Mixed Race Studies

La Mulata: Cuba’s National Symbol

Focus Anthropology: A Publication of Undergraduate Research
Issue IV: 2004-2005
20 pages

Tamara Kneese
Kenyon College

This essay provides a discourse analysis of la mulata as an ambivalent symbol of Cuban national identity. In many ways, la mulata is representative of Cuba’s sexual, racial, and economic hierarchies. On the one hand, la mulata is a living emblem of Cuba’s histories with imperialism and slavery, mirroring Cuba’s exploitation by white male foreigners. On the other hand, la mulata is portrayed as a manifestation of Cuba’s tenacity and diversity, particularly during the Special Period when jineteras, who were often characterized as mulatas, drew tourists and capital to Cuba.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Sugar, Sex, and Marriage
U.S. Tourism, Part I
U.S. Tourism Part II –The Special Period
Images of the Mulata in Brazil and in Cuban-American Consciousness
Conclusions
Appendix
References
Abstract

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Puerto Rican Phenotype: Understanding Its Historical Underpinnings and Psychological Associations

Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
(2008)
Vol. 30, No. 2
pages 161-180
DOI: 10.1177/0739986307313116

Irene López, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Kenyon College

The following is a historically informed review of Puerto Rican phenotype. Geared toward educating psychologists, this review discusses how various psychological issues associated with phenotype may have arisen as a result of historical legacies and policies associated with race and racial mixing. It discusses how these policies used various markers to demarcate an “authentic” Puerto Rican identity, and how we continue to reference these variables when defining Puerto Rican identity, despite the fact that identity is contextual and fluid. In reviewing the historical underpinnings and contextual nature of phenotype, it is hoped that the reader will gain a greater appreciation of the role of phenotype in the lives of Puerto Ricans and understand how phenotype, and, most importantly, historical trauma can be related to a host of psychological concerns.

Multiculturalism in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru

Race & Class
(2008)
Vol. 49, No. 4
pages 1-21
DOI: 10.1177/0306396808089284

Felipe Arocena (farocena@fcs.edu.uy), Professor of Sociology
Universidad de la República-Uruguay

The different strategies of resistance deployed by discriminated ethnic groups in Brazil, Peru and Bolivia are analysed here. In Brazil, Afro movements and indigenous populations are increasingly fighting against discrimination and developing their cultural identities, while demystifying the idea of Brazil’s national identity as a racial democracy. In Peru and Bolivia, indigenous populations are challenging the generally accepted idea of integration through miscegenation (racial mixing). Assimilation through race-mixing has been the apparent solution in most Latin American countries since the building of the nation states. Its positive side is that a peaceful interethnic relationship has been constructed but its negative side, stressed in recent multicultural strategies, is that different ethnicities and cultures have been accepted only as parts of this intermingling and rarely recognised as the targets of discrimination.

Sab and Autobiography

University of Texas Press
1993
185 pages
6 x 9 in.
ISBN: 978-0-292-70442-8

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga
Translated and introduced by Nina M. Scott

Eleven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin fanned the fires of abolition in North America, an aristocratic Cuban woman told an impassioned story of the fatal love of a mulatto slave for his white owner’s daughter. So controversial was Sab’s theme of miscegenation and its parallel between the powerlessness and enslavement of blacks and the economic and matrimonial subservience of women that the book was not published in Cuba until 1914, seventy-three years after its original 1841 publication in Spain.

Also included in the volume is Avellaneda’s Autobiography (1839), whose portrait of an intelligent, flamboyant woman struggling against the restrictions of her era amplifies the novel’s exploration of the patriarchal oppression of minorities and women.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Autobiography of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Sab
Notes
Works Cited

Read an excerpt here.

Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific

University of Hawai’i Press
July 2009
304 pages
15 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3342-8

Fiona Paisley, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities
Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia

Perspectives on the Global Past

Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories.

