My Monticello, Fiction

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Novels, United States, Virginia on 2021-10-21 00:21Z by Steven

My Monticello, Fiction

Henry Holt & Company (an imprint of Macmillan)
2021-10-05
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781250807151
e-Book ISBN: 9781250807168
Audiobook ISBN: 9781250820723
Compact Disk ISBN: 9781250820716

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.

In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.”

United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.

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The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Poetry on 2017-03-17 19:47Z by Steven

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2014-01-21
640 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780374125615

Derek Walcott (1930-2017)

Selected by Glyn Maxwell

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott’s celebrated, inimitable, essential career

“He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.” Alongside Joseph Brodsky’s words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 draws from every stage of the poet’s storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like “In My Eighteenth Year,” published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like “A Far Cry from Africa,” which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one’s very blood; his mature work, like “The Schooner Flight” from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender “Sixty Years After,” from the 2010 collection White Egrets.

Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one’s own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott’s friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

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Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study

Posted in Anthologies, Asian Diaspora, Books, Census/Demographics, Economics, Gay & Lesbian, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Latino Studies, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, Slavery, Social Science, United States, Women on 2015-10-24 18:38Z by Steven

Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study

Macmillan
Ninth Edition
2014
732 pages
Paper Text ISBN-10: 1-4292-4217-5; ISBN-13: 978-1-4292-4217-2

Paula S. Rothenberg, Senior Fellow; The Murphy Institute, City University of New York
Professor Emerita; William Patterson University of New Jersey

Like no other text, this best-selling anthology effectively introduces students to the complexity of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States and illustrates how these categories operate and interact in society. The combination of thoughtfully selected readings, deftly written introductions, and careful organization make Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Ninth Edition, the most engaging and balanced presentation of these issues available today.

In addition to including scholarly selections from authors like Beverly Tatum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Annette Lareau, and Jonathan Kozol, Rothenberg includes historical documents like the Three-Fifths Compromise, firsthand narrative accounts of how these issues have affected the lives of individuals, and popular press pieces reporting on discrimination in everyday life.

This edition includes 28 new selections considering such relevant topics as the citizenship and immigration, transgender identity, the 2010 census, multiracial identity, the 99% and the occupy movement, the tragic story of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, South Asian Identity post 9/11, multiracial identity, disability, sexual harassment in the teenage years, and much more.

