Racial Mixture Research Articles

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada by Joanne Rappaport (review)

Reviewed by: The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada by Joanne Rappaport L. Kaifa Roland The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Joanne Rappaport. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. xiv + 352 pp., figures, map, appendix, notes, glossary, bibliography, and index. $25.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-5636-3). Joanne Rappaport’s The Disappearing Mestizo is an important interrogation of the sixteenth and seventeenth century archives in service of detailing the construction of an enduring socio-racial category encountered throughout [End Page 253] Latin America. What is a mestizo, or as Rappaport challenges: when, where, and for whom was the mestizo category activated? As students of Latin American race are aware, mestizaje is understood to describe the condition of racial mixture, usually involving European and indigenous parentage. However, Rappaport finds the question of “impure blood” that mestizaje seems to indicate moves in and out of focus at various times, depending on a variety of contexts. “But must we confine our understanding of mestizaje to the offspring of mixed unions? In the early modern period, mixture resulted not only from sexual encounters but also from other sorts of activities, both public and intimate in character. That is, mixing was not necessarily genealogical in nature” (p.18). She invokes the title trope of “the disappearing mestizo” to address the instability of the category, and expertly engages the archives to ethnographically portray several men and women to whom the contentious label was ascribed in court cases. After introducing some of the “characters” readers will meet in the course of the book (also denoted in the appendix), Rappaport highlights her strong interdisciplinary approach, while acknowledging the limitations of working with archival data in her ethnographic construction of colonial history. She concedes that she only has information on her subjects for the fragments of time that they enter the legal archives, filling in other parts from available genealogical records in the region. Rather than forcing the evidence to fit the model, she interrogates the record and asks questions of gaps left in the wake of absent data. The greatest strength of the book is in its storytelling and the sensitive portrayal of historic individuals labeled or contesting the label of mestizo who were encountered in the archives. In chapter one, Rappaport introduces a series of vignettes in order to dismiss the notion that the “disappearing mestizo” phenomenon is an attempt at “passing” from one racial category to another. Rather, she finds individuals contesting or reinforcing classifications associated with Spanishness or indigenousness using color, gender, religion, and status to make the case. Given this fluidity, it can be anticipated that the second chapter’s inquiry into whether mestizos constituted a community is answered in the negative. While mestizo men, in particular, often found themselves on the fringes of society given their exclusion from both Spanish and indigenous society, they often associated with other marginalized individuals—and thus became associated with marginal behaviors like assaults, rapes, and kidnapping (p.87). While distinctions in gendered experiences are discussed throughout the book, chapter three stands out in the book for the way it highlights why it was often easier for women to transcend mestizaje than it was for men. Certainly, marriage provided mestiza-born women access to different forms of mobility than it did for men, but Rappaport also emphasizes the importance in colonial Spanish society of honor and reputation—especially so in the New World where noble lineages were established through more diverse means than in the Old World. Whereas women could largely be absorbed into Spanish or indigenous communities without upsetting the system too much, men had to be categorized by their particular role in the tribute system. In trying to determine why mestizo men found themselves excluded from sites of power, Rappaport may rely too much on the question of bloodline and biological relationships given her earlier arguments about how mestizaje also took account of issues of cultural mixture like how one comports oneself in public or marriage pairings. [End Page 254] Chapter four turns the attention from mestizos contending with their elite Spanish heritage, to mestizos fighting to be recognized among the chiefly indigenous...

Subverting the German Volk: Racial and Musical Impurity in Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues

Considering that the Nazis relied upon narrowly defined categories of race and art in an effort to cleanse German genetic stock and artistic culture, it is notable that the title of Esi Edugyan’s second novel, set largely in Germany and France at the outbreak of WWII, signals a violation of both racial and musical categories. The title, Half-Blood Blues, suggests the racial mixture of several of the characters (which contravenes dichotomous racial categories) as well as the blending of musical genres in the namesake song, “Half-Blood Blues.” The characters acknowledge that the song is not “true blues” because it lacks “the right chord structure,” but they are unconcerned since “blues wasn’t never bout the chords” (275). Thus the book title alerts the reader that the novel will challenge authoritative classifications by undermining prescriptive definitions of purity. In particular, the novel explores the implications of mixture for the original “pure” categories being violated—specifically, those categories that were understood to define German people and culture. The song “Half-Blood Blues” is the musicians’ subversive interpretation of the Nazis’ own “Horst Wessel” and it therefore constitutes a kind of dialogue between the German (“Horst Wessel”) and that which corrupts the German (jazz) according to National Socialist leadership. Ultimately, the novel’s exploration of racial and musical designations is a simultaneous examination of the customary formulation of Germanness (taken to an extreme under the Nazis). Half-Blood Blues challenges the foundational claims to purity that characterize the long-established conception of Germanness by depicting impure Germanness. By portraying blackness and jazz as unquestionably German and thus demonstrating the Germanness of non-Aryan race and culture, Edugyan’s novel subverts the conventional—and still prominent—understanding of Germanness and gestures toward the growing conundrum of Western European nations: how to reconcile black citizenry with a white cultural, national, and racial “heritage.” Since the novel challenges German notions of purity, it is essential to understand how the concepts of “pure” racial, national, and cultural identity were constructed in Germany. The concepts of volkisch and Volk that the novel challenges are not simply a matter of what North Americans might consider racial or phenotypical whiteness. Translated as “folk” and signifying a people, a nation, and a race or tribe, the terms refer to the nationalist ethnic German identity that existed well before and after National Socialism. That this conception of Germanness has persisted for so long demonstrates its deep roots in German culture and consequently explains, in some small part, how Nazi ideology could arise. As Clarence Lusane explains in Hitler’s Black Victims,

Science in support of racial mixture: Charles-Augustin Vandermonde's Enlightenment program for improving the health and beauty of the human species

In 1756, while he was regent of the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, Charles-Augustin Vandermonde published his Essai sur la Manière de Perfectionner l’Espèce Humaine. This treatise was situated within the French-led medical movement of meliorism, meant to increase public health by boosting the medical arrangement of marriages from all strata of society. What made Vandermonde different from his colleagues is that he was not just looking for a way to improve the health of society: he was also proposing a series of measures meant to increase the beauty of humankind. And, for the first time in the history of European medicine, he advocated mixed-race couplings as a means to obtain the best results. This latter development is so unexpected in the global setting of the Enlightenment that we could arguably hail Vandermonde as the founding father of what Michel Foucault later called ‘biopolitique’.55As developed by Foucault, ‘biopolitique’ stands for the progressive seizing by higher power of the population's daily life. For a lengthier description of how this process unfolds according to Foucault, see Foucault, Michel. L’incorporation de l’hôpital dans la technologie modern, in Dits et Écrits, t.2, Gallimard, Paris, 2001.

La Civilidad en las Castas Veladas del México Actual

This paper deals with the problem of the present patterns of living together of Mexicans, starting from the concept of Caste , managed during the Colonial times. In the New Spain, that concept meant ‘racial mixture’ and, with that meaning, the concept integrated two different semantic horizons: that of the mixture of races and that of the social stratum . During the Colonial times, the caste placed people in two different horizons, one based on somatic characteristics, and another, based on social hierarchy. Today, the Novohispanic meanings of the words ‘caste’ y ‘race’ are absent. The issue of the somatic differences has disappeared from the analysis of the identity of the Mexican, but those differences are still underlined as a sign of differences of economic, educative and cultural wealth, and, overall, as a sign of interpersonal manners, that is, as signs of differences of civility.

Stripe Rust Resistance in Aegilops tauschii Germplasm

ABSTRACTAegilops tauschii Coss., the D‐genome progenitor of hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), is an important source of useful genes for wheat improvement. We characterized a germplasm collection of 118 Ae. tauschii accessions for response to stripe rust, a devastating disease caused by the fungus Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst). We evaluated tillering stage and adult‐plant resistance to stripe rust using prevalent Pst races from the United States and China. Resistant accessions predominated in Ae. tauschii subsp. strangulata and Ae. tauschii subsp. tauschii from the Caspian Sea region. We further analyzed the inheritance of stripe rust resistance by inoculating F2 plants of 60 crosses with a mixture of Chinese Pst races. Crosses between resistant and susceptible lines indicated both dominant and recessive inheritance. Tests of allelism among 14 highly resistant accessions indicated the common presence of YrAS2388, previously mapped on chromosome arm 4DS, in all accessions. In conclusion, the study presented valuable data on stripe rust resistance in Ae. tauschii, which assist with informed introgression of the D‐genome trait for stripe rust resistance in common wheat.

