Mixed Race Studies

The following is information about forthcoming media, articles or projects.  Details may be incomplete. As complete details become available, I will remove the respective item and post it separately in the Forthcoming Media category.  If you notice any errors or omissions, please contact me.

• Justin Vaughn and Jennifer Mercieca’s edited volume titled, The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency is scheduled for 2014 publication by Texas A&M University Press. The volume draws together scholars of rhetoric, politics, media, English, and history to consider how the rhetoric of heroic expectations affects how we think about Barack Obama’s presidency.  They argue that our heroic expectations for the presidency means that any president faces three kinds of burdens: institutional, contextual, and personal.  The essays in this volume analyze these three facets of Obama’s presidential burden.
• Mia Bagneris, (Assistant Professor of History of Art at Tulane University) is particularly interested in the place of images in the history of slavery, colonialism, empire, and the construction of national identities and in images of interracial contact and the mixed-race body. Her current project, Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, c. 1765-1800, challenges conventional designations of Brunias’s paintings as uncomplicated plantocratic propaganda that functioned as visual “field guides” for reading racial identity and social status, examining instead how the artist’s images reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by Britons in the colonial Caribbean during the late eighteenth century.
• Guy Foster’s current book project is titled “Waking Up with the Enemy: Postwar African American Literature and the Ethics of Interracial Intimacy.”
• Mary Chapman’s latest book project “Sui Sin Far” in Canada: The Uncollected Canadian Writings of Edith Eaton (under contract, McGill-Queen’s University Press) will more than quadruple the existing Eaton corpus and expand scholarly awareness of her Canadian and American publications.
• Daniel Livesay’s book manuscript, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: West Indians of Color and the Atlantic Family, 1700–1820” (in progress with the University of North Carolina Press) explores the migration of elite mixed-race individuals from the colonies to Britain in the Georgian period.  In analyzing why white fathers sent their offspring of color to live with relatives across the ocean, his study shows how notions of family belonging were crucial to racial ideology in the British Atlantic.
• Robert C. Schwaller’s (University of Kansas) current book project, ‘Géneros de Gente’: Defining Difference in Early New Spain explores the intellectual and social development of racial labels in early colonial Mexico. This research traces how late medieval Iberian notions of difference were transported across the Atlantic where they evolved into new socio-racial categories. Terms like español, indio, mestizo, mulato, negro came to define and circumscribe individuals by mapping stereotypes on to phenotypical and somatic difference. In order to better understand the relevance of these categories, this study analyzes the social and cultural history of early mestizos and mulatos. Although these individuals suffered prejudice in early colonial society, during the sixteenth century the socio-racial order defined by Spaniards did not fully circumscribe individuals’ ability to be economically or socially successful.
• Joanne Rappaport is currently completing a book on racial mixing in 16th century Bogotá, with the tentative title, The Disappearing Mestizo.
• Nico Slate’s second book, currently in draft form, examines the intellectual and cultural history of colored cosmopolitanism in greater detail. Entitled Colored: A Biography of Race, this book revolves around the intellectual relationships that Calcutta-born Eurasian scholar, Cedric Dover, developed with five influential African American artists and activists: W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Aaron Douglas. By researching the ideas that connected these historical actors, I examine the relationship between racially-defined scholarly communities, the production of knowledge concerning race and ethnicity, and anti-racist social movements.
• Derek Adams of Ithaca College is currently working on a project that examines unconventional performances of racial normativity in African American and American literature. The project explores some of the more subtle connections between the American canon of racial passing literature and the current social climate of “racelessness” in the United States.
• Christina Synder is currently at work on a book-length work called The Indian Gentlemen of Choctaw Academy: Status and Sovereignty in Antebellum America. Choctaw Academy, operating from 1825 to 1848, was the first multitribal boarding school in the United States, and it was run by Richard Mentor Johnson (vice president under Van Buren) and Johnson’s mixed-race family. Although initiated by the Choctaw Nation, the Academy became home to a diverse range of Native peoples from the Southeast and Midwest, including Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Potawatomis, Miamis, and Osages. Although extraordinary in many respects, Choctaw Academy illuminates wider patterns in American antebellum history; this place has much to teach us about the gap between racial ideology and everyday practice, as well as cross-cultural ideas about class and status, and Indian notions of sovereignty during the crucial Removal era.
• Melissa Blanco Borelli is currently working on a monograph titled She is Cuba: A Genealogy of Mulata Corporeality.
• Helen Diamond Steele, Ph.D. [Clemson University] candidate in Educational Leadership Higher Education, has been awarded the Research Incentive Grant by the Southern Association for College Student Affairs (SACSA) for her dissertation study entitled, “Racial Identity Development of Mixed-Race College Students.” The purpose of the study is to identify the factors that influence mixed-race college students’ choice of racial identity.
