Mixed Race Studies

Re-articulating the New Mestiza

Journal of International Women’s Studies
Vol 12, #2 (March 2011)
Special Issue: Winning and Short-listed Entries from the 2009 Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Annual Student Essay Competition
pages 61-74

Zalfa Feghali
University of Nottingham

This essay provides an overview, critique, and the beginning of a refiguration of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the new mestiza as set out in her seminal 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. By examining both Anzaldúa’s precursors and the articulations of hybrid identities of her contemporaries, this essay depicts the complex dynamic that characterizes the mestiza’s need to develop, beyond borders and attempts to fashion a more contemporary, transnational mestiza. Using the writing and criticism of Françoise Lionnet alongside Anzaldúa’s and other critics, and utilizing postcolonial and feminist theories, this essay hopes to provide an alternative articulation to conventional understandings of hybridity and mestizaje in contemporary thought.

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to provide an overview, a critique, and the beginning of a refiguration of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the new mestiza. Anzaldúa’s mestiza exists in borderlands, and is “neither hispana india negra española / ni gabacha;”1 rather, she is “mestiza, mulata, half-breed / caught in the crossfire between camps / while carrying all five races on [her] back / not knowing which side to turn to, run from” (Borderlands/La Frontera 216). However, according to Anzaldúa, and despite the difficulties engendered by her very existence, the mestiza is also a figure of enormous potential, as her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all minority communities in order to achieve social and political change. Anzaldúa locates the new mestiza consciousness at a site that, as Françoise Lionnet suggests, “is not a territory staked out by exclusionary practices” (“The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage” 5).

Although there are clear precursors to Anzaldúa’s work, one of which I discuss at length below, many critics and thinkers choose her work to engage with. This has to do with her unique place in the “canon” of Chicana/Mexican American writing—what she calls the “Moveimento Macha.” Writing from the position(s) of queer Chicana womanhood, code-switching between English and Spanish, and mixing poetry and prose, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, at the time of publication in 1987, represented an important break from the mainly male-dominated pool of “traditional” Chicano writers and inspired a generation of women, Chicana and non-Chicana alike, to write about their experiences as border-crossers with hybrid identities. Anzaldúa’s work remains popular because it retains much of its original subversive potential, its cross-disciplinarity providing new and varied methodologies to analyze borders. In many ways, it has also played an important role in refocusing American studies as a transnational discipline. In her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin identified Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as epitomizing the transnational nature of American studies, and credited her work for opening up a space for “American studies scholars [to] increasingly recognize that understanding requires looking beyond the nation‟s borders, and understanding how the nation is seen from vantage points beyond its borders” (“Crossroads of Cultures” 20)…

…A “Cosmic Race”

In his original essay of 1925, Vasconcelos lauds the people inhabiting the area of Mexico for their mestizo/a culture, which, as Rafael Pérez-Torres has put it, “locates itself within a complex third space neither Mexican nor American but in a transnational space of both potential and restraint” (“Alternate Geographies and the Melancholy of Mestizaje” 322). In its traditional meaning, mestizaje “reflects a simultaneously racial, sexual, and national memory, an embodiment of colonization and conquest” (Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas 9). In fact, one of the reasons that Jose Vasconcelos won popular acclaim for his theories was the attractiveness of the idea that an entire population, which literally embodies a history of violence, can forge an identity that moved beyond such a violent history—and flourish. Anzaldúa herself refers to this very specific history in her hope that the emergence of the new mestiza will bring an end to rape, violence, and war.

