Mixed Race Studies

History, Trauma, and the Discursive Construction of “Race” in John Dominis Holt’s Waimea Summer

Cultural Critique
Number 47, Winter 2001
pages 167-214
DOI: 10.1353/cul.2001.0026

Susan Y. Najita, Associate Professor of English
University of Michigan

In contemporary discussions about the literature of Hawai’i and its decolonization, a central problematic resulting from on-going Euro-American imperialism is the tension between genealogical and racial definitions of Hawaiianness. Haunani-Kay Trask in “Decolonizing Hawaiian Literature” argues for a notion of “Hawaiian” that is based upon “[g]enealogical claims” of Hawaiians as the first people of Hawai’i,” a claim that establishes their status as indigene and Native (170). She argues, “It is the insistence that our Native people have a claim to nationhood on Hawaiian soil that generates the ignorant and ill-intentioned response that Hawaiian nationalists are racists. In truth, Hawaiians are the only people who can claim Hawai’i as their lahui, or nation” (170). I quote this passage to show how Trask suggests the way in which genealogical claims, when viewed from more Western perspectives of family descent and pedigree, can be taken to imply a more racialized idea of ancestry.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui has aptly noted the difference between pedigree and genealogy in the contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty struggle. The Hawai’i State Constitution and the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 define “native Hawaiian” in terms of blood quantum, specifically, 50 percent Hawaiian blood. Kauanui argues that this notion of pedigree is based upon the assumption of racial purity and the suggestion that as racial mixing and intermarriage continue, “Hawaiians,” as defined by blood quantum, will be bred out of existence, will “vanish.” She advocates a turn toward a genealogical definition that valorizes multiple interpersonal relations more reflective of the Hawaiian sense of group belonging. Such [End Page 167] an approach implies impurity and mixing that is not a “dilution” but a reterritorialization, reflecting the complex relations between ethnic groups in Hawai’i.

In his novel Waimea Summer, Native Hawaiian writer John Dominis Holt [1919-1993] vividly depicts the conflict between identities based, on the one hand, upon racializing notions such as eugenics and pedigree that imply purity, and on the other hand, upon genealogy that implies relations between people and a sense of the past that guides future action. For Holt, genealogy and history guide nationalist struggle, and so in order to chart a decolonized future, he must first address one of the legacies of colonialism, the way in which racial constructions have interfered with genealogy in structuring identity.  Holt’s novel depicts how this oppositional and racialized notion of pedigree is one of the causes of his protagonist’s traumatic acting out in the novel; it prevents him from wholly accepting the nationalistic claims that his genealogy makes upon him.

The novel tells the semiautobiographical story of a hapa haole (part-Hawaiian, part-white) youth, Mark Hull, who visits his paniolo uncle, Fred Andrews, in the ranching town of Waimea on the island of Hawaici. Amid the financial and social decline of his extended family, Mark attempts to understand what it means to be Hawaiian as he is introduced to various cultural practices of his rural relations in Waimea and Waipio Valley. During his stay, he attempts to keep his uncle’s family together and to save the life of his young cousin Puna.  At the novel’s end, the protagonist is familiarized with his genealogical ties to his ancestor, Kamehameha I, the first chief to unite the islands under a single ruler. The central problem with which Mark struggles is the oppositional way missionary discourse and eugenics structures hapa haole identity along the construction of race and racial mixing in contrast to the Hawaiian emphasis on genealogy, which implies a connection to ancestral history that guides future action…

Read the entire article here.

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (Book Review)

Journal of Southern History
Vol. 67
2001

Lloyd A. Hunter
Franklin College of Indiana

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. By Cyprian Clamorgan. Edited and with an introduction by Julie Winch. (Columbia, Mo., and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 1999. Pp. xiv, 122. $27.50, ISBN 0-8262-1236-0.)

When Cyprian Clamorgan wrote The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis in 1858, he described what it took to “make it” as an anomaly in that city. He recognized that, in St. Louis as in antebellum communities throughout the United States, to be free and of African descent meant that one did not fit into a society that assumed that black people were meant to be slaves and that only white people could know freedom. Yet Clamorgan observed that there existed in the Mound City “a certain circle; … a peculiar class–the elite of the colored race” who attained their high status through “wealth, education, or natural ability” (p. 46). And the greatest of these was wealth. This stress on wealth as the key component of St. Louis’s black aristocracy comes through clearly in Julie Winch’s reprint of Clamorgan’s brief work. Through her informative introductory chapters, meticulous editing, and extensive annotation, Winch enriches our perception of the African American community of pre-Civil War St. Louis.  She also makes a valuable contribution to the study of free blacks.

