Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The contrast between the multigenerational and first-generation experiences is further underscored by the fact that the latter is frequently viewed as a more legitimate basis for multiracial identity. The reasons for this are related to the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 and the liberalization of social attitudes on race over the past three decades. Moreover, the first-generation experience originates in the context of interracial marriage and thus includes an element of choice. Marriages confer equal legal status on both parties and, by extension, equal legitimacy on both parents’ identities. The one-drop rule, therefore, has been less consistently enforced, both in theory and in practice, in the case of their offspring. This is particularly true of policies at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and to a lesser extent of the Census Bureau. Before the 1980s, the NCHS ciassified racially blended children in terms of the “minority” parent, while the Census Bureau classified them in terms of the father’s racial or ethnic identity. Since the 1980s both agencies have based the children’s race on the racial identity of the mother. Many multiracial children of European American mothers have therefore been designated as “white” rather than as “biracial.” Since the mid-1960s, however, adoption agencies have tended to describe blended children as “racially mixed” or “biracial” in order to attract white adoptive parents by appealing to their Eurocentric bias.

Such flexibility has not been extended so readily to multi generational individuals. Their experience carries with it the implicit stigma of concubinage, rape, and illegitimacy; and the parents and families of these individuals have typically been seen as African American. Attitudes toward Native Americans and Latinos—two other populations that have experienced significant miscegenation with European Americans—provide a point of contrast. The European American, as well as the Native American and Latino communities, have more openly acknowledged multiple racial and cultural backgrounds in the discourse on identity. In these populations as well, however, the same divisive and pernicious “colorism” that has infected African-descent Americans has arisen, with the result that lighter-skinned and otherwise more European-appearing Latinos and Native Americans are treated preferentially within and outside their communities. Nevertheless, greater openness among these groups to multiracialism has mitigated the generational differences as the primary factor determining the legitimacy of multiracial identity. Multigenerational individuals of European American and African American decent, therefore, find themselves at odds not only with the larger society and the African American community, but often with first-generation individuals as well. Since most African-descent Americans have some European American ancestry in their genealogy but identify themselves as black, blacks often accuse multigenerational individuals of trying to escape the stigma attached to “blackness.” Some first-generation individuals contend that their own biracial experience is the legitimate starting point for a blended identity…

Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 104-105.

Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007)

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2010-06-18 21:34Z by Steven

Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007)

Wide Screen
Vol 1, Issue 2, June 2010
15 pages
ISSN: 1757-3920
Published by Subaltern Media

Zélie Asava

‘Passing’ narratives question fixed social categorisations and prove the possibility of self-determination, which is why they are such a popular literary and cinematic trope. This article explores ‘passing’ as a performance of identity, following Judith Butler’s (1993) idea of all identity as a performance language. The performance of multiple roles in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007) draws our attention not only to ‘passing’, ‘morphing’ and cultural hybridity, but also to the nature of acting as inhabiting multiple identities.

I’m Not There is a biopic of the musician Bob Dylan. It is a fictional account of a real man who, through his ability to plausibly ‘pass’ for a range of personae, has achieved legendary status. It uses four actors, an actress and a black child actor to perform this enigma.

The performance of multiple identities in this film explores the ‘moral heteroglossia’, that is, the variety and ‘many-languagedness’ (as Mikhael Bakhtin put it) of identity, through its use of multiply raced and gendered actors. But the film’s use of representational strategies is problematic. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) note that mixed-race and black representations are often distorted by a Eurocentric perspective. And, as Aisha D. Bastiaans notes, representation is a process which operates ‘in the absence or displaced presence, of racial and gendered subjects’ (2008: 232). This article argues that I’m Not There, like Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991) video, exploits racial and gendered difference through ‘passing’ and ‘morphing’ narratives, to reinforce the white-centrism of American visual culture.

Read the entire article here in PDF or HTML format.

Tags: Wide Screen, Zélie Asava

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993)

Posted in Arts, Books, Chapter, Europe, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2010-01-29 18:19Z by Steven

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993) In: Martin McLoone & Kevin Rockett, eds. Irish Films, Global Cinema, Studies in Irish Film 4.

Four Courts Press
2007
176 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84682-081-6

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

The chapter analyses the positionalities of the mixed-race female protagonists of each film and the visualisation of their mixed-race identity. It considers aspects of their struggle for self-definition against the director’s visual clues about their ‘true’ racial space. It also explores the possibility in these films for a representation of mixed identity that surpasses the stereotypes of the ‘tragic mulatto’ torn between black and white worlds (as represented by mothers in the American films and lovers/parents in the French film). Finally the article – as with my thesis – considers the limitations of American cinema in transcending binaried representations of race and the alternatives which French cinema offers, in order to consider the possibility for a mixed-race representative model which would visualise the multiplicity and ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha put it, of mixed-race identity.

Tags: Four Courts Press, France, tragic mulatto, Zélie Asava

‘The Nephew’ and ‘The Front Line’: black and mixed masculinities in Irish Cinema

Posted in Europe, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations on 2009-09-30 18:24Z by Steven

‘The Nephew’ and ‘The Front Line’: black and mixed masculinities in Irish Cinema

Old Ireland, New Irish: ‘The same people living in the same place’: American Conference for Irish Studies 2009
‘Into the heartland of the ordinary’: Second Galway Conference of Irish Studies 2009

Hosted by
Centre for Irish Studies
National University of Ireland, Galway
2009-06-10 through 2009-06-13

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

This paper explores representations of ethnicity and gender in The Nephew and The Front Line, Irish films which feature mixed-race and black male protagonists, and so reflect the changing face of the nation in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland as well as reflecting contemporary concerns regarding the histories and transformations of Irish identity and tradition.

Historically the mixed/black body formed a canvas for Western conceptual theories of blackness, as Fanon noted: ‘I am overdetermined from without’.v In the last 20 years mixed/black actors have featured in several Irish films – Pigs, The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Irish Jam, Breakfast on Pluto, Isolation and Boy Eats Girl – as prostitutes, single mothers, rappers and social contaminants. The transnational migratory bodies of The Nephew and The Front Line will be explored as revealing new directions in Irish cinema which attempt to deconstruct the mixed/black body, multiculturalism and the ‘new Irish’.

The discourses of ‘race’ and gender expressed in these two films portray ‘the possibility of a very differenced Ireland in the world’ which Gerardine Meaney observes may reconfigure the field of Irish Studies. They represent and reinvent public and private identities by projecting non-white Irish identity onto an Irish landscape in order to bring this social demographic from the margins to the centre of Irish visual culture.

Tags: Ireland, Zélie Asava

Mixed Race Studies

Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007)

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993)

‘The Nephew’ and ‘The Front Line’: black and mixed masculinities in Irish Cinema

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