Mixed Race Studies

D’Eichthal and Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche: Race, Gender, and Reconciliation after Slave Emancipation

Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2011)
pages 240-258
E-ISSN: 1536-0172 Print ISSN: 0146-7891

Naomi J. Andrews, Assistant Professor of History
Santa Clara University

This article is a close reading of Gustave d’Eichthal and Ishmayl Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (1839), written during the decade prior to the “second” French emancipation in 1848. The article argues that the hierarchical gendering of race described in the letters is reflective of metropolitan concerns about potential for social disorder accompanying slave emancipation in the French colonies. In arguing for social reconciliation through interracial marriage and its offspring, the symbolically charged figure of the mulatto, the authors deployed gendered and familial language to describe a stable post-emancipation society.

Read or purchase the article here.

Who Belongs to Whom?: Codes, Property, and Ownership in Madame Charles Reybaud’s “Les Épaves”

Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2011)
pages 229-239
E-ISSN: 1536-0172 Print ISSN: 0146-7891

Molly Krueger Enz, Assistant Professor of French
South Dakota State University

French Romantic writer Madame Charles Reybaud explores the coupling of gender and race by depicting the legal restrictions imposed upon married women and slaves in her novella “Les Épaves” (1838). Both groups have a lack of power and are treated as inferior in a colonial, patriarchal society. This article examines the parallels between Madame Éléonore de la Rebelière, the Creole wife of a Belgian plantation owner, and Donatien, a former slave. They are both subordinated by Monsieur de la Rebelière: Donatien because of being a mixed-race épave and Éléonore because of her status as a married, Creole woman.

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Racial group boundaries and identities: People of ‘mixed‐race’ in slavery across the Americas

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 15, Issue 3 (1994)
pages 17-37
DOI: 10.1080/01440399408575137

Stephen Small, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

One of the fundamental developments to arise as a result of the settling of the Americas by Europeans was the creation of racial barriers, group boundaries and identities both in law and in practice. Contact between diverse ethnic and national groups from Europe and from Africa was closely followed by social and sexual interaction. These relations were increasingly interpreted and explained by Europeans by employing the idea of ‘race’ (and ‘race’ purity and domination). The idea of ‘race’ inevitably led to the idea of ‘race-mixing’, an idea saturated in imagery and mysticism, but very clearly framed by the powerful group and individual economic, political and psychological interests of Europeans.

A significant section of the voluminous literature on slavery across the Americas focuses on the creation of racial barriers, boundaries and identities. Most attention has focused on the ways in which notions of Europe and Christianity interacted with notions of Africa and heathens to demarcate group boundaries. But significant attention has also been devoted to people of ‘mixed-race’. There are studies of single territories, as well as comparative studies. As one reads this literature one can detect a consensus around the characterizations of the definitions, circumstances and attitudes of people of ‘mixed-race’. It is argued that there arc fundamental differences in their ‘treatment’ in the territories of the British Caribbean and North America. It is maintained that in the British Caribbean people of ‘mixed-race’ received preferential ‘treatment’ and occupied an intermediate status between black slaves and free whites, while in North America they were placed in the same category as blacks. It is further suggested that in the Caribbean people of ‘mixed race’ rejected any association with blacks and sought to establish a distinctive ‘mulatto’ identity. This characterization of three-tier and two-tier systems is often described as ‘racial continuum’ and ‘racial caste’ and the primary explanation offered for the growth of this intermediate group is demographic: it developed where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites…

Read or purchase the article here.

Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. – book reviews

Journal of Social History
Volume 28, Number 2 (Winter 1994)

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 432 pages, Paperback ISBN-10: 9780801852510; ISBN-13: 978-0801852510.

The numbers tell the story: the heart of the New World African diaspora lies, not north of the border, but south. During the period of slavery, ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as to the United States. People of African ancestry found considerably more favorable conditions in North America for their survival and increase than they did in Latin America; nevertheless, by 1990 the estimated 100 million Afro-Latin Americans still outnumbered Afro-North Americans by a factor of more than three to one and accounted for almost twice as large a proportion of their respective national populations.

