The White Indians of Mexican Cinema

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Mexico, Monographs on 2022-04-21 17:00Z by Steven

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema: Racial Masquerade throughout the Golden Age

State University of New York Press
April 2022
326 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781438488035

Mónica García Blizzard, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Emory University, Atlantic, Georgia

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masquerade—the representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity—during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Adopting a broad decolonial perspective while remaining grounded in the history of local racial categories, Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other. Close readings of twenty films and primary source material illustrate how Mexican cinema has mediated race, especially in relation to gender, in ways that project national specificity, but also reproduce racist tendencies with respect to beauty, desire, and protagonism that survive to this day. This sweeping survey illuminates how Golden Age films produced diverse, even contradictory messages about the place of Indigeneity in the national culture.

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“Our Relations…the Mixed Bloods” Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2021-08-31 00:06Z by Steven

“Our Relations…the Mixed Bloods” Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes

SUNY Press
April 2021
264 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8285-9

Larry Nesper, Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Foreword by:

Michael S. Wiggins Jr., Chief Executive Officer & Tribal Chairman
The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Ashland, Wisconsin

Articulates the relationships between kinship, racial ideology, mixed blood treaty provisions, and landscape transformation in the Great Lakes region.

In the Great Lakes region of the nineteenth century, “mixed bloods” were a class of people living within changing indigenous communities. As such, they were considered in treaties signed between the tribal nations and the federal government. Larry Nesper focuses on the implementation and long-term effects of the mixed-blood provision of the 1854 treaty with the Chippewa of Wisconsin. That treaty not only ceded lands and created the Ojibwe Indian reservations in the region, it also entitled hundreds of “mixed-bloods belonging to the Chippewas of Lake Superior,” as they appear in this treaty, to locate parcels of land in the ceded territories. However, quickly dispossessed of their entitlement, the treaty provision effectively capitalized the first mining companies in Wisconsin, initiating the period of non-renewable resource extraction that changed the demography, ecology, and potential future for the region for both natives and non-natives. With the influx of Euro-Americans onto these lands, conflicts over belonging and difference, as well as community leadership, proliferated on these new reservations well into the twentieth century. This book reveals the tensions between emergent racial ideology and the resilience of kinship that shaped the historical trajectory of regional tribal society to the present.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Foreword
  • Introduction
  • 1. Ojibwe Ethnogenesis and the Fur Trade
  • 2. Descent Ideology, Sociality, and the Transformation of Indigenous Society
  • 3. Ojibwe Treaties, the Emerging Paradigm of Race, and Allotting Mixed Bloods
  • 4. “Mixed Bloods” in the Southwest Sector of Anishinaabewaki
  • 5. Implementing the Mixed-Blood Provision of the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe
  • 6. Constituting Reservation Society on the Emerging Postdispossession Landscape
  • 7. Allotment and the Problems of Belonging
  • Conclusion
  • Epilogue
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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Identities in Flux: Race, Migration, and Citizenship in Brazil

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Mexico, Monographs, Slavery on 2021-08-30 19:01Z by Steven

Identities in Flux: Race, Migration, and Citizenship in Brazil

SUNY Press
February 2021
296 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8249-1
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8250-7

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Reevaluates the significance of iconic Afro-Brazilian figures, from slavery to post-abolition.

Drawing on historical and cultural approaches to race relations, Identities in Flux examines iconic Afro-Brazilian figures and theorizes how they have been appropriated to either support or contest a utopian vision of multiculturalism. Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of a runaway slave community in the seventeenth century, is shown not as an anti-Brazilian rebel but as a symbol of Black consciousness and anti-colonial resistance. Xica da Silva, an eighteenth-century mixed-race enslaved woman who “married” her master and has been seen as a licentious mulatta, questions gendered stereotypes of so-called racial democracy. Manuel Querino, whose ethnographic studies have been ignored and virtually unknown for much of the twentieth century, is put on par with more widely known African American trailblazers such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Niyi Afolabi draws out the intermingling influences of Yoruba and Classical Greek mythologies in Brazilian representations of the carnivalesque Black Orpheus, while his analysis of City of God focuses on the growing centrality of the ghetto, or favela, as a theme and producer of culture in the early twenty-first-century Brazilian urban scene. Ultimately, Afolabi argues, the identities of these figures are not fixed, but rather inhabit a fluid terrain of ideological and political struggle, challenging the idealistic notion that racial hybridity has eliminated racial discrimination in Brazil.

