Mixed Race Studies

Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640

Cambridge University Press
June 2022
Hardback ISBN: 9781316514382
eBook ISBN: 9781009086905

Miguel A. Valerio, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Washington University, St Louis, Missouri

Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Sovereign Joy
• 1. ‘With their king and queen’: Early Colonial Mexico, the Origins of Festive Black Kings and Queens, and the Birth of the Black Atlantic
• 2. ‘Rebel Black Kings (and Queens)’?: Race, Colonial Psychosis, and Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens
• 3. ‘Savage Kings’ and Baroque Festival Culture: Afro-Mexicans in the Celebration of the Beatification of Ignatius of Loyola
• 4. ‘Black and Beautiful’: Afro-Mexican Women Performing Creole Identity
• Conclusion: Where did the black court go?
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country

University of Minnesota Press
August 2022
304 pages
5½ x 8½
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-5179-1230-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5179-1231-4

Ryan Thomas Skinner, Associate Professor of Music and African American and African Studies
Ohio State University

Foreword by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

A compelling examination of Sweden’s African and Black diaspora

Contemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden, Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community.

Skinner employs the conceptual themes of “remembering” and “renaissance” to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies.

The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter.

Contents

• Foreword
• Jason Timbuktu Diakité
• A Note on Orthography
• Introduction: Race, Culture, and Diaspora in Afro-Sweden
• Part I. Remembering
  • 1. Invisible People
  • 2. A Colder Congo
  • 3. Walking While Black
• Part II. Renaissance
  • 4. Articulating Afro-Sweden
  • 5. The Politics of Race and Diaspora
  • 6. The Art of Renaissance
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Special Research Collection

Library at University of California, Santa Barbara
2022-08-22

G. Reginal Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, UCSB Professor of Sociology and member of the Advisory Board of MASC (Multiracial Americans of Southern California), and Paul Spickard, UCSB Professor of History, in coordination with Danelle Moon, Head of UCSB Library Special Research Collection, have been collecting primary documents from support and educational organizations involved in the multiracial movement, particularly from the late 1970s through the early 2000s. This period was the height of discussions surrounding changes in official data collection on race, as in the census, to make it possible for multiracial individuals to identify as such.

HISTORY

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, interracial families and multiracial adults became part of a multiracial movement that endeavored, among other concerns, to change official racial-data collection standards that required individuals to identify with only one racial background. Activists were unsuccessful in bringing about changes on the 1990 census. Yet their efforts intensified in the wake of the census. Consequently, by the 2000 census, for the first time, and largely through the activism of multiracial organizations, multiracial-identified individuals were allowed to self-enumerate by checking more than one racial box on the census.

On the 2000 census, multiracials (or the “more than more race” population) totaled 7 million or 2.4 percent of the population. Based on 2010 census data their numbers increased to 9 million people—or 2.9 percent of the population. Although multiracials still make up only a fraction of the total population, this is a growth rate of about 32 percent since 2000.

WHY CALIFORNIA, WHY SANTA BARBARA

The West Coast, particularly California and Hawaii, has the highest concentration of interracial couples and the largest number and highest proportion of multiracial-identified individuals. California, in particular, has been a major center of multiracial activism, as well as academic research and university courses on multiracial identity. The University of California, specifically the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses, has the longest-standing university courses on this topic in the United States.

The UCSB Library Special Research Collection currently holds documents from iPride (Interracial/Intercultural Pride) and MASC, which, along with IMAGE, the Amerasian League, and Hapa Issues Forum, are among the local support and educational organizations founded in California. The Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA), which was a national umbrella organization for numerous local groups, as well as A Place for Us National (APUN), which was another national organization, originated and maintained headquarters in California. Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equality) is an additional national organization with headquarters in California although it was originally located in Roswell, George. That said, iPride and MASC are the two oldest organizations founded in California as well as two of the oldest organizations nationally. Moreover, they were two of the organizations most actively involved in deliberations surrounding the collection of official data on race.

HOW TO CONNECT

The documents from iPride and MASC have been catalogued and are ready for public perusal by those interested in consulting primary documents on the multiracial movement. Currently, the items can only be viewed within the Special Research Collection reading room. Hopefully, the library will be able, at some point in the near future, to secure funding to make many, if not all, of the documents available online. A list of the library holdings can be found on the UCSB Library website (https://www.library.ucsb.edu) under the heading “Archives and Manuscripts” by entering “Multiracial” in the “Search” box. That will take clients to the individual iPride and MASC collections. Clients can download a pdf that contains the specific holdings for each organization after clicking on the red- highlighted organization titles. Go to the upper righthand corner and click “View entire collection guide.” Subsequent documents donated by other organizations will be similarly catalogued.

Mixed Race in Nordic Europe

Journal of Critical Mix Race Studies
Volume 1, Issue 2 (2022)
287 pages

Cover Image: Stein Egil Liland

Numerous scholarly works have been published on the topic of multiraciality and mixed-race experiences in the United States and Great Britain. There has historically been limited research on Nordic Europe. These analyses seek to help further research on Nordic Europe in terms of critical mixed race studies.

Read the entire issue here.

By The Cut of Their Cloth

The Mixed Museum
London, United Kingdom
2022-03-21

BTCOTC’s creative director, Warren Reilly, and the Director of The Mixed Museum, Dr Chamion Caballero, discuss the inspiration behind their exploration into Brent’s mixed race and multicultural history as well as the project’s activities.

BTCOTC is part of the Being Brent Heritage 2021 Well Being fund. To learn more about the project, visit: https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/btcotcproject.

