Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Hollywood (review) [Emily D. Edwards]

Journal of Film and Video
Volume 61, Number 4 (Winter 2009)
E-ISSN: 1934-6018
Print ISSN: 0742-4671
DOI: 10.1353/jfv.0.0051

Emily D. Edwards, Professor of Broadcasting and Cinema
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Mixed Race Hollywood is a collection of essays that could not be timelier. As popular media, journalists, and citizen bloggers actively dispute the impact of President Barack Obama’s election on attitudes toward race, editors Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas have compiled a series of essays that explore ways popular media and celebrity have presented miscegenation and racial identity for Americans. These historical and critical essays analyze specific films, television programs, Internet sites, and the appearance of celebrity image to help explain the ways popular media presentations of race correspond with the development of social behaviors and attitudes. Though some might credit “liberal Hollywood” for ushering America into the “mulatto millennium,” it is obvious from the collection of essays in this book that Hollywood is not always the leader of public opinion but often takes the more conservative approach, lagging behind fairly widespread social attitudes.

The editors divide the book into four sections: themes of mixed race representation, miscegenation and romance, genre and mixed race characters, and finally, a section that examines the shift in media presentation of mixed race characters from tragic to heroic. The introduction by Beltrán and Fojas helps set the background and the overall argument that media presentations reveal a cultural shift in American attitudes toward mixed race characters. The introduction also provides some useful notes on terminology.

The essays begin, appropriately, with J. E. Smyth’s chapter, “Classical Hollywood and the Filmic Writing of Interracial History, 1931–1939.” This chapter examines films such as Cimarron (1931), Ramona (1936), Show Boat (1936), Jezebel (1938)…

Read the entire review here.

Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music

Temple University Press
December 2009
238 pp
6×9
1 figure 5 halftones
Paper EAN: 978-1-43990-090-1; ISBN: 1-4399-0090-6
Cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-089-5; ISBN: 1-4399-0089-2

Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Tufts University

Listen Up! When the New York-born Tito Puente composed “Oye Como Va!” in the 1960s, his popular song was called “Latin” even though it was a fusion of Afro-Cuban and New York Latino musical influences. A decade later, Carlos Santana, a Mexican immigrant, blended Puente’s tune with rock and roll, which brought it to the attention of national audiences. Like Puente and Santana, Latino/a musicians have always blended musics from their homelands with other sounds in our multicultural society, challenging ideas of what “Latin” music is or ought to be. Waves of immigrants further complicate the picture as they continue to bring their distinctive musical styles to the U.S.—from merengue and bachata to cumbia and reggaeton.

In Oye Como Va!, Deborah Pacini Hernandez traces the trajectories of various U.S. Latino musical forms in a globalizing world, examining how the blending of Latin music reflects Latino/a American lives connecting across nations. Exploring the simultaneously powerful, vexing, and stimulating relationship between hybridity, music, and identity, Oye Como Va! asserts that this potent combination is a signature of the U.S. Latino/a experience.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Hybridity, Identity, and Latino Popular Music
• 2. Historical Perpectives on Latinos and the Latin Music Industry
• 3. To Rock or Not to Rock: Cultural Nationalism and Latino Engagement with Rock ‘n’ Roll
• 4. Turning the Tables: Musical Mixings, Border Crossings and new Sonic Circuitries
• 5. New Immigrants, New Layerings: Tradition and Transnationalism in the U.S. Dominican Popular Music
• 6. From Cumbia Colombiana to Cumbia Cosmopolatina: Roots, Routes, Race, and Mestizaje
• 7. Marketing Latinidad in a Global Era
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Bradley Lincoln of  Multiple Heritage Project (mix-d™) Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.  Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #138 – Bradley Lincoln
When: Wednesday, 2010-01-27 00:00Z

Bradley Lincoln, Founder
Multiple Heritage Project (now mix-d™)
Manchester, United Kingdom

Bradley Lincoln is the founder of the Multiple Heritage Project.  The Multiple Heritage Project exists for a number of reasons.

• Firstly, a growing population of young people are being marginalised, expected to choose one racial identity at the exclusion of another and rarely given a voice on the subject.
• Secondly, many professionals lack confidence in dealing with issues of appropriate terminology and thus are unable to empower these individuals.
• Thirdly, lone parents/carers of mix-d children can feel isolated without a full understanding of their child’s racial heritage or access to communities where they could get more information.

Review Essay: Racial Relations and Racism in Brazil

Culture & Psychology
Volume 13, Number 4 (December 2007)
pages 461-473
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07082805

Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima
Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil

Telles, Edward Eric, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 324 pp. ISBN 978–0–691–12792–7 (pbk)

Edward Telles‘ book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (2006) has contributed to the understanding of racial and skin color relations in Brazil. The main aspects of the past and present of racism in Brazil are discussed, such as whitening, mestizaje, and the ideology of racial democracy, and some additional data are presented. This work reflects on and brings to light the reflections of Telles and of other researchers of racism about a future of more equalitarian racial and social relations in Brazil.

Read or purchase the review here.

Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South

University of North Carolina Press
March 1998
382 pages
6.125 x 9.25
8 tables, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-4712-1

Peter W. Bardaglio, Associate Professor of History
Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Winner of the 1996 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians

In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio’s analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

Read the preface here.

The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing

University of Minnesota Press
2006
288 pages
5 7⁄8 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4786-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4786-6
Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4785-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4785-9

Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature
University of Pittsburgh

Challenges conventional thinking about the widely accepted concept of cultural hybridity.

