miscegenation
Miscegenation (Latin miscere “to mix” + genus “kind”) is the mixing of different racial groups, that is, marrying, cohabiting, having sexual relations and having children with a partner from outside one’s racially or ethnically defined group.
The term “miscegenation” has been used since the nineteenth century to refer to interracial marriage and interracial sex, and more generally to the process of racial admixture, which has taken place since ancient history but has become more global through European colonialism since the Age of Discovery. Historically the term has been used in the context of laws banning interracial marriage and sex, so-called anti-miscegenation laws. It is therefore a loaded word and is considered offensive by many.
Today, the word miscegenation is avoided by many scholars, because the term suggests a distinct biological phenomenon, rather than a categorization imposed on certain relationships. The word is considered offensive by many and other terms such as “interracial,” “interethnic” or “cross-cultural” are more common in contemporary usage. However, the term is still used by scholars when referring to past practices concerning multiraciality, such as anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriages…
Tags: anti-miscegenation laws
[...] understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States–laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between [...]
[...] use into the twentieth century. In the United States, it was partly replaced after 1863 by the term miscegenation. While the term amalgamation could refer to the interbreeding of different white as well as [...]
[...] 1: Tracing the Origins: Miscegenation, Moral Degeneracy, and [...]
[...] article compares the regulation of interracial intimacies in North America, contending that anti-miscegenation laws in the United States and Canada’s Indian Act regimes are both striking and comparable [...]
[...] as witnessed in the country’s celebration of morenidade (brownness). Not all forms of miscegenation are valued in Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, and some “types of mixture” are [...]
[...] than on the more painful return of slavery after 1802. When scholars of European history think of miscegenation laws, we often turn immediately to colonial arenas, or look to the later nineteenth and twentieth [...]
[...] performance explores the influences of the 1859 play The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault, miscegenation laws, and the U.S. Census on biracial identity. All these factors are used in the analysis of the [...]
[...] use into the twentieth century. In the United States, it was partly replaced after 1863 by the term miscegenation. While the term amalgamation could refer to the interbreeding of different white as well as [...]
[...] are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person’s race by [...]
[...] representations of intimacy or sex took on political dimensions, whether advocating assimilation or miscegenation or defending the status quo. She also examines the degree to which novelists reacted to beliefs [...]
[...] the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers [...]
[...] took that question to Brazil, where the idea that miscegenation (a “mixed race” population) and non-racialism (deemphasizing the role of race in the society) [...]
[...] The stories collected in Bayou Folk present remarkably vivid snapshots of daily life in a now vanished world. Many of them highlight the relations between blacks and whites in a society where the rules of engagement still reflected the entrenched patterns of slavery some two decades after the Civil War. As she was ahead of her time regarding women’s rights in The Awakening, where she depicted a woman unafraid to throw off traditional restraints, Chopin was also farsighted about race relations in Bayou Folk. Perhaps the story Désirée’s Baby about the birth of a mixed-race baby to two ‘white’ parents best expresses the uneasy relationship between blacks and whites in the old South, and the moral outrage of its strict codes against miscegenation. [...]
[...] the poignancy of the lovers’ fate, while some critics voiced disgust at the very notion of miscegenation. To portray such a relationship only three years after the Civil War was to many an act of [...]
[...] as a vessel for one particular language crucial to racial segregation in the South: the language of miscegenation. It was through sex that racial segregation in the South moved from being a local social practice [...]
[...] essays examine cross-plantation marriages among slaves, white orphanages, childhood mortality, miscegenation and inheritance, domestic activities such as sewing, and same-sex [...]
[...] the prevailing memory of racial separatism while further underscoring the illegitimacy of miscegenations past. By establishing racial freedom in marriage, Loving also sets a misleading context for the [...]
[...] in long-term sexual relationships with each other. Recent studies addressing the laws that barred miscegenation have shown that investigating governmental reactions to intimate interracial connections reveals [...]
[...] the Baby Boom generation was in college, the last miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, but interracial romances retained an aura of taboo. Since 1960 [...]
[...] includes a straightforward discussion of the role of slavery, the “one-drop” rule, miscegenation, the Jim Crow laws, and the civil rights era in the rigid categorization of blacks as a racial [...]
