Mixed Race Studies

Self-made women in a (racist) man’s world: The ‘tragic’ lives of Nella Larsen and Bessie Head

English Academy Review
Volume 25, Issue 1 (May 2008)
pages 66-76
DOI: 10.1080/10131750802099490

Diana Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

(Her research aims to situate mixed race studies in a relatively unexplored sub-Saharan African context.)

Nella Larsen, the ‘mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,’ and Bessie Head, the famous ‘woman alone,’ are known for their ambiguous origins and their fabrication of personal ‘facts.’This article argues that these mixed race female writers, born under Jim Crow and apartheid respectively, carved out niches in these segregationist societies through the art of self-invention. Because of their precarious positions as ‘mulattas’ in anti-miscegenation worlds, clear parallels are identifiable between Larsen and Head, such as the creation of multiple selves and the realisation of the ‘tragic mulatto‘ stereotype through such characters as Helga Crane in Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Elizabeth in Head’s A Question of Power (1973). The representation of the ‘mulatto’ as a tragic figure caught between races is primarily an American literary trope, but both Larsen and the African-born Head evoke this stereotype in their personal and written stories. These two writers also resist labelling, however, by inventing new identities through pseudonyms, autobiographical heroines, and imagined ‘truths.’ This article examines the overt parallels between two mixed race women writers from different generations and continents, initiating crucial dialogue about the development of racial stigmas across cultures and temporalities.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘No Such Thing as a Mulatto Slave’: Legal Pluralism, Racial Descent and the Nuances of Slave Women’s Sexual Vulnerability in the Legal Odyssey of Steyntje van de Kaap, c.1815-1822

Fiona Vernal
Department of History
University of Connecticut

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 29, Issue 1
January 2008
pages 23 – 47
DOI: 10.1080/01440390701841034

In 1815, a contentious case came before the Court of Justice in the Cape Colony. Steyntje Van de Kaap, a creole slave, claimed manumission for herself and four children based on her status as a concubine. Harkening back to the Dutch period at the Cape, her suit resurrected a little-known 1772 statute, which, upon the death of slave owners, granted freedom to their concubines and any children from such unions. So indicative was the case of sexual relations at the Cape that one contemporary observer declared that the outcome could threaten one-third of the local slave property, while a Privy Councilor in England who heard the case on appeal, predicted grave consequences if the case should set a precedent. The protracted suit became enmeshed in the nineteenth-century struggle between slaveholders, abolitionists and colonial administrators at the Cape, and in Great Britain. On the eve of amelioration in British colonies like the Cape, Steyntje’s case demonstrated how white paternity and the status of concubine became legal grounds for freedom. This article explores how one woman’s sexual relations with her masters transcended the boundaries of her personal life to challenge the local system of matrilineal descent, to complicate the issue of consent in slave-master sexual relations, and to invoke the worst fears of slaveholders as they confronted a new imperial legal regime interested in reforming slavery.

Situating Multiethnic Identity: Contributions of Discourse Theory to the Study of Mixed Heritage Students

Journal of Language, Identity & Education
Volume 3, Issue 3 (July 2004)
pages 195-213
DOI: 10.1207/s15327701jlie0303_2

Kendra R. Wallace
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The article considers the contributions of Gee‘s Discourse theory to the study of multiethnic identity among mixed heritage students. By framing experience within social context, activity, and interaction, I argue that Discourse theory facilitates a conceptualization of ethnic identity as a situated phenomenon emerging at the intersection of the individual and the collective. Drawing on the life histories of a diverse group of mixed heritage students, the article details how Discourse theory provides a particularly powerful lens for exploring the social processes influencing identity development across contexts, such as those related to enculturation within multiple heritage communities.

Read or purchase the article here.

Politicking the personal: examining academic literature and British National Party beliefs and wishes about intimate interracial relationships and mixed heritage

Information & Communications Technology Law
Volume 18, Issue 2
June 2009
pages 83 – 98
DOI: 10.1080/13600830902814992

Mike Sutton
School of Social Sciences
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Barbara Perry
Faculty of Criminology Justice and Policy Studies
University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Ontario, Canada

Drawing heavily on our earlier work in this area (Perry and Sutton 2006; forthcoming), this article discusses the issue of intimate interracial relationships (IIRs) within the context of the UK Government’s current concerns with social cohesion and provides an overview of the literature on hate and prejudice against those in IIRs in the UK and USA. Following an examination of the official statistics and the numbers of mixed race people in England and Wales, we move on to provide a brief but disturbing glimpse of what it would mean if the BNP‘s long-term dream of winning a national election were actually to happen in light of their official website published proposed policies against IRRs and mixed heritage people.