For the purposes of his essay, Vasconcelos sees this group as the first stage in the creation of a new, cosmic race that will eventually take on characteristics and subsume genetic streams from all the races on earth. This cosmic race will take on the best or most desirable traits from each respective race. Eventually, according to Vasconcelos, the lines between the “original” races will blur to the point that any one individual’s “racial heritage” would be completely indistinguishable from another‟s, thus becoming the ultimate mestizo/a (something akin what critics would now call a “post-ethnic” or “post-racial” world). This emphasis on the special character and potential of the mestiza/o Mexican subject has made Vasconcelos‟ theory very attractive to Mexican and Chicano/a activists, particularly nationalists. As many Chicano/a activists have done, Anzaldúa uses a narrow interpretation of Vasconcelos’ essay in the hope of finding a solid theoretical grounding for her own project. However, this has brought her much criticism, as Vasconcelos’ theory has been rigorously undermined. As Didier Jaén puts it:

It is true that mestizaje is one of the central concepts of the Vasconcelos essay, but of course, it is also clear that the racial mixture Vasconcelos refers to is much wider, much more encompassing, than what can be understood by the mestizaje of the Mexican or Chicano…But even if we expand the concept of mestizaje to include all other races, this biological mixture would not fulfill what Vasconcelos expresses with the idea of the Cosmic race (“Introduction” xvi).

Clearly, Vasconcelos’ utopian vision of mestizaje leading to a new, privileged subject that lives in a race-less world does not hold up theoretically or pragmatically. For example, he clearly delineates the “four major races of the world” before envisioning a fifth, cosmic race which embraces the four “original” races of the world. Despite the fact that the original text was written in 1925 and must be read with one eye trained on that time’s theoretical and scientific reach, it is problematic in the way it combines scientific language and terms with a more mystical outlook (something that is echoed in Anzaldúa‟s work, albeit for a different purpose). It thus presents itself as scientific fact and knowledge while in fact holding little or no solid scientific basis.

My main objection to Vasconcelos’ analysis comes from the implications of his own underlying premise, namely, that there are four races of humans: the Black, the Indian (as in American native), the Mongol, and the White. Out of these four races, Vasconcelos imagines that the fifth, mestizo, cosmic race will resemble a symphony:

Voices that bring accents from Atlantis; depths contained in the pupil of the red man, who knew so much, so many thousand years ago, but now seems to have forgotten everything. His soul resembles the old Mayan cenote of green waters, laying deep and still…This infinite quietude is stirred with the drop put in our blood by the Black, eager for sensual joy, intoxicated with dances and unbridled lust…There also appears the Mongol, with the mystery of his slanted eyes that see everything according to a strange angle…The clear mind of the White, that resembles his skin and his dreams, also intervenes…

Clearly Vasconcelos’ theory is based on fundamental racism on his part. Yet despite having borne heavy criticism for his theory, Vasconcelos’ essay was reprinted in 1948 and became a rallying point for Chicano activist and Mexican nationalist movements. In addition to Vasconcelos’ popularity as an alternative Mexican historian, this is most likely why Anzaldúa espouses his theory. However, as I plan to show, Anzaldúa’s work also falls into many of the same traps as Vasconcelos’. It has been important to look at Vasconcelos’ work in such depth as I will show that Anzaldúa’s work, while in many ways vastly different, may have the effect of re-inscribing Vasconcelos’ racism…

Read the entire article here.

Mistaken identity

The Boston Globe
2005-02-20

Holly Jackson

What if a novelist celebrated as a pioneer of African-American women’s literature turned out not to be black at all?

IN THE LATE 1980s, scholars of African-American studies carried out the most impressive American literary recovery project to date, excavating and reprinting the works of numerous unjustly forgotten African-American writers. The most ambitious of these efforts was Oxford University Press’s 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, published in 1988 under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr., currently the chair of Harvard’s department of African and African American Studies.

Here at last, Gates explained in his foreword, were the literary ancestors of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. With one exception, all these works had been previously out of print, making it difficult for scholars to track down copies. In fact, it was Gates’ discovery of one such ”lost” novel, ”Four Girls At Cottage City” (1895) by Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, that prompted him to put these neglected texts back into print-”in part,” he wrote, ”so that I could read them myself.”