Table of Contents *Articles new or revised for this edition

  • Part I THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
    • 1 Racial Formations / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
    • 2 The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch / Richard Wright
    • 3 Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege / Pem Davidson Buck
    • 4 How Jews Became White Folks / Karen Brodkin
    • 5 “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender / Judith Lorber
    • 6 The Social Construction of Sexuality / Ruth Hubbard
    • 7 The Invention of Heterosexuality / Jonathan Ned Katz
    • 8 Masculinity as Homophobia / Michael S. Kimmel
    • 9 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History / Douglas C. Baynton
    • 10 Deconstructing the Underclass / Herbert Gans
    • 11 Domination and Subordination / Jean Baker Miller
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part II UNDERSTANDING RACISM, SEXISM, HETEROSEXISM, AND CLASS PRIVILEGE
    • 1 Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?” / Beverly Daniel Tatum
    • 2 Color-Blind Racism / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
    • 3 Smells Like Racism / Rita Chaudhry Sethi
    • 4 Oppression / Marilyn Frye
    • 5 Patriarchy / Allan G. Johnson
    • 6 Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism / Suzanne Pharr
    • *7 The 10 Percent Problem / Kate Clinton
    • 8 White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack / Peggy McIntosh
    • *9 Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life / Annette Lareau
    • *10 Class in America—2012 / Gregory Mantsios
  • Part III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
    • 1 A Nation of None and All of the Above / Sam Roberts
    • 2 A New Century: Immigration and the US / MPI Staff, updated by Kevin Jernegan
    • *3 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America / Mae Ngai
    • 4 Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves / Evelyn Alsultany
    • *5 For many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color / Mireya Navarro
    • *6 Testimony / Sonny Singh
    • 7 Asian American? / Sonia Shah
    • 8 The Myth of the Model Minority / Noy Thrupkaew
    • 9 Personal Voices: Facing Up to Race / Carrie Ching
    • Suggestions for Further Readings
  • Part IV DISCRIMINATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
    • 1 The Problem: Discrimination / U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
    • 2 Abercrombie Settles Class-Action Suit
    • 3 Apparel Factory Workers Were Cheated, State Says / Steven Greenhouse
    • 4 Women in the State Police: Trouble in the Ranks / Jonathan Schuppe
    • *5 Why Transgender Identification Matters / Rebecca Juro
    • 6 Where “English Only” Falls Short / Stacy A. Teicher
    • 7 Blacks vs. Latinos at Work / Miriam Jordan
    • 8 Manhattan Store Owner Accused of Underpaying and Sexually Harassing Workers / Steven Greenhouse
    • 9 Muslim-American Running Back off the Team at New Mexico State / Matthew Rothschild
    • 10 Tennessee Judge Tells Immigrant Mothers: Learn English or Else / Ellen Barry
    • *11 Tucson’s Ousted Mexican-American Studies Director Speaks: The Fight’s Not Over / Julianne Hing
    • 12 My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish / Mana Lumumba-Kasongo
    • 13 The Segregated Classrooms of a Proudly Diverse School / Jeffrey Gettleman
    • 14 Race and Family Income of Students Influence Guidance Counselors’ Advice, Study Finds / Eric Hoover
    • 15 College Choices Are Limited for Students from Needy Families, Report Says / Stephen Burd
    • 16 Wealthy Often Win the Race for Merit-Based College Aid / Jay Mathews
    • 17 On L.I., Raid Stirs Dispute over Influx of Immigrants / Bruce Lambert
    • 18 More Blacks Live with Pollution / Associated Press
    • *19 National Study Finds Widespread Sexual Harassment of Students in Grades 7-12 / Jenny Anderson
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part V THE ECONOMICS OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
    • *1 Imagine a Country—2012 / Holly Sklar
    • *2 Dr King Weeps from His Grave / Cornel West
    • *3 Rich People Create Jobs! And Five Other Myths That Must Die for our Economy to Live / Kevin Drum
    • *4 It’s Official: The Rich Got Richer: Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds / Robert Pear
    • *5 Study Finds Big Spike in the Poorest in the U.S. / Sabrina Tavernise
    • *6 The Making of the American 99% and the Collapse of the Middle Class / Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
    • *7 Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics Twenty-to-One: Executive Summary / Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor
    • 8 The Economic Reality of Being Asian American / Meizhu Lui and others
    • 9 The Economic Reality of Being Latino/a in the U.S. / Meizhu Lui and others
    • *10 Hispanic Children in Poverty Exceed Whites / Sabrina Tavernise
    • *11 Gender Gap on Wages is Slow to Close / Motoko Rich
    • 12 Women Losing Ground / Ruth Conniff
    • 13 Lilly’s Big Day / Gail Collins
    • 14 “Savage Inequalities” Revisited / Bob Feldman
    • 15 Cause of Death: Inequality / Alejandro Reuss
    • *16 Undocumented Immigrants Find Paths to College, Careers / Gosnia Wozniacka
    • 17 Immigration’s Aftermath / Alejandro Portes
    • *18 Inequality Undermines Democracy / Eduardo Porter
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part VI MANY VOICES, MANY LIVES: SOME CONSEQUENCES OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER INEQUALITY
    • 1 Civilize Them with a Stick / Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog) with Richard Erdoes
    • 2 Then Came the War / Yuri Kochiyama
    • 3 Yellow / Frank Wu
    • 4 The Arab Woman and I / Mona Fayad
    • 5 Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past / Oscar Casares
    • 6 The Event of Becoming / Jewelle L. Gomez
    • 7 This Person Doesn’t Sound White / Ziba Kashef
    • *8 In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger / Susan Saulny
    • 9 Family Ties and the Entanglements of Caste / Joseph Berger
    • 10 Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain / Don Sabo
    • 11 The Slave Side of Sunday / Dave Zirin
    • 12 He Defies You Still: The Memoirs of a Sissy / Tommi Avicolli
    • 13 Requiem for the Champ / June Jordan
    • *14 Against Bullying or On Loving Queer Kids / Richard Kim
    • 15 Before Spring Break, The Anorexic Challenge / Alex Williams
    • 16 The Case of Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson: Ableism, Heterosexism, and Sexism / Joan L. Griscom
    • *17 Misconceptions Regarding the Body / Jennifer Bartlett
    • 18 C. P. Ellis / Studs Terkel
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part VII HOW IT HAPPENED: RACE AND GENDER ISSUES IN U.S. LAW
    • 1 Indian Tribes: A Continuing Quest for Survival /U.S. Commission on Human Rights
    • 2 An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves, South Carolina, 1712
    • 3 The “Three-Fifths Compromise”: The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2
    • 4 An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Slaves to Read
    • 5 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
    • 6 The Antisuffragists: Selected Papers, 1852–1887
    • 7 People v. Hall, 1854
    • 8 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
    • 9 The Emancipation Proclamation / Abraham Lincoln
    • 10 United States Constitution: Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments
    • 11 The Black Codes / W. E. B. Du Bois
    • 12 Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873
    • 13 Minor v. Happersett, 1875
    • 14 California Constitution, 1876
    • 15 Elk v. Wilkins, November 3, 1884
    • 16 Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
    • 17 United States Constitution: Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
    • 18 Korematsu v. United States, 1944
    • 19 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954
    • 20 Roe v. Wade, 1973
    • 21 The Equal Rights Amendment (Defeated)
    • 22 Lawrence et al. v. Texas, 2003
    • *23 Equal Protection Indeed / The Economist
    • *24 Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution / Linda Hirshman
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part VIII MAINTAINING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER HIERARCHIES: REPRODUCING “REALITY”
    • 1 Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes / Mark Snyder
    • 2 Anti-Gay Stereotype / Richard D. Mohr
    • 3 White Lies / Maurice Berger
    • 4 Am I Thin Enough Yet? / Sharlene Hesse-Biber
    • 5 Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse / Sut Jhally
    • 6 The Plutocratic Culture: Institutions, Values, and Ideologies / Michael Parenti
    • 7 Media Magic: Making Class Invisible / Gregory Mantsios
    • 8 Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid / Jonathan Kozol
    • 9 Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex / Angela Davis
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Part IX SOCIAL CHANGE: REVISIONING THE FUTURE AND MAKING A DIFFERENCE
    • 1 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference / Audre Lorde
    • 2 Feminism: A Transformational Politic / bell hooks
    • 3 A New Vision of Masculinity / Cooper Thompson
    • 4 Interrupting the Cycle of Oppression: The Role of Allies as Agents of Change / Andrea Ayvazian
    • 5 Rethinking Volunteerism in America / Gavin Leonard
    • *6 The Most Important Thing in the World / Naomi Klein
    • *7 Beyond Elections: People Power / Mark Bittman
    • *8 Demand the Impossible / Matthew Rothschild
    • Suggestions for Further Reading
  • Index
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Who We Be: The Colorization of America