Though the historiography on Afro-Latin America has expanded greatly during the last twenty years, it continues to differ in at least one important respect from comparable work on the United States: it focuses almost entirely on slavery, and essentially comes to an end at the moment of abolition. While historians in the United States have devoted extensive attention to the post-emancipation period in this country and to the subsequent evolution of race relations during the twentieth century, Magnus Morner’s evaluation, written a quarter of a century ago, still holds true today: historians of Latin America “seem to lose all interest in the Negro as soon as abolition is accomplished. In any case, he disappears almost completely from historical literature.”

race in the region has been shaped by anthropologists and sociologists: Thales de Azevedo, Roger Bastide, Florestan Fernandes, Gilberto Freyre, Marvin Harris, Carlos Hasenbalg, Octavio Ianni, Clovis Moura, Joao Baptista Borges Pereira, and Charles Wagley in Brazil; Angelina Pollak-Eltz in Venezuela; Jaime Arocha and Nina de Freidemann in Colombia; Norman Whitten in Ecuador, to name just a few. Even this literature is not abundant; and, significantly, much of it has been produced by scholars who are not native to the countries they study. Latin American sociologists have proven reluctant to contest their societies’ self-image as “racial democracies”; and as Peter Wade suggests for the case of Colombia, the belief that people of African ancestry have been satisfactorily integrated into their national societies has tended to remove them as objects of study for local anthropologists, who focus instead on the less assimilated, more “primitive” Amerindian populations.

So when three major new works on Afro-Latin America (written, in keeping with the pattern just noted, by foreign anthropologists) appear in a relatively short space of time, it is an event worthy of notice. Only one of those works, Peter Wade’s Blackness and Race Mixture, focuses specifically on questions of race. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s Death Without Weeping is concerned with “slow starvation … as a primary motivating force in social life” and “the effects of chronic hunger, sickness, death, and loss on the ability to love, trust, have faith and keep it.” (Scheper-Hughes: 15) And John Burdick’s Looking for God in Brazil seeks to explain why Catholic liberation theology and “base communities,” hailed during the 1970s and 80s as engines of progressive political change, are now being displaced among poor and working-class Brazilians by evangelical Protestantism and Afro-Brazilian umbanda. But in order to answer these questions, Scheper-Hughes and Burdick both carried out field research in communities which are majority Afro-Latin American. And since all three authors were able to talk directly to the subjects of their research, they portray those communities with a depth and richness of detail that historians forced to work with sketchy and fragmentary documentary evidence can only rarely achieve.

Paralleling (and in part inspired by) recent scholarship on Brazil, Peter Wade begins by questioning Colombia’s semi-official image of itself as a racial democracy, a mestizo society created by a centuries-long process of race mixture among Europeans, Indians, and Africans. He has little trouble demonstrating that, like other Latin American societies, Colombia is in fact a racial hierarchy in which whiteness is highly valued over blackness and Indianness. Whites are correspondingly over-represented in the upper and middle classes, and nonwhites are over-represented in the working class and among the poor.

Thus far this is familiar ground. Wade pushes on beyond the existing literature, however, by noting that racial groups are unequally distributed not just in Colombia’s class structure; they are unequally distributed across the country’s regions as well. This leads him to ask how the ideology and practice of racial hierarchy vary between areas which are predominantly black and those which are predominantly white. The book thus becomes a comparative study within Colombia, focusing on the Choco, a lowland tropical rain forest bordering Panama, and the highland region of Antioquia…

Read the entire review here.