In the following decade, scholarship on black women’s fiction exploded alongside popular interest in the work of contemporary African-American writers. In particular, the flourishing of black literature in the 1890s-the decade that saw Jim Crow become federal law and witnessed the highest number of lynchings in American history-has remained a fruitful area of scholarly inquiry. For African-American writers of that period, the creation of a literary tradition was a political imperative. As Pauline Hopkins wrote in 1900, ”We must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history.”

But despite continual scholarly interest in Kelley-Hawkins as an important voice of the period, the woman who Gates credits with inspiring the Schomburg Library has never fit comfortably within the African-American canon. Most puzzling has been the apparent whiteness of her characters, who are repeatedly described with blue eyes and skin as white as ”pure” or ”driven” snow-a conundrum that critics have largely sidestepped by arguing that these women would have been understood as ”white mulattos,” or very light-skinned women of color, by Kelley-Hawkins’s original audience of black readers. Furthermore, while the novels of contemporaries like Frances E.W. Harper or Pauline Hopkins are explicitly concerned with racial uplift and protest, ”Four Girls at Cottage City” and ”Megda” follow a group of adolescent female friends in eastern Massachusetts from carefree youth through Christian conversion to appropriate wifehood, with no mention of the difficulties facing black women.

Meanwhile, Kelley-Hawkins herself remained a complete historical cipher. While she had been identified as an African-American writer as early as the 1970s, when her first novel, ”Megda,” was mentioned in several reference works, the most basic facts of her life-down to the date and place of her birth-were totally unknown.

As it turns out, these novels, and their author, are far more anomalous than scholars have realized. Judging from archival documents that I have recently uncovered, Kelley-Hawkins does not appear to have been African-American at all…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto: an unspeakable concept

Working Papers on the Web
Department of English Studies at Sheffield Hallam University
Volume 5 (September 2003) (Racial Disciplines)
ISSN: 1478-3703

Julian Murphet, Senior Lecturer of English
The University of Sydney

The discourse of race has necessarily produced its own supplements; and there has been no more intriguing categorical supplement to racial discourse than that of the ‘mulatto’. In this essay, I explore some of the meanings of this supplement as it was produced, accepted, and then retracted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—first as a legalistic and sociological category, and second as an ideological signifier in the domain of fictional and autobiographical literary genres.

Shifting and stuttering between a ‘both/and’ and a ‘neither/nor’ binary logic of racial identification, the mulatto is a peculiarly homeless signifier that hesitates in the no-man’s-land between monolithic racial alternatives and casts an immanent doubt upon both their houses. As early as the 1910s, meditation on the mulatto would precipitate speculation that, far from being an isolated ‘problem’, the ‘man of mixed blood’ was the springboard of societal progress: ‘the advance of civilization is dependent upon this process of racial intermixture’, which could be spotted everywhere across Europe and the rest of the world. As racial discourse has evolved in a myriad of directions and forms according to the structures of the political and sexual economies in which it operates, this supplement has of course known various, often incompatible applications. Nowhere, perhaps, has the supplement been as ‘dangerous’ as in the USA, for reasons, and with results, which will be discussed in this essay. Nevertheless, if there is a consensus of opinion about this supplement today, it would seem to be that it is unspeakable. The ‘strategic essentialisms’ employed by the various Black peoples since the 1960s in the name of civil and human rights have finally settled all doubts in favour of a performative ‘one drop of blood’ rule whose essentialist origins are, precisely, those of the ultra-racist American South. As a recent article on the subject in Australia has put it, ‘When “self-identification” was introduced in the early 1970s as the means by which Aboriginality would be determined, it was a repudiation of all those racist notions of half-caste, quarter-caste, and “quadroon” which had been used to deny indigenous people their culture, their land and their children … [P]eople could claim Aboriginality if they fitted three criteria: indigenous ancestry, self-identification and community acceptance.’  The presumptions here are as perplexing as they are inescapable: the notion of the ‘mulatto’ or ‘half-caste’ is a racist one, that has been superseded by a new performative identity which nonetheless contains an appeal to a dualistically conceived ancestry. There are Aborigines and there are white people, and this is notracist. Only the supplement is.