The Cyprian Clamorgan who emerges on these pages was a barber and a well-traveled steward on numerous Mississippi River boats. He was also a mulatto with an exceedingly complex ancestry. Winch adeptly unravels the snarled tale of Clamorgan’s family and of Cyprian’s descent from an apparently unsavory French voyageur, the ambitious slave trader Jacques Clamorgan (ca. 1734-1814), and one of Jacques’s parade of “Negro wives” (p. 23). Although Jacques amassed a considerable estate, he failed to gain entry to the white upper class of St. Louis. Later his equally opportunist grandson Cyprian sought to benefit financially both from the sale of Jacques’s land claims and the marketing of a literary challenge to the white “notion that black people were all alike because they were black” (p. 2). Hence his publication of The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis in 1858, a propitious time when the Dred Scott case, which also emanated from St. Louis, was commanding national attention.

Clamorgan’s little book is a virtual tour of the free black neighborhood of antebellum St. Louis. Through colorful vignettes and often humorous comments, the reader meets the African American elite while also receiving, in Winch’s view, “a serious message about race, class, and power” (p. 3). Here for example is Mrs. Pelagie Rutgers, a former slave who bought her freedom for three dollars but who is now “worth half a million dollars” (p. 48). Around the corner is Mrs. Pelagie Nash, who owns nearly the entire block on which she lives. Here also are the “inveterate gambler” but “strictly honest” Samuel Mordecai (p. 51) and the “nearly white” Antoine Labadie (p. 56). Interspersed with the visits are some of Clamorgan’s bold judgments. Although adamantly opposed to slavery, he believed that abolitionists suffered from “the same morbid and diseased brain” as that of Harriet Beecher Stowe (p. 45). Moreover, the colored aristocracy, while unable to vote, controlled elections because “wealth is power” (p. 47).

It is Winch, however, not Clamorgan, who tells the more balanced story of St. Louis’s black elite. Her voluminous annotations provide a wellspring of information based on a wide array of primary sources ranging from church records and court cases to deeds and census data. The annotations occasionally contain more facts than are necessary, and many of the archival materials could be more adequately dated, but Winch’s careful research and its insightful presentation offer a valuable window on black society, and on the roles of class and race, in a vital southern river city.

Why Are People Different?: Multiracial Families in Picture Books and the Dialogue of Difference

The Lion and the Unicorn
Volume 25, Number 3, September 2001
pages 412-426
E-ISSN: 1080-6563
Print ISSN: 0147-2593
DOI: 10.1353/uni.2001.0037

Karen Sands-O’Connor

The issue of race has often been contentious in children’s literature, from controversies over Twain‘s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to Bannerman‘s Little Black Sambo, to Keats‘s The Snowy Day, to Herron’s Nappy Hair. How race is portrayed and who portrays it have been crucial for many critics. Violet J. Harris suggests this preoccupation with cultural authenticity, as she terms it, centers on “individual books and their portrayals of people of color, as well as the representation of specific aspects of their cultures such as values, customs, and family relationships” (40-41). Francis Wardle counters, “presenting the Black race and cultural group as a single, unified, world-wide entity is not only inaccurate, but denies the tremendous richness of economic, cultural, linguistic, national, political, social and religious diversity that exists in the world-wide Black community” (“Mixed-Race Unions” 200). This insistence on cultural authenticity poses even more problems when more than one culture is portrayed within a family, and it is perhaps for this reason that little has been written on the multiracial family as portrayed in literature…

Purchase the entire article here.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Legacy
Volume 26, Number 1 (2009)
pages 182-184
E-ISSN: 1534-0643
Print ISSN: 0748-4321
DOI: 10.1353/leg.0.0069

Martha Jane Nadell, Associate Professor
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson opens her provocative and intriguing book, Portraits of the New Negro Woman, with a reading of a painting by Harlem Renaissance artist Archibald Motley. One of Motley’s many portraits of mixed-race women in a 1928 solo exhibition, A Mulatress, drew a great deal of attention, even appearing on the front cover of the exhibition catalogue and in reviews of the show. Critics used a language of racial classification, rather than of painterly inquiry, to discuss Motley’s work; they described it and other works in terms of race and primitivism, rather than as meditations on line, color, or composition. Sherrard-Johnson uses the portrait and reactions to it to set up the central concern for her book: the aesthetically and culturally complex representations of the mulatta in the visual and literary work of the Harlem Renaissance. Images of mixed-race women—in novels, films, paintings, and illustrations—engage with racially inflected discourse, evident in interpretations of Motley’s portraits: Mulattas in Sherrard-Johnson’s visual and textual sources are simultaneously proper and primitive, domestic and desirable, civilized and sexual.  As such, they are most significantly also a central part of the Harlem Renaissance’s wrestling with race.

