Mixed Race Studies

The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (review)

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Volume 31, Number 1, Fall 2012
pages 206-208
DOI: 10.1353/sho.2012.0123

Andrea Levine
George Washington University

This volume’s title signals its central critical intervention, a challenge to the masculine biases that have shaped studies of minstrelsy and of cross-racial appropriation and desire more broadly. Most conspicuously, Lori Harrison-Kahan takes on the influential paradigm established by Michael Rogin in his 1996 Blackface, White Noise. Rogin, of course, argues that early twentieth-century Jewish blackface performances worked to confirm the still-contested “whiteness” of Jewish entertainers, a “true” whiteness that presumably resided beneath the “mask” of blackface.

Harrison-Kahan, in fact, identifies Rogin’s paradigm as one of two predominant, “oppositional,” modes of reading Jewish investment in black culture; in the second paradigm, which she traces back at least to Irving Howe, Jews “empathetically identify” with black suffering (p. 4). In practice, though, she contends much more consistently with Rogin’s well-known charges of appropriation and exploitation.

The White Negress demonstrates that once we begin to look at women’s engagement with “cross-cultural exchange” (p. 15), these transactions appear far more nuanced than such binary approaches allow. Harrison-Kahan reads a number of early twentieth-century Jewish American women’s texts and performances as invested less in claiming “whiteness” than in destabilizing it, in part through assertions—if frequently ambivalent ones—of Jewish identity. Her analysis places considerable weight on the resistance to sanctioned gender and sexual roles on the part of such Jewish American female performers and writers as Sophie Tucker and Fannie Hurst. The author also revises “unidirectional” narratives of Jewish American cultural appropriations of “blackness,” suggesting that scholars should acknowledge the more “reciprocal” transactions that obtain among African American and Jewish American cultural producers and historical actors. So, for instance, she reads Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, as a send-up, rather than a reinscription, of minstrel conventions, one that explores both the power dynamics and the mutual “cross-identifications” that attended Black-Jewish coalitions in the early years of the civil rights movement.

In another acute challenge to prevailing scholarship, Harrison-Kahan argues that the racial politics of Edna Ferber’s Showboat look quite different when one reads the novel that served as the basis for the Broadway musical, much-maligned for its traffic in sentimental and demeaning representations of African American characters. Harrison-Kahan emphasizes the novel’s “pluralistic” rendering of Jewishness and its emphasis on racial “mixing.” Similarly, she re-reads Hurst’s 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, which provided the basis for both the 1934 and 1959 film versions, texts far more familiar to most scholars than Hurst’s original novel. Harrison-Kahan argues that Hurst’s novel interrogates and exposes the commodification of “blackness” on which its protagonist’s business rests—and that these challenges to racial stereotypes work in conjunction with the challenges that Bea Pullman, as a “working woman,” poses to normative scripts of white femininity and maternity. As in the chapter on Ferber, the author makes a persuasive case for the under-examination of Hurst as a Jewish American author, in part because her biography deviated from that of the largely New York-based Eastern European Jewish immigrants whose work dominates the Jewish American “canon,” and in part—as with so many women writers—because her work was consistently marginalized by critics for its commercial success. One might, however, suggest that even given the historical frame of Harrison-Kahan’s project, her own privileging of “working” white femininity as a disruptive version of femininity is rather a circumscribed choice, leaving heterosexuality, among other indices of normative femininity, largely intact.

Harrison-Kahan’s readings are subtle and deft, and to her credit, she does not over-state the radicalism of either her own approach or the texts she reconsiders. A characteristic passage reads, “Hurst’s novel thus negotiates a fine line between being an additional inculcation of the mammy myth and a commentary on it” (p. 124). Harrison-Kahan works cogently and intelligently in the ambivalent space she charts, writing in the conclusion that whiteness can be “produced and destabilized through cross-racial performances and encounters” (p. 179).