The unspeakableness of ‘mulatto’ today is, of course, an index of its historicity—our retrospective distaste for it springing from its contamination by an essentialist doctrine of races, from which we have emerged into the broad light of ‘culturalist’ day. Any such transcendence of nineteenth century racialism, which invariably decodes for us as racism, is surely a boon of the great modern revolutions in ethnography, biology and social science. What is less clear, however, is how, in the context of a specifically American state-racism, this concept in particular once helped to open a loophole in the dominant ideologies of racial identity, and uniquely contributed to the development of our very ‘culturalist’ paradigm of race; and how, in that same context, the mulatto has always been unspeakable anyway: a dirty secret or scandalous aporia to be resolved back into the imperturbable binarism of black and white (which is rather a different binary from that of Negro and Caucasian)…

Read the entire article here.

Plessy and Ferguson unveil plaque today marking their ancestors’ actions

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2009-02-11

Katy Reckdahl

Today, Plessy versus Ferguson becomes Plessy and Ferguson, when descendants of opposing parties in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court segregation case stand together to unveil a plaque at the former site of the Press Street Railroad Yards.

Standing behind Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson will be a large group of students, scholars, officials and activists who worked for years to honor the site where in 1892, Tremé shoemaker Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was arrested for sitting in a railway car reserved for white people.

People often think that his ancestor held some responsibility for the legalized segregation known as “separate but equal, ” said Keith Plessy, 52, a longtime New Orleans hotel bellman whose great-grandfather was Homer Plessy’s first cousin. In actuality, Homer Plessy boarded that train as part of a carefully orchestrated effort to create a civil-rights test case, to fight the proliferation of segregationist laws in the South…

…Plessy, born in 1863 on St. Patrick’s Day, grew up at a time when black people in New Orleans could marry whomever they chose, sit in any streetcar seat, and attend integrated schools, Medley said. But as an adult, those gains from the Reconstruction era eroded.
 
On any other day in 1892, Plessy could have ridden in the car restricted to white passengers without notice. According to the parlance of the time, he was classified “7/8 white.”
 
In order to pose a clear test to the state’s 1890 separate-car law, the Citizens’ Committee in advance notified the railroad—which had opposed the law because it required adding more cars to its trains.
 
On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket for the commuter train that ran to Covington, sat down in the car for white riders only and the conductor asked whether he was a colored man, Medley said. The committee also hired a private detective with arrest powers to take Plessy off the train at Press and Royal streets, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state’s separate-car law.
 
Everything the committee plotted went as planned—except for the final court decision, in 1896. By then the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court had gained a more segregationist tilt, and the committee knew it would likely lose. But it chose to press the cause anyway, Medley said. “It was a matter of honor for them, that they fight this to the very end.”…

…”You don’t know American history until you know Louisiana history, ” Plessy said…

Read the entire article here.

Bill Moyers interview with Patricial Willilams and Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Bill Moyers Journal
2009-01-23

Bill Moyers, Host

Patricia Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia University

Melissa Harris-Lacewell (Harris-Perry), Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

Bill Moyers sits down with Columbia law professor and Nation columnist Patricia Williams and Princeton politics and African American studies professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell about the significance of this milestone and what it means for the future.

BILL MOYERS: A year and a half ago Melissa Harris-Lacewell sat right here and told me she thought Barack Obama could not be elected president in 2008. This week she attended his inauguration. I’m eager to hear her reaction.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She’s the author of “Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought”.

Patricia Williams is back, too. She teaches law at Columbia University, writes “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” column in “The Nation” magazine, and is the author of “The Alchemy of Race and Rights”. It’s good to see you both back.

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Thanks.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Thanks, great to be here.

