Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

University of Washington
Department of Communications
2010-11-15

Amanda Weber

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.

Constructing Whiteness: Regulating Aboriginal identity

University of Toronto
2009
93 pages
Publication Number: AAT MR59722
ISBN: 9780494597224

Rebecca Boock

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Graduate Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Curricula in classrooms facilitate a national amnesia of colonialism that renders inconceivable the possibility of Aboriginal heritage or mixed-blood presence in national subjects. This thesis examines my own family history alongside the Indian Act and discourses of multiculturalism. I provide a personal account for the ways in which Aboriginal identities are regulated in Canada. I examine how glorified white settler narratives—reproduced through both formal and informal schooling—work to displace Aboriginal peoples as the original inhabitants of the land. I argue that this facilitates ongoing Canadian colonialism that continues to circumvent the possibility of particular mixed-blood Aboriginal identities within the confines of national belonging. Citizenship education in the Toronto District School Board is situated as a mechanism of formal schooling that continues to negate the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal people so that mixed-race Aboriginal students may continue to assume themselves as white subjects within the nation.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Rendering Whiteness: Making National Belonging White
• Chapter Two: National Benevolence and the Erasure of Canadian Colonialism
• Chapter Three” Citizenship Education: Reinscribing Whiteness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Southern Spaces
An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections
2007-08-28

Ed Piacentino, Professor of English
High Point University, High Point, North Carolina

This essay examines Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), a short story acknowledged as the first fictional work by an African American. Through its representation of physical and psychological effects, Séjour’s story, a narrative of slavery in Saint-Domingue, also inaugurated the literary delineation of slavery’s submission-rebellion binary. The enslaved raconteur in “The Mulatto” voices protest and appeals to social consciousness and sympathy, anticipating the embedded narrators in works of later writers throughout the Plantation Americas.

Sections:

• Introduction
• Liberated Narrative Voice
• Restricted Space
• Clotel’s Rebellion
• Local Color
• Conclusion & Notes
• Recommended Resources
• “The Mulatto”

Introduction

A little-known story first translated into English in 1995 by Philip Barnard for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”) by Victor Séjour (1817-1874), a New Orleans free man of color, was initially published in the March 1837 issue of Cyrille Bisette’s Parisian abolitionist journal La Revue des Colonies. La Revue was a monthly periodical of “Colonial Politics, Administration, Justice, Education and Customs” owned and sponsored by a “society of men of color.” A recent immigrant to Paris, Séjour was in an amenable environment among kindred spirits who shared his sentiments about slavery.

…Although little known in its era, “The Mulatto” presents the binary of submission and rebellion that became a motif in U.S. based slave narratives and novelized autobiographies treating racialized sexual harassment and/or exploitation of mulattas such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, antislavery novels such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel or; The President’s Daughter and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and even late nineteenth-century southern local color stories with embedded former slave storytellers, such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius. In exposing the brutality of the slave system, such as the impact of miscegenation on persons of mixed race; the sexual violation of enslaved persons; and the physical and psychological brutalities of slavery—particularly the devastating effects on family life of whites as well as on blacks—“The Mulatto” deploys strategies for antislavery protest writing that will appear in antebellum slave narratives and anti-slavery novels and in postbellum fiction about slavery…

Read the entire article here.

Bringing the Mix-d: Experience to Leicester College: A Good Practice Guide to Meeting the Needs of Mixed Heritage Students in Further Education

Multiple Heritage Project
May 2010
26 pages

Leicester College was successful in gaining funding from the LSC [Learning Skills Council] for a specific action research project to work with a group of mixed heritage young people on their issues, and to produce this good practice guidance, other resources and staff training. The College advertised for a consultancy to undertake the work and subsequently commissioned the Multiple Heritage Project  (MHP) based in Manchester, as they had wide ranging national experience and a proven track record in this area. This is their report.

…Mix-d: on the margins of FE

Mix-d: [mixed heritage] students are the focus for this good practice guide because the data shows that they increasingly occupy stereotypical positions in society and institutions, are a growing group and are rarely, if ever, acknowledged in educational research. The small amount of research that exists suggests that mix-d: people are often expected to choose one racial identity at the exclusion of another, or are seen as occupying a ‘confused’ middle space.

