Mixed Race Studies

Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America

University of Texas Press
2004
6 x 9 in.
216 pp., 3 b&w illus.
ISBN: 978-0-292-70596-8

Marilyn Grace Miller, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Tulane University, New Orleans

Latin America is characterized by a uniquely rich history of cultural and racial mixtures known collectively as mestizaje. These mixtures reflect the influences of indigenous peoples from Latin America, Europeans, and Africans, and spawn a fascinating and often volatile blend of cultural practices and products. Yet no scholarly study to date has provided an articulate context for fully appreciating and exploring the profound effects of distinct local invocations of syncretism and hybridity. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race fills this void by charting the history of Latin America’s experience of mestizaje through the prisms of literature, the visual and performing arts, social commentary, and music.

In accessible, jargon-free prose, Marilyn Grace Miller brings to life the varied perspectives of a vast region in a tour that stretches from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. She explores the repercussions of mestizo identity in the United States and reveals the key moments in the story of Latin America’s cult of synthesis. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race examines the inextricable links between aesthetics and politics, and unravels the threads of colonialism woven throughout national narratives in which mestizos serve as primary protagonists.

Illuminating the ways in which regional engagements with mestizaje represent contentious sites of nation building and racial politics, Miller uncovers a rich and multivalent self-portrait of Latin America’s diverse populations.

Genealogy as Social Memory: Making the Public Personal

The 7th Annual Committee on Historical Studies, Sociology Department and International Labor Working Class History Journal Joint Conference
History Matters: Spaces of Violences, Spaces of Memory
New School for Social Research
2004-04-23 through 2004-04-24

Karla Hackstaff, Associate Professor of Sociology
Northern Arizona University

“Race, like nature and sex, is replete with all the rituals of guilt and innocence in the stories of nation, family, and species. Race, like nature, is about roots, pollution, and origins. An inherently dubious notion, race, like sex, is about the purity of lineage; the legitimacy of passage; and the drama of inheritance of bodies, property, and stories”
(Haraway 1995, p. 213).

In May 2002, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation which runs Monticello and is comprised of the descendants of Thomas and Martha Jefferson voted to deny membership and associated burial rights to the descendants of Sally Hemings—a slave who appears to have had children by Thomas Jefferson (San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2002, p. D4).  This decision was somewhat surprising because in 1998 genetic tests appeared to confirm what Hemings’ relatives had claimed through oral history for years—that at least one, if not all, of Sally Hemings’ children had descended from Thomas Jefferson. Still, the white descendants concluded that the historical and scientific evidence was “insufficient.”…

…First, within sociology there is a large and growing literature on the formation of racial/ethnic identities, relations, and the accompanying constructions of inequalities (e.g. Azoulay 1997; Brah and Coombes 2000; Collins 2000; DaCosta 2000; Haraway 1995; Nagel 1994; Omi and Winant 1994; Pedraza and Rumbaut 1996; Song 2001; Waters 1990; Worchel 1999). Given that race, ethnicity, and nationality organize many genealogical associations, clearly, race and ethnicity are constructed in the process of doing genealogy. Although ‘race’ as a biological construction has been widely rejected, it is no less real for being a social construction. As many scholars have shown, racialethnic constructions must be sustained, and are neither invariant nor universal.  Ethnoracial identities are sustained through various practices, policies, and institutions—including families.  Because interracial relations have been taboo, we still assume and to a large degree produce families that appear monoracial (DaCosta 2000). Intermarriage has grown substantially in recent decades—there were ten times as many couples categorized as interracial in 1990 as had been the case in 1960; still, in 1990 interracial marriages were just three percent of all marriages in the United Stated (DaCosta 2000, p. 9-10). By 2000, six percent of marriage households were interracial (Simmons and O’Connell 2003).  The practices of adoption agencies and sperm banks often, if not always, produce monoracial families as well. In short, ethnoracial identities continue to be crucial to family constructions…

Read the entire paper here.

Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean

University of Minnesota Press
2003
336 pages, 27 halftones
5 7/8 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3574-9
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3574-0
Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-3573-0
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3573-3

José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Professor and Chair of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

A revelatory account that places mulatto experience at the center of Caribbean history.

This ambitious book brings to light the story of what José F. Buscaglia-Salgado terms mulataje-the ways Caribbean aesthetics offer the possibility of the ultimate erasure of racial difference. Undoing Empire gives a broad panorama stretching from the complex politics of medieval Iberian societies to the beginning of direct U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century.

Buscaglia-Salgado begins with an examination of Washington Irving‘s “American Columbiad” as an act of historical and territorial plundering. He then traces the roots of mulatto society to the pre-1492 Iberian world, not only finding a connection between the Moors of “Old Spain” and the morenos-the blacks and mulattos of the New World-but also offering a profound critique of creole and imperial discourses. Buscaglia-Salgado reads the pursuit and contestation of what he terms the European Ideal in colonial texts, architecture, and paintings; then identifies the mulatto movement of “undoing” the Ideal in the wars that shook the nineteenth-century Caribbean from Haiti to Cuba, arguing that certain projects of national liberation have moved contrary to the historical claims to freedom in the mulatto world.

