Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The church exists in the wake of this racial world, and for this reason mixed bodies still trouble the waters. Mulattos were bodies that troubled the waters for all of us because they existed on both sides in a space that could not sustain such a possibility. That we no longer characterize mixed-race children as mulatto does not mitigate the growing fact of these interracial children. But perhaps even more important, these children continue to pose a problem because the patterns of faith, education, and marriage still flow along the trenches of a world forged by race. The ambivalence of our racial condition is no clearer than in both the election of a mixed-race president, Barack Obama, as well as in the vehement questioning of his faith, birth, and citizenship. Just as darker and lighter Americans alike are reimagining the possibility of political life in the United States, so too are the numbers of militias swelling, and chants of “we want our country back” growing. The possibility of post-racial is only an illusory bridge. To enter into such divisions we must recognize interracial children and their perpetuation in our own lives in the subtle and glaring ways we seek to reinforce our difference and refuse the possibility of becoming something different.

Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity, (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010), 9-10.

“Our Ancestors came from many Bloods”. Gendered Narrations of a Hybrid Nation

Posted in Africa, Anthropology, Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-04-14 01:16Z by Steven

“Our Ancestors came from many Bloods”. Gendered Narrations of a Hybrid Nation

Lusotopie
Volume 12, Issue 1 (2005)
pages 217-232
DOI: 10.1163/176830805774719728

Isabel P.B. Fêo Rodrigues, Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Narratives of mixed ancestry in Cape Verde use gender as common denominator in the weaving of a Creole nation. These narratives may hide tensions, conflicts, and adversities, but they also contain elements of fusion and national cohesion. They are and have been gendered narratives, partial and selective of the elements of fusion substantiating and sustaining a Cape Verdean identity vis-à-vis the multiple symbolic and material challenges faced by this young post-colonial nation-state. In them, Cape Verde is portrayed as an exceptional African case with boundaries carved by the ocean, free from ethnic conflict, and without a pre-colonial past through which to filter present realities.

Tags: Cape Verde, Isabel Fêo Rodrigues, Isabel P.B. Fêo Rodrigues, Lusotopie

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“Our Ancestors came from many Bloods”. Gendered Narrations of a Hybrid Nation

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