Contentious Legacies: Mixed-Race in the Age of Colorblindess and Beyond

Posted in Census/Demographics, History, Live Events, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2010-03-24 21:18Z by Steven

Contentious Legacies: Mixed-Race in the Age of Colorblindess and Beyond

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champiagn
Asian American Cultural Center
2010-03-30
12:00 CDT (Local Time)

Tessa Winklemann

This presentation is about Mixed Race issues, the 2010 Census, and the history of the construction of race and the census in the United States.

For more information, click here.

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Professor G. Reginald Daniel to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Live Events, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-03-24 12:25Z by Steven

Professor G. Reginald Daniel to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #146 – Professor G. Reginald Daniel
When: Wednesday, 2010-03-24 22:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

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

Key Publications: Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006); “Multiracial Identity in Global Perspective: The United States, Brazil, and South Africa,” New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (2002); More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2001); “Black and White Identity in the New Millennium: Unsevering the Ties That Bind,” The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (1996); “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide,” Racially Mixed People in America (1992).

Most Recent Publications:

From February 2003: G. Reginald Daniel discusses his book, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order.

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Race marks: Miscegenation in nineteenth-century American fiction

Posted in Dissertations, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Slavery, United States on 2010-03-24 01:58Z by Steven

Race marks: Miscegenation in nineteenth-century American fiction

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1997
195 pages

Kimberly Anne Hicks

This dissertation examines the process of miscegenation in the work of four authors who occupy pivotal positions in American writing about race. It is concerned with a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts produced by William Wells Brown, George Washington Cable, Pauline Hopkins, and Thomas Dixon between the years 1846 and 1915. This study will examine how miscegenation provided these authors with a way of narrativizing American race relations in a period which encompasses slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction and Redemption, as well as the creation of a segregated South and an imperial America.

Individual chapters engage in cultural as well as literary analyses by reading mixed-race characters as literary signs which gave rise to a wide range of narrative possibilities, as political instruments which allowed each author to intervene in contemporary debates about the construction of American history, the nature of race, and laws designed to regulate interracial contact. While remaining aware of the personal and political differences which separate the writers under consideration, this study notes similarities in the ways in which each makes use of mixed-race characters and miscegenation plots.

Attention to gender likewise unites the individual chapters. The fact of mixed parentage signifies differently for male and female characters, no matter what plot these authors chose. For each, the figure of the quadroon woman presented special problems, as indicated by the sheer number of pages each devoted to telling child re-telling her story. This study traces the permutations of plots centered around quadroon women by reading a number of fictional works by each of the primary authors. It also examines the ways in which constructions of gender are overdetermined by methods of race representation which appear in the works of African-American writers, as well as in that of their white counterparts.

By focusing on a works which illustrate the interconnectedness between black and white Americans from slavery through segregation–works created by authors who themselves represent, in their persons as well as their politics, a variety of subject positions–this dissertation seeks to locate itself in the context of current efforts to produce a new canon of American literature, one more truly reflective of the varied nature of American life. It examines a literature not of race, but of race relations; one which repeatedly describes positions on a racial continuum too complicated to be characterized in terms of black and white.

Read or purchase the dissertation here.

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Acts of Intercourse: “Miscegenation” in three 19th Century American Novels

Posted in Articles, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2010-03-24 01:35Z by Steven

Acts of Intercourse: “Miscegenation” in three 19th Century American Novels

American Studies in Scandinavia
Volume 27 (1995)
pages 126-141

Domhnall Mitchell, Professor of English
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Until this period of the evening, the duties of hospitality and the observances of religion had prevented familiar discourse. But the regular offices of the housewife were now ended for the night; the handmaidens had all retired to their wheels; and as the bustle of a busy and more stirring domestic industry ceased, the cold and selfrestrained silence, which had hitherto only been broken by distant and brief observations of courtesy, or by some wholesome allusion to the lost and probationary condition of man, seemed to invite an intercourse of a more general character.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (Columbus, Ohio; Charles E. Merrill, 1970).

In a 19th century American novel like Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, intercourse usually means conversation, an important activity which supports, sustains and secures a community’s perception of its shared identity. If we take the above quotation as an example, Cooper manages to convey a sense of common purpose and harmonious enterprise, to such an extent that the people described seem almost to function as members of one family. But intercourse of another, sexual kind also takes place in the novel, between one of the white daughters of this family and a Narragansett sachem. The second kind of intercourse takes place outside the confines of, and disturbs the kind of stability and integrity represented by, the first. The unanimity of social institutions is disrupted and threatened first by the arrival and second by the acceptance of the Indian within the white family. When it is remembered that, in 19th century American history, the word intercourse is further associated with a series of acts regulating the transaction of land and goods between European Americans and Native Americans, and that there was contention about exactly what kind of contact, if any, should be maintained between the two groups, then it can be seen that this single word carries with it a complex sequence of literary and cultural connotations.