Film directed and edited by Justine Nassef Magdy.

The archival photographs featured in the video are from the Petersen Collection at Glamorgan Archives, and Butetown History and Arts Centre (material now hosted at The Heritage & Cultural Exchange Archive).

For more information, click here.

Understanding Juneteenth’s History

NBC 4
New York, New York
2022-06-19

Here to help us understand Juneteenth’s history is Zebulon Miletsky, an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University.

The Proud Portrait of Richard T. Greener

The Crimson
2020-09-17

Sophia S. Liang, Staff Writer

Greener’s rosy recollection of Harvard reflects a series of contradictions that characterized his life, both during and after college. Greener was a light-skinned Black man straddling racial divides in a segregated world. He received life-changing opportunities at a university where he struggled with loneliness and lacked faculty support. And despite his tremendous contributions in activism and public service, he remains relatively unknown to historians today.

In an 1881 speech at the Harvard Club of New York, Richard T. Greener, Class of 1870, lavished his alma mater with praise: “[Harvard] answered the rising spirit of independence and liberty by abolishing all distinctions founded upon color, blood, and rank,” he told an applauding audience. “There has been but one test for all. Ability, character, and merit — these are the sole passports to her favor.”

Such sentimental remarks may come as something of a surprise coming from the first Black graduate of Harvard College. The University, after all, had not been a friendly place to most who came before him and many who came after — nor, at times, to Greener. Indeed, the Harvard Club of Washington, D.C. would reject his own application four years later for no reason other than his race.

Greener’s rosy recollection of Harvard reflects a series of contradictions that characterized his life, both during and after college. Greener was a light-skinned Black man straddling racial divides in a segregated world. He received life-changing opportunities at a university where he struggled with loneliness and lacked faculty support. And despite his tremendous contributions in activism and public service, he remains relatively unknown to historians today…

Read the entire article here.

A Fable of Agency

The New York Review of Books
2022-05-26

Brenda Wineapple

The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail by Kristen Green. Seal, 332 pp., $30.00

Kristen Green’s The Devil’s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.

In The Allure of the Archives (1989), a gem of a book, the French historian Arlette Farge talks about unearthing, insofar as it’s possible, a past that’s not quite past—particularly in relation to the lives of women, whose histories have often been hidden, forgotten, or written over, women spoken about but whom we seldom hear speaking. Combing through the judicial archives at the Préfecture of Paris, Farge reads the sullen or angry answers that ordinary eighteenth-century Parisian women, some of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable, give to the police who have arrested them. And she knows that to understand what they say, or don’t say, we need to care and not to care: to distance ourselves with empathy while we set aside expectations and assumptions. Deciphering what’s left in the archives, Farge writes, “entails a roaming voyage through the words of others, and a search for a language that can rescue their relevance.”

Piecing together stories about women who managed the uncertainties and privations of their situations is even more difficult when the women in question have been enslaved and thus forbidden even the basic rights that an eighteenth-century Parisian laundress enjoyed. That is Kristen Green’s task in her impassioned The Devil’s Half Acre, which she calls “the untold story of how one woman liberated the South’s most notorious slave jail.”

Green is a journalist and also the author of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County (2015), a personal account of how that Virginia county defied Brown v. Board of Education and shut down its schools for almost five years rather than integrate them. In The Devil’s Half Acre, she recovers the life of Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman of mixed race born in 1832 who, likely by 1840, was held in bondage at Lumpkin’s Jail, a chamber of horrors located between Franklin and Broad Streets in Shockoe Bottom, the central slave-trading quarter in Richmond, Virginia…

Read the entire review here.

Podcast Season 2 Episode 8: Centering Garifuna in the African Diaspora

Dialogues in Afrolatinidad
2022-05-04

Michele Reid-Vazquez, Host and Associate Professor
Department of Africana Studies
University of Pittsburgh

In this episode of Dialogues in Afrolatinidad, Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College talks with our host Dr. Michele Reid-Vazquez about his research on Garifuna migration and different meanings of Black identity. The conversation also touches upon Afro-Latinx communities in the United States, their relations with African-Americans, and issues of queer identity in these communities.

The Burdened Virtue of Racial Passing

The Boston Review
2022-05-13

Meena Krishnamurthy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Though a means of escaping and undermining racial injustice, the practice comes with own set of costs and sacrifices.

In Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, adapted by Rebecca Hall and distributed on Netfli­x last fall, Clare Kendry—a light-skinned Black woman—decides to pass as white. Clare grows up poor in Chicago; after her alcoholic father dies, she is taken in by her racist white aunts. When she turns eighteen she marries a rich white man who assumes she is white. Clare makes a clean escape until, some years later, she runs into her childhood friend, Irene Redfield, at a whites-only hotel; Irene, it turns out, sometimes passes herself, in this case to escape the summer heat. The storyline traces their complex relationship after this reunion and ends in tragedy for Clare.

Hall’s film adaptation joins several other recent representations that dramatize the lived experience of passing. The protagonist of Brit Bennett’s best-selling novel The Vanishing Half (2020), for example, decides to start passing as white in the 1950s at age sixteen after responding to a listing in the newspaper for secretarial work in a New Orleans department store. Much to her surprise, after excelling at the typing test, Stella is offered the position; her boss assumes she is white. Initially Stella keeps up the ruse just to support her and her sister, but passing also becomes a way for her to escape the trauma of her father’s lynching and the prospect of her own…

Read the entire article here.