The Wind Done Gone

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2001
224 pages
Trim Size: 5.50 x 8.25
ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618219063
ISBN-10: 0618219064

Alice Randall

In this daring and provocative literary parody which has captured the interest and imagination of a nation, Alice Randall explodes the world created in Gone With the Wind, a work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Taking sharp aim at the romanticized, whitewashed mythology perpetrated by this southern classic, Randall has ingeniously conceived a multilayered, emotionally complex tale of her own—that of Cynara, the mulatto half-sister, who, beautiful and brown and born into slavery, manages to break away from the damaging world of the Old South to emerge into full life as a daughter, a lover, a mother, a victor. The Wind Done Gone is a passionate love story, a wrenching portrait of a tangled mother-daughter relationship, and a book that “celebrates a people’s emancipation not only from bondage but also from history and myth, custom and stereotype” (San Antonio Express-News).

The Irish in the Caribbean 1641-1837: An Overview

Irish Migration Studies in Latin America
Volume 5, Number 3 (November 2007)
pages 145-156

Nini Rogers, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in History
Queen’s University, Belfast

The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean brought about irreversible demographic change. Decimated by defeat and disease, ‘peaceful’ Arawaks and ‘warlike’ Caribs alike ceased to exist as an identifiable ethnic group, their gene pool dissolving into that of the newcomers, where it died away or remained un-investigated. The replacement of native peoples by European settlers was desultory. After their arrival in 1492 the Spanish explored and settled the Caribbean islands with some enthusiasm. The extension of activities into Mexico and Peru, however, rich in precious metals and with a structured agricultural work force, swiftly eclipsed the islands as a destination for settlers. More northerly Europeans (French, English, Irish, and Dutch) arriving later, slipped into the more neglected Spanish possessions in the Leeward Islands (today’s eastern Caribbean) or Surinam, on the periphery of Portuguese Brazil. These seventeenth-century colonists initiated the process which turned the Caribbean into the world’s sugar bowl. To do so, they imported enslaved Africans who soon became the most numerous group on the islands. In the nineteenth century, as sugar receded in economic importance, so too did the remaining whites, and the Caribbean assumed its present Afro-Caribbean aspect.

Changing the islands’ flora, fauna and demography, the newcomers also imported their religious and political systems and ‘great power’ rivalries. Those who founded the colonies were eager for royal support and recognition, thinking very much in terms of subsequently returning home to enjoy wealth and importance. As their tropical possessions proved themselves valuable, kings and governments became more and more determined to retain and expand them. The sugar boom made the Caribbean a cockpit for warfare among the European powers. This presented difficulties and opportunities for the Irish. Divided at home into colonists and colonised, when seeking their fortunes in Europe’s overseas empire, they had to choose which king to serve, which colony to plant.

Irish Inter-Racial Marriages and Affairs

In 1775, nineteen-year-old Charles Fitzgerald, naval officer, brother to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and third son of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, wrote to his mother with literary panache that ‘the jet black ladies of Africa’s burning sands have made me forget the unripened beauties of the north’. A few months later he followed this up with the news that she could look forward to ‘a copper coloured grandchild’ (Tillyard 1995:331).

Relations between Irish men and African women were as much a staple of the Caribbean experience as malaria, yellow fever, hurricanes, rum drinking and turtle soup, but it is an area of life which rarely appears on the written record. The earliest emigrant letters hint at this scheme of things. In 1675 John Blake, a merchant settler from Galway admitted to the veracity of his brother Henry’s accusation that he had brought a ‘whore’ from Ireland to Barbados along with his wife, but excused himself on the grounds of domestic necessity; his wife’s ‘weak constitution’ meant that she could not manage everything herself ‘for washing, starching, making of drink and keeping the house in good order is no small task to undergo here’. He could not dispense with the services of the prostitute until the African girl he had bought was properly trained in household matters (Oliver 1909-19, II: 55).