“Hybridity” is a term that has been applied to Latin American politics, literature, and intellectual life for more than a century. During the past two decades, it has figured in—and been transfigured by—the work of prominent postcolonialist writers and thinkers throughout the Americas.

In this pathbreaking work, Joshua Lund offers a thoughtful critique of hybridity by reading contemporary theories of cultural mixing against their historical precursors. The Impure Imagination is the first book to systematically analyze today’s dominant theories in relation to earlier, narrative manifestations of hybridity in Latin American writing, with a particular focus on Mexico and Brazil.

Generally understood as the impurification of standard or canonized forms, hybridity has historically been embraced as a basic marker of Latin American regional identity and as a strategy of resistance to cultural imperialism. Lund contends that Latin American theories and narratives of hybridity have been, and continue to be, underwritten by a structure of colonial power. Here he provides an informed critique and cogent investigation of this connection, its cultural effects, and its political implications. Using the emergence of hybridity as an analytical frame for thinking about culture in the Americas, Lund examines the contributions of influential thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Candido, and many others.

Distinguished by its philosophical grounding and underpinned with case studies, The Impure Imagination employs postcolonial theory and theories of race as it explores Latin American history and culture. The result is an original and interrogative study of hybridity that exposes surprising—and unsettling—similarities with nationalistic discourses.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Stakes of Hybridity
• Part I: Theorizing Hybridity Today
  • 1. Genres Are Not to Be Mixed
  • 2. Erasing Race and the Persistence of Teleology
  • 3. The Ambivalence of Theorizing Hybridity: Coloniality and Anthropology
• Part II: Mexico
  • 4. New Cultural History and the Rise of Mediation
  • 5. Back Toward a Positive Mestizaje
  • 6. They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe
  • 7. Mestizaje and Post-Revolutionary Malaise: Vasconcelos and Azuela
• Part III: Brazil
  • 8. The Brazilian Family
  • 9. On the Myth of Racial Democracy
  • 10. The Iracema-effect in Casa-grande e Senzala
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500-1600

University of Texas Press
2005
6 x 9 in.
391 pp., 20 figures, 11 maps, 2 tables
ISBN: 978-0-292-71276-8

Alida C. Metcalf, Harris Masterson, Jr. Professor of History
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Doña Marina (La Malinche) …Pocahontas …Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as “go-betweens” as Europeans explored and colonized the New World.

In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf’s convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

• A Note on Spelling and Citation
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Go-betweens
• 2. Encounter
• 3. Possession
• 4. Conversion
• 5. Biology
• 6. Slavery
• 7. Resistance
• 8. Power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Adding up preoccupations about color, race in literature

Emory Report
Emory University
1999-02-22
Volume 51, Number 21

The class listed in Emory’s spring course atlas as “The Calculus of Color” might at first sound like an art class on color theory, but instructor Cassandra Jackson intends for her class to explore mulatto figures and miscegenation in 19th and 20th century American literature.

The course takes its title from a chapter in Werner Sollors‘ book, Neither Black Nor White, a thematic exploration of biracial characters in European and American literature.

Jackson said students were drawn to the course for specific reasons. “A number of my students felt as though biracial people are very much a part of American culture and history, yet they hold an invisible space. Personal history also had an influence. A few are biracial or have a biracial parent. The students work hard and are really committed. Many of them feel a personal investment in the class because they see race issues as relevant to their lives.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story

The American Historical Review
Volume 108, Number 1 (February 2003)
pages 84-118

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

There are many ways to expose the mercurial nature of racial classification. Scholars of U.S. history might note, for example, that the category of “mulatto” first appeared in the federal census of 1850 and then disappeared in 1930, or they might discover that immigrants who had not thought of themselves as “black” at home in the Caribbean found themselves classified as such upon passage to the United States. Such episodes serve to unmask the instability of racial systems, yet simply marshaling evidence to prove taxonomies fickle tells only a partial story. In an effort to tell a fuller story about the workings of “race”—by which I mean principally the endeavors of racial categorization and stratification—I focus here on historical actors who crossed geographical boundaries and lived their lives within different racial systems. A vision that accounts for the experiences of sojourners and migrants illuminates the ways in which racial classification shifts across borders and thus deepens arguments about racial construction and malleability.

At the same time, however, the principal argument of this essay moves in a different direction. We tend to think of the fluid and the mutable as less powerful than the rigid and the immutable, thereby equating the exposure of unstable racial categories with an assault on the very construct of race itself. In a pioneering essay in which Barbara J. Fields took a historical analysis of the concept of race as her starting point, she contended that ideologies of race are continually created and verified in daily life. More recently, Ann Laura Stoler has challenged the assumption that an understanding of racial instability can serve to undermine racism, and Thomas C. Holt has called attention to scholars’ “general failure to probe beyond the mantra of social constructedness, to ask what that really might mean in shaping lived experience.” Hilary McD. Beckles affirms that “the analysis of ‘real experience’ and the theorising of ‘constructed representation’ constitute part of the same intellectual project.” Drawing together these theoretical strands, I argue that the scrutiny of day-to-day lives demonstrates not only the mutability of race but also, and with equal force, the abiding power of race in local settings. Neither malleability nor instability, then, necessarily diminishes the potency of race to circumscribe people’s daily lives…

Read the entire article here or here.

Writing in 2010 about the Idea of Racial Identity

The 17th Annual Oxford Conference for the Book (2010-03-04 through 2010-03-06)
2010-03-05, 13:30 – 15:00 EST (Local Time)
Overby Center for Southern Journalism
University of Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi

Ted Ownby, Professor History and Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
University of Mississippi

Bliss Broyard

W. Ralph Eubanks

Danzy Senna