Mixed Race Studies

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

University of Minnesota Press
2010
296 pages
25 b&w photos, 2 tables
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6578-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6577-8

Jean M. O’Brien, (White Earth Ojibwe) Professor of History
University of Minnesota

Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled.

In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.

In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

Facts of Blackness: Brazil is not Quite the United States… and Racial Politics in Brazil?

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 4, Issue 2, 1998
pages 201-234
DOI: 10.1080/13504639851807

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Professor in Ethics
Queen Mary University of London

Studies of racial subordination in Brazil usually stress the puzzling co-existence of racial inequality with Brazil’s self-image as a ‘racial democracy’. Frequently, they identify the absence of racial conflict and a clear white-black distinction as explanations for the low level of black political mobilisation. In doing this, these studies (unreflectedly) take the United Sates as a universal model of racial subordination of which Brazilian difference is a mere variation. What seems to escape these analysts is that the Brazilian construction of race was set against the view that ‘racial differences’ identify distinct groups, a view which still prevails in the United States and in sociological constructions of race. Actually, an analysisof writings on Brazilian subjectivity suggests that the texts which write blackness do so by deploying various modern categories of ‘being’ (race, nation, gender, and class) both in the narratives—which have produced blacks as subordinate subjects in modernity and in the texts which aim to foster black emancipation.

October, 1995, After three years living in the United States, during which time I had followed the unfolding of three episodes which placed race at the centre of the political debate (the L.A. riots, O.J. Simpson’s trial and the Million Man March), I was very excited by the timing of my second trip back home. I would have the opportunity to participate in an event which seemed (finally) to place race at the centre of the political debate in Brazil: the 300th anniversary of the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of the most lasting (one hundred year) community of runaway slaves in Brazil, Quilombo dos Palmares. Over the past 20 years, the black movement has chosen Zumbi as the symbol of a separate identity and has declared 20 November (the supposed date of his death) as the national day of black consciousness.

In 1995, however, Zumbi was at risk of being captured by the dominant racial discourse, as a national hero—as Palmares reconstructed by academics and politicians as an initial experience of racial democracy in Brazil. Throughout the year, city, state and federal administration promoted several events (conferences, parties, and political activities) to celebrate the third centennial of Zumbi’s death. Black movement organisations, on the other hand, seized the opportunity (once again) to denounce the ‘myth of racial democracy’ and the continuing subordination of blacks in Brazilian society. Excited about the…

Read or purchase the article here.

From blanqueamiento to reindigenización: Paradoxes of mestizaje and multiculturalism in contemporary Colombia

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 80, (April 2006) Constructing Ethnic Labels
pages 5-23

Margarita Chaves, Researcher
Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH), Bogotá

Marta Zambrano, Associate Professor of Historical Anthropology
Universidad Nacional Colombia, Bogotá

During the past two decades Latin American projects of nationhood have experienced an unexpected shift towards multiculturalism. This move, accompanied by the reconfiguration of local and translocal ethnicities and constitutional reforms recognizing cultural diversity, has produced a surge of recent and provocative academic research (Gros 2000a; Kymlicka 1996; Van Cott 2000; Wieviorka 1997; Zapata 2001). Earlier, and from a different perspective, the role of ideologies and practices of mestizaje has also provoked sustained scholarly inquiry and political debate. Erstwhile cast within polar approaches that highlighted either the inclusive or the exclusive consequences of hegemonic ideologies of racial mixing, in the past years the debate has shifted focus to include a plurality of discourses and practices.

This article interweaves these two key threads of investigation. We argue that academic discussions about pluralism and multiculturalism in Latin America have paid little attention to mestizaje as a crucial dimension of nation-making projects. Following a critical examination of the pluralist as well as the neoliberal inclination towards ‘la nación mestiza’ linking cultural recognition with rising social inequalities, we examine recent cases of indigenous resurgence and strategies of reindigenización of subaltern groups in Colombia. We explore the current pluralist turn of the Colombian imagined national community to ponder the shifting political and social elements of mestizaje, understood as a multifaceted and conflicting terrain. We argue that while in the recent past mestizaje promised a secure but ambiguous avenue to becoming white (blanqueamiento), it has now become an equally muddled path to becoming indigenous again (reindigenización).

Read the entire article here.

Beyond the Pale: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in the Novels of Harper, Hopkins, Fauset and Larsen