BILL MOYERS: You did say, sitting right there — Obama can’t win.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: I did. And probably the worst part was I suggested I thought he’d be a great vice president. And in my mind I was thinking John Edwards would be at the top of the ticket. So this is maybe more than anything why political scientists don’t run actual political campaigns. I mean, it has been quite an electoral season.

BILL MOYERS: So what were you thinking on Tuesday?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: I suppose the greatest thought I was having as I was watching the inauguration of Barack Obama was my sense that I didn’t even know I wanted a black president. I wasn’t particularly attached to the idea of an African American in the White House. It seemed just sort of symbolic. And yet I was moved at a very profound level about how this made me feel connected to my country in a way that I’d never fully felt connected before. It was an astonishing feeling.

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: But I think this was a very particular, remarkable moment because it came on the tail end of a very freighted, complicated, and I think unhappy eight years. And so I think a lot of people who did not necessarily even support the Democratic Party voted for Obama or celebrated his inauguration because the joy in it was infectious. And the sense of improvement, the sense of an opportunity for global recognition, not just domestic recognition, was something that, just spread like wildfire…

…PATRICIA WILLIAMS: I do think that we need to quell some of the expectations that, now that he is president, you know, bluebirds have suddenly come into, you know, that butterflies are hatching all over the country. It is, we still have difficulty with, for example, the vocabulary of race that I think is still very much confining how we see Barack Obama. Now, again, that may change-

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Well, I think that he is, on the one hand, our first African American president. And some people call him our first bi-racial president.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Some people say that he is, or really consider him still much more acceptable because he has a white parent. I think that part of that internecine warfare within the black community based on skin color.

I think one of the freighted problems within the black community with hearing words like “bi-racial” is that, you know, African Americans have always been multi-racial. We are, I mean, you know, since slavery, at least bi-racial. And so that some of that vocabulary within the black community I think evokes images of half-breed, quadroon, mulatto, the kind of color coded, tragic mulatto conversation that induces a kind of hierarchy. And I think that that’s going to be part of a new American vocabulary in dealing with that unconscious level of distinction.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think about that?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, so for me I suppose the notion of Barack Obama as our first bi-racial president is troubling. And it’s troubling in part because, as you point out, African Americans have always been a multi-racial people, or at least for all of contemporary American history they have been a multi-racial people. But the other thing is that race is not simply about biology.

Race is, of course, socially and legally constructed. And at every point in American history Barack Obama would have been in the category of black. He would have been enslaveable under the slave codes. He would have been Jim Crowed in the context of the Jim Crow South.

Homer Plessy, who is the litigate in the Plessy v. Ferguson, which establishes separate but equal, the legal code that we think of the civil rights movement as finally breaking open, was so visibly or physiologically white that he had to go to the conductor on the train and tell him, “I’m passing the color line here. I’m breaking the color line. You need to arrest me.”

So all of the moments of American racial political history hinge right around a space where multi-racial, sometimes much more sort of in appearance white-black people, have been a part of the story. So it’s very hard for me to imagine that now, at the culmination of one part of the black political story, we would start to break that off and assign it to a group that simply does not exist as a matter of law, the bi-racial group.

I suppose what I find exciting about the upfrontness about Barack Obama’s patchwork, racial identity is that it allows him to be empowering to many different kinds of people. But at the same time, to take away that this is a particular moment of ordinary black folks on the ground who came to D.C. in numbers like nothing I’ve ever seen, who stood there in the cold.

That is the accomplishment and the achievement of ordinary black folks on the ground as voters, as those who survived the Jim Crow South. So I just can’t take Barack away from us. We need him…

Watch the video clip here. Read the transcript here.

Race, Ethnicity, and Difference in a Contemporary Carioca Pop Music Scene

Diagonal: Journal of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music
Volume 6 (2010) [Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Brazilian Music (c1600-Present)]
16 pages

Frederick Moehn, Assistant Professor of Music; Affiliate, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

Parts of this paper are from my book-in-progress, tentatively titled “Chameleon in a Mirror: Essays on Sound and Society in a Brazilian Popular Music Scene”, for Duke University Press.

