Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Race is an elusive category and provides an even more elusive way to forge a sense of collective belonging. Nobody is more aware of this elusiveness than Brazilian black-power activists. For most of the history of blacks in Brazil, Africans and their descendents had a strong sense of being different from their white slaveholders. This difference was forced onto them and used to hold them at the bottom of Brazil’s social hierarchies, and it left no doubt that Brazilian whites had no intention whatsoever to accept the moral and legal equality of blacks, which held true well into the twentieth century. The sense of black identity was indeed so strong during most of the colonial period and slavery, which lasted until 1888, that African and Brazilian blacks of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and of different degrees of biological mixture repeatedly united to contest white supremacy and attempted to overthrow the system that held them at the bottom. On several occasions, Brazil barely escaped its “Haitian moment.” As late as 1931, the radical Frente Negra Brasileira, the Brazilian Black Front, had a membership of about 200,000, mostly concentrated in the industrialized south (Davis 1999: 187). In 1936, however, the authoritarian government of Vargas outlawed the Black Front, together with all other oppositional political parties. The Vargas government sought to discourage any association that had the potential to endanger his project of national unity. The risk of factionalism and even secession was so great during the 1930s that the Vargas government undertook extraordinary measures to forge a sense of nationality, national pride, and even a sense of what it meant to be Brazilian.

Among the most successful in this cause was sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1986). Freyre’s writings on the Brazilian national character provided the ideological foundation upon which a unified nation could be constructed, and the Vargas regime left no means untouched to disseminate this ideology. Brazil would be a racial paradise, inhabited by one race, the Brazilian version of “cosmic race”—a tropical mulatto republic. Anybody daring to say differently was transformed into a naysayer and a reactionary. The concept of a racial paradise promised a solution to finally catch up to the developed world, even if—and especially because—Brazil had such a large mixed population.

To the black-power movement, this move proved devastating. Up until the 1930s, Brazilian blacks were forcefully united by the perverse power of racism and social Darwinism; after the 1930s, asserting one’s blackness was transformed into an act of civic upheaval and antipatriotism and little by little, as the Vargas regime made sure that its version of the truth was accepted, asserting ethnic difference became an act of political incorrectness not only aimed against the state, but against mainstream society. Under Vargas, race was removed from textbooks, censuses, and from the official discourse about Brazil. The state thus produced the main and only official way to represent the country, and any Brazilian—black or white, mixed or indigenous—had no other choice but to accept that reality and to find ways of social mobility that explicitly took it into account. The core of the doctrine disseminated under Vargas was that no matter what their ethnic background, Brazilians are all mixed and hence one. Nevertheless, this was not an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson (1991) suggests. Rather, it was a designed community, designed by the state and forced onto its people. The only one imagining, dreaming, and sometimes hallucinating such a community was the father of the idea, Gilberto Freyre.

The Vargas years severely delegitimized any attempt to forge a sense of racial solidarity among excluded blacks. Just as black-power movements regrouped during the 1950s and early 1960s, the state stepped in again, this time to avoid a potentially explosive bonding between labor and racialized groups. During the military regime, black-power activism became subversive and was subject to prosecution in the best-case scenario, but also to state-sponsored persecution, imprisonment, torture, and even death. The military regime also ensured that the category race would disappear again from the census, and it thus sought to curtail even the prospects for an emerging racial solidarity that would embrace and represent all those affected by the forces of racism and racialized exclusion. Categories, after all, are the building blocks of group consciousness (Brubaker 2004). Without numbers, mobilization is greatly complicated, as there can be no sense of a shared destiny if it is not known with whom, and with how many, this destiny is shared. Political activism is all but rendered impossible if there are no data and no existing categories other than being Brazilian.

Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell (Gladys Mitchell-Walthour), “The New Politics of Race in Brazil” in Brazil’s New Racial Politics, edited by Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012): 3-5.

MFA Thesis Choreographies

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-03 19:24Z by Steven

MFA Thesis Choreographies

Davis Life Magazine
Davis, California
2013-02-28

UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance is proud to present MFA Thesis Choreographies: “Ligilo” by Jarrell Iu-Hui Chua, in collaboration with Bobby August Jr., travels through the worlds of memories, dreams and present realities to investigate touch and its effects on relationships; “Transmutation” by Christine Germain, in collaboration with Andrea del Moral and Deirdre Morris, examines questions of personal identity and shifts in identity. MFA Thesis Choreographies opens at Mondavi Center’s Vanderhoef Studio Theatre on Thursday, Feb. 21 and runs through Sunday, March 3.