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
December 1996
303 pages

Teresa Christine Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

A thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor Of Philosophy

This dissertation proposes that writers like Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen “talk out both sides” of their mouths, parodying the values of the black bourgeoisie, racialized notions of womanhood, and understandings of racial difference popular at the turn into the twentieth century. Using complex modes of address, these authors have written novels that in all likelihood were read in different directions by their white and African American readerships. I contend that these narratives would have placated their white readership with familiar forms, while simultaneously forging a sense of community with their African American readers in novels of a highly political nature which questioned and subverted definitions of womanhood and “race”. These “tragic mulatta” and “passing” novels, published from 1892 to 1931 are contextualized with an analysis of three cultural efforts to consolidate turn-of-the-century American beliefs regarding race and gender: legal statutes codifying racial identities, theories of racial difference, and notions of gender identity disseminated through the cult of domesticity. Because the mulatto is neither white nor black, her ambivalent identity and experience make parody a significant trope with which these authors interrogate identity. In order to “pass” for “true women” or for white, these mulatto characters utilize and parody the very qualities designed to ensure the “purity” of whiteness and womanhood. This study argues that such parodies access an African American tradition of parodic performance that played to and on white notions of “blackness” and constructions of white identity. Moving from a consideration of such “signifyin(g)” acts as a challenge to gender and racial identities represented by heroines who pass for “true women,” the study concludes with a consideration of how race, as a political category of description, is destabilized through the representation of heroines who choose to pass for white.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: Codifying and Quantifying “Race” in Turn-of-the-Century America
• CHAPTER 2: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in Tum-of-the-Century America: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces
• CHAPTER 3: Policing the Bounds of Race: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
• CHAPTER 4: Transgressions and Excess: Passing as Parodic Performance in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• CONCLUSION: New Trajectories of Self-Definition

Read the entire thesis here.

Passing and the figure of the Europeanized American in Edith Wharton’s fiction

Purdue University
2005
216 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3210795
ISBN: 97805425959510

Jasmina Starcevic

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Jasmina Starcevic In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation traces the evolution of the Europeanized American as a passing figure in five works by Edith Wharton—The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920), The Old Maid (1924), and The Mother’s Recompense (1925). By reading Wharton’s major fiction through the lens of the passing narrative, I show that the Europeanized American emerges as a vehicle of mediation and the expression of the relationship between the cultures of Europe and America, crucial for exploring the issues of gender, class, race and nationality. I argue that Wharton invests the Europeanized American with the characteristics of the passing subject, thus deploying an ostensibly white figure as the trope of racial difference. Stripped of their fitness for self-government, Europeanized Americans figure as undesirable, unfit, or traitorous subjects vying for the social privileges of the white establishment in the face of psychological persecutions, marginalization, and even death. In order to secure acceptance in the white hegemony, the Europeanized American must engage in a form of passing. Unlike Americans of European descent (or European Americans), Europeanized Americans embody “Europeaness” as an indiscernible trait, not simply visible on the surface of the subject’s body. This important distinction allows Wharton to portray Europeanized Americans as culturally and racially more complex than their European or American “cousins.”

The body of historical and theoretical work on passing produced by prominent social, political, literary and cultural theorists provides the theoretical framework for my analysis of passing in Wharton’s fiction. In Wharton’s major works, passing denotes both psychological and performative aspects of the struggle to acquire social visibility and secure place within the national cultural matrix, and it is directly related to the production of whiteness and American identity. This study establishes the Europeanized American as a passing figure and explores the significance of the figure in Wharton’s major works.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION: Passing in Edith Wharton’s Fiction
• CHAPTER ONE: Passing Through the House of Mirth: The Figure of the Europeanized American in Wharton’s Early Fiction
• CHAPTER TWO: The “Cool Security” of Class: Cross-Racial Theater and Upward Mobility in The Custom of the Country
• CHAPTER THREE: Marriage, Race, and Nation: Passing in The Age of Innocence
• CHAPTER FOUR: Old World Mothers and New World Daughters: Motherhood and Passing in The Old Maid and The Mother’s Recompense
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• VITA

Purchase the dissertation here.

Colonial Peru, the Caste System, and the “Purity” of Blood

South Americana: The History and Culture of the World’s Most Exotic Continent
2012-03-20

David Gaughran

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat’s blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy—Robert Lacey, Aristocrats
 
The historical Spanish obsession with the purity of blood evolved into an elaborate caste system which reached its apogee with the colonization of South America and the subsequent intermingling of settlers with both South American Indians and imported African slaves, all of whose mixed offspring needed a separate classification, of course.
 
It was an intricate system—designed to pit sections of society against each other and play on the subsequent fear of overthrow by the lower classes, so that Spain could continue to exert its top-down control. But it also signified the relative social importance of the caste members, usually in a pejorative sense, meaning that only certain rights, occupations, and institutions were open to them.
 
If you had been born in Spain, then you automatically qualified as a member of the elite. If you had been born in South America, but your bloodline was “pure” then you were accorded privileged status, but of the second order, and the most influential posts were out of reach. However, if your ancestors had the temerity to dally with the Indians or blacks, then a complicated algorithm was brought to bear….

…Caste membership didn’t simply determine what occupation you could hold, but also whether you could bear arms, attend university, or even the clothes you were allowed wear…

Read the entire article here.

The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” Address, March 18, 2008

Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2009
pp. 167-194
DOI: 10.1353/rap.0.0101

David A. Frank, Professor of Rhetoric
Robert D. Clark Honors College
University of Oregon

Barack Obama’s address of March 18, 2008, sought to quell the controversy sparked by YouTube clips of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ, condemning values and actions of the United States government. In this address, Obama crosses over the color line with a rhetorical strategy designed to preserve his viability as a presidential candidate and in so doing, delivered a rhetorical masterpiece that advances the cause of racial dialogue and rapprochement. Because of his mixed racial heritage, he could bring perceptions and misperceptions in black and white “hush harbors” into the light of critical reason. The address succeeds, I argue, because Obama sounds the prophetic voice of Africentric theology that merges the Jewish and Christian faith traditions with African American experience, assumes theological consilience (that different religious traditions share a commitment to caring for others), and enacts the rhetorical counterpart to Levinas’s philosophy featuring the “face of the other.”