At the same time, mix-d: people are often heralded as the embodiments of a culturally diverse and post-racial society. As the numbers of mix-d: students entering FE increases, their absence from current race equality policies and invisibility within the curriculum are causing education practitioners to analyse more closely what is currently being offered to those who identify as mix-d:.

Although race is a social construct, the “politics” of race—and the part racism plays—is a regular and unavoidable feature of life for many and should not be confused with ethnicity which simply means belonging to a human group ie White British people also have an ethnicity.

Limited research in the area of mix-d: students suggests that there is a significant number of younger people in this group who are failing to have their needs met. Indications in this area of work are that socio-economic factors, family structure, stereotyping and lack of appropriate terminology can hinder any positive moves forward.

There seems to be a dearth of policy in this area and low levels of awareness regarding this growing group. Some professionals appear reticent to address issues concerning race and ethnicity and still frequently struggle with appropriate terminology. It is time that targeted and focussed research addressed the presence of this growing population…

Read the entire report here.

Multiracial and Adopted Asians

Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
Volume 3, Number 2 (Fall 2001)
Theme: Interracial and Mixed-racial Relationships and Families

C. N. Le, Senior Lecturer Professor
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In the 1980s Asian Americans became the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the United States in terms of percentage growth.  As part of this growth, the number of those who are multiracial and adopted from Asia is increasing significantly.  These particular Asian Americans face unique political and cultural challenges from Asians and non-Asians alike.  While many struggle to fit into both cultures, many are creating their own identity that unites, rather than separates, their experiences. 

Table of Contents

• All Mixed Up?
• All Asians Alone or with Other Races
• Room to Grow
• Much More Than the Sum of the Parts
• References
• Editor’s Note

Read the eniter article here.

Ethnic, Multi-Ethnic, and Nationalist Identity in Belize: Voices of Belizean Children

Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
Volume 3, Number 1 (Spring 2001)
Theme: International Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

Sarah Woodbury Haug

This paper discusses ethnicity and nationalism in children in the rural community of Punta Gorda, Belize. Ethnicity and nationalism are important aspects of identity in Belize because of a deliberate government policy to teach about these identities in the schools. My purpose in this paper is to contrast what is taught in schools about ethnicity and nationalism with how children describe their own identities.

Table of Contents

• The Government’s Plan
• Methodology
• Ethnicity in Punta Gorda
• Working in the Schools
• Voices of Ethnically Mixed Children
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• References

Read the entire article here.

Ethnicity and Ethnically “Mixed” Identity in Belize: A Study of Primary School-Age Children

Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Volume 29, Issue 1 (March 1998)
pages 44–67
DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1998.29.1.44

Sarah Woodbury Haug

This article focuses on the ehtnic identity of children in Belize. Belizean nationalism, as taught in the primary schools, is both pan-ethnic and multiethnic. However, because the increasingly widespread practice of ethnic mixing is unacknowledged, there is a discrepancy between what is taught in school and the daily life of children. This has resulted in a paradox. Whereas the overt intent is to recognize and celebrate difference, the result has been to silence children’s voices.

Teacher: “Everyone here belongs to an ethnic group. You will draw the clothing of your group.”
Mixed Mestizo/Garifuna girl: “What if you are mixed?”
Teacher: “It doesn’t matter if you are mixed… you draw the Creole outfit.”
[Teacher tells four other children of mixed ethnicity which clothing they will draw.]
Anthropologist to teacher: “What ethnic group are you?”
Teacher: “I am mixed with Creole and Spanish but my husband is an East Indian.”
Anthropologist: “What ethnic group do your children belong to?”
Teacher [laughs and waves her hand dismissively]: “They are just mixed.”
Anthropologist: “Oh. What did you do with the mixed children in your class?”
Teacher: “Well, I assigned them to a group.”