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Neo-race Realities in the Obama Era

Posted in Anthologies, Barack Obama, Books, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Justice, Social Science, United States on 2019-09-26 01:00Z by Steven

Neo-race Realities in the Obama Era

SUNY Press
May 2019
174 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-7415-1

Edited by:

Heather E. Harris, Professor of Communication
Stevenson University, Stevenson, Maryland

Considers the impact of neo-racism during the Obama presidency.

Neo-race Realities in the Obama Era expands the discourse about Barack Obama’s two terms as president by reflecting upon the impact of neo-racism during his tenure. Continually in conversation with Étienne Balibar’s conceptualization of neo-racism as being racism without race, the contributors examine how identities become the target of neo-racist discriminatory practices and policies in the United States. Individual chapters explore how President Obama’s multiple and intersecting identities beyond the racial binaries of Black and White were perceived, as well as how his presence impacted certain marginalized groups in our society as a result of his administration’s policies. Evidencing the hegemonic complexity of neo-racism in the United States, the contributors illustrate how the mythic post-race society that many wished for on election night in 2008 was deferred, in order to return to the uncomfortable comfort zone of the way America used to be.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Foreword / Amardo Rodríguez
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction / Heather E. Harris
  • Part I
    • 1. Obama’s Transformation of American Myths / Zoë Hess Carney
    • 2. Transformational Masculinity and Fathering in the Age of Obama: “Roses and Thorns” / Shanette M. Harris
    • 3. How Obama’s Hybridity Stifled Black Nationalist Rhetorical Identity: An Ideological Analysis on His Two-Term Third-Space Leadership / Omowale T. Elson
  • Part II
    • 4. “Who Gets to Say Hussein? The Impact of Anti-Muslim Sentiment during the Obama Era” / Nura A. Sediqe
    • 5. The End of AIDS? A Critical Analysis of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy / Andrew R. Spieldenner, Tomeka M. Robinson, and Anjuliet G. Woodruffe
    • 6. The President Was Black, Y’all: Presidential Humor, Neo-racism, and the Social Construction of Blackness and Whiteness / Jenny Ungbha Korn
    • 7. L’homme de la créolisation: Obama, Neo-racism, and Cultural and Territorial Creolization / Douglas-Wade Brunton
  • Notes
  • List of Contributors
  • Index
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Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2019-09-24 23:29Z by Steven

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America

SUNY Press
April 2018
194 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6945-4
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6946-1

Kyle T. Mays, Assistant Professor
Department of African American Studies and American Indian Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.

Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social, political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently, Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing “traditional” beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their “traditions.” Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the “politics of authenticity” by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of “tradition” and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.

Table of Contents

  • Preface: A Note on Language: Black English and Uncensored Mode
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Can We Live and Be Modern and Indigenous?: Toward an Indigenous Hip Hop Culture
  • 1. #NotYourMascot: Indigenous Hip Hop Artists as Modern Subjects
  • 2. The Fashion of Indigenous Hip Hop
  • 3. Indigenous Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture: Or, How Indigenous Feminism Can Reform Indigenous Manhood
  • 4. “He’s just tryna be black”: The Intersections of Blackness and Indigeneity in Hip Hop Culture
  • 5. Rhyming Decolonization: A Conversation with Frank Waln, Sicangu Lakota
  • Conclusion: “It’s bigger than Hip Hop”: Toward the Indigenous Hip Hop Generation
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
  • Index
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We Have Not Stopped Trembling Yet: Letters to My Filipino-Athabascan Family

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, Social Justice, United States on 2018-03-05 01:37Z by Steven

We Have Not Stopped Trembling Yet: Letters to My Filipino-Athabascan Family

State University of New York Press
February 2018
200 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6952-2

E. J. R. David, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Alaska, Anchorage

A father’s personal and intimate account of his Filipino and Alaska Native family’s experiences, and his search for how to help his children overcome the effects of historical and contemporary oppression.

In a series of letters to his mixed-race Koyukon Athabascan family, E. J. R. David shares his struggles, insecurities, and anxieties as a Filipino American immigrant man, husband, and father living in the lands dominated by his family’s colonizer. The result is We Have Not Stopped Trembling Yet, a deeply personal and heartfelt exploration of the intersections and widespread social, psychological, and health implications of colonialism, immigration, racism, sexism, intergenerational trauma, and internalized oppression. Weaving together his lived realities, his family’s experiences, and empirical data, David reflects on a difficult journey, touching upon the importance of developing critical and painful consciousness, as well as the need for connectedness, strength, freedom, and love, in our personal and collective efforts to heal from the injuries of historical and contemporary oppression. The persecution of two marginalized communities is brought to the forefront in this book. Their histories underscore and reveal how historical and contemporary oppression has very real and tangible impacts on Peoples across time and generations.