Glamour in the Pacific tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history. Early chapters consider the first PPWA conferences and the decolonizing process undergone by the association. Following World War II, a new generation of nonwhite women from decolonized and settler colonial nations began to claim leadership roles in the Association, challenging the often Eurocentric assumptions of women’s internationalism. In 1955 the first African American delegate brought to the fore questions about the relationship of U.S. race relations with the Pan-Pacific cultural internationalist project. The effects of cold war geopolitics on the ideal of international cooperation in the era of decolonization were also considered. The work concludes with a discussion of the revival of “East meets West” as a basis for world cooperation endorsed by the United Nations in 1958 and the overall contributions of the PPWA to world culture politics.

Read the introduction here.

The limits of internationalist interventions into the politics of “race” and the historical legacies of imperialism, nationalism and colonialism familiar to much contemporary world history were fundamental questions preoccupying women at the PPWA also. As I argue in this book, the resilience of race thinking and the limits of the cross-cultural ethos within the PPWA should be read not as constituting the organization’s failure to somehow transcend history, but rather as a reminder of the inherence of racialism to modern feminism and liberal thought more generally. Wishing to be unbounded by territory yet inevitably preoccupied by territorial issues, the Pan-Pacific conferences discussed in the following chapters provide unique insight into the profoundly interconnected histories of race and gender that have shaped feminist internationalism, as well as other progressive politics, and illustrate their on-the-ground, embodied, and passionate contestations.  By viewing the interwar Pacific as a newly conceived territory of modernity in both spatial and temporal terms, this book sees the interwar period as a pivotal moment in the twentieth century, one in which new ways of thinking about the world opened up, however partially, to questions of diversity and difference at the global level that still occupy us today. Not least, these decades saw new accounts of the flow of populations across the Pacific, encouraging a generation of ethnographers, demographers, and anthropometrists to declare the similarities between the races and cultures and in the Pacific in particular, to announce the future intermixing of peoples and cultures as the Pacific solution to world affairs, and to predict the future advancement of world civilization. Warwick Anderson points out that racial intermixture was claimed by many of those undertaking studies in the Pacific such as Felix and Marie Keesing, who feature in this study, to announce the way forward for humankind, thus envisaging interracial relations in stark contrast to the disavowal of racial mixing in the United States and its anxious management in Australia and elsewhere. The Keesings were also critical of the mandate of their own country, New Zealand, in Samoa (alongside the United States), contrasting that regime with their ideal of advancement through dynamic racial and cultural flows.  As Tony Ballantyne explains, the region was conceptualized spatially and temporally as the product of waves of population linking more recent colonization to deep time.

The History of White People

W. W. Norton & Company
March 2010
448 pages
6.125 × 9.25 in
ISBN: 978-0-393-04934-3

Nell Irvin Painter

A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of “whiteness”—an illuminating work on the history of race and power.

Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is “white” and who is “American” have evolved over time.

A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history.

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

W. W. Norton
May 2006
240 pages
5.8 × 8.6 in
ISBN: 978-0-393-05890-1

Kym Ragusa, Professor of Nonfiction &  Professor Writing
Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina
Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Inistitute of Technology

A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty.

Kym Ragusa’s stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa’s working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them.

From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker’s observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa’s sensuous memories are a reader’s delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2008
800 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-06477-3
6.5 × 9.6 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33776-1
816 pages
6.1 × 9.2 in

Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

Winner of the National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize

In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth.

So begins this epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—Annette Gordon-Reed’s “riveting history” of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family’s extraordinary engagement with one of history’s most important figures.

Not only do we meet Elizabeth Hemings—the family matriarch and mother to twelve children, six by John Wayles, a poor English immigrant who rose to great wealth in the Virginia colony—but we follow the Hemings family as they become the property of Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles. The Hemings-Wayles children, siblings to Martha, played pivotal roles in the life at Jefferson’s estate.