Wills and investigations instituted over disputed inheritance would sometimes reveal lifelong secrets concealed from the family back home. Thus in 1834 R. R. Madden (anti-slavery activist and future historian of the United Irishmen—see Burton’s article in this journal) penetrated into the mountains of Jamaica in order to view a deceased relative’s plantation, long the subject of a chancery suit. There he was startled to find several mixed-race cousins and their elderly mother, his uncle Garret’s mulatto concubine (Madden 1835, I: 171)…

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(In) between identities: Representations of the island and the mulatto in nineteenth-century French fiction

University of Wisconsin, Madison
2005
205 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3186126
ISBN: 9780542274718

Molly Krueger Enz, Assistant Professor of French
South Dakota State University

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (French)

This dissertation explores how five nineteenth-century authors depict the tension surrounding racial (in)equality in France’s island colonies through the creation of mulatto characters who are portrayed as “in-between” characters in exile. The thesis is divided into two sections, each based on a common a theme. The first part treats two novels containing mixed-race characters who criticize racial prejudice and the hypocrisy of metropolitan and colonial societies. In my first chapter, I examine how the protagonist of Dumas’s Georges devotes his life to ending racial discrimination against mulattoes on the Île de France and show that the figures of the island and mulatto are structured around similar tensions of isolation and self-sufficiency. My second chapter explores how mixed-race characters in Hugo’s Bug-Jargal refuse to be classified racially. I argue that race is changeable and reflects the unstable history of the island of Saint-Domingue. The second section of this study considers the themes of female heroism and oppression through the figures of the revolutionary, the “tragic mulatta,” and the épave. In the third chapter, I contend that the central mulatta character in Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture, the product of her black mother’s rape by a white colonist, is depicted as a revolutionary heroine who symbolizes the political power struggle between France and Saint-Domingue. My fourth chapter claims that the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, previously studied in relation to American literature, can be applied to Sand’s eponymous white heroine in Indiana. In my fifth chapter on Madame Charles Reybaud’s “Les Éépaves” and Madame de Rieux, I argue that white female characters usurp traditional white male roles when they enter relationships with men of color. Furthermore, I analyze the figure of the “épave,” neither free nor slave, which I feel best represents the “in-between” nature of the mulatto. This dissertation analyzes geographic, racial, and gendered “in-between” spaces in French Romantic literature on colonialism to further develop an understanding of how marginalized identities were formed in the first half of the nineteenth century and how these identities in turn shaped Romanticism.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction: Margins and Mixings
• I. Prejudice and Hypocrisy: Criticisms of Metropolitan and Colonial Societies
  • CHAPTER ONE: The Mulatto as Island and the Island as Mulatto in Alexandre Dumas’s Georges
  • CHAPTER TWO: Mirroring, Monstrosity, and Métissage: Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal
• II. Heroism and Oppression: The Revolutionary, the Tragic Mulatta, and the Épave
  • CHAPTER THREE: Female Revolutionary Heroism in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture
  • CHAPTER FOUR: Slavery and the Tragic Mulatto Stereotype in George Sand’s Indiana
  • CHAPTER FIVE: Who “Belongs” to Whom?: Sexual Politics in Two Works by Madame Charles Reybaud
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Works Consulted

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Hudson River School via Cincinnati

Chronogram: Arts, Culture, Spirit
Kingston, New York
2011-05-28

Sparrow

“History can be blind,” observes Joseph D. Ketner II, curator of “Robert S. Duncanson: ‘the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons,’” an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historical Site in Catskill. Duncanson (1821-1872) was an African-American landscape painter, once highly regarded, now almost entirely forgotten.
 
Born a freedman in Seneca County, New York, Robert Duncanson moved as a youth to Michigan. At the age of 16 he apprenticed to a house painter, then briefly began his own painting and glazing business. In 1840, Duncanson resolved to become an artist, relocating to Cincinnati, the largest city in “the West.” The youth taught himself to paint by copying Thomas Cole paintings and sketching from life. He became an itinerant portraitist, then moved on to nature scenes.
 