[...] Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word “miscegenation” was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and [...]
[...] Bolivia, indigenous populations are challenging the generally accepted idea of integration through miscegenation (racial mixing). Assimilation through race-mixing has been the apparent solution in most Latin [...]
[...] years. After detailing the inferiority of the black race, Norwood explained to his audience that miscegenation was a horrible threat to the nation. Even though the law forbade interracial sex, having legal [...]
[...] the prevailing memory of racial separatism while further underscoring the illegitimacy of miscegenations past. By establishing racial freedom in marriage, Loving also sets a misleading context for the [...]
[...] pot,” history shows that social convention and legal statutes have been less than tolerant of miscegenation, or “race mixing.” For students and teachers of history, the topic can provide useful context [...]
[...] My point is that, in public statements, the white male leadership of colonial Virginia reviled miscegenation, and we have come to believe that they were genuinely revolted by race mixing. Then how could these [...]
[...] years. After detailing the inferiority of the black race, Norwood explained to his audience that miscegenation was a horrible threat to the nation. Even though the law forbade interracial sex, having legal [...]
[...] tremendous gender and racial disparities, miscegenation and interracial cohabitation became the norm in eighteenth-century Jamaica. A large number of [...]
[...] played by Asian Americans in confronting old racial structures, as embedded in law. Challenges to miscegenation laws in the US West were mounted by Nisei such as Noriko Sawada Bridges and Harry Oyama during the [...]
[...] differences are so important that interracial marriages must be regulated or outlawed entirely. Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal [...]
[...] essay surveys and compares American and French attitudes toward miscegenation or métissage since the extensive contacts with non-European peoples that began in the Atlantic [...]
[...] between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the [...]
[...] policy toward intermixture that emerged before the Civil War, however, was not all-encompassing. Miscegenation laws sought not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them. Those in [...]
[...] editors divide the book into four sections: themes of mixed race representation, miscegenation and romance, genre and mixed race characters, and finally, a section that examines the shift in [...]
[...] First Nations), Asian, and European ethnic heritages. Contrary to the African-disappearance-by-miscegenation-hypothesis-turned-ideology, it introduces the theory of the widespread Africanization of Mexico [...]
[...] had on the development of Mexican national identity over the past centuries. By analyzing Mexican miscegenation from a perspective identified as mestizaje positivo (positive miscegenation) where an equality [...]
[...] though Jean Toomer was black and white, his fascination with miscegenation in his hybrid short-story cycle Cane (1923) was puzzling and untimely. Joel Williamson writes that [...]
[...] first in-depth history of miscegenation law in the United States, this book illustrates in vivid detail how states, communities, and the [...]
[...] the prevailing memory of racial separatism while further underscoring the illegitimacy of miscegenations past. By establishing racial freedom in marriage, Loving also sets a misleading context for the [...]
[...] begins many of the eleven chapters with stories describing the people and circumstances involved in miscegenation cases throughout history. These stories are carefully selected to show the great variation in [...]
[...] since colonial times, but their number increased after the Civil War. The idea that race mixing, or miscegenation, causes genetic deterioration was proposed by Joseph Arthur Gobineau and other anthropologists in [...]
[...] Mexican Americans and the state in mid-twentieth-century Texas and California—trials involving miscegenation, school desegregation, and jury exclusion—to see the way in which state actors used Mexican [...]
[...] examples to illustrate the absurdity of racial prejudice in a Caribbean context where cultural miscegenation is so deep, and where habits of perception, accents, and tastes are so mixed, that wearing several [...]
[...] melting pot is a fundamental archetype in our national mythology. But discomfort with the idea of miscegenation and with the individuals born to parents of different races is equally fundamental to the American [...]
[...] presence of racism in Brazil, particularly their unique expression in the juxtaposition of the miscegenation ideology of nonracism with the living legacy of Lombrosian criminology. The author proposes the [...]
[...] to support their views concerning evolutionary distance between the races and the dangers of miscegenation. Here we examine the contribution of comparative racial serology to this affair, the arguments and [...]
[...] parents, two dark-skinned blacks, married in 1967, a year when miscegenation — interracial marriage, cohabitation or sex — was a criminal offense in sixteen states. [...]