This article illuminates the subjective nature of ethnic identification in a nation-state that promotes multiculturalism and ethnic diversity within its borders. The government of Belize supports the cultures of all its ethnic groups and teaches about them in schools as part of its program of nationalism. The scene above illustrates the combination of issues that are involved in locating children of mixed ethnicity within the government’s ethnic framework in Punta Gorda, a small town of 3,500 people on the southern coast. Because ethnic mixing is unacknowledged by the Belizean government and not discussed in schools, there is a great discrepancy between what is taught in the schools, and the daily life of such children. What schools teach and what children understand are not the same. The silence on the part of the government, however, speaks loudly to children as they attempt to place themselves within the ethnic framework of their community and country.

To many adults, not only Punta Gordans, children are reflections of the adult world. They are thought of as simple creatures who absorb all that is taught to them (Jenks 1996:2; Stephens 1996:12), or viewed as a means of measuring the values of society (Ndebele 1996:322). They are not, as Stephens writes, “social actors in their own right, engaged in making sense of and recreating the social worlds they inherit” (1996:23-24). However, my research shows that children clearly are active participants in the construction of their own identity, even if their constructions are not recognized by the adult community and even if children are labeled by adults according to adult needs and perceptions…

Read the entire article here.

Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World

Gender & History
Volume 22, Issue 3 (November 2010)
pages 585–602
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2010.01613.x

Brooke N. Newman, John Carter Brown Library Scholar (2010-2011)
University of Oxford

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo-Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth-century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio-sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.

Read or purchase the article here.

History’s most sordid cover-up

New African
February 2004

Stella Orakwue

The history of the former European colonies’ mixed-race populations is one of the world’s biggest hidden scandals. How did these populations come about? We did not miraculously or biblically produce mixed-race babies from thin air. Most of the black women were raped…

…Her children come from the Thurmond family line because Essie Mae Washington (below) has unveiled Strom Thurmond, the American senator famous for having been the country’s leading segregationist,  as her father. Thurmond died last June, aged 100. But in 1948 “Daddy” was very much alive, and kicking out at blacks, coloureds, Negroes, call them what you will. People not as white as he was. People like, as we now know, his daughter…

For black women, it is a horror subject that is almost blindingly difficult to go near. I’m finding this very difficult to write. I hate what I have to think about. But isn’t that why lies prosper, because people find deeply disturbing subjects too hard to discuss honestly? Therefore, the liars and the lies win. And we live our lives in pain without at least knowing what the source is.

Press on. Ask any Westerner whether when they visit North and South America, when they visit Africa—especially Southern Africa—when they visit the Caribbean, whether they think that these regions’ huge numbers of mixed-race and very light-skinned people appeared fully formed from nowhere?

Who originally created these populations of light-skinned people? I know you would think from the acres of trees felled to cover stories about the handful of white women who chose to have sexual relationships with black men during empire days that somehow white women are linked to these communities, but, no, the history of former European colonies’ mixed-race populations has nothing to do with white females.

How did these populations come about then? Let me make it clear for you. They are with us because black women had babies during the empire days whose fathers were white men. But the black women did not get to choose. They were not volunteers. Let us be precise here. Most of the black women who gave birth to those babies were raped by the white men…

Read the entire article here.

A Silenced History from Belgian Congo: A Mixed Race History

Afro-Europe International Blog
2010-06-15

Sibo Kano

The Bastards in Our Colony: Hidden Stories of Belgian Metis

You haven’t heard much from me lately. I was writing a book and it’s finally finished and published. The book I wrote together with Kathleen Ghequière traces back a history of Africa and Europe that has been ignored for too much time. Some of you know about the mixed race children of Australia thanks to movies such as ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ or even Baz Luhrmann’s latest ‘Australia’. But concerning Africa this history is unknown.

It seems as if the European colonizer didn’t have intimate relationships with the African colonized. But many children were born out of relations between white Europeans and black Africans during colonization. These children undermined the racial colonial order with their existence. These children have been hidden and their stories silenced. At least for the Belgian Congo this story is now unveiled and in this book the mixed race children of Belgium and Congo express their history freely…

Read the entire article here.