• Jennifer Ho’s current book manuscript, Telling Stories, Making Knowledge: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, examines the theme of racial ambiguity in various modes of cultural production (oral history, new media, literature, film, sports journalism) created predominantly by and about Asian Americans in the late-20th century. The central claim of this book argues that all Asian American subjects (in the sense of both people and objects of inquiry) are ambiguous and that Asian American culture produces ambiguity as a form resistance to normative understandings of racial formation.
• Zélie Asava is lecturing at two universities in Dublin, Ireland. She is also the winner of the Peter Lang Young Scholars Award and book contract. Her book will be titled, The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities in Irish Film and TV and will hopefully be in print by Summer 2013. Lastly, her article “The Nephew, Irish Jam and The Front Line: Black and Mixed Masculinities in Irish Cinema” has been published as a chapter in the anthology Contemporary Irish Film: New Perspectives on a National Cinema.
• Rita Reynolds is presently working on a book on wealthy free women of color in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina.
• Daniel R. McNeil is currently completing a book entitled Honest Men: Black Radicals, White Liberals and a Neoliberal Revolution, which examines the spectral effect of Frantz Fanon on two cohorts of intellectuals in Britain, Canada and the United States. He is also working on a number of projects relating to representations of slavery, racial liberalism and ‘mixed-race’ metaphors.
• Gregory Smithers is continuing his research into race, sexuality, and gender in a new book tentatively titled The Cherokee Diaspora (under contract to Yale University Press). This work analyzes changes in Cherokee Indian and African-Cherokee identity in a global context, focusing on the experiences of Cherokee and African-Cherokee people throughout the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.
• Lauren Davenport’s (PhD candidate in American politics at Princeton) dissertation assesses the identity construction and political outlook of the White-Black, mixed-race population. She argues that the rising number of multiracial-identifying Americans illustrates a new shifting of the margins of racial classification, and that political scientists must reconsider their treatment of race as a mutually exclusive construct. Lauren’s work seeks to problematize the study of racial identity, and explores the connection between group consciousness and public opinion. For people of mixed-race parentage, does the decision to identify with a single race or instead with multiple races meaningfully shape behavior and policy views, and in what ways? What are Americans’ racial and political attitudes towards people of mixed-race? Lauren’s research employs both large-n quantitative survey data and qualitative methods in an attempt to understand the political consequences of mixed-race identification.
• Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan is currently completing her PhD dissertation (University of British Columbia): an ethnography of global sex tourism in Ponta Negra, a tourist area in the coastal city of Natal, Brazil. In particular, Marie-Eve is interested in the trajectories of Brazilian women who utilize the sex tourist economy in projects of social mobility and explores the ambiguous relationships of love and money between (mixed-race) Brazilian women and (white) European male tourists.
• Julie Cary Nerad’s monograph “Blood Legacies: Identity, Inheritance, and Intent in Racial Passing Novels.” in under revision.  Also, her edited volume “The Politics of Appearance: Racial Passing in U. S. Fiction, Memoir, Television and Film, 1990-2010.” is under review at the University of Georgia Press.
• Nathan P. Rambukkana is completing a post-doctoral project at the graduate program in Communication & Culture at York University (Ontario, Canada) titled “Postcoloniality and Privilege in the Hybrid Subject: Mixed-race Identity and Intimate Privilege in Theory and Popular Discourse.” The project is funded by the Fonds Québéquois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC).
• The May 2011 edition of Ebony Magazine features a special report called “Mixed Race in America” and included is an essay by University of Mississippi Associate Law Professor Michèle Alexandre called “Black Like Me: One Drop, No Difference?” in which she tackles post-racialism and the political ramifications of racial identification.
• Allyson Hobbs’s book project When Black Becomes White: A History of Racial Passing in American Life is under contract with Harvard University Press.  The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present.  She argues that racial passing, the practice by which light-skinned African Americans deliberately chose to present themselves as white, opens a window onto the enduring problem of race in American society and onto the personal and intimate meanings of race and racial identity for African Americans.
• Susan Lambe, M.A., M.Ed., is a doctoral candidate at the Clinical Psychology Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research focuses on racial and ethnic minority psychology, with an emphasis on issues related to mixed race individuals and families. Ms. Lambe’s dissertation examines intergenerational ethnic-racial socialization processes within interracial families, as well as understandings of race, ethnicity, and inter-group relations among multiracial adolescents. Her clinical training has been in school and community clinic settings with Latino, African American, and Asian American populations. She is working to develop a strengths-based, culturally-relevant, affinity group framework to enhance academic performance, psychosocial engagement, and racial identity development among adolescent girls of color. Before Susan began her doctoral work, she earned a masterês degree in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In addition, since 2002, she has served as the Director of SwirlBoston, the first chapter Swirl, Inc., a national organization for multiracial individuals, couples, and families.