[...] their racial identities. Their experiences are placed within the context of history, including miscegenation laws and governmental racial classifications. Beyond Black and White is a remarkable celebration of [...]
[...] Integrity Act of 1924 An investigation of the people who laid the groundwork for Virginia’s miscegenation law reveals that the pseudo-science of the eugenics was a convenient facade used by men whose [...]
[...] dissertation examines the process of miscegenation in the work of four authors who occupy pivotal positions in American writing about race. It is [...]
[...] policy toward intermixture that emerged before the Civil War, however, was not all-encompassing. Miscegenation laws sought not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them. Those in [...]
[...] Peter Nazareth and Moyez Vassanji, this article attempts to account for the popularity of tropes of miscegenation in the literature produced by East African writers of South Asian descent. The appearance of the [...]
[...] liberty without recounting the social, political, and legal codes governing the practice of miscegenation. Under both the colonial British regime and the post-Revolutionary political order of the United [...]
[...] Studies takes the reader on a 150 year interdisciplinary trek encompassing the origins of “miscegenation theory” and false notions of moral and hybrid degeneracy, to contemporary discourses on identity [...]
[...] these painters’ unconventional colorism and formal daring indexed the pervasive anxiety that miscegenation would lead to racial chaos. …Initially, though, the apparent prevalence of mixed races in [...]
[...] is anchored in representations of displacement and “Red-Headed Baby” is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on [...]
[...] volume of research on American Black-and-White mixed race people and the American history of anti-miscegenation. However, I was surprised at the minute amount of information available on non-Black-and-White [...]
[...] to the country in bondage. The legal interpretation of blackness was accompanied by laws barring miscegenation between whites and blacks. The one-drop rule endured after the Civil War and after emancipation as [...]
[...] Map of French West Africa and Togo Introduction 1. Miscegenation in French West Africa 2. Abandonment and Intervention 3. Education and Employment 4. Race and [...]
[...] important difference was the extent of miscegenation or race mixture, resulting largely from a high sex ratio among its colonial settlers. In contrast [...]
[...] Miscegenation has long been recognized as one of the recurrent tropes of colonial discourse, and recent work has convincingly demonstrated that it was often enlisted in efforts to justify more authoritarian colonial rule. Critics such as Nancy Paxton and Jenny Sharpe have drawn attention to the ubiquitous theme of interracial romance and marriage in domestic fiction written by the British in India, a body of literature previously relegated to the genre of romance and dismissed as what Margaret Stieg calls “sub-literature” (3). While critics have begun to recognize that the focus of this large body of fiction on domestic arrangements expresses anxiety about interracial liaisons and miscegenation, few pay adequate attention either to the historical reality of the Eurasian community in existence during the periods they analyze or to the Eurasian characters in these works of fiction and their particular ideological function. The tendency of literary critics discussing miscegenation to categorize Eurasians and “natives” as equal threats in the domestic sphere is itself evidence of the success of this body of fiction’s strategic response to historical Eurasians: the disconcertingly familiar Eurasian is converted in fiction from proximate other to distant other, thereby relocating the anxiety generated by both the uncanniness of the Eurasian and the material threat this population posed to smooth colonial rule… [...]
[...] the relatively harmonious Brazilian race relations were due to more or less smooth Afro-European miscegenation, which contrasted so sharply with the rigid “one-drop rule” of the United [...]
[...] sexuality, and colonialism by foregrounding how African women and men engaged in and reflected on miscegenation at the center of analysis. Furthermore, this article emphasizes the colonial encounter as a [...]
[...] that much more compelling. Here her passing is in direct opposition to segregation and the fear of miscegenation, which are based on the sexual reproduction of a pure white race. Thus, I understand Clare and her [...]
[...] book celebrates the special occasion of being born and reared in a household where miscegenation was the rule rather than the exception—where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental [...]
[...] 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 [...]
[...] the United States’ vexed history of color-consciousness, anti-miscegenation laws (the last of which were struck down only in 1967) enshrined the notion of hypodescent. [...]
[...] sought to apply these ideas to the public sphere. Well-respected geneticists wrote openly that “miscegenation can only lead to unhappiness under present social conditions and must, we believe, under any social [...]