I Define My Own Identity: Pacific Articulations of ‘Race’ and ‘Culture’on the Internet

Ethnicities
Vol. 3, No. 4
pp. 465-490
(2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1468796803003004002

Marianne I. Franklin
University of Amsterdam

Most of the participants in the internet discussion forums, the Kava Bowl and the Kamehameha Roundtable, herald from the South Pacific islands of Tonga and Samoa. These forums are part of a cluster of popular online meeting places for the ‘Polynesian Diaspora’ and other people from the Pacific Islands who live in the USA, Australia and New Zealand for the most part. They have been going strong since the mid-1990s, nearly as long as the worldwide web. One of the most recurring topics in the discussions is the nature of Tongan and/or Samoan ‘identity’ and how this relates to ‘living overseas’. In these discussions, participants – many of whom are of ‘mixed race’ – exchange personal experiences, political opinions, emotional and intellectual expectations about the outer and inner limits of race/ethnicity, and/or culture in their everyday lives. This article reconstructs several of the more substantial debates on the meaning and implications of ‘identity’ that show how these generations of the postcolonial South Pacific Islands are (re)defining what it means to be Tongan, Samoan – Polynesian – in a diasporic context. Discussions revolve around several axes; the personal and political issues of race (ethnicity) as everyday embodiments; Tongan/Samoan and Pacific Island cultures as negotiable rather than fixed practices; ways of turning colonialist categories for Pacific Island societies, such as ‘Polynesian’, into futurist tropes for communities who are often socioeconomically disadvantaged and discriminated against both ‘at home’ and ‘overseas’. As they argue, write, read, send emails and interact with one another on and offline, the creators of thousands of interwoven online texts over the years have been articulating ‘race’ and ‘culture’ on their own terms. They have been doing so in the public cyberspaces of the worldwide web, tracing, as they come and go, a nascent postcolonial politics of representation.

Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States

Progress in Human Geography
Vol. 27, No. 4
pp. 457-474
(2003)
DOI: 10.1191/0309132503ph444oa

Richard Wright
Department of Geography
Dartmouth College

Serin Houston
Department of Geography
Dartmouth College

Mark Ellis
Department of Geography and Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
University of Washington

Steven Holloway
Department of Geography
University of Georgia

Margaret Hudson
Department of Geography
University of Georgia

This review highlights geographical perspectives on mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States, explicitly calling for increased analysis at the scale of the mixed-race household. We begin with a discussion of mixed-race rhetoric and then sketch contemporary trends in mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the US. We also weave in considerations of the public and the private and the genealogical and social constructions of race. Our challenges to current thought add to the landscape of scholarship concerned with race and space. By presenting mixed race in fresh ways, we offer new sites for intervention in this evolving literature.

Read the entire article here.

Philosophical aspects of the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’

Anthropological Theory
Volume 1, Number 4 (December 2001)
pages 445-465
DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228836

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

I apply philosophical analysis to the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ (American Anthropological Association, 1998) and the commentary on its earlier draft published in the Anthropology Newsletter (1997). Racial essentialism is the theory that there are distinct and general human biological traits that determine racial membership and cause the presence of specific racial traits. This theory is false, as is the belief that a taxonomy of human races, or race, exists. But the 1998 ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ fails to repudiate racial essentialism explicitly. Instead, the Statement denies that race determines culture or psychology and thereby misses the broad logical point that race cannot determine anything, because it does not exist. In the Anthropology Newsletter discussion of Kennewick Man, which appeared to be a debate about racial essentialism, contributors spoke past one another in confusing population-based measures of human diversity with race. The same confusion clouds contemporary concerns about the relevance of common-sense racial categories to medical diagnosis and treatment. Education is the solution to the public’s ignorance about the scientific foundation for its ideas about race. It is an empirical question whether such education will remedy racism or unjust treatment based on the false racial taxonomy. Although mixed-race categories are no more real than ‘pure’ ones, their acceptance may help unsettle the prevailing false taxonomy of race.

Read the entire article here.

Australian Mixed Race

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 7, Number 2 (May 2004)
pages 177-199
DOI: 10.1177/1367549404042493

Maureen Perkins, Associate Professor of History, Anthropology and Sociology
Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

This article argues against the case for colour-blindness as a fundamental principle of liberal policy and recommends more colour consciousness rather than less. The growth in mixed race studies around the world suggests that the use of terms of colour, black and white, to indicate a simple racial binary is being eroded by more complicated ‘in-between’ positions, which are now demanding recognition. In Australia, where black and white mean Indigenous and non-Indigenous, terms of ‘mixed’ identity carry a residue of colonial racist usage and are unequivocally rejected by Aboriginal communities. In refusing to consider ‘mixedness’, however, Australian culture makes national loyalty and a sense of belonging difficult for those non-white Australians who are not Indigenous. The article compares the Australian census with those in the UK and US to show that there needs to be much more discussion of the terminology used to discuss colour in order to keep up to date with the crumbling of racial boundaries and the increasing numbers of interracial children.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (review)

Henry Wiencek. The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Xx + 361pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-312-19277-8.