Intercourse, then, is a useful term with which to begin looking at aspects of relations between Native American Indians and Europeans in certain 19th Century American novels. For the word can have several definitions. It implies physical intimacy; it can also mean commercial exchange, including the transaction of property: and finally, it suggests discourse, or dialogue. These different meanings indicate different levels we might profitably look at.

In its modern sense, intercourse suggests sexual relations, and several 19th century novels imagine the possibility of union between Indians and Whites. I have chosen three of these; Hobomok, written by Lydia Maria Child and published in 1824; Catharine Maria Sedgwick‘s Hope Leslie, which appeared in 1827; and the second, revised, 1833 edition of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (or The Borderers), by James Fenimore Cooper, which was first printed in 1829. Although all three of the works under consideration were written by Americans in the 1820s, the time and place of their narration is 17th century New England, so there is an element of dialogue between texts and historical contexts. The dialogue also involves a reconstruction of early colonial history. These novels integrate or negotiate with Indian versions of historical events as well as attempting to create colourful rather than credible Native characters. For example, in 1653, a woman was hanged for taking the Indian demigod Hobbamock as her husband, and it is therefore interesting that Child’s novel Hobomok begins with Mary Conant going into the forest late at night and meeting the Indian character of the same name, who she later marries and has a child by.  Instead of the dominant 17th century imperatives of war and suspicion, Hobomok dramatizes the possibility of an assimilation which is at once sexual and cultural. And yet, what I intend to show in this article is that Indian loving is in fact not very different in its final results from the kind of Indian hating which characterized later works such as James Hall’s Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the West (1835) and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Jibbenainosay, or Nick of the Woods (1837)…

Read the entire article here.

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Multiracial students speak out on campus

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media, Social Science, United States on 2010-03-24 01:08Z by Steven

Multiracial students speak out on campus

The Vermont Cynic
2010-03-15

Patrick Dowd

The question of racial identity isn’t always black and white. 

Multiracial students on campus  say that struggle for identity extends beyond stereotypes and name mispronunciations, according to the four student panelists who spoke on behalf of UVM’s multicultural students at Harris/Millis.

“Since I came to UVM, I’ve become confused about my racial identity,” senior Tania Khartabil said. “I don’t feel authentic anymore.”

The panelists all shared this feeling and expressed similar frustration in constantly being culturally labeled without acknowledgement of their mixed identity…

Read the entire article here.

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Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education

Posted in Anthologies, Arts, Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-03-24 00:43Z by Steven

Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2010
250 pages
Paparback ISBN: 978-1-4331-0840-2

Edited by:

Shirley R. Steinberg
McGill University

Lindsay Cornish

Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is a collection of 15 compelling and controversial articles from the pages of Taboo: The Journal of Cultural Studies and Education. Scholars including Henry A. Giroux, Deborah P. Britzman, and Lawrence Grossberg explore intersections of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and power by examining cultural icons such as Forrest Gump and Borat, and social phenomena including cheerleading and the depiction of Jewish mothers on television. Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is an indispensable resource for cultural studies scholars and students alike.

Table of Contents

  • Lawrence Grossberg: What’s in a Name (One More Time)
  • Deborah P. Britzman: What Is This Thing Called Love?
  • Aaron D. Gresson III: Postmodern America and the Multicultural Crisis: Reading Forrest Gump as the “Call Back to Whiteness”
  • Henry A. Giroux: Black, Bruised, and Read All Over: Public Intellectuals and the Politics of Race
  • Kurt Kors: The Scenography of HIV Infection for Young Gay Men: Educating Emotion and Desire
  • Kathalene A. Razzano: Tiger Woods: A Discursive Struggle over the Construction of a Multiracial Image
  • Awad Ibrahim: “Hey, Whadup Homeboy?” Identification, Desire, and Consumption Hip Hop, Performativity, and the Politics of Becoming Black
  • Molly Quinn: Getting Thrown Around: Little Girls and Cheerleading
  • Myrna Hant: TV Jewish Mothers: The Creation of a Multiethnic Antiheroine
  • Michelle Stack: Made for TV: Selling Kids’ Suffering and Creating Angels to Save Them
  • Priya Parmar: Cultural Studies and Rap: The Poetry of an Urban Lyricist
  • Eric J. Weiner: Constructions of Innocence in Times of War: Breaking into the Hegemony of Peace
  • Dennis Parsons: Almost Feminist: Truth, the Trope of the Writer, and the Male Gaze in Almost Famous
  • Roymieco A. Carter/Leila E. Villaverde: Laughing at Ourselves (in the Dark): Comedy and the Critical Reflections of Social Actions
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