Mulatto

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

From the last quarter of the sixteenth century until 1850, most of Brazil and Angola formed a South Atlantic System sustained by an intercolonial trade that complemented, albeit often contradictorily, exchanges between these regions and Portugal. Bilateral trade and the movements of merchants, militiamen, royal servants and missionaries, fostered relations between the Portuguese enclaves on either side of the South Atlantic. Typically, ships from Lisbon travelling to and from Angola called at Brazilian harbours, and during this period, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco were closer to Luanda and Benguela than to Maranhão and Pará. In fact, thanks to winds and maritime routes, the former three captaincies were socially, economically and geographically closer to Angola than they were to the Brazilian territories to the north of Cape São Roque (in the modern state of Rio Grande do Norte), comprising the Estado do Grão Pará e Maranhão. Therefore, to compare colonial Brazil and Angola is to bring together two parts of a social space also shared (in South America) with Amerindians. Both regions were also Slaves societies, such that Portuguese and African cultures collided and mingled in both.

This article studies from a longue durée perspective the articulation of anti-slavery sentiments and other socio-racial sensibilities within the Spanish Atlantic, from the first theological criticisms of the 16th century to the efforts to abolish slavery in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Spain, in the second half of the 19th century. We focus on the most significant cases of individuals who shared a white identity and who advocated against slavery, slave trade and socio-racial discrimination of Free Coloureds. We argue that the many egalitarian proposals made during the Spanish American revolutions and at the Cortes of Cádiz represent a second golden moment (after the ‘Mulatto Affaire’ during the French Revolution) in the struggle for the granting of political equality to subaltern sectors the Atlantic World. In the end, we expect to provide a clearer picture of how the socio-racial sensibilities contributed to accelerate, or to postpone, the introduction of abolitionist or equalitarian measures vis-à-vis the coloured subaltern sectors in the Spanish Atlantic in the Late Modern Age.

The aim of this paper is to clarify the role that Cuban intellectuals gave the
black population in the process of construction of the Cuban identity. The
novelty of this research is that it deepens the understanding of this issue
through the study of two literary works, Cecilia Valdés, by Cirilo Villaverde
and Francisco, by Anselmo Suárez Romero

The term “mulatto,” meaning an offspring of one black parent and one white parent,
is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish word “mulatto” meaning a
young mule. The mule, a sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is an
important metaphor in early African American literature and folklore.
Anthropologists collected African American tales with mules, and Charles Waddell
Chesnutt (1858-1932), inspired in part by this folklore, employed the mule as a
metaphor in his literary output to represent in part the subjugation of blacks.

"Bonnie Claudia Harrison, PhD
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, City Colleges of Chicago
Abstract for “The Creole Vision of Archibald Motley”
Roots of the Black Chicago Chicago Renaissance
Richard Courage and Christopher Reed, eds.


While the majority of cultural histories about the African American experience in Chicago focus on the era after World War I, a handful of scholars, including Allen Spear and Christopher Reed have focused their attention on the histories of the small population of Black people who lived in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century before the Great Migration. Through meticulous research, these scholars have brought into question received notions about the geographic distribution of African Americans in Chicago's neighborhoods, including the persistent idea that racial segregationhas always been a consistent feature of the city reinforced by racial covenants and redlining.  My own ethnic mapping projects offer visual support for  Reed's assertion that neighborhoods like Englewood on  the South Side were not all White until Negroes "invaded."  Though mostly populated by native and foreign born European Americans,  early twentieth century Englewood had  significant Black and mixed ethnicity popluations that produced a number of  notable African American artists, entrepreneurs, and civic leaders, including Archibald Motley.  The Creole Vision of Archibald Motley examines Motley's family background, his social networks, including his affiliations with colored and white neighbors, artistic colleagues, patrons, and audiences,  to anaylze how his circumstances contributed to his art and to his ethnic identity.

Born to a Louisiana Creole family in New Orleans, Archibald Motley arrived in Chicago at the age of 3 just after the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition when the African American population in the city was not more than .03%, less than 30,000 persons out of a total population of more than one million.  These peculiar circumstances suggest how Motley  experiences in a relatively isolated African American Middle Class Southern family nurtured a wrought and often contradictory sense of identity that vacillated between creole, mulatto, and negro senses of self. After he graduated as the lone Black student in his class at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago,  Motley primarily associated with white colleagues, even though unlike them, he focused on Black ethnic and multi-ethnic subject matter. While Motley spent his artistic energies largely representing African American communities, his nearly ethnological studies of African Americans explored Black identity and culture well outside of approved representational politics, even as the swelling population of Southern migrants contributed to a growing intolerance for the coloured population of his city. The Creole Vision of Archibald Motley is an opportunity to analyze Motley's hybrid representational politics and the contrasting modes of progressive self-determination and social integration that formed his strategic identity as one of Chicago's New Negroes.
"

The presence of the mulatto figure in American literature in the time of slavery and during the age of emancipation served to blur the racial line between black and white, enabling an exploration of the social and sexual relations between the two in these respective time periods. From the antebellum to postbellum eras, the mulatto figure served increasingly to highlight race as a sociocultural construct, rather than a product of biological determinacy, and consequently sought to inspire the identification of white readers with the black subject and abolitionist cause. Authors enhanced this conversation by highlighting "whiteness" in descriptions of mulatto characters, drawing parallels between white and black characters, and playing on familiar themes and archetypes (the tragic mulatto, the gentleman, the predator vs. the damsel in distress, courtship, love) to persuade white readers to identify with mulatto characters.  Other trends in the literature include an exploration of gender roles, particularly with regard to white femininity, though arguably to different degrees in literature from either era. Particularly in postbellum novels like Iola Leroy, mixed-race characters are given an agency that is not as prominent in antebellum stories like Slavery's Pleasant Homes or The Quadroons, perhaps due to a difference in target audience and time period.

