Mixed Race Studies

Race, Creole, and National Identities in Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” and Phillips’s “Cambridge”

Small Axe
Number 21 (Volume 10, Number 3)
October 2006
pages 87-104
E-ISSN: 1534-6714, Print ISSN: 0799-0537
DOI: 10.1353/smx.2006.0035

Vivian Nun Halloran, Assoiate Professor of Comparative Literature
Indiana University, Bloomington

As postmodern historical novels dramatizing slavery and its legacy in the anglophone Caribbean islands, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1993) problematize Englishness as a national and cultural identity that may or may not be dependent upon race and also reject the Creole as an identity subordinate in status to that of European. By questioning the prevailing nineteenth century assumption of an inherent relationship linking the observable geographical boundaries of a state and the essential character of its national culture, Cambridge destabilizes Englishness as a homogeneous racial signifier for whiteness in its depiction of London as a bustling metropolis with a small but visible population of Black Britons, while Wide Sargasso Sea portrays Creole Jamaican society, black and white, at a moment of crisis, on the eve of the arrival of the first wave of indentured servants from India. Both novels suggest that social demarcations between English and Creole cultural identities are artificial because they ultimately depend on chance — on the geographical accident of a given person’s or character’s place of birth…

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Situating the Essential Alien: Sui Sin Far’s Depiction of Chinese-White Marriage and the Exclusionary Logic of Citizenship

MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 2008
pages 654-688
E-ISSN: 1080-658X Print ISSN: 0026-7724
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1561

Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Assistant Professor of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This essay looks at how Sui Sin Far’s [born Edith Maude Eaton] short stories contested an emerging model of national citizenship that attempted to expand the rights of blacks and women by excluding Chinese immigrants. It argues that her depiction of Chinese-White marriage strategically redresses anxieties about black-white miscegenation that were fueled by Progressive and post-Reconstruction reform. While Sui Sin Far counters Chinese national exclusion by strategically pointing up the more offensive threat of black racial difference, she also exposes the disingenuous logic that attempted to situate national and racial exclusions on opposite sides of a hinge.

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Rene, Louis, and Leopold: Senghorian Negritude as a Black Humanism

MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2005
pages 921-935
E-ISSN: 1080-658X Print ISSN: 0026-7724
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2006.0008

Michel Fabre

Randall Cherry

Jonathan P. (Paul) Eburne, Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Pennsylvania State University

Drawing from archival documentation of their long-standing literary relationship, this essay examines the correspondences between the negritude writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor and the assimilationist thought of his literary precursor René Maran. It traces the history of Senghorian negritude as a theory of cultural intermixture or métissage. As Fabre demonstrates, Senghor’s ideas about the ethical and political significance of cultural hybridity, which emerged from his intellectual relations with transnational black figures of the 1920s and 1930s, aimed to counter biologically-rooted forms of racial essentialism with a notion of blackness—what Senghor referred to as the “black soul”—considered as a set of cultural properties.

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The Meaning of Race in Healthcare and Research-Part 2: Should Race Be Used in Health Care and Research?

Pediatric Nursing
Volume 31, Number 4 (July-August 2005)
Pages 305-308

Cathy J. Tashiro, PhD, RN, Associate Professor of Nursing
University of Washington, Tacoma

The state of race today is complex and challenging. An article published in the preceding issue of this journal examined the history of race and its impact on health care. This article further examines the issue of race and health care as concerns arise regarding the relevance of genetics to health disparities. Pediatric nurses must examine the literature on race, as well as our own assumptions, and be clear about when and why we use racial categories and what they really mean.

The impreciseness of racial categories, as well as the history of racial discrimination in the United States, has contributed to skepticism about the use of race in the clinical setting. Reasonable concerns have been raised that suggest race has been proven to be a non-scientific concept, and that its use in medicine can both be highly misleading and can reinforce an erroneous belief in the inherent biology of race (Witzig, 1996). Fullilove (1998) has argued that race should be abandoned as a variable in public health research in favor of other levels of analysis, such as place of residence, which can provide more meaningful data about social conditions influencing health. The use of race in the clinical setting in particular can lead to stereotyping and even false assumptions (Anderson, Moscou, Fulchon, & Newspiel, 2001), as demonstrated by the case study at the beginning of the companion article published in the previous issue of this journal (Tashiro, 2005). President Clinton’s Cancer Panel, which convened a meeting of experts on “The Meaning of Race in Science,” concluded that race, as a social and political construct, has no basis in science; that there is no genetic basis for racial classification, nor for a belief that distinct races exist; and, that racism continues to exert a powerful influence in society (Freeman, 1997).