H-Net Reviews: in the Humanities & Social Sciences
April 1999

Catherine Clinton

HISTORIES OF RECONCILIATION

It was with joy and fear that I finished Henry Wiencek’s breathtaking saga, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. Joy, in that I was introduced to such a compelling cast of characters, set within riveting contexts, drawn with insight and erudition, illuminated by vivid, narrative that pulls the reader toward the important reckoning slavery continues to create for us all. Fear, in that the resonance of this story, the compelling quality of the author’s prose, the superior level of his research, both with oral histories and archival digging, may set too high a standard for future work.

But we must all swallow our fears, and let Wiencek’s remarkable confrontation with slavery wash over us. The author allows us to make a journey along with him, by letting us know how he innocuously began his investigation of a North Carolina plantation, and then spent seven years tracking down the remarkable Hairston family from its colonial roots to the present. On the brink of the Civil War the white Hairstons owned forty-five plantations in four states, with combined slave holdings of over ten thousand slaves: Samuel Hairston of Oak Hill, Virginia had land and slaves worth nearly five million dollars–reputedly the largest slaveowner in the South. But Wiencek also began his quest by attending an African American family reunion of Hairstons, with nearly a thousand in attendance from all over the country. His curiosities, his hesitancy, his reverence all interlace his analysis. He joined up on the amazing trek toward their African-American past, guided by the voices of blacks forced to keep counter-accounts, unabashedly determined to restore some balance to whitewashed tales of a plantation past dripping in nostalgia…

Over the past twenty years, numerous scholars have been able to demonstrate the way in which shadow families and white male sexual coercion could and did shape conficts within southern culture, in particular I am thinking of Carol Bleser and Drew Faust on James Henry Hammond, Kent Leslie, Jean Yellin, Adele Logan Alexander, Deborah White, Jacqueline Jones, Mary Frances Berry and Darlene Clark Hine, among others, on African American women’s responses, and Nell Painter, Peter Bardaglio, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and this reviewer, among others, on white women’s responses.  Although much of this scholarship has become conventional wisdom within southern women’s history, it has been resisted mightily by many scholars working on slavery and on the nineteenth century more generally. The fact that rape, coercion and concubinage were institutionalized within ante-bellum southern slavery remains a contested issue.

The passionate opinions exchanged in late 1998 over DNA testing of descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s female slave, Sally Hemings, has created more than a tempest in a teapo–more like a hurricane, gale winds creating havoc and bluster among historians of early America.

So much of the evidence” concerning interracial heritage, short of DNA testing, remains dificult to dig up. Much of this evidence remains within the realm of oral histories passed down in families–most often black families. It is stumbled upon by modern historians, in the majority white scholars, who have limited access to African American family lore. I am reminded of the white southern scholar who confided to me that when he went to interview a black family in the 1980s he was surprised to see a large portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, hanging in their home–but was informed Forrest was an ancestor!

The issues surrounding mixed race legacies are topics that I believe academically trained scholars continue to stumble over and continue to stumble around. So it should be no surprise that the most compelling books dealing with this constellation of concerns have been produced by those outside the academy: Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White and Edward Ball’s National Book Award-winning Slaves in the Family…

…The way in which black and white Hairstons are able to confront or deny their mixed heritage becomes a running theme of the book as well. Does Peter W. Hairston, the white patriarch with whom the author began his quest, really want to know the truths about his family, especially his grandfather? How are Ever Lee Hairston, an outspoken black woman, and Lucy D. Hairston, a white southern lady of the old school, able to make their peace?…

Read the entire review here.

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

St. Martin’s Press an imprint of Macmillan
February 1999
ISBN: 978-0-312-25393-6
ISBN10: 0-312-25393-1
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
400 pages, Plus 16-page b&w photo insert

Henry Wiencek

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.

The black family’s story is most exceptional. It is the account of the rise of a remarkable people—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves—who took their rightful place in mainstream America.

In contrast, it has been the fate of the white family—once one of the wealthiest in America—to endure the decline and fall of the Old South, and to become an apparent metaphor for that demise. But the family’s fall from grace is only part of the tale. Beneath the surface lay a hidden history—the history of slavery’s curse and how that curse plagued slaveholders for generations.

For the past seven years, journalist Wiencek has listened raptly to the tales of hundreds of Hairston relatives, including the aging scions of both the white and black clans. He has crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek out the descendants of slaves. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons’ stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching.

Paradoxically, Wiencek demonstrates that these families found that the way to come to terms with the past was to embrace it, and this lyrical work, a parable of redemption, may in the end serve as a vital contribution to our nation’s attempt to undo the twisted historical legacy of the past.