In my research on popular music making in Brazil, primarily in Rio de Janeiro and largely among middle-class subjects, one of the things I have sought to analyze is how individuals conceptualize mixture, understood on a variety of levels but always in relation to the dominant discourse of national identity in the country. As you all know, this is a discourse which holds that Brazil’s history of miscegenation corresponds to a natural facility with cultural mixing. Moreover, it is widely presumed that this purported capacity is most fabulously in evidence in the sphere of music making. There exists a comfortable fit between celebratory discourses of national identity as rooted in miscigenação, on the one hand, and the way many contemporary Brazilian musicians—not just in Rio de Janeiro but generally in urban areas—talk about their practice, on the other. Such talk, in turn, has real bearing on musical sound as mixture becomes almost an imperative in some scenes: to make “Brazilian” music, following this logic, is to mix (and not to mix risks seeming rather un-Brazilian, or at least overly traditionalist). What theoretical tools can we bring to bear on this naturalized and seemingly self-evident logic of cultural production, interpretation, and national identity? In this paper I will examine a variety of aspects of these dynamics in an effort to reflect on our central theme of rethinking race and ethnicity in Brazilian music…

…Hybridity theory and difference

Let me return for a moment to the question of mixture and its association with racial contact. In Brazil, of course, we also encounter the influential modernist theory of cultural cannibalism, or anthropophagy, as a specifically artistic discourse about difference, appropriation and recombination, arising around the same time as race mixture begins to be positively valued in debates over national identity; that is, the 1920s and 30s. These modernist tendencies predate the emergence of the hybridity theory that arose in the postmodern postcolonialism of the 1980s and 1990s. As Joshua Lund has written, the resurgence of hybridity in the human sciences during these later decades “was met with the incredulous response in Latin Americanist circles that can be summed up by the question ‘So what else is new?’“ Hybridity, suddenly the fashionable cultural theory, “had always been a generic mark of Latin America’s geocultural singularity.”…

Read the entire article here.

Petitioning subjects: miscegenation in Okinawa from 1945 to 1952 and the crisis of sovereignty

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Volume 11, Issue 3 (2010)
pages 355-374
DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2010.484172

Annmaria Shimabuku, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
University of California, Riverside

This paper tells a story about miscegenation between US military personnel and Okinawan women from 1945-1952, which includes sexual violence, the establishment of ‘entertainment districts,’ and the emergence of international marriage. Whereas this history has been mobilized by leftists as a truth-weapon in the struggle for political sovereignty from the US military, this paper takes an explicitly genealogical approach. Drawing on Foucault’s work on biopower, this paper shows how Okinawans were transformed into ‘petitioning subject’—subjects that negotiated the sexual exploitation of their bodies in tandem with the radically changing relationship between their bodies and the territory.

Read or purchase the article here.

For the first time, blacks outnumber whites in Brazil

Miami Herald
2011-05-24

Taylor Barnes, Special to the Miami Herald

Brazilians are no longer reluctant to admit being black or ‘pardo,’ experts said.

RIO DE JANEIRO—In the past decade, famously mixed-race Brazilians either became prouder of their African roots, savvier with public policies benefiting people of color or are simply more often darker skinned , depending on how you read the much-debated new analysis of the census here.

A recently released 2010 survey showed that Brazil became for the first time a “majority minority” nation, meaning less than half the population now identifies as white.
 
Every minority racial group—officially, “black,” “pardo” (mixed), “yellow” and “indigenous”—grew in absolute numbers since 2000. “White” was the only group that shrank in both absolute numbers and percentage, becoming 48 percent of the population from 53 percent 10 years ago.

Experts say the shift reflects a growing comfort in not calling oneself white in order to prosper in Brazil and underscores the growing influence of popular culture. Paula Miranda-Ribeiro, a demographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, said another factor was the increase in bi-racial unions with mixed-race kids.