Posted in Books, Communications/Media Studies, Monographs, United States on 2014-12-13 02:48Z by Steven

Who We Be: The Colorization of America

St. Martin’s Press (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2014
416 pages
7.81 x 9.33 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780312571290; ISBN10: 0312571291

Jeff Chang, Executive Director
Institute for Diversity in the Arts
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

Race. A four-letter word. The greatest social divide in American life, a half-century ago and today.During that time, the U.S. has seen the most dramatic demographic and cultural shifts in its history, what can be called the colorization of America. But the same nation that elected its first Black president on a wave of hope—another four-letter word—is still plunged into endless culture wars. How do Americans see race now? How has that changed—and not changed—over the half-century? After eras framed by words like “multicultural” and “post-racial,” do we see each other any more clearly? Who We Be remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests and corporate marketing campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trayvon Martin into a powerful, unusual, and timely cultural history of the idea of racial progress. In this follow-up to the award-winning classic Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang brings fresh energy, style, and sweep to the essential American story.

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The Madonna of Excelsior: A Novel

Posted in Africa, Books, Media Archive, Novels, South Africa on 2012-11-12 18:53Z by Steven

The Madonna of Excelsior: A Novel

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
March 2005
288 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780312423827; ISBN10: 0312423829

Zakes Mda, Professor of Creative Writing
Ohio University

In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior in South Africa’s white-ruled Free State were charged with breaking apartheid’s Immorality Act, which forbade sex between blacks and whites. Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of one irrepressible fallen madonna, Niki, and her family, at the heart of the scandal.

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Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

Posted in Biography, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States, Virginia on 2012-10-19 21:34Z by Steven

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

Farrar, Straus and Giroux an imprint of Macmillan
2012-10-16
352 pages
Hardback ISBN-10: 0374299560; ISBN-13: 978-0374299569

Henry Wiencek

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.

So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves—and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children—in his ledgers they are recast as money—while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call “a vile commerce.”

Many people of Jefferson’s time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

The thunderstorm that shook the mountain during the telling of Peter Fossett’s story passed. We tourists were deposited back into the present, with shafts of sunlight illuminating a peaceful scene–a broad pathway stretching into the distance, disappearing over the curve of the hillside. Jefferson named it Mulberry Row for the fast-growing shade trees he planted here in the 1790s. One thousand yards long, it was the main street of the African-American hamlet atop Monticello Mountain. The plantation was a small town in everything but name, not just because of its size, but in its complexity. Skilled artisans and house slaves occupied cabins on Mulberry Row alongside hired white workers; a few slaves lived in rooms in the mansion’s south dependency wing; some slept where they worked. Most of Monticello’s slaves lived in clusters of cabins scattered down the mountain and on outlying farms. In his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves. At any one time about 100 slaves lived on the mountain; the highest slave population, in 1817, was 140…

…Jefferson made his emancipation proposal around the same time he took on an intriguing legal case, Howell v. Netherland, that illuminates the shifting, increasingly ambiguous racial borderland in colonial Virginia, where strict enforcement of racial laws could have the effect of making white people black.