Ellen Craft: A New American Opera

8th Annual New York City International Fringe Festival
2004-08-13 through 2004-08-29

Lyrics by Sherry Boone
Music: Sean Jeremy Palmer
Book: Sherry Boone and Sean Jeremy Palmer

Ellen Craft: A New American Opera is based on true events of a half -white, half-black womans harrowing escape from slavery disguised as a white man. Ellen‘s fiery story of revenge, love, forgiveness and redemption was recognized as Best Ensemble Performance at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival. Ellen Craft will be performed on both the Music Theatre and Operatic Stages of the world.

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom or The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

Louisiana State University Press
Originally Published: 1860
Published by LSU Press: 1999
120 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 5 halftones
ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-2320-1 Paper

William Craft

With a Foreword and Biographical Essay by

Richard J. M. Blackett,  Andrew Jackson Professor of History
Vanderbilt University

Husband and wife William and Ellen Craft’s [her mother was a slave and her father was her mother’s owner.] break from slavery in 1848 was perhaps the most extraordinary in American history. Numerous newspaper reports in the United States and abroad told of how the two—fair-skinned Ellen disguised as a white slave master and William posing as her servant—negotiated heart-pounding brushes with discovery while fleeing Macon, Georgia, for Philadelphia and eventually Boston. No account, though, conveyed the ingenuity, daring, good fortune, and love that characterized their flight for freedom better than the couple’s own version, published in 1860, a remarkable authorial accomplishment only twelve years beyond illiteracy. Now their stirring first-person narrative and Richard Blackett’s excellent interpretive pieces are brought together in one volume to tell the complete story of the Crafts.

Ellen Craft

Summary by Monique Pierce of Documenting The South:

Published in 1860, shortly before the start of the Civil War, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is the narrative of William and Ellen Craft‘s escape from slavery. Both were born and grew up in Georgia, and they lived in Macon prior to their escape. In December 1848 they devised a plan in which Ellen Craft, who was very light- skinned, would dress as a man and pretend to be a rheumatic seeking better treatment in Philadelphia. William was to accompany her and act as her slave. Relying exclusively on means of public transportation, including trains and steamers, they made their way to Savannah, then to Charleston, Wilmington, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia, where they arrived on Christmas Day. They then relocated to Boston and sailed for England after the Fugitive Slave Law enabled slave hunters to pursue them even in free states. At the time this work was published, they were living in England with their sons. The narrative includes many anecdotes about slavery and freedom for Blacks and discusses how they were treated in both the South and the North.

Read the entire book in HTML format here.  You may also obtain it here.

Multiracial America: A Resource Guide on the History and Literature of Interracial Issues

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
March 2005
264 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-8108-5199-7; ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5199-3

Edited by

Karen Downing, Foundation and Grants Librarian
Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan

Darlene Nichols, Psychology Librarian and Coordinator of Instruction
Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan

Kelly Webster, Associate Librarian
Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan

Multiracial America addresses a growing interest in interracial people and relationships in America. Over the past decade, there have been numerous books and articles written on interracial issues. Despite the rampant growth in publishing, locating these often-scattered and inaccessible materials remains a challenge. This resource guide provides easy access to the available literature. Topical chapters on the most often researched themes are included, such as core historical literature, books for children and young adults, hot-button issues (passing, identification, appearance, fitting in, and blood quantification), interracial dating and marriage, families, adoption, and issues pertaining to race and queer sexuality. Each chapter includes a brief discussion of the literature on the topic, including historical context and comments on the breadth and depth of the available literature, and followed by annotations of books, popular and scholarly journals, magazines, and newspaper articles, videos/films, and websites. Other useful sections include a chapter on the depiction of interracial relationships in film, teaching an interracial issues course, and how to search for materials given changing terminology and classification issues. Indexes by race and non-print media are included.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction

1. Accessing the Literature by Karen Downing
2. Teaching an Interracial Issues Course by David Schoem
3. Hot Button Issues by Karen Downing and Kelly Webster
4. Core Historical Literature by Chuck Ransom
5. The Politics of Being Interracial by Karen Downing
6. Interracial Dating and Marriage by Alysse Jordan
7. Interracial Families by Renoir Gaither
8. Transracial Adoption by Darlene Nichols
9. Books for Children and Young Adults by Darlene Nichols
10. Multiracial Identity Development by Kelly Webster
11. The Intersection of Race and Queer Sexuality by Joseph Diaz
12. Representations of Interracial Relationships and Multiracial Identity on the American Screen by Helen Look and Martin Knott