While Americans look at race as a question of origin, Brazilians largely go by appearance, so much so that the children of the same parents could mark different census categories, she said…

…Activists and artists here say they’ve seen a greater mobilization for mixed-race Brazilians to call themselves black or pardo in recent years.

“The phenomenon I perceive are people getting out of that pressure to whiten themselves, and assuming their blackness,” says visual artist Rosana Paulino, whose doctoral work at the University of São Paulo focused on the representation of blacks in the arts.
 
She sees a rising self-esteem on the part of mixed-race Brazilians who stop using middle-ground terms like “moreninho” (“a little tan”) or “marrom-bombom” (“brown chocolate”) and simply call themselves black…

Read the entire article here.

Hidden in plain sight: defying juridical racialization in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Volume 1, Issue 4 (2004)
Pages 313-334
DOI: 10.1080/1479142042000270458

Nadine Ehlers, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University

This article examines the intersectionality of law and race to argue that law, in its broadest understanding, has played a pivotal role in the performative constitution of racial subjects. This disciplinary regulation, which has operated to “fix” an individual within a racial status under law, has augmented the production of the individual as a raced subject. An analysis of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, however, illuminates that a defiance of racial performative dictates can render “race” hidden in plain sight. This rendering represents an escape from the regulatory mechanisms of law, posing a counter-power that threatens to disturb hegemonic whiteness.

…By prohibiting inter-racial sex and marriage, and generating and enforcing racial classification based on fractions of “blood,” racial purity laws served to chart and maintain racial boundaries in order to “keep” whiteness “pure.” Peggy Pascoe has noted that this racial separation was established and maintained through recourse to an alleged “truth” that could be established in “[g]enealogy, appearance, [social]claims to identity, or that mystical quality ‘blood’.” All such efforts, however, positioned the body as that which articulated this racial ontology. As more than merely the mapping of racial peripheries, I argue that these laws provided two primary mechanisms that operated in tandem to discipline and, subsequently, racialize bodies. These efforts worked at one level to regulate the production of race in that these attempted to patrol what kinds of racial subjects were produced (in a literal capacity) through discursive definition. On a second level, these laws have sought to regulate the take-up of race; that is, they have governed the manner in which racial subjects can come to operate in the world. Put another way, law can be seen to generate “knowledge” pertaining to the meaning of supposedly disparate bodies and,in attaching this meaning to the corporeal, has contributed (1) to what kinds of racial subjectivities emerge and (2) to the regulation of “appropriate” articulations of racial subjectivity based on the designation of racial status. Ultimately, this juridical policing of “racial borders” has rendered “race” a literal and figurative vehicle of containment. This containment has been executed through constraining the possible interpretations and articulations of racial subject-hood—constraints that have functioned to call into being or produce the very racial subjects that legislation and legal judgments have claimed only to classify and keep separate…

Read or purchase the article here.

Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawai’i

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2  (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 133-153
DOI: 110.1080/0031322X.2011.563159

Jonathan Y. Okamura, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of Hawai’i

Okamura reviews the 2008 US presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama as a ‘post-racial candidate’ in terms of two different meanings of ‘post-racialism’, namely, colour blindness and multiculturalism. He also discusses his campaign and election from the perspective of Asian America and Hawai’i given that Obama has been claimed as ‘the first Asian American president’ and as a ‘local’ person from Hawai’i where he was born and spent most of his youth. In both cases, Obama has been accorded these racialized identities primarily because of particular cultural values he espouses and cultural practices he engages in that facilitate his seeming transcendence of racial boundaries and categories generally demarcated by phenotype and ancestry. Okamura contends that proclaiming Obama as an honorary Asian American and as a local from Hawai’i inadvertently lends support to the post-racial America thesis and its false assertion of the declining significance of race: first, by reinforcing the ‘model minority’ stereotype of Asian Americans and, second, by affirming the widespread view of Hawai’i as a model of multiculturalism.

Read or purchase the article here.