• Tom I. Romero, II is revising a book manuscript on multiracial formation and the law in post-World War II Denver, Colorado; where among other aspect of the analysis, he extensively explores Keyes v. School Board No. One, 413 US 189 (1973) (the first non-Southern school desegregation case to reach the United States Supreme Court).
• Nicole Asong Nfonoyim was awarded the New Professional Award by the Multiracial Network (MRN) of the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) for her work with mixed-race issues in higher education.
• University of Sydney Honorary Associate Vicki Grieves is descendent from the midnorth coast of NSW [New South Wales] and is a registered Native Title Claimant in that region. Her research interests are the constructions of race, especially as they impact on mixed-race Indigenous families, the impacts of colonialism and public policy and most recently Indigenous knowledges development. She has published widely including in the “history wars” debate and by invitation in journals including the international Indigenous scholarly journal AlterNative. She is currently completing a Ph.D. thesis exploring mixed-race marriages in Worimi and a biography of the Worimi elder Mr Les Ridgeway for which she has received the NSW Indigenous History Fellowship. With Dr Fiona Probyn of the University of Sydney she is researching the experience of mixed-race family life on an individual’s understanding of “race”, through interviews with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal family members to be published as Significant Others: race and the Australian family.
• Johanna Workman has just received a Psy.D  in Psychology for successfully defending her dissertation titled, Biracial Daughter’s Perceptions of Self-Mother Relationships and Body Image: An Object Relations-Informed Study at the California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University in San Diego.
• Rachel Jean-Baptiste is working on a manuscript entitled A Free Town: Marriage and Sex in Twentieth Century Libreville, Gabon.  The manuscript examines contestations over conjugal and sexual relationships in Libreville to understand transformations in gender roles, social status, and political authority in the emerging urban locale.  Her other research projects on Gabon include interracial sex and métissage, as well as a project on the codification of customary law.   She also has a forthcoming article titled “The EuroAfrican: Women’s Sexuality, Motherhood, and Masculinity in the Configuration of Métis Identity in French Africa, 1945-1960”, in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 20, Issue 3, (September 2011).
• Nitasha Tamar Sharma is collecting ethnographic data for her second project, Hapas and Douglas: Asian/Black Multiraciality in Hawai‘i and Trinidad. This transoceanic analysis of multiracial Black Asians and Black Pacific Islanders details how mixed race people negotiate, express, and repress race as they identify across constructed racial categories. It illustrates the heterogeneity of African and Asian diasporas by locating Asians in the Caribbean and Blacks in the Pacific. This work speaks to debates in Mixed Race Studies, Comparative Race Studies, and Diaspora Studies.
• Edward E. Telles has an article in progress with Stanley R. Bailey titled, From Ambiguity to Affirmation: Challenging Census Race Categories in Brazil.  He also has another article in progress titled, Racial ambiguity among the Brazilian population.
• Jessica J. Good and  Diana T. Sanchez have an article in-press titled, “Sources of self-categorization as minority for mixed race individuals: Implications for affirmative action entitlement” in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
• Emma J. Teng’s current book project examines the lives and writings of Chinese Eurasians in China and the US from 1850 until World War II.
• Camie Augustus is working on a Ph.D. in the  Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan.  In her current research, “Mixed Race, Legal Space: A Comparative History of Indigenous Mixed-Blood Identity in Law,” she studies the impact of colonial law and the codification of miscegenation on the development and absence of indigenous mixed-ancestry identities.  Using the United States, Australia, and Latin America as points of comparison, she seeks to investigate the effects of both segregationist and assimilationist policies on indigenous mixed-ancestry populations.  Also, she has left the University of Saskatchewan for a year to take up a prestigious “Pre-doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Award in American Indian Studies” at Michigan State University. Camie is working on “Indigenous Mixed Blood Identities: A Comparative Approach (Canada, US, Mexico and Australia)”.
• Marcia Alesan Dawkins is begining work with Ulli K. Ryder (Brown University) to launch The Institute for the Study of Multiracial Identity and Communications. Rhode Island corporate filing information is here.
• Race and Postracialism in the Age of Obama: A More Perfect Union? by Hettie V. Williams and G. Reginald Daniel is under contract with University of Mississippi Press for a Fall 2012 release date.  Read the abstract for the Zebulon Vance Meletsky’s chapter “Mutt Like Me: Obama, Biracial Identity, and the Mixed Race Experience” here.
• HAFU, a film about the experiences of mixed-race people living in Japan is set to complete next year.  This is the documentary branch of the ‘Hafu’ (Half-Japanese) Project which creates a dialogue about being in between cultures. By increasing discussions about culture, ‘race’ and ethnicity they hope to achieve a deeper understanding of these issues.
