Mixed Race Studies

Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland

Rhizomes Postgraduate Conference
Rhizomes: Re-visioning Boundaries Conference
The School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2006-02-24 through 2006-02-25

Alzena D’Costa
Curtin University of Technology

This paper argues that the ‘nostalgia’ that the Anglo-Indian community exhibits in the telling of its (hi)stories can be seen as functioning to (re)claim India as homeland. The Anglo-Indians are the Indian-European minority community of India whose origins and history is inextricably interwoven with the politics of colonial India. Within the framework of post-independence Indian thought, the Community has been alienated from embodying the national identity and is made to feel unhomely.

In his book Long-distance Nationalism, Zlatko Skrbiŝ defines nostalgia as ‘a painful condition related to the homeland (Gr. nostos means ‘to return home’ and algia, ‘a painful condition’ (41). Roberta Rubenstein, in her book Home Matters, also describes nostalgia as a temporal separation (4). The recent nostalgic writings produced by the Anglo-Indian community remember, idealise and pine for the colonial past – a time when the Anglo-Indian community felt a sense of belonging in India. Some historians claim that nostalgia is ‘perhaps the most dangerous … of all the ways of using history’ because it glosses ‘over the past’s iniquities and indignities’. However, Rubenstein points out that nostalgia can also ‘fix’ the past and recover it in ‘narrative terms’ (6). With this insight, I will argue that via nostalgic writing the Anglo-Indian community can revisit, and hence reclaim, India as home.

Read the entire paper here.

Frantz Fanon’s reception in Brazil

Penser aujourd’hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon (Symposium on Frantz Fanon)
Université Paris 7
February 2008

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothers. However, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.

Although he had previously had a limited readership in Brazil, Fanon became known within cultural circles, as in other parts of the world, when revolutionary violence was the order of the day, championed by thinking revolutionary fighters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres; or by black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X and Eldridge Cleaver; or Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Kwame N’Krumah. However, after this phase, contrary to what occurred in other places, his thinking did not become the object of elucidating and critical reflection on the part of Brazilian universities and academics who were established in study centres, as was the case with other revolutionary thinkers.

In this paper, I will defend two theses. The first is that his lukewarm reception was due to a national and racial makeup totally opposed to racial conflicts, highly instilled within an intellectual middle class which was white and mixed race, yet racially colourless. That is, the Brazil of racial democracy. The second thesis explains the limited dissemination of Fanonian studies by the small number of black professors and researchers at Brazilian universities who focus on the formation of black identity or the affirmation of racially oppressed subjects as their area of study.

Fanon’s thinking came to Brazil much like all new ideas – in European books – and at a time when Marxism and existentialism competed for the limelight of the Brazilian cultural and political scene.

Read the entire paper here.

Interview with Brazilian Journalist and Activist Daniela Gomes

The Husslington Post
2011-12-04

Amil Cook, Correspondent

In this interview, Husslington Post correspondent, Amil Cook, goes in depth with journal/scholar/activist Daniela Gomes about her fight against racism in Brazil. This is the first installment in what we hope will become a series of interviews by Amil.

How influential is Hip-Hop and African American culture in Brazil?

For a long time Afro Brazilians didn’t have access to information about the black leaders in our history. The myth of the racial democracy created an important issue in our country, where a lighter skin person didn’t consider him/herself as black. So for many years for mixed people in Brazil to be black was a shame. In some cases this still happens. So after a long time we were without any understanding about black consciousness but during the 1970s some cultural and political movements started to be inspired by Afro American movements and heroes such as: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. And Hip Hop is a part of this because of its cultural influence.

What is racial democracy for those who may not be familiar with this term?

Racial democracy was a theory created in the early 1900s. The main creator was Gilberto Freyre, who used to affirm that Brazilian society was totally different from other countries because it was a racially mixed country and as a mixed country there wasn’t racism here. He taught that we should value our three races [indigenous (native), African and European] that formed our society because it made us better, made our slavery less painful and things like that. It is important to explain that before Freyre the theory that used to be adopted in Brazil, was the ‘whitening theory’, it was used to affirm that if we started to mix the country we could clean our race and it was believed that in little time black people would be extinct in Brazil. The main thinker of this theory was Nina Rodrigues, a doctor who used to see the black population as a shame. Gilberto Freyre was Rodrigues’ student, and “improved” Rodrigues’ racist theories when he decided to hide the racial issue in Brazil. These two theories are fundamental to understand racial thought in Brazil. The first one [Rodrigues], made Brazilians believe that if they are mixed they aren’t black and the second one [Freyre] made them believe that we are special because we are mixed; there isn’t racism in our country so we don’t need to fight against it. And although the black struggle in my country never stopped, ideas like that made our mission harder…

Read the entire interview here.

Ecco To Publish Pulitzer Prize Winning U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memoir

HarperCollins Publishers
2012-06-28

Michael McKenzie

New York, NY (June 28, 2012) – Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, is thrilled to announce that it has won the rights to publish Pulitzer Prize winning United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s untitled memoir in a very heated auction. Her book will map the intersections of personal and cultural history, as it navigates the channels and byways of memory and the legacy of race in America. Chronicling her life from early childhood – the daughter of a black mother and a white father, she was born in Gulfport, Mississippi a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia – this deeply felt memoir explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the ‘70s and ‘80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances of these seminal events in her life and work.