This volume makes an important contribution to a scholarly…

Review: Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Southern California Quarterly
Volume 94, Number 4 (Winter 2012)
pages 492-494
DOI: 10.1525/scq.2012.94.4.492

Alex Jacoby

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in Sun Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 256 pp.)

In the last decade there lias been an increased recognition of the need for multiethnic studies to letter understand the processes of racialization and community formation beyond a simplistic binary. Important works by Peggy Pascoe, Moon-Kie Jung, Scott Kurashige, Laura Pulido, Mark Wild, and others have contributed innovative research, methodological approaches, and theoretical ideas to facilitate this comparative analysis. Joining this wealth of new scholarship is Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, a social history of the interplay and imbrication of Mexican and Filipino communities in San Diego during the first half of the twentieth century. The author, Rudy Guevarra Jr., is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies at Arizona State University, and this monograph is an extension of his dissertation project. He argues that, as a reaction to being marginalized and facing segregation, both ethnic groups…

Read or purchase the review here.

Where Ethnicity Was Fluid

The New York Times
2012-12-29

Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

In “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America” (Harvard University Press, $35), Vivek Bald, who teaches writing and digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has produced an engaging account of a largely untold wave of immigration: Muslims from British India who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries…

…“Collectively they used Americans’ confusion over their ‘race’ to their advantage, developing a fluid and contextual approach to their identity,” he writes. “They were ‘white’ when they attempted to claim citizenship, ‘Hindoo’ when selling exotic goods, ‘black’ or ‘Porto Rican’ when disappearing into U.S. cities or actively attempting to evade the immigration authorities.”…

Read the entire review here.

Book Review: Exploring the Borderlands of Race, Nation, Sex and Gender

Discover Nikkei: Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants
2012-12-26

Nancy Matsumoto

Growing up in predominantly white Marin County, mixed-race yonsei Akemi Johnson hates her name and just wants to blend in. In college, though, her attitude changes. She studies race and ethnicity and travels to Japan. Though her stated purpose there is to study issues around the American bases in Okinawa, she later writes, ”My real motives were more personal and intertwined with the past, with traumas that had been born many years before.” She reflects on why her grandparents, who were imprisoned at the Tule Lake and Gila River concentration camps, never talked about those experiences. Eventually she returns to America satisfied that she has confronted her “fears of association, shame, really, of my Japanese ancestry—and won.”

Johnson’s story is just one of many that psychologist Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu tells in his latest book, When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities. Exploring the complex issue of identity among mixed-race Asians has been his life work. With subtleness and great empathy he guides us through what he calls “the borderlands” where transnational and multiethnic identities are formed, arguing that in an increasingly globalized world, identities are more flexible and inclusive, and can “challenge the meaning of national and racial categories and boundaries.”…

Read the entire review here.

Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law (Davis review)

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 22, Number 1, January 2013
pages 163-165
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2013.0012

Rebecca L. Davis, Associate Professor of History
University of Delaware

Campaigns to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples have inspired activists, journalists, scholars, and others to look to the history of interracial marriage for comparisons. Fay Botham’s new book appears as one consequence of these interests. Frustrated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s refusal to countenance marriage for same-sex partners in the early twenty-first century, Botham details the Roman Catholic Church’s relatively progressive attitude toward interracial marriage in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. She notes as well the pernicious influence of southern Protestant beliefs about racial differences to the history of interracial marriage in the United States. Historians need works that probe these intersections among religion, race, sexuality, and American culture. Unfortunately, this book’s flaws limit its usefulness.