The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Campaign

SUNY Press
September 2010
300 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 1-4384-3659-9; ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3659-3
eBook SBN10: 1-4384-3661-0; ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3661-6

Edited by:

Heather E. Harris, Associate Professor of Business Communication
Stevenson University, Stevenson, Maryland

Kimberly R. Moffitt, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Catherine R. Squires, John and Elizabeth Bates Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity, and Equality
University of Minnesota

Timely, multidisciplinary analysis of Obama’s presidential campaign, its context, and its impact.

November 4, 2008 ushered in a historic moment: Illinois Senator Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States of America. In The Obama Effect, editors Heather E. Harris, Kimberly R. Moffitt, and Catherine R. Squires bring together works that place Barack Obama’s candidacy and victory in the context of the American experience with race and the media. Following Obama’s victory, optimists claimed that the campaign signaled the arrival of an era of postracism and postfeminism in the United States. This collection of essays, all presented at a national conference to discuss the meaning and impact of the nomination of the first presidential candidate of African descent, remind the reader that reaching a point in U.S. history where a biracial man could be deemed “electable” is part of a still-ongoing struggle. It resists the temptation to dismiss the uncertainty, hope, and fear that characterized the events and discourse of the two-year primary and general election cycle and brings together multidisciplinary approaches to assessing “the Obama effect” on public discourse and participation. This volume provides readers with a means for recalling and mapping out the enduring issues that erupted during the campaign—issues that will continue to shape how our society views itself and President Obama in the coming years.

(W)rites of passing: The performance of identity in fiction and personal narratives

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
February 2006
108 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3212756
ISBN: 9780542630743

Tracy L. Vaughn

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2006 Department of English

In my dissertation, “(W)rites of Passing: The Performance of Identity in Fiction and Personal Narratives,” I explore the literary, historical, psychological and cultural dimensions of passing, particularly as it relates to race and class. Through the works of Arnold van Gennep, Stephen Greenblatt, and Victor Turner, I have discovered intriguing comparisons between the forms of “class-passing” presented in 16th and18 th century British novels with 20th and 21st century “race passing” novels.

In much of my work on race passing and African American literature, I argue that while racial passing may have brought certain socio-economic benefits to those who passed (whether temporarily or permanently,) it also invariably forced them to engage in what I would describe as exercises of restraint. These exercises of restraint might manifest themselves in various forms of cultural impotency ranging from a loss and/or repression of emotional expressivity to a more extreme decision to be voluntarily childless—a forced barrenness, if you will. One of the main questions my research attempts to answer is: “Does the act of passing, whether it be through race or class, reinforce the very hierarchy it seems to subvert?” Also, if in fact race and/or class are identities that are performative, then what role does the audience play in permitting individuals to pass? In an attempt to answer these and other questions, I apply performance theory as a lens to provide a clearer and perhaps alternative perspective to the ways in which passing is both implicit (through the individual’s choice to pass) and complicit (through the audience’s suspension of disbelief.) My research questions how much responsibility the audience carries in the passing individual’s effort to pass successfully. At the same time, I discuss how the performance element of improvisation is absolutely necessary in the process and act of passing. What I have defined as the “process of passing” is a variation of Arnold van Gennep’s Rites de Passage : a performance ritual with “distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups [and individuals] become adjusted to internal changes, and adopt them to their external environment.” Van Gennep’s three phases of separation, transition and incorporation that define a rite of passage serve as the foundation of my definition of the process of passing.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Daniel Sharfstein wins 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

Vanderbilt Law School News
Vanderbilt University
2012-03-16

Daniel Sharfstein, associate professor of law, has won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for his sensitive account of the fine line people of mixed race have tread in the United States since the nation’s beginning, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011).
 
“[The Invisible Line] makes real the fact that, not so long ago, American citizens were forced into hiding their lineage and identity just to live free in this democracy, the perils and sense of loss, no matter which road they chose, and the price being paid even to this day by their descendants, and by extension, all of us,” the judges said in a press release issued by Columbia and Harvard universities.
 
The J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, established in 1998 in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist J. Anthony Lukas, is co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognizes excellence in nonfiction that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of its namesake, J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. Sharfstein will receive the award prize of $10,000 on May 1, 2012, at a ceremony at Harvard University.

In The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, Sharfstein chronicles the history of three African American families who crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities, starting in the 17th century. The book is a result of Sharfstein’s research on the legal history of race in the United States and on dozens of families that, for social, economic, safety and other reasons, chose to change their racial identity and create new lives. He found court and government records, personal letters and other archives that helped paint vivid pictures of these Americans and document their migration across the racial divide…

Read the entire new release here.