We follow the Hemingses to Paris, where James Hemings trained as a chef in one of the most prestigious kitchens in France and where Sally arrived as a fourteen-year-old chaperone for Jefferson’s daughter Polly; to Philadelphia, where James Hemings acted as the major domo to the newly appointed secretary of state; to Charlottesville, where Mary Hemings lived with her partner, a prosperous white merchant who left her and their children a home and property; to Richmond, where Robert Hemings engineered a plan for his freedom; and finally to Monticello, that iconic home on the mountain, from where most of Jefferson’s slaves, many of them Hemings family members, were sold at auction six months after his death in 1826.

As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative

Indiana University Press
2007-12-04
272 pages
30 b&w photos, 6.125 x 9.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34944-6
ISBN: 0-253-34944-3

Michael A. Chaney, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College

Analyzing the impact of black abolitionist iconography on early black literature and the formation of black identity, Fugitive Vision examines the writings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, and the slave potter David Drake. Juxtaposing pictorial and literary representations, the book argues that the visual offered an alternative to literacy for current and former slaves, whose works mobilize forms of illustration that subvert dominant representations of slavery by both apologists and abolitionists. From a portrait of Douglass’s mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverb and prophesy on Dave the Potter‘s ceramics, the book identifies a “fugitive vision” that reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and cultural production.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Looking Beyond and Through the Fugitive Icon
• Part 1. Fugitive Gender: Black Mothers, White Faces, Sanguine Sons
  1. Racing and Erasing the Slave Mother: Frederick Douglass, Parodic Looks, and Ethnographic Illustration
  2. Looking for Slavery at the Crystal Palace: William Wells Brown and the Politics of Exhibition(ism)
  3. The Uses in Seeing: Mobilizing the Portrait in Drag in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
• Part 2. Still Moving: Revamped Technologies of Surveillance
  1. Panoramic Bodies: From Banvard‘s Mississippi to Brown’s Iron Collar
  2. The Mulatta in the Camera: Harriet Jacobs’s Historicist Gazing and Dion Boucicault‘s Mulatta Obscura
  3. Throwing Identity in the Poetry-Pottery of Dave the Potter
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy

The American Historical Review
2005
Volume 110, Number 2

Saliha Belmessous, Research Fellow of History
University of Syndey

Although the idea of race is increasingly being historicized, its emergence in the context of French colonization remains shadowy. This is despite the fact that colonization was central to the emergence of race in French culture. The French are either credited with a generous vision and treatment of Amerindians or they are kept in limbo. The publication of Richard White’s Middle Ground in 1991 shook up these conventional ideas by showing that French conciliation toward indigenous peoples had to be explained by particular political and economic factors rather than by national character. Yet the issue of race has remained almost untouched, and French America has still not taken its place in the current debate about race, color, and civility.

The present essay is an empirical contribution to the discussion on the origins of European racialism as applied to colonial situations. It argues that racial prejudice in colonial Canada emerged only after an assimilationist approach had been tried for almost a century and had failed. In the seventeenth century, French policy toward the indigenous peoples of New France relied on the assimilation of the natives to French religion and culture. The aim was to mix colonial and native peoples in order to strengthen the nascent New France. This policy of francisation (sometimes translated as “Frenchification”) was based on a paternalistic vision of cultural difference: the French officials viewed the Amerindians as “savages,” socially, economically, and culturally inferior to the Europeans. As such, they had to be educated and brought to civility. This policy remained the official “native policy” employed throughout the period of the French regime in Canada despite the internal tensions and contradictions displayed by French officials. Historians have traditionally emphasized the implementation of this policy by missionaries and, consequently, have neglected or, at best, diminished the significance of francisation for civil authorities. The conversion of Amerindians to Christianity was undoubtedly an important part of the policy of francisation, but that importance has been overstated: francisation was more a political program than a religious one. An understanding of the central role played by the state in the promotion of the policy of assimilation has profound consequences for our comprehension of the relations between the French and Amerindians…

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