In the winter of 1769, Samuel Howell, a mixed-race indentured servant who had escaped from his master, sought a lawyer in Williamsburg to represent him in suing for freedom. His grandmother was a free white woman, but his grandfather was black, so Howell had become entrapped in a law that prescribed indentured servitude to age thirty-one for certain mixed-race people “to prevent that abominable mixture of white men or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell, aged twenty-seven, was not indentured forever, since he would be freed in about four years, but nonetheless Jefferson felt angry enough over this denial of rights that he took Howell’s case pro bono.

Jefferson later became famous for his diatribes against racial mixing, but his arguments on behalf of Howell, made more than a decade before he wrote down his infamous racial theories, suggest that the younger Jefferson harbored doubts about the supposed “evil” of miscegenation. The word “seems” in the following sentence suggests that he did not quite accept the prevailing racial ideology: “The purpose of the act was to punish and deter women from that confusion of species, which the legislature seems to have considered as an evil.”

Having just one black grandparent, Howell probably appeared very nearly white. But with the full knowledge that Howell had African blood, Jefferson argued to the justices that he should be immediately freed. He made his case partly on a strict reading of the original law, which imposed servitude only on the first generation of mixed-race children and could not have been intended, Jefferson argued, “to oppress their innocent offspring.” He continued: “it remains for some future legislature, if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [the punishment of servitude] to the grandchildren and other issue more remote.” Jefferson went further, declaring to the court: “Under the law of nature, all men are born free,” a concept he derived from his reading of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, the concept that would later form the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. In the Howell case, Jefferson deployed it in defense of a man of African descent…

Read the entire excerpt here.

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Almost White

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, Social Science, United States on 2012-07-31 04:28Z by Steven

Almost White

Macmillan
1963
212 pages
Original Classication ID: E184.A1 B53
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

Brewton Berry

Contents

  • Preface
  • 1. The Myth of the Vanishing Indian
  • 2. Where Are They?
  • 3. Who Are They?
  • 4. What the Whites Believe
  • 5. What the Negro Thinks
  • 6. Etiquette
  • 7. How They Live
  • 8. Their Schools
  • 9. Almost Red
  • 10. Almost Black
  • 11. Almost White
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Preface

Miscegenation seems to be an inevitable consequence of the meeting of races and nationalities. Despite the fears and warnings of the Jeremiahs, hybrids are everywhere. Fortunately, most people of mixed blood are able to identify themselves with, and are accepted by, one or the other of the racial groups from which they have sprung. Thus, the American mulatto thinks of himself as a Negro and is accepted by other Negroes as one of themselves.

But here and there we find pathetic folk of mixed ancestry who never know quite where they belong. There are Eurasians in the Far East, Anglo-Indians in India, Cape Coloured and Afro-Asians in South Africa, Jamaica Whites in Jamaica, and Indo-Europeans in Indonesia. Elsewhere we find Bovianders, Lobos, Caboslos, Cafusos, Moplahs, Moriscos, Cholos and countless others. These are raceless people, neither fish nor fowl, neither white, nor black, nor red, nor brown. They bear a heavy cross.

We have such folk in the United States. I first became aware of them as a youth in Orangeburg, South Carolina where there are outcasts known as Brass Ankles, Red Legs, and Buckheads. But, like others of my class, I remained aloof from them and never gave them a passing thought. Not, at any rate, until 1937 when I read Everett Stonequist’s The Marginal Man. That set me to thinking, and for the past twenty-five years I have been searching out and visiting these hybrid communities. A fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation enabled me to spend one full year in the field, and another was made possible by a grant from the Graduate School of The Ohio State University.

My informants have been legion. Over the years I have corresponded with hundreds of persons who shared my interest. I have talked with thousands of whites and Negroes who live in proximity to these mixed-bloods. My indebtedness to all these is very great. Especially do I appreciate the help given me by Dr. William Harlen Gilbert, Jr., of the Library of Congress, Mr. Calvin L. Beale of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. Edward T. Price of Los Angeles State College, and Mr. C. A. Weslager of Wilmington, Delaware. I am grateful to Dr. Chapman J. Milling, of Columbia, South Carolina, for permission to use his poem “Croatan” which appears in Chapter II. The editors of Phylon allowed me to reprint “The Myth of the Vanishing Indian,” and the University of North Carolina Press granted permission to quote from James Aswell’s God Bless the Devil!