Almighty God Created the Races tries to answer two related but distinct questions: First, how did religious ideas and arguments shape antimiscegenation laws in the United States? Second, what role did American ideals of religious freedom play in the campaign to end restrictions on interracial marriage? Botham argues that religion was determinative in both cases. Southern Protestant ideas about racial separateness undergirded the defense of slavery and subsequent rationales for banning interracial sex and marriage. “The attorneys and judges who argued for antimiscegenation laws,” she contends, “employed Protestant theologies of marriage and separate races to bolster their legal arguments” (131). Given the overwhelming predominance of Protestants on the bench, that claim hardly seems surprising, but Botham’s contribution is to tease out how deeply certain Protestant theological interpretations penetrated American jurisprudence on marriage. Botham argues that, by contrast, Roman Catholic doctrines of racial equality and marital freedom proved crucial to a court case that laid the groundwork for the eventual dismantling of state bans on interracial marriage. These arguments give too much causative weight to theology at the expense of social, cultural, and political history, but they nevertheless result in some insights.

Botham begins with an intriguing premise: that we owe the ultimate dismantling of antimiscegenation laws in the United States to Roman Catholic theologies of marriage and race. In 1947 a county clerk in Los Angeles denied Sylvester Davis Jr. and Andrea Perez a marriage license because Davis was identified as African American and Perez, whose family was of Mexican ancestry, was considered white. Davis and Perez, who were Catholic, hired Daniel Marshall, a lawyer who was both Catholic and liberal, to take their case to the California Supreme Court. Marshall argued that California’s antimiscegenation law denied the religious freedoms of interracial Catholic couples who wanted to participate in what Catholic theology defined as the holy sacrament of marriage. Chief Justice Roger Traynor, who wrote the majority opinion in Perez v. Sharp (which Botham identifies by its less common name, Perez v. Lippold), largely ignored Marshall’s first amendment argument; Botham concedes that “religious freedom . . . did not even make a ‘blip’ on Traynor’s ‘radar screen’ in terms of having any real importance to the case” (42). Botham is intrigued, however, by a concurring opinion, in which one justice agreed with Marshall that the first amendment protected the rights of interracial Catholic couples to marry. Botham argues that because the concurring opinion tipped the court to a 4–3 majority, the case “pivot[ed] on the axis of religious liberty” (49).

More plausible is the argument that Peggy Pascoe made in What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America: that Marshall prevailed in Perez in spite of his religious liberty arguments. Marshall instead piqued the court’s interest when he pointed out that most of the cases that the state of California cited as precedence for its antimiscegenation law were steeped in the increasingly discredited logic of race science. As Botham notes, Marshall pressed this point with comparisons to the race science employed in Nazi Germany; the lawyer for the state strained to explain why interracial marriages produced offspring…

In ‘Red Pyramid,’ Kid Heroes Take On Ancient Egypt

Backseat Bookclub
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2012-12-19

Melissa Block, Host

Robert Siegel, Senior Host

If there was a recipe for the best-selling writer Rick Riordan, it would go something like this — start with a love of storytelling, fold in more than a decade of teaching middle school English, combine that with two sons of his own who don’t quite share their dad’s love of literature, and marinate all of that with a deep passion for mythology.

Riordan has sold tens of millions of kids’ books. He hit pay dirt with the Percy Jackson series — it’s about an everyday kid who has superhero powers because he’s the secret son of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea.

Egyptian gods reign supreme in our latest book for NPR’s Backseat Book Club. It’s The Red Pyramid from Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles. It tells the story of a brother and sister — Carter and Sadie Kane — who have lived apart most of their lives. One Christmas Eve, their father brings them both together for a trip to the British Museum, and a terrible, magical accident happens that unleashes the gods of ancient Egypt into the modern world.

Carter and Sadie learn that they are descended from ancient Egyptian magicians. This means they are the only ones who have the magic that might be able to put the gods back where they belong — before the world spirals out of control.

Riordan is an author who knows his audience — and that has influenced his writing. “I imagine myself in front of my own class,” he tells NPR’s Michele Norris. “I don’t teach anymore, but I can still clearly see fifth period after lunch — that’s a real tough time to teach. And I tried to imagine writing a story that would appeal to those kids — even when they’re tired, even when they’re bouncing off the walls. … If I could find a way to tell a story that would resonate with them, then I had something going.”