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Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2017-11-09 03:16Z by Steven

Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases

State University of New York Press
October 2017
318 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6661-3

Doug Coulson, Assistant Professor
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Explores the role of rhetoric and the racial classification of Asian American immigrants in the early twentieth century.

From 1870 to 1940, racial eligibility for naturalization in the United States was limited to “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent,” and many interpreted these restrictions to reflect a policy of Asian exclusion based on the conclusion that Asians were neither white nor African. Because the distinction between white and Asian was considerably unstable, however, those charged with the interpretation and implementation of the naturalization act faced difficult racial classification questions. Through archival research and a close reading of the arguments contained in the documents of the US Bureau of Naturalization, especially those documents that discussed challenges to racial eligibility for naturalization, Doug Coulson demonstrates that the strategy of foregrounding shared external threats to the nation as a means of transcending perceived racial divisions was often more important to racial classification than legal doctrine. He argues that this was due to the rapid shifts in the nation’s enmities and alliances during the early twentieth century and the close relationship between race, nation, and sovereignty.

Table of Contents

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Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Posted in Biography, Books, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2017-06-11 21:29Z by Steven

Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

State University of New York Press
April 2017
202 pages
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-4384-6513-5

Vanessa K. Valdés, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
City College of New York, New York, New York

Examines the life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg through the lens of both Blackness and latinidad.

A Black Puerto Rican–born scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder.

While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburg’s life as an Afro-Latino suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: The Silence and the Meaning of It All
  • 1. “Patria y Libertad”: Schomburg and Puerto Rico
  • 2. The Diasporic Race Man as Institution Builder
  • 3. Afro-Latinx Chronicles: Schomburg’s Writings
  • 4. “Witness for the Future”: Schomburg and His Archives
  • 5. “Furtive as He Looks”: The Visual Representation of Schomburg
  • Conclusion: The Dynamics of Afro-Latinx Subjectivity
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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México’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Mexico, Monographs, Religion, Women on 2017-03-26 21:35Z by Steven

México’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women

State University of New York Press
February 2017
350 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6357-5

B. Christine Arce, Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture
University of Miami, Miami, Florida

2016 Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Book Prize, presented by the International Association of Hispanic Feminine Literature and Culture

Analyzes cultural materials that grapple with gender and blackness to revise traditional interpretations of Mexicanness.

México’s Nobodies examines two key figures in Mexican history that have remained anonymous despite their proliferation in the arts: the soldadera and the figure of the mulata. B. Christine Arce unravels the stunning paradox evident in the simultaneous erasure (in official circles) and ongoing fascination (in the popular imagination) with the nameless people who both define and fall outside of traditional norms of national identity. The book traces the legacy of these extraordinary figures in popular histories and legends, the Inquisition, ballads such as “La Adelita” and “La Cucaracha,” iconic performers like Toña la Negra, and musical genres such as the son jarocho and danzón. This study is the first of its kind to draw attention to art’s crucial role in bearing witness to the rich heritage of blacks and women in contemporary México.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: The Paradox of Invisibility
  • Part I: Entre Adelitas y Cucarachas: The Soldadera as Trope in the Mexican Revolution
    • 1. Soldaderas and the Making of Revolutionary Spaces
    • 2. The Many Faces of the Soldadera and the Adelita Complex
    • 3. Beyond the “Custom of Her Sex and Country”
  • Part II: The Blacks in the Closet
    • 4. Black Magic and the Inquisition: The Legend of La Mulata de Córdoba and the Case of Antonia de Soto
    • 5. “Dios pinta como quiere”: Blackness and Redress in Mexican Golden Age Film
    • 6. The Music of the Afro-Mexican Universe and the Dialectics of Son
  • Conclusion: To Be Expressed Otherwise
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self

Posted in Books, Latino Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Philosophy, Women on 2016-03-15 02:53Z by Steven

In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self

State University of New York Press
April 2016
296 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5977-6
Electronic ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5978-3

Mariana Ortega, Professor of Philosophy
John Carroll University, University Heights, Ohio

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood.

This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being in the world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits.

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