Most of all I am indebted to the thousands of mixed-bloods, whom I call mestizos, who received me with kindness and courtesy, and who shared their secrets with me. I hope that this book will help to remove some of the prejudice and misunderstanding to which they have been subjected.

Brewton Berry

Read the entire book here.

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Last Child

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Novels, United States, Women on 2011-11-07 01:24Z by Steven

Last Child

Henry Holt and Company (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2005
240 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages,
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8050-7739-1, ISBN10: 0-8050-7739-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-4299-3709-2, ISBN10: 1-4299-3709-2

Michael Spooner, Director
Utah State University Press

A mixed-race girl must grow up quickly when danger threatens her world

Rosalie’s biggest problem used to be her own divided feelings. The constant tug-of-war between her white half and her Native American half is hard. She even has two names: Rosalie when she’s at the fort with her father and Last Child when she’s in the village with her mother.

But now a steamboat has carried smallpox into Rosalie’s world—and the Mandans have no resistance to the disease. Suddenly the name Last Child is all too real.

Set during the smallpox epidemic of 1837, this is the powerful story of a mixed-race girl fighting her way into adulthood against all odds.

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Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science on 2011-08-13 20:04Z by Steven

Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World

Berg Publishers (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2001
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-85973-531-2, ISBN10: 1-85973-531-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-85973-632-6, ISBN10: 1-85973-632-7

Lionel Caplan, Emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Associate
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Among the legacies of the colonial encounter are any number of contemporary ‘mixed-race’ populations, descendants of the offspring of sexual unions involving European men (colonial officials, traders, etc.) and local women. These groups invite serious scholarly attention because they not only challenge notions of a rigid divide between colonizer and colonized, but beg a host of questions about continuities and transformations in the postcolonial world.

This book concerns one such group, the Eurasians of India, or Anglo-Indians as they came to be designated. Caplan presents an historicized ethnography of their contemporary lives as these relate both to the colonial past and to conditions in the present. In particular, he forcefully shows that features which theorists associate with the postcolonial present—blurred boundaries, multiple identities, creolized cultures—have been part of the colonial past as well. Presenting a powerful argument against theoretically essentialized notions of culture, hybridity and postcoloniality, this book is a much-needed contribution to recent debates in cultural studies, literary theory, anthropology, sociology as well as historical studies of colonialism, ‘mixed-race’ populations and cosmopolitan identities.

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The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America

Posted in Books, History, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, United States on 2011-07-30 03:20Z by Steven

The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America

Hill and Wang (an imprint of Macmillan)
May 2011
432 pages
6 x 9 inches, 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9517-9, ISBN10: 0-8090-9517-3

Julie Winch, Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Boston

The historian Julie Winch uses her sweeping, multigenerational history of the unforgettable Clamorgans to chronicle how one family navigated race in America from the 1780s through the 1950s. What she discovers overturns decades of received academic wisdom. Far from an impermeable wall fixed by whites, race opened up a moral gray zone that enterprising blacks manipulated to whatever advantage they could obtain.

The Clamorgan clan traces to the family patriarch Jacques Clamorgan, a French adventurer of questionable ethics who bought up, or at least claimed to have bought up, huge tracts of land around St. Louis. On his death, he bequeathed his holdings to his mixedrace, illegitimate heirs, setting off nearly two centuries of litigation. The result is a window on a remarkable family that by the early twentieth century variously claimed to be black, Creole, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Jewish, and white. The Clamorgans is a remarkable counterpoint to the central claim of whiteness studies, namely that race as a social construct was manipulated by whites to justify discrimination. Winch finds in the Clamorgans generations upon generations of men and women who studiously negotiated the very fluid notion of race to further their own interests. Winch’s remarkable achievement is to capture in the vivid lives of this unforgettable family the degree to which race was open to manipulation by Americans on both sides of the racial divide.

Table of Contents

Introduction: “The Clamorgans Are Fighters”
1. Sieur Jacques
2. “Ester, a Free Woman of Color'”
3. Natural Children
4. “In Them Days Everything Was Free and Easy”
5. The Aristocracy of Color
6. A Settling of Scores
7. An Independent Man
8. Thickets of the Law
9. The Mathematics of Race
10. “Well Known in Negro Circles”
11. Defining Whiteness
12. On the Fringes
Epilogue: Clamorgan Alley
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Read Chapter 1 here.

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