Carter and Sadie are biracial characters, but Riordan doesn’t dwell on this in the book. He is more interested in the idea of kids being caught between two worlds, a concept to which he says his readers can relate…

Read the entire article here. Read the transcript here. Download the interview here.

Commentary: Black Is…

Black Entertainment Television (BET)
2012-12-17

James Braxton Peterson, Director of Africana Studies; Associate Professor of English
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Black in America explores what it means to be Black.

CNN’s Black in America series has become something of a welcome crucible for the Black community these last four years — especially as the community has developed discursively across social media networks and platforms. The fifth iteration of the series debuted, with host Soledad O’Brien, last week to conflicting reviews and reports (especially on Facebook and in the Twitterverse) asking what does it mean to be Black in America and how do we define who is Black?

As usual, there is no easy answer, especially when we meet Nayo Jones and Becca Khalil, two teenage women of color who wrestle with their identities in the face of society’s need to categorize them in outdated and restrictive racial boxes.

Nayo, who would certainly be categorized as a Black woman on the street, struggles with being abandoned by her Black mother and raised by her white father. Nayo’s younger sister readily identifies as Black, but Nayo is conflicted and reluctant to identify herself as her sister has. Her best friend, Becca, an Egyptian-American, readily and enthusiastically identifies herself as African-American…

…Becca and Nayo are not alone in the conflicts they encounter as they seek to form their own identies. Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop Project was the inspiration behind this year’s Black in America, and is a revelation of how intra-racial bias and/or colorism continues to deeply affect the Black community. Blay interviewed light-complexioned people of African descent about self-determination and the resulting extraordinary project is both historical and relevant to identity formation…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatán (review)

Enterprise & Society
Volume 13, Number 4, December 2012
pages 932-934

Jeremy Baskes, Professor of History
Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio

Visitors to modern day Yucatán encounter a region rich in indigenous culture; guidebooks extol the grandeur of ancient Maya kingdoms whose ruins still dot the countryside; local populations converse in Maya dialects, proof of Maya cultural survival, despite the centuries of conflict that began with the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors. As Matthew Restall shows in his book, however, these images entirely overlook the tremendous role played by people of African descent, who participated in the initial conquest and settlement of the peninsula and then represented a sizeable percentage of its population throughout the colonial era. Indeed, the number of Afro-Yucatecans equaled the combined total of Spaniards and mestizos throughout the centuries, and by 1700 represented about 10 percent of Yucatan’s total population.

Involuntary African migrants arrived to Yucatán from the colony’s beginning, but the region’s poverty precluded the use of wide-scale African slavery. As a result, slaves were few in number and greatly exceeded by free Afro-Yucatecáns. Furthermore, Mayas did the unskilled labor, often managed by the Afro-Yucatecán populations, both free and slave, one example of the “middle” role played by the colony’s “blacks.”

One of Restall’s central theses is that Yucatán was not a slave society but was a society with slaves, an all-important factor distinguishing the lives of Afro-Yucatecáns from, for example, the lives of blacks in the slave society of the American south. Restall goes to great lengths to argue that there existed no coherent ideology of racism in Yucatán, rather slaves were viewed as individuals, known by their names, welcomed into Catholic society, integrated into urban occupations, and allowed to marry and have children. Indeed, Restall shows that the line between slave and free was a narrow one, as slaveowners largely treated slaves no differently than they did free people of color, viewing them more as status symbols than labor to exploit. Emancipation in 1829 was not particularly controversial in Yucatán; slaves had long enjoyed high rates of manumission and were anyway greatly outnumbered by free Afro-Yucatecáns.

Afro-Yucatecáns were stationed solidly in the “middle” of the society, working for Spaniards as managers in rural and urban enterprises, and even becoming owners of middling level businesses, such as silversmiths, barbers, tailors, and shoemakers, often times after having first served as apprentices to Spaniards. Moving from apprentice to owner demonstrates Afro-Yucatecán social mobility, a process also often achieved in Yucatán by service in the Pardo militia. Afro-Yucatecán companies defended the colony from pirates and enemy naval attacks, earning prestige and income at the same time. In many ways, Restall shows that blacks were in the middle between Spaniards and Mayas.