The deal was negotiated between Daniel Halpern, President and Publisher of Ecco, and Rob McQuilkin of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. Halpern says, “I can’t remember a more emotionally intense auction for a book, ever. I truly admire Natasha’s spirit, her graceful presence on these pages, which tell a story that no one is likely to forget.”

Trethewey adds, “I am honored to work with this venerable press, and with Daniel Halpern in particular, on a book I know will be difficult to write even as it seems that the past—and geography—have rendered me destined to do so.”

The book, which Ecco acquired the North American rights to, is tentatively scheduled for 2014…

Read the entire press release here.

For Daughters of the American Revolution, a New Chapter

The New York Times
2012-07-03

Sarah Maslin Nir

Olivia Cousins can trace her family in the United States to a soldier who joined the rebelling colonists when he was just 17. But when a friend suggested she join the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization whose members can prove they are related to someone who aided the rebels in 1776, Dr. Cousins nearly laughed.

Dr. Cousins is black. And the D.A.R., as it is commonly called, is a historically white organization with a record of excluding blacks so ugly that Eleanor Roosevelt renounced her membership in protest.

Yet last week, in a circa-1857 stone chapel in Jamaica, Queens, Dr. Cousins was named an officer in a small ceremony establishing a new chapter. Her daughter took photos. The pictures documented a singular moment for the D.A.R., founded in 1890: 5 of the 13 members of the new chapter are black.

Perhaps more strikingly, the Queens chapter is one of the first in the organization’s nearly 122-year history that was started by a black woman: Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly, from Rosedale, who is also its regent, or president. Ms. Kelly traces her origins to the relationship between a slaveholder and a slave, who appear to have considered themselves married, and her new position is part of a remarkable journey for both her family and the organization.

“My parents understood that they were Americans and that they were a real important part of the American story,” said Dr. Cousins, who, like the other members, is a passionate student of genealogy. Her Revolutionary War ancestor was a free man of mixed race. “Their whole thing was that segregation is unacceptable,” she said of her parents. For her, she said, “de facto segregation was unacceptable.”…

Read the entire article here.

Follow MixedRaceStudies.org on Twitter

MixedRaceStudies.org
2012-07-04

Steven F. Riley

Thanks to a suggestion by University of Wisconsin History Professor Gregory Carter, all new posts on MixedRaceStudies.org will be simultaneously “tweeted” on Twitter at @mixed_race.

Freedom Road Spotlights St. Augustine History

VisitFlorida.com
2012-06-29

Amy Wimmer Schwarb

Derek Hankerson wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

A St. Augustine company is trying to reshape the American story – not to rewrite history, but to retell it.

Derek Hankerson, the man at the helm of Freedom Road, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., learning the same tales of America’s birthplace that are told in children’s textbooks throughout the United States. But he often visited relatives in St. Augustine  and could never reconcile the history he found there with what he learned in school.

“The sign in St. Augustine said, ‘Established in 1565,’ and then I go back to school, and I don’t see a thing about Florida. I don’t see a thing about blacks,” Hankerson said. “All I see is 1776.”

Hankerson spotted that disparity when he was about 10 years old, and announced to his family that he planned to correct it. He wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

Today, Hankerson is the managing partner of Freedom Road, which offers in-depth bus tours of northeast Florida that give visitors insight into an early American story that might be new to many of them.

“Our tours deal with five centuries of history,” Hankerson said. “This is history related to the New World. I say ‘the New World’ because that’s different than the United States of America. We’re talking pre-United States of America.”…

…James Bullock, the creative director for Freedom Road, is typically the guide for the tours. Dressed in period costume, he walks guests through how different cultures – Spanish, African, Native American, German, Irish, Greek – made their lives in the New World…

And Bullock and Hankerson stress that while much of U.S. history has focused on the separation of races, Spanish Florida brought a different culture to the New World. Even the geography of the Old World played a role: Only 11 miles separate Spain from Africa at their closest point, so trade, relationships and inter-marrying were common even before the groups came across the Atlantic...

Read the entire article here.

The creation and intepretation of ‘mixed’ categories in Britain today

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

The growth and recognition of ‘Mixed’ in Britain

It is difficult to imagine a society (such as Britain) in which ethnic and racial categories, and the powerful imagery and ideologies associated with notions of ethnic and racial difference, do not exist. The population of the UK is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, and national identity. While not new, one major demographic development is the significant growth of ‘mixed race’ people in Britain.

Accompanying the growth in mixed relationships and people is the increased social and media attention they have received in recent years. For instance, mixed celebrities are impossible to avoid in various contemporary British (and other) media.Furthermore, the BBC has just shown a whole series of programs called ‘Mixed Britannia’, in which we learn, among other things, that being mixed was by no means a new phenomenon in the earlier parts of the 20th century, whether in Tiger Bay, or in the docks of Liverpool. Various analysts have argued that, in many parts of contemporary, metropolitan Britain, being mixed, and the everyday interactions between disparate groups, is absolutely ordinary.