By the 1850s in Cincinnati, the two most popular art forms, landscape painting and daguerreotype photography, were dominated by African-American artists. James P. Ball was the preeminent daguerreotypist, Duncanson the top painter. Both men were light-skinned “mulattos,” of mixed race, benefiting from the racial caste system of the time. Cincinnati was a northern city, in a “free state” (one without slavery) whose economy and social outlook were Southern. “Cincinnati was one of the most vociferous abolitionist cities, behind Boston, and it was also one of the most adamant pro-slavery cities, simultaneously—a very, very complex dynamic,” explains Ketner.

In 1855, Duncanson and Ball painted a 600-yard antislavery panorama entitled “Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade.” This work consisted of a canvas wrapped around two large dowels, which would be unspooled in an auditorium to the accompaniment of an orchestra, with lighting effects and a narrator describing the changing scenes. The “Mammoth Pictorial Tour” traveled the country, advertised as “Painted by Negroes.” Sadly, it is no longer extant…

…It is tempting to interpret Duncanson’s landscapes politically. Those dreamy temples on the shores of rivers—are they images of a utopian world without slavery and racism? Or does that oversimplify them? Duncanson himself once told his son, on the issue of race, “I have no color on the brain; all I have on the brain is paint.”…

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Researcher presents new views on 18th century mixed races and their families

William & Mary: News & Events
2011-06-15

Andrea Davis

Daniel Livesay, NEH postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at William & Mary, presented a paper at the University of Texas in February that discussed the mixed children of white men and black women and their impact on British society in the 18th century. The BBC has contacted him to use some of this new information for a documentary it is working on.
 
His paper focused on racial groups traditionally labeled as creoles in colonial Louisiana and mulattos in the Caribbean. Livesay’s dissertation centered on social hierarchies in 18th century Britain and the family ties of mixed children both born in Jamaica and of British descent.
 
According to his paper, “Preparing to Meet the Atlantic Family: Relatives of Color in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” mixed-race children like Edward Thomas Marsh and James Tailyour and their families’ responses signified a time in Britain where society heatedly debated the issue of blacks as inferior.

“During those two decades, debates on the humanity of the slave trade branched into numerous ancillary arguments over skin color, equality, and racial gradation,” he wrote. “The issues of slavery and family overlapped, with observers commenting on the sexual standards of enslaved families, and the demographic implications throughout the Atlantic of an empire with unrestricted connections between races.”

These children faced a serious dilemma. Like the creoles and mulatto, their place in 18th century British society was uncertain. On the one hand, having mothers of color made them slaves by birth; at the same time, their white father’s heritage gave them freedom. Livesay says they stood between the two social placements set out in British and even colonial society. What determined their place was the amount of acceptance they received from their British relatives…

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The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family [Review]

The Journal of American History
Volume 98, Issue 1 (2011)
Pages 154-155
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jar004

Brenda E. Stevenson, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. (New York: Norton, 2008. 802 pp. Cloth, ISBN 978-0-393-06477-3. Paper, ISBN 978-0-393-33776-1.)

Annette Gordon-Reed’s much-lauded book (it has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was a national best seller) is an ambitious attempt to re-create the lives of several generations of one slave family in the American South. Gordon-Reed traces this family from one of their original African ancestors, who arrived in Virginia during the colonial era, through the antebellum decades. This is not just any extended enslaved family, however. Her black and mixed-race subjects are the Hemingses—the founding father Thomas Jefferson’s slaves and family, by marriage and blood.

Building on the research and analysis of her book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Gordon-Reed, a legal scholar by training, adds admirably to her primary- and secondary-source research base for this work, carefully synthesizing the historiography descriptive of the social relationships in American slavery and drawing on the rich data and analysis supplied by historians and archeologists at Monticello. Gordon-Reed treats readers to a journey of no short distance (the book is almost seven hundred pages in length!) in which she explores several avenues of possibility that might shed light on the social lives, relationships, and family ties…

Read or purchase the review here.