sometimes ignored, tolerated, or even accepted.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1. Exceptions to the Rules
• CHAPTER 2. A Story
• CHAPTER 3. The Dickson Will
• CHAPTER 4. The Death of a Lady
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place

Duke University Press
September 2010
400 pages
21 photographs, 14 tables, 4 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4787-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4803-0

Edited By:

Lowell Gudmundson, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
Mount Holyoke College

Justin Wolfe, William Arceneaux Associate Professor of Latin American History
Tulane University

Contributors: Paul Lokken, Russell Lohse, Karl H. Offen, Rina Cáceres Gómez, Catherine Komisaruk , Juliet Hooker, Lara Putnam, Ronald Harpelle, Mauricio Meléndez Obando

Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African roots and participation in favor of Spanish and Indian antecedents and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of a region considered by many to be one of the most successful cases of African American achievement, political participation, and power following independence from Spain in 1821.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction / Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe

Part I. Colonial Worlds of Slavery and Freedom

 
• Angolans in Amatitlán: Sugar, African Immigrants, and Gente Ladina in Colonial Guatemala / Paul Lokken
• Cacao and Slavery in Matina, Costa Rica, 1650-1750 / Russell Lohse
• Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia, 1600-1787 / Karl H. Offen
• Slavery and Social Differentiation: Slave Wages in Omoa / Rina Cáceres Gómez
• Becoming Free, Becoming Ladino: Slave Emancipation and Mestizaje in Colonial Guatemala / Catherine Komisaruk

Part II. Nation Building and Reinscribing Race 

• “The Cruel Whip”: Race and Place in Nineteenth-Century Nigaragua / Justin Wolfe
• What Difference did Color Make? Blacks in the “White Towns” of Western Nicaragua in the 1880s / Lowell Gudmundson
• Race and the Space of Citizenship: The Mosquito Coast and the Place of Blackness and Indigeneity in Nicaragua / Juliet Hooker
• Eventually Alien: The Multigenerational Saga of British Western Indians in Central America, 1870-1940 / Lara Putnam
• White Zones: American Enclave Communities of Central America / Ronald Harpelle
• The Slow Ascent of the Marginalized: Afro-Descendents in Costa Rica and Nicaragua / Mauricio Meléndez Obando

Bibliography
Contributors
Index

2007 URO Spotlight: Noel Voltz – History and African American Studies

Undergraduate Research Office
The Ohio State University

Noel Voltz is finishing her degree in African American and African Studies. She is currently writing her Honors Thesis and plans on continuing her research and pursuing a PhD in History.

…What specifically have you researched, and what projects are you currently working on?

My research project/honors thesis is entitled “Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships” and I have been working on it for the past two years.  I am conducting historical research that focuses on New Orleans from 1805 to 1860.  More specifically, I am studying the relationship choices made by some of these free women of color.  It appears that some of these women chose to enter into sexual relationships with white men as a mean of gaining social standing, protection, and money.  Until recently, historians have overlooked the lives of Louisiana’s free women of color during the colonial and antebellum eras.  This research, therefore, expands historical knowledge about the unique social institution of Quadroon Balls and plaçage relationships in order to give greater breadth to our understanding of free women of color’s sexual and economic choices. Ultimately, I plan to continue this project as my graduate dissertation…

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

W. W. Norton and Company
April 2010
590 pages
6.2 × 9.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-93070-2

Hazel Rose Markus (Editor)
Stanford University

Paula M. L. Moya (Editor)
Stanford University

A collection of new essays, written by a team of interdisciplinary authors, that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity.

In Doing Race, scholars from across the disciplines have written original essays on race and ethnicity aimed at an undergraduate audience. The book provides a practical response to the view, common in American debates, that race and ethnicity no longer matter, or that race and ethnicity should not be taken into account when deciding how to structure society and formulate public policy. It also answers the question of why race and ethnicity play such a large role in fueling violence around the globe.

Doing Race shows that race and ethnicity matter because they are important resources in answering the fundamental, even universal “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” questions. It demonstrates how understanding how identities are shaped by race and ethnicity is central to understanding individual and collective behavior in the United States and throughout the world.

Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, these original essays provide undergraduates with an effective framework for understanding the persistence of racial inequalities and problems in the 21st century.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Doing Race

Hazel Rose Markus

and

Paula M. L. Moya

Part I: Inventing Race and Ethnicity

• Defining Race and Ethnicity: The Constitution, the Court, and the Census, C. Matthew Snipp, Sociology
• Models of American Ethnic Relations: Hierarchy, Assimilation, and Pluralism, George Fredrickson, History
• The Biology of Ancestry: DNA, Genomic Variation, and Race, Marcus W. Feldman, Biology
• Which Differences Make a Difference? Race, Health, and DNA, Barbara Koenig, Medical Anthropology

Part II: Racing Difference

• The Jew as the Original ‘Other’: Difference, Antisemitism, and Race, Aron Rodrigue, History
• Knowing the ‘Other’: Arabs, Islam, and the West, Joel Beinin, History
• Eternally Foreign: Asian Americans, History, and Race, Gordon H. Chang, History
• A Thoroughly Modern Concept: Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and the State, Norman M. Naimark, History

Part III: Institutionalizing Difference

• Race in the News: Stereotypes, Political Campaigns, and Market-Based Journalism, Shanto Iyengar, Communication and Political Science
• Going Back to Compton: Real Estate, Racial Politics, and Black-Brown Relations, Albert M. Camarillo, History
• Structured for Failure: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement, Linda Darling-Hammond, Education
• Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment, Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, Sociology

Part IV: Racing Identity

• Who Am I? Race, Ethnicity, and Identity, Hazel Rose Markus, Psychology
• In the Air Between Us: Stereotypes, Identity, and Achievement, Claude M. Steele, Psychology
• Ways of Being White: Privilege, Stigma, and Transcendence, Monica McDermott, Sociology
• Blacks as Criminal, Blacks as Apes: Race, Representation, and Social Justice, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Psychology
• We’re Honoring You Dude: Myths, Mascots, and American Indians, Stephanie Fryberg and Alisha Watts, Psychology

Part V: Re-presenting Reality

• Another Way to Be: Women of Color, Literature, and Myth, Paula M. L. Moya, English
• Hiphop and Race: Blackness, Language, and Creativity, Marcyliena Morgan and Dawn-Elissa Fischer, African and African American Studies and Africana Studies
• The ‘Ethno-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome’: Mixed-Race, Identity, and Popular Culture, Michele Elam, English
• ‘We wear the mask’: Performance, Social Dramas, and Race, Harry Elam, Drama

Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships

Ohio State University
May 2008
81 Pages

Noël Voltz
The Ohio State University

A Senior Honors Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation with research distinction in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

In 1805, a New Orleans newspaper advertisement formally defined a new social institution, the infamous Quadroon Ball, in which prostitution and plaçage–a system of concubinage–converged. These elegant balls, limited to upper-class white men and free “quadroon” women, became interracial rendezvous that provided evening entertainment and the possibility of forming sexual liaisons in exchange for financial “sponsorship.” It is the contention of this thesis such “sponsored” relationships between white men and free women of color in New Orleans enabled these women to use sex as a means of gaining social standing, protection, and money. In addition, although these arrangements reflected a form of sexual exploitation, quadroon women were able to become active agents in their quest for upward social mobility.

Until recently, historians have overlooked the lives of Louisiana’s free women of color during the colonial and antebellum eras. My research, therefore, expands historical knowledge about the unique social institution of Quadroon Balls and plaçage relationships in order to give greater breadth to scholarly understandings of quadroon women’s sexual and economic choices. This research formally began in summer 2006, during my participation in the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) at the Ohio State University. Through this experience, I was able to begin analyzing the institution of Quadroon Balls and I have discovered the immense possibilities of this topic. While there are many directions that this research can take, I have decided to focus my undergraduate research and honors thesis on the history of the balls and quadroon women’s agency in antebellum New Orleans. In order to research these concepts, I have utilized a combination of primary sources and secondary sources written about women of color. In winter 2006, I was awarded an Undergraduate Research Scholarship and, with this money, I visited New Orleans and Baton Rouge to conduct archival research. My most recent trip to New Orleans and Baton Rouge has augmented my understanding of the topic by providing a large quantity of primary source materials, including court cases and other legal documents, as well as affording me an opportunity to experience archival research first hand in the actual historical environment in which the balls took place. Ultimately, I plan to continue my current research as my dissertation topic.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abstract
“The Quadroon Ballroom” Poem by Rixford J. Lincoln
Introduction and Historiographic Review
Chapter 1. A Historical Background of New Orleans’ Free Women of Color
Chapter 2. Plaçage Relationships
Chapter 3. Quadroon Balls
Chapter 4. Case Study: Five Generations of Women
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography

Read the entire paper here.