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice (Review)
by Ronald R. Sundstrom

SUNY Press
2008, 190pp., $24.95 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9780791475867

Notre Dame Philisophical Reviews
2009-06-29

Reviewed by Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.)
Vanderbilt University

The United States is undergoing the most profound demographic changes in the country’s history so that in a few decades, if not sooner, persons identified (and identifying themselves) as white and tracing their ancestry to Europe will have become part of the nation’s racial and ethnic plurality, no longer its numerically dominant racial group. This historic development portends others equally historic and transformative, among these the gradual — possibly even dramatic — displacement of white people as the dominating group politically, economically, socially, even culturally…

…Some persons envision a United States no longer ordered by racial or ethnic considerations, where color-consciousness has been dissipated by practicing color-blindness, and by the demographic predominance of “brown” Americans to such an extent that the sorting of persons into hierarchically valued, color-coded racial and ethnic groups will not have a demographic basis.  Such was the wish of Frederick Douglass: that the nation’s racial population groups would intermingle and interbreed — in his words “amalgamate’ — to such an extent that a new “blended” race, neither black nor white, would emerge and rescue our country from the scourge of color-conscious, color-valuing racialisms and racisms…

…In the midst of all of the many aspects of invidious racial and ethnic oppressions that have been devised and practiced across the history of the United States, the aspect most sensitive and productive of the most grotesque violence has been that having to do with the most intimate and consequential of human involvements: intimate relations, intimate sexual relations especially, between persons of different and differently ranked racial groups. These are subjects, Sundstrom argues, that have been systematically avoided by contemporary thinkers who wrestle with race matters. He would have us stop avoiding the subject, not least because of the foundational importance of intimate relations for the formation and continuation of polities. Without such relationships, there can be no polities. There can be no resolution of our racial and ethnic difficulties without being forthright about intimate and sexual interracial matters.  These, argues Sundstrom, must not be relegated to the realm of privacy and thus put off limits to philosophers and theorists of the social and political. Moreover, he would not have these matters be wedded to the “browning of America” as their presumed resolution, as Frederick Douglass had hoped out of anguished alienation and desperation. Chapter four, “Interracial Intimacies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America” is required reading for us all, if social justice is not to be evaded.

So, too, chapter 5, “Responsible Multiracial Politics”. Here the reader will experience, as well as come to understand, the personal existential weight and philosophical significance for Sundstrom of political endeavours for persons whose identities are neither easily nor accurately given fulfilling, coherent, authentic, and healthy articulation and lived-experience if forced into a seemingly singular, unitary, and thus supposedly harmonious racial designation. Persons who are descendants of multiracial, multiethnic unions — even when the races and ethnic groups are understood as social, rather than biological, constructs — need the terms and concepts by which they can identify, identify with, and live their important various heritages, by which they can, in all appropriate instances, ‘remember their grandmothers’.  Needed, too, are modes of politics that sanction and nurture this important existential work as another crucial aspect of multiracial, multiethnic democratic polities, modes of politics by which persons of complex identities can be made ready for and welcomed to shared and responsible political life.  Social justice without evasion…

Read the entire review here.

A New Take On A Old Idea: Do We Need Multiracial Studies?

Du Bois Review: Social Science Review on Race
Volume 3, Issue 2 (September 2006)
pages 437-447
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X06060280

Victor Thompson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersery

Publications about multiracial identity and the multiracial population increased significantly prior to the 2000 U.S. Census. Most of these publications emerged after 1997—a significant year in the recent history of studies on the multiracial population, as this was the year the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established new guidelines for collecting data on race, allowing people to choose more than one race (Office of Management and Budget 1997). It quickly became evident that this change in how the federal government tallies race was a significant event that merited the attention of academics. This surge in research on multiracial identity and the multiracial movement reflected, on the one hand, a push by multiracial advocates for more attention to the complexities of “being multiracial” and, on the other hand, a group of scholars interested in understanding the unfolding of these events…

…Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America, by Kim Williams (2006), treats issues characteristic of scholars interested in the set of events leading up to and following the adoption of the “mark one or more” (MOOM) option for the 2000 Census.  Challenging Multiracial Identity, by Rainier Spencer (2006), represents a growing interest in critically understanding and evaluating the motivations of “multiracial” politics.  And The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking (2004), edited by Heather Dalmage (2004), is a collection of essays by authors who contribute to what might be seen as the emerging field of multiracial studies.  I shall discuss these authors’ attempts to reflect on, and potentially give birth to, a sub-discipline of multiracial studies, after first offering a synopsis of each work…

Read the entire review of all three books here.