Yucatecáns of African descent also lived in rural areas, especially in the “dome” of Yucatán, northwest of Campeche, a region Restall calls “the colored crescent.” In the countryside, Afro-Yucatecáns never formed their own segregated communities, but lived among the Mayas, growing corn and beans on milpas (small plots), becoming fully integrated into village life, marrying Maya spouses, and raising Maya-speaking, Afro-Maya children.

Miscegenation was constant and prevalent throughout the colony; mulattoes far out-numbered blacks, for example. Restall examines extensively the perception in Yucatán of mixed-race “castas,” concluding that casta categorization was largely ambiguous. An individual classified as mulatto at baptism might later be referred to as mestizo. In any event, such classifications were not too important since “calidad” (meaning, roughly, status) was determined by a host of traits with race being only one. Prejudice existed, Restall admits, but tended to be directed at individuals whose behavior was deemed dishonorable rather than at any ethnic group as a whole.

A fascinating section, albeit one less well integrated into the book, examines witchcraft, especially healing and love magic. Interestingly, Restall finds that Afro-Yucatecáns were no more likely to be accused of black magic than Spaniards. This revelation is important for several…

Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America [Eisenberg Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 923-925
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.748214

Martin Eisenberg
Department of Urban Studies
Queens College, City University of New York

Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver and Tract Burch. Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2012. xii + 260 pp.

In this book. Hochschild, Weaver and Burch contend that the USA is on the cusp of a democratic transformation of its racial order On the basis of survey data and demographic analyses, they are struck by the increasing heterogeneity and interactions across differences that have developed over the last two decades. Whether a democratic transformation occurs depends upon new policies that make it possible to overcome the obstacles that arc part of the old racial order. There are no certainties, but the authors arc optimistic that major “ethno-racial” boundaries will continue to blur in the near future.

The authors believe that the social forces generating the possibility of change in the racial order are immigration, multiraiialism, genomics, and the current, equalitarian cohort of young adults, all interacting with one another, and underlain by demographic and legal changes. Immigration and multiracialism contribute to blurring the traditional categories of racial difference. Nearly 50 million Latino, Caribbean Asian and African immigrants have settled in the USA since 1970. Some immigrant groups bring with them their own racial categories, and the children of some of these groups intermarry and have children at relatively high rates with whites. The authors see multiracialism as a political movement, and as a public identity. Some Americans have succeeded in asserting the legal right to identify as ‘multiracial’, not just as a single race on the US Census and other official documents. Also, multiracialism generates variations in how people identify in different situations. And, surveys show that young adults possess more democratic attitudes and interact across difference with more frequency, in ways less governed by stereotypes, and without the conflicts of the past in their collective memories.

According to the authors, genomics is the branch of genetics that studies organisms in terms of full DNA sequences. Its goal is mainly medical to discover genes and genomic interactions that cause disease and to develop effective medications. Scientists have confirmed that all human beings share 99.9% of their genetic makeup: that about 94%. of all physical variation lies within the ‘so-called’ racial groups; and that there is much overlapping of genes and phenotypes in neighbouring populations. Yet, despite the overlapping and blurring of boundaries around groups, some concepts like race or ethnicity or bio-geographic ancestry remain useful for genomic purposes to designate clusters of genes. Genomic science answers the question, ‘what is race?’ ambiguously. It thoroughly undermines the older conception of a few biologically distinct and internally homogeneous races. But it also undermines the claim that race, defined genetically, is merely arbitrary. Genomically, the authors write, races are simultaneously real, arbitrary, heterogeneous, and blurred, so it is not surprising that individual classifications are intricate and confused. And, it will continue that way until it becomes possible lo avoid racial classifications by testing for alleles and developing treatments for the genetic components of diseases among individuals. Until those procedures are developed, the authors predict continued contentiousness among biological scientists on how to conceptualize race…

Read or purchase the review here.

