Mixed Race Studies

Stanford profs examine mixed race in U.S. society

The Dartmouth
Victoria Boggiano, The Dartmouth Staff
2008-04-18

In 2000, the U.S. Census gave Americans the chance to identify themselves by more than one race for the first time. Almost seven million people — over 80 percent of whom were under 25 — checked more than one box, Stanford University professors Harry and Michele Elam told a crowded auditorium in Haldeman Hall on Thursday. A new global “mixed-race movement” has begun, they said in their lecture, titled “The High Stakes of Mixed Race: Post-Race, Post-Apartheid Performances in the U.S. and South Africa.”

The couple’s research stems from studies they have conducted to analyze theatrical performances in the United States and South Africa. Claiming that performance is a “transformative force for institutional and social change,” the Elams examined a variety of plays from these two countries. The research provided the couple with insight into the effect of the worldwide “mixed-race movement” on race politics and cultural identities, Harry said.

“We’re arguing that analyzing mixed race as a type of social performance can help us make sense of some of these new cultural dynamics,” he said…

…In the United States, the “mixed-race movement” is comprised of an uneasy coalition of “interracial couples, transracial adoptees and a new generation of mixed-race-identified youth,” the Elams said…

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Inexacting Whiteness: Blanqueamiento as a Gender-Specific Trope in the Nineteenth Century

Cuban Studies
Volume 36, 2005
pages 105-128
E-ISSN: 1548-2464
Print ISSN: 0361-4441
DOI: 10.1353/cub.2005.0033

Gema R. Guevara, Associate Professor, Languages & Literature and Associate Professor, Spanish Section
University of Utah

In Cuba, race, nation, and popular music were inextricably linked to the earliest formulations of a national identity. This article examines how the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento, or whitening, became part of a nineteenth-century literary narrative in which the casi blanca mulata, nearly white mulatta, was seen as a vehicle for whitening black Cubans. However, as the novels of Cirilo Villaverde and Ramón Meza reveal, the mulata’s inability to produce entirely white children established the ultimate unattainability of whiteness by nonwhites. This article analyzes the fluidity of these racial constructs and demonstrates that, while these literary texts advocated the lightening of the nation’s complexion over time, they also mapped the progressive “darkening” of Cuban music as popular culture continued to borrow from black music.

Read the entire article here.