This thesis, following a textual analysis, examines the chief protagonist, Huckleberry Finn, in Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from African-American multiculturism perspectives. Although the novel is mostly about a white male figure’s childhood adventures, the thesis argues that his character is moulded by African-American cultural traditions and underneath the character there is an Afro-American who risks his own life to rescue a black slave (Jim), has many struggles and plays tricks on white people for survival. One important aspect the thesis reveals is Huck Finn’s mother and her identity as a black slave which has not been researched. It also reveals through the textual analysis that Huck Finn is a Mulatto born of an illegitimate relationship between Pap Finn (Huck’s father) and a slave woman. Finally, the thesis shows that Huck Finn as an African America trickster figure and Signifying Monkey uses silence to subvert the racially divided world in the novel and he is a ‘white’ African American.

This article focuses on the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987). It is my goal to demonstrate how Freyre applied Nietzschean ideas to his interpretation of Brazilian society in an attempt to concretize the prophecy of the “new man” in the shape of the multiracial “mestiço.” By Nietzschean ideas I mean ideas indebted to Nietzsche directly or indirectly and reflected in the rhetorical, stylistic and argumentative strategies used by Freyre. It is not my intention to discuss whether Freyre interpreted Nietzsche’s ideas correctly; rather, I wish to highlight parallels to Nietzschean concepts and to indicate how the eclectic, even opportunistic, use of Nietzsche’s work allowed Freyre to move the discussion on Brazilian identity in a new direction.

Casa-grande & Senzala (1933), a obra secular de Gilberto Freyre, foi traditionalmente interpretado de um ponto de vista sociólogo e histórico. Esta interpretação deixou duas questões essenciais em aberto: 1) Como se pode explicar que Freyre interpretou a noção de miscegenação de uma forma (muito) mais positiva do que sociólogos anteriores e 2) Como se pode explicar as tendências elitistas e aristocráticas na sua obra? Este artigo explore estas duas perguntas analisando a influência em Freyre da filosofia de Friedrich Nietzsche através da interpretação de Henry L. Mencken. Argumenta que a influência de Mencken foi maior do que tradicionalmente tem sido admitido e que na obra de Mencken sobre Nietzsche se pode encontrar a mesma interpretação de miscigenação que Freyre mais tarde explorou em Casa-grande & Senzala. Argumenta também que Mencken profundamente influenciou Freyre com as suas ideias aristocráticas e elitistas."

Color and race are important references for assessing the privileges and barriers that sustained or impeded the social ascension of New Christians, Africans, Indians, and mestiços in the Portuguese world. Questions of race and color had profound links with the Catholic faith and with social exclusion, especially of Afro-descendants. The ideas of race and racism are not static, but were forged over time. Initially, they were strongly influenced by Catholicism and later were incorporated into the scientific knowledge of the 18th and 19th centuries. Therefore, the terms “race” and “racism,” based on 19th-century biological determinism, are not suitable for discussing social relations in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Color and race are important references for assessing the privileges and barriers that sustained or impeded the social ascension of New Christians, Africans, Indians, and mestiços in the Portuguese world. Questions of race and color had profound links with the Catholic faith and with social exclusion, especially of Afro-descendants. The ideas of race and racism are not static, but were forged over time. Initially, they were strongly influenced by Catholicism and later were incorporated into the scientific knowledge of the 18th and 19th centuries. Therefore, the terms “race” and “racism,” based on 19th-century biological determinism, are not suitable for discussing social relations in the 17th and 18th centuries.

En esta investigación se utilizan las cartas escritas por Miguel Enríquez con el fin de trazar sus redes sociales, un sistema de conexiones que no tan sólo trascendió los límites de Puerto Rico sino que también alcanzó gobernadores, familias pudientes, clérigos y hasta el propio rey de España.  Se describen también la calidad de estas relaciones y cómo el corsario las utiliza para subir escalones sociales en el Puerto Rico del dieciocho.

Under contract, University of Virginia Press, Writing the Early Americas Series.

Reckoning with Race in the New World represents the merging of my two principal research fields when I wear my early (Latin) Americanist hat: the history of science and the history of the race concept.  My first book, Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains (Liverpool, 2000), was the first transatlantic account of the history and philosophy of modern experimental science and conquest in the early modern Spanish world (Spain, Italy, Mexico, Peru). 

With the publication of my second book, Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America (Vanderbilt, 2005), I began to propose that pre-Darwinian notions of human diversity were rooted in an animal-vegetable-human continuum distinct from the epistemology and animal-human divide of modern race science.  This second antecedent of RECKONING WITH RACE IN THE NEW WORLD focused on local negotiations and socio-legal notions of human kinds or groupings (castas) in colonial Latin America, and it has had a visible impact on anthropologists and historians.