The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker (review)

Studies in American Indian Literatures
Volume 24, Number 3, Fall 2012
pages 138-141
DOI: 10.1353/ail.2012.0035

Margaret M. Bruchac

By reconstructing the life history of Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (1797–1866), historian and librarian Judith Ranta has done some fine detective work that illuminates an otherwise little-known aspect of women’s lives in nineteenth-century New England. This compilation will be useful for scholars of social history, yet there is one significant flaw. Ranta champions Chamberlain as a Native American author, and she has organized the collected works to emphasize this point.

We need not retroactively adjudicate degrees of Indian blood, but we must weigh real and fictive kin affiliation when discerning social identities. Betsey’s paternal grandmother, Sarah Loud Guppy, was said to have some Indian blood, but no specific tribal nation was ever recalled. Betsey’s parents, William and Comfort Guppy, who lived in Brookfield and Wolfboro, New Hampshire, near Lake Winnepesaukee, identified as white people. Given their locale, in Central Abenaki homeland, Ranta assumes that Betsey’s grandmother was Abenaki Indian. There is no evidence, however, to indicate that Loud, her son, or her granddaughter ever self-identified or were counted among members of any Abenaki (or other Native American) community.

Chamberlain’s publications began only after the death of her first husband, Josiah Chamberlain, when she left an intentional community (likely Shaker) in New Hampshire. She worked in the textile mills around Newmarket and Lowell, Massachusetts, and ran a boarding house, while publishing dozens of articles in the mill’s journal, the Lowell Offering. In 1843 she married Charles Boutwell and moved to Illinois, but she returned to Lowell to work two more years in the mills and publish more stories in the New England Offering before settling in Illinois.

Ranta convincingly demonstrates that Chamberlain had ready access to popular literature, so it is no surprise that her narratives reproduced prevalent social and ethnic stereotypes. Along with hundreds of her fellow female textile workers, she partook of Lowell’s public libraries, lectures, and events and attended “Improvement Circles” featuring amateur readings at local churches. Chamberlain was sensitive to anti-Indian prejudices, and her style resembles that of Lydia Maria Child, with its feminine sensitivities and calls to justice for the downtrodden. Yet, as Siobhan Senier has observed, Chamberlain’s melodramatic short fiction and vignettes of home life matched popular genres, and her “dream visions” resembled transcendentalist ramblings (Senier 673). None of this suggests tribal heritage.

Ranta claims that Chamberlain tapped Algonkian storytelling practices, but I see no trace of Indigenous oral traditions, cultural practices, or environmental knowledge in any of her writings. Curiously, Ranta censored the collection by omitting Chamberlain’s lurid stories of Indian attacks against white settlers, perhaps because these might undermine assertions of identity. Chamberlain’s anecdotes of Indian encounters on the colonial frontier employ sharp gender and racial divisions with satirical overtones and Christian messages; Native voice and agency are absent or marginalized. For example, “The Indian Pledge” recounts the rescue of a racist young white man by a “savage” Indian, in exchange for the gentle white wife’s earlier kindness to the poor Indian. “A Fire-Side Scene” features an old Yankee veteran recalling, with some pride, the mass burning of a Native village on the western Miami frontier (125–26). Chamberlain’s pseudonymous “Tabitha” (presented as the author of these tales) seems to be an alternate identity, rooted in ethnic masking or cultural appropriation.

Chamberlain’s creative work must be seen as a commercial transaction; whether paid or not, she trafficked in productions that elevated her own social position. She earned high wages in the mills, but she also found time to compose more than forty stories for the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering in a few years’ time. Exotic narratives containing Indians, scripted by a woman of mysterious ancestry, would have been an easy sell, but what was her inspiration? Was her favorite literary character, the “old maid,” based on some older woman who befriended the mill girls? Who…