The title of Jarrell Iu-Hui Chua’s work “Ligilo” means “link” in Esperanto, a language that represents the choreographer’s ethnic sensitivities. She and collaborator Bobby August Jr. are both “hapa,” a term that Chua lovingly uses to describe their half-Asian heritage. Their hapa experiences of prejudice growing up in America are a core element in the choreography as is personal trauma from which Chua is recovering.

Emanating from these painful themes, “Ligilo” portrays anger and violence as two performers, Chua and August Jr., physically connect and disconnect. Most emphatically, the piece explores the positive dimensions of human touch in erotic love, humor, tenderness and other aspects of humanity and healing. The spiritual touch of bathing a loved one conveys hope and tranquility. This is both the heart of “Ligilo” and the basis of its foreign title as Esperanto (literally meaning “one who hopes”) was intended to foster peace among peoples of differing cultures…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Bobby August Jr., Christine Germain, Davis Life Magazine, Jarrell Iu-Hui Chua, University of California at Davis

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MMXLII Viewpoint: What Are You?

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-03 19:14Z by Steven

MMXLII Viewpoint: What Are You?

MMXLII: the power of diversity
2013-03-01

Joel Wacks

Our guest correspondent Joel Wacks is back with another intriguing article as he takes time to reflect on his personal life. As a person of mixed race there is a common question he seems to always be asked, and for one reason or another…it doesn’t sit too well. Hit the jump and take a look at his opinion and see what many other people of mixed race have to deal with constantly. Take a walk in their shoes so you can think about how that question may come across for some people. And if you are of mixed race, this is probably a story you can relate to.

A week or two ago I spent a weekend in New York, where I happened to chat, briefly, with a girl from Maryland. Or at least a girl who went to school in Maryland- it might be that she was from somewhere else originally. There were several minutes of generic pleasantries, and then she asked me, just as pleasantly as she’d asked my name and about my flight, what I was. Those were her exact words. “What are you?”

It was a question I found jarring and unpleasant. Which is unfair- it wasn’t unpleasantly, I’m sure, and I certainly had no excuse for being jarred. It’s a question I’ve been asked many times, by many people, for as long as I can remember. The truth is, though, that the more times I’m asked what I am, the more bothersome I find it. On the flight back to California, I had some time to think about why.

As an English major, I’ll start the discussion with a close reading, an analysis of the diction used in this three-word query. I’ll go ahead and say right now that it could usually be phrased more sensitively. I’ve heard stabs at this, actually- “What ethnicity are you?” “What nationality are you?” “Where are you from?” invariably followed by the clarifying but not necessarily enlightening “No, I mean originally?” For whatever reason though the most common formulation remains the simplest- “What are you?” (Of course the evidence for this is purely anecdotal, as much as I wish I had I haven’t actually kept track.)

It’s the “what” I think, that’s the sticking point. There’s some ugly implication, not entirely accidental I suspect, that you don’t fit into acceptable categories or genres, that you’re something completely different, unrecognizable, freakish. It’s telling that the snarky response most often suggested by my friends and family is “Human.” After all, who else is asked what they are besides the racially ambiguous? It’s what you ask the Terminator when his flesh scrapes away to reveal the robot beneath. It’s what you ask the newest Batman villain, right before he does you in. It’s what you ask Frankenstein’s monster, when you notice all those stitches. “What” is for monsters. When you’re talking to people, you usually say “who.” But of course, if you ask someone “Who are you?” they’d just tell you about themselves, and might forget to mention race at all.

Which brings me to the second issue I have with “What are you?” I never know how to answer. When I was younger, I would tell people that I was half Chinese and a quarter Jewish, falling prey to the racism of marked terms and assuming that the final fraction of unadulterated WASP DNA needed no explaination. At some point I figured out that the fractions didn’t add up, and switched to “Half Chinese and half white.” That formula lasted for years, before I began to worry that it sounded too much like a formula. “Half and half.” It made me feel like a cocktail, or a dairy product…

Read the entire article here

Tags: Joel Wacks, MMXLII, MMXLII: the power of diversity

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One Drop of Love: Debut Performance

Posted in Arts, Live Events, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2013-03-03 02:08Z by Steven

One Drop of Love: Debut Performance

Arena Theater
California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State University Drive [Directions] [Map]
Los Angeles, California 90032
Saturday, 2013-03-09, 20:00 PST (Local Time)

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator
Jillian Pagan, Director

One Drop of Love is a solo show by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni that journeys from Jamaica to Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Michigan, and East and West Africa from 1790 to the present to explore how ‘race’ affects our most intimate relationships.

For more information, click here.

Tags: Fanshen Cox, Fanshen Cox Digiovanni, Jillian Pagan

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Mixed Race Studies

MFA Thesis Choreographies

MMXLII Viewpoint: What Are You?

One Drop of Love: Debut Performance

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