• Martha J. Cutter is is currently at work on a third book, Passing: The Strange Cultural and Historical Meaning of a Word, which will trace the origins of racial passing and provide a cultural history of its changing significance in U.S. society from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
• Katy Massey, is a final-year Ph.D. student at Newcastle University, UK.  She is researching literature which takes racial mixing at its subject and is particularly interested in how critical race studies and postcolonial theory relate to the theme of ambiguous racial identities.  She is also working on a memoir about growing up in 1980s Leeds called Are we home yet? and has previously published memoir, short fiction and poetry.
• Mary Beltrán is working on a new book, Post Race Pop? Diversity, Ambiguity, and Colorblind Politics in Millennial Media Culture. Post Race Pop? aims to explore ethnic representation, racial ambiguity, and mixed-race representation in its critique of network and narrative strategies for increased ethnic diversity in contemporary television series such as Lost, Ugly Betty, and The Wizards of Waverly Place.
• Karina Eileraas, Ph.D., a research scholar at UCLA since 2008, is researching the constructions of multiracial identity in “American Girl” dolls.
• Anne Farrah Hyde has a forthcoming chapter titled “Hard Choices: Mixed Race Parents and Children in a Post-Conquest West” in Love and Power in the American West, ed. David Adams (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).  She also has another forthcoming chapther titled Mixed-Race and Half Breeds: Children and Family Choices in the Nineteenth Century” in Childhood and History, Paula S. Fass, ed. (Routledge, 2010).
• Larry Hajime Shinagawa has one book forthcoming, From Where I Stand: Readings in Multicultural America, and another to be published by Cornell University Press, Asian American Intermarriage and the Social Construction of Love.
• Miri Song and Peter Aspinall have a monograph in progress titled Mixed Race Britain: A Comparative Study of Mixed Race Young People.
• Jenifer L. Bratter is exploring the meaning of blurred racial identity more broadly through drawing connections to blurred gender identity. A new project conducted with Kristen Schilt is identifying possible parallels between mixed race identities and transgender identities.
• Heidi Ardizzone is currently revising an article, “Rumors of Race: Ambiguity and Knowing in the Case of Belle da Costa Greene,” and is also working on her third book, The Color of Blood: The Significance of the Black-White Figure in American History.
• Martha Hodes is currently working on a research project entitled “Racial Classification and Narratives of Skin Color in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” This project investigates the meanings and uses of narratives about human complexion in the nineteenth-century United States, with attention to transnational settings.
• Ginette Curry is in the process of finalizing two upcoming book publications on pre-colonial Africa and multiracial themes in African-European literature.
• Carina Ray is working on her book manuscript, Policing Sexual Boundaries: The Politics of Race in Colonial Ghana, which focuses on the creation and contestation of sexual boundaries between Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana). Therein, she argues that the domain of colonial interracial sexual relations in the Gold Coast became a space in which various hierarchies (racial, administrative, gendered, indigenous) were created, contested and reordered by a broad range of social actors, both African and European.
• Tace Hedrick is writing her next book, tentatively titled Queering the Cosmic Race: Spirituality, Race, and Sexuality in U.S. Latina/o Artists and Writers, 1970–2000. This project focuses on four U.S. Latina/o artists and writers: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, Nuyorican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and Puerto Rican television personality and astrologist Walter Mercado. Dr. Hedrick places these artists within a transnational intellectual and artistic history of people of color of the Americas who have, from the early twentieth century, investigated alternatives to Western spirituality – Eastern, African or Native religions and beliefs, Buddhism, the occult, spiritualism, Theosophy, esoteric knowledges – as a way of reformulating existing social ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. These are artists whose mixed-race heritage and sometimes queer sexuality lead them to seek within spiritual and esoteric traditions images of sexual and racial unity and a language of personal and social transformation.
• Thompson, Beverly Yuen. “The Price of ‘Community’: From a Bisexual/Biracial Perspective.”  In The Colors of the Rainbow: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender People of Color in the Academy, (Voices), Vernon A. Wall and Jamie Washington, eds.  University Press of America and the American College Personnel Association, forthcoming 2010.
• Stephen Small is in the final stages of writing a book manuscript entitled, The Matrix of Miscegenation: People of Mixed Origins under slavery in the USA and the Caribbean, to be published by New York University Press.
• Stefanie Dunning is at work on a new book, Everyday Hybridities, which explores questions of racial and sexual confusion and indetermincy, focusing specifically on class confusion, bisexuality and mixed race identity after 1967.
• Rockquemore, Kerry Ann and Loren Henderson, “Inter-Racial Families in Post-Civil Rights America.” In Barbara Risman (Ed.), Families As They Really Are, New York: Norton.
• Harris, Cherise and Kerry Ann Rockquemore. “Multicultural Perspectives of Self and Racial and Ethnic Identity.” In Margaret Beale Spencer, Dena Phillips, and Malik Edwards (Eds). Adolescent Development During a Global Area. Elsevier Press.