This growth of mixed people has engendered the creation and institutionalization of new ethnic and racial categories by official bodies, such as the Office of National Statistics (ONS). For the first time, the growth in mixed people was officially recognized by the inclusion of ‘Mixed’ categories in the 2001 England and Wales census, in which about 677,000 people (or about 1.2% of the population) were identified as mixed…

Read the entire article here.

‘ORPHEUS’; Legacy of Domination

The New York Times
2000-09-03

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

To the Editor:

In his observations about the differences in the Brazilian and foreign receptions of two very distinct cinematic renditions of the Orpheus tale [“Orpheus, Rising From Caricature,” Aug. 20], Caetano Veloso makes a number of larger, insightful points about the intense processes of creolization in Brazilian popular culture, which confound easy labels like ”global” and ”local” as well as ”authentic” and ”pure.”

Two points raised by Mr. Veloso are in tension, however, with his advocacy of what he has called ”subversive Pan-Americanism.” First, Mr. Veloso seemingly abides by a key tenet of Gilberto Freyre’s views about Brazilian race relations, one that equates miscegenation with ”racial democracy.” Although Mr. Veloso rightly acknowledges that ideas of whitening are not peculiar to Brazil, he does not mention the effects of such ideologies on darker-skinned African-descended people in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas—which, in the case of someone like Michael Jackson (whom Mr. Veloso mentions), are more than a case of playful hybridity.

Like Gilberto Freyre, Mr. Veloso seems to be suggesting that miscegenation leads to racial tolerance, whereas hypodescent (the one-drop rule) does not. If one were to apply Mr. Veloso’s premise, that racial miscegenation equals racial democracy, to race relations in the United States, South Africa or Haiti, then the fact of miscegenation would have helped engender societies that were more tolerant of alleged racial differences among their populations. It did not.

The point here is that miscegenation, in Brazil and in other former slave-holding societies, began as acts of dominance and not as an egalitarian principle that led to the erosion of unequal relations. It is important to remember that the etymological origin of the term miscegenation (as well as mulatto, by the way) is to ”mis-mate,” or mate badly. In Brazil, the celebration of miscegenation has occurred simultaneously in national popular culture and mythology with terminology that denigrates darker-skinned Brazilians, while upholding Northern European ideals of feminine and masculine beauty. Thus, miscegenation cannot be considered outside the lens of power and aesthetics…

Read the entire letter here.

‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Daniel McNeil, Associate Professor of History, Migration and Diaspora Studies
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Many conservative commentators reacted to the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 with platitudes about the clash of civilizations. Robert Fulford, a prominent cultural critic for the Canadian National Post, was one of the few to tie a post-9/11 context to the fortieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. In an article strategically published at the beginning of Black History Month, Fulford claimed that Fanon’s classic texts were invoked and not read, as if The Wretched of the Earth was just another ironic commodity for consumers full of sound and fury who wear images of Malcolm X and Che Guevara without knowing anything about their commitment to human rights. To go further, he maintained that Fanon should be remembered as a ‘poisonous thinker’ who helped usher in a culture of violence and victimization in the West.

Providing a critical alternative to Fulford, activists and scholars marked the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s passing with extensive discussions of his impact on social justice movements and intellectual debates about existentialism, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. This short article takes a rather circuitous route to their commentaries on the legacy of Fanon’s explorative, suggestive and provocative work. It argues that the loaded metaphors Fanon used to target ‘half-breed’ translators in the 1950s and 60s have been creatively adapted by transnational intellectuals in their critique of forms of neoliberal multiculturalism that privilege the multiracial American citizen as a subject more universal and legitimate than even the multicultural world citizen.

The article revolves around three sections and three conceptual metaphors in its attempts to address an oft-repeated element of Fanon’s work that has rarely been the subject of extended analysis or critical inquiry. The first section introduces three popular metaphors about mixed-race objects and ‘racial bridges’ that Fanon used to invoke the threat of bestial, immature and consumerist Others – metaphors that were not swept away by the winds of change in the 1960s, or the decline and fall of Black internationalist movements in the 1970s. It contends that similar metaphors and similes continue to frame representations of mixed-race individuals that emerged after the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 80s called for ‘new’ multicultural identities to replace ‘old-fashioned’ notions of racial essences. The second section documents how intellectuals such as David Theo Goldberg, Paul Gilroy and Lewis Gordon have engaged with Fanon and mixed-race metaphors in order to critique the slyness of neoliberal agents in the age of Obama. The third and final section also addresses three writers – Jared Sexton, Paul Spickard and Mark Anthony Neal – who have developed work on multiracial national subjects in the United States. The short conclusion contends that Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism avoids some of the pitfalls of national consciousness evident in the work of Spickard and Neal – and engages with the diasporic work of Fanon and ‘Fanon’s children’ in order to challenge multiracial, and post-racial, environments that deny the legitimacy of African American anger. In short, it uses Sexton’s vision of a global African American studies to illuminate some of the discordant affinities between more insular visions of ethnic American studies and the cultural project of neoliberal multiculturalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries…

Read the entire article here.