• Appendix I. Subject Heading/Descriptor Vocabularly to Assist in Searching by Karen Downing
• Appendix II. Definitions of Terms Used in Interracial Literature by Karen Downing
• Appendix III. Sociology 412 — Ethnic Identity and Intergroup Relations Syllabus by David Schoem
• Appendix IV. OMB Directive 15
• Appendix V. Resources by Race
• Index
• About the Contributors

‘But most of all mi love me browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired

Feminist Review(on-Line)
Volume 65, Issue 1
June 2000
pages 22 – 48
DOI: 10.1080/014177800406921

Patricia Mohammed, Head and Lecturer
Centre for Gender and Development Studies, Mona Unit
University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as ‘mixed race’. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin [1924-2009] in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category ‘woman’ in historiography and sociology.

Self-made women in a (racist) man’s world: The ‘tragic’ lives of Nella Larsen and Bessie Head

English Academy Review
Volume 25, Issue 1 (May 2008)
pages 66-76
DOI: 10.1080/10131750802099490

Diana Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

(Her research aims to situate mixed race studies in a relatively unexplored sub-Saharan African context.)

Nella Larsen, the ‘mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,’ and Bessie Head, the famous ‘woman alone,’ are known for their ambiguous origins and their fabrication of personal ‘facts.’This article argues that these mixed race female writers, born under Jim Crow and apartheid respectively, carved out niches in these segregationist societies through the art of self-invention. Because of their precarious positions as ‘mulattas’ in anti-miscegenation worlds, clear parallels are identifiable between Larsen and Head, such as the creation of multiple selves and the realisation of the ‘tragic mulatto‘ stereotype through such characters as Helga Crane in Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Elizabeth in Head’s A Question of Power (1973). The representation of the ‘mulatto’ as a tragic figure caught between races is primarily an American literary trope, but both Larsen and the African-born Head evoke this stereotype in their personal and written stories. These two writers also resist labelling, however, by inventing new identities through pseudonyms, autobiographical heroines, and imagined ‘truths.’ This article examines the overt parallels between two mixed race women writers from different generations and continents, initiating crucial dialogue about the development of racial stigmas across cultures and temporalities.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘No Such Thing as a Mulatto Slave’: Legal Pluralism, Racial Descent and the Nuances of Slave Women’s Sexual Vulnerability in the Legal Odyssey of Steyntje van de Kaap, c.1815-1822

Fiona Vernal
Department of History
University of Connecticut

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 29, Issue 1
January 2008
pages 23 – 47
DOI: 10.1080/01440390701841034

In 1815, a contentious case came before the Court of Justice in the Cape Colony. Steyntje Van de Kaap, a creole slave, claimed manumission for herself and four children based on her status as a concubine. Harkening back to the Dutch period at the Cape, her suit resurrected a little-known 1772 statute, which, upon the death of slave owners, granted freedom to their concubines and any children from such unions. So indicative was the case of sexual relations at the Cape that one contemporary observer declared that the outcome could threaten one-third of the local slave property, while a Privy Councilor in England who heard the case on appeal, predicted grave consequences if the case should set a precedent. The protracted suit became enmeshed in the nineteenth-century struggle between slaveholders, abolitionists and colonial administrators at the Cape, and in Great Britain. On the eve of amelioration in British colonies like the Cape, Steyntje’s case demonstrated how white paternity and the status of concubine became legal grounds for freedom. This article explores how one woman’s sexual relations with her masters transcended the boundaries of her personal life to challenge the local system of matrilineal descent, to complicate the issue of consent in slave-master sexual relations, and to invoke the worst fears of slaveholders as they confronted a new imperial legal regime interested in reforming slavery.

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

St. Martin’s Press an imprint of Macmillan
February 1999
ISBN: 978-0-312-25393-6
ISBN10: 0-312-25393-1
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
400 pages, Plus 16-page b&w photo insert

Henry Wiencek

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.

The black family’s story is most exceptional. It is the account of the rise of a remarkable people—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves—who took their rightful place in mainstream America.

In contrast, it has been the fate of the white family—once one of the wealthiest in America—to endure the decline and fall of the Old South, and to become an apparent metaphor for that demise. But the family’s fall from grace is only part of the tale. Beneath the surface lay a hidden history—the history of slavery’s curse and how that curse plagued slaveholders for generations.

For the past seven years, journalist Wiencek has listened raptly to the tales of hundreds of Hairston relatives, including the aging scions of both the white and black clans. He has crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek out the descendants of slaves. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons’ stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching.

Paradoxically, Wiencek demonstrates that these families found that the way to come to terms with the past was to embrace it, and this lyrical work, a parable of redemption, may in the end serve as a vital contribution to our nation’s attempt to undo the twisted historical legacy of the past.