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) stops short of advocating the abandonment of the concept of race altogether, but urges that when race is used adequate justification should be provided. According to the authors of the AAP (2000) position statement on race, “Although race historically has been viewed as a biological construct, it is now known to be more accurately characterized as a social category that has changed over time and varies across societies and cultures” (p. 1349). For this reason, in order not to perpetuate erroneous stereotypes, AAP recommends that race and ethnicity be used as variables in research only when they are accurately defined and when the reasons for using them are adequately explained.

Kaplan and Bennett (2003) suggest guidelines for responsible use of race and ethnicity in health- related publications. These include stating the reason for the use of race as a variable and specifying how individuals in the study are assigned to racial categories, avoiding the use of race as a proxy for genetic variation, and avoiding any stigmatizing and/or misleading terminology (Kaplan & Bennett, 2003, pp. 2711-2713). Regarding terminology, some (e.g., Lee, Mountain, & Koenig, 2001) have advocated for the use of the term “racialized groups” instead of “race” in research using race as variable, emphasizing that race is not inherently meaningful scientifically, but rather a concept that is produced by society.

While it would seem to make intuitive sense to abandon the use of race as a variable altogether, there are some dangers to that position too. Proponents for continuing to collect data by race argue that abandoning this practice would eliminate the evidence of health differences due to persistent inequalities between racialized groups (Krieger, Williams, & Zierler, 1999). Race is a social fact in the U.S., and the routine collection of data by race began in earnest because of the Civil Rights Act, in order to identify and eliminate discrimination in housing, employment, and other areas of civic life. Without the data, evidence of discrimination would be lost. In fact, the concept of “color-blind racism” has been identified as a way of perpetuating the racial hierarchy by ignoring racial inequalities (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). In this regard, if the Institute of Medicine report on unequal treatment, discussed previously in the companion article (Tashiro, 2005), is any indication, “color-blindness” has not yet arrived in the examining room, and to pretend that it has will detract from efforts to ameliorate the social and economic conditions producing health disparities.

One’s stance toward race must by necessity be complex. As Krieger (2001) states in relationship to epidemiologic research, “considering lived experiences of racism as real but the construct of biological ‘race’ as spurious, social epidemiological research investigates health consequences of economic and non-economic expressions of racial discrimination” (p. 696). To paraphrase Krieger: while race is not real, racism is.

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Gabriela Meets Olodum: Paradoxes of Hybridity, Racial Identity, and Black Consciousness in Contemporary Brazil

Research in African Literatures
Volume 38, Number 1 (Spring 2007)
pages 181-193
E-ISSN: 1527-2044
Print ISSN: 0034-5210
DOI: 10.1353/ral.2007.0007

Russell G. Hamilton, Emeritus Professor of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone African Literatures
Vanderbilt University

With respect to the first part of this article’s title, Gabriela is the formidable female protagonist of Jorge Amado’s celebrated novel Gabriela, Cravo e Canela. This novel, first published in 1958, has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and its English-language version, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, made the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year. Moreover, the novel was adapted to the small screen as a TV series, as well as to the silver screen. In the role of Gabriela, Sônia Braga, a prototypical Brazilian morena, a term used to designate a mixed-race woman, became a sensation in the 1975 telenovela (soap opera). Braga later received international acclaim when she starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni in the 1985 film adaptation of the novel.

When Amado’s novel first appeared in print, Gabriela became the latest in a long line of enchanting female mulatto characters in Brazilian literature. To a greater or lesser degree, all of these fictional females, the mixed-race offspring of African and European or of Brazilian Indian and Caucasian parentage, are most often depicted as physically and otherwise appealing literary characters. Whether in literature and other modes of cultural expression, or in real and imagined social existence, exotic, mysterious, coquettish, and sensual women of color, most especially mulatas (mulatto women), constitute both the subjects and objects of a nativistic and, indeed, pan-Luso-Brazilian cult. This cult of the mulataencantada (enchanted mulatto woman) has been codified as a romanticized component of Brazil’s national identity and popular culture. Although less likely to occur as blatantly today, in this era of increased black consciousness, the cult of the enchanted mulatto, and mulatto enchantress, has manifested itself in the popular press…

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