Displaced looks: The lived experience of beauty and racism

With a focus on appearance and racialised perceptions of skin colour, this paper discusses the differences between being and feeling acceptable, pretty or ugly and the possibility of such displacement (from being to feeling or vice versa), as a way to understand what beauty does in people’s lives. The paper explores the fragility of beauty in relation to the visibility of the body in specific racialised contexts. It investigates the claim that beauty can be considered a feeling that emphasises processes (what beauty does) rather than contents (what beauty is). Drawing from life stories with Mexican women, I examine their concerns about visibility, temporality and appearance as expressions of racist practices and ideas, within a context where the racial project of mestizaje (racial mixture) is in operation. Beauty matters as it makes evident the pervasiveness of racism in the everyday. The lived experience of beauty, in its displacement and fragility, as a feeling and as resource, can also point to some of the strategies to resist, cope and get on.

Malays, China and Indian Ethnicities: A Case Study of Art and Ethnography Content Analysis and Multiculturalism on Upin-Ipin Animation

This study aims to describe the ethnic group or tribe is a group of people whose members identify themselves with one another, usually based on lineage are considered the same as culture, language, religion traits, behaviors, or biological. Ethnicity is a fundamental factor in human life, interactions and intrinsic property of a group. The method of research used content analysis approaches and ethnographic art. The results showed
 determination by mixing or races as “Peranakan”: for a mixture of Malay race with China, people who are determined according to their religion, for Malays in Malaysia it meant that the Muslim bumiputera, “the Mestis” for Hispanic mix by bumiputera.
 Upin Ipin-released on September 14, 2010 in Malaysia and produced by Les’ Copaque. The results of this study show Upin-Ipin filled with simplicity in bringing Islamic values, education, manners, and respect among fellow was meant for all people of good Malaysian nation or religion. Good relations between different cultures (Malay, Chinese, Indian) were described in this animated film. Upin-Ipin animated movie brings
 the perfect image and message, ie, with different cultures can create a good relationship with the harmony of differences in unity and simplicity.

AFFECTIVE HYBRIDITIES: DINAH MULOCK CRAIK'S OLIVE AND BRITISH HETEROGENEITY

In this article, Alisha Walters argues that Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive (1850), frequently received as an emulation of Charlotte Brontë's more famous novel Jane Eyre (1847), is a thematically significant text on its own merit, as it directly engages with ideas of race and hybridized Victorian nationalism. Published in 1850, at a time of rampant anti-Celtic prejudice in Britain and during the ascendance of Saxonism—an ideology which posited that the nation owed its essential character to a pure Teutonic racial lineage—Craik's text of mixed-race characters paints a controversial, hybridized national portrait. Her Britain is comprised of both Saxons and Celts, while the novel also cautiously posits that Britishness may include forms of non-white mixture, in light of the empire. This article claims that what links these forms of national hybridity in the novel is the discourse of sentiment. Affect intersects with Victorian theories of racial mixture, and an emotive understanding of the racialized Other is produced in Olive. Affective language urges acceptance of racial difference, as a “felt” model of hybridized nationality is inculcated in the text. At a time when exclusionary theories of monoracial origin were gaining national popularity, Craik deploys affect to create a more complex, heterogeneous ideal of Britishness in the mid nineteenth century.

From Racial Mixture to Black Nation: Racialising Discourses inBrazil's African Affairs

The article links reflections aboutBrazilian race relations with institutional transnational dialogues betweenBrazil and ‘Africa’. I point out that although racial/cultural mixture and the ‘brown’ census category have traditionally reflected much of national identity inBrazil,Brazil today is increasingly spelling out its blackness, both on the national and international scenes. I highlight that, not by coincidence, this fact is happening at a historical moment when programmes of ‘black’ affirmative action and other differential politics in favour ofAfro‐descendants are taking off in the country, and also at a time whenBrazil is expanding its geopolitical and economic interests inAfrica.

The House, the Street and the Brothel: Gender in Latin American History

This article delineates scholarship in Latin American history (mostly in English) defined by gender relations and/or focused on women. From 1492 until 1750, the honor code, the process of miscegenation or race mixture, and property rights are emphasized. Scholarship has overturned the traditional view that colonial households and production were invariably patriarchal, since between 25 to 45 percent of households were headed by women. Illegitimacy and consensual unions were found to be prevalent principally among the non-white and non-elite populations. From 1750 to 1930, profound and contradictory changes included a secularization process that caused women’s loss of many colonial protections. However, new opportunities developed for women’s employment and control of property. Women were essentially controlled within the private sphere during the colonial period, but that control moved to the workplace in the nineteenth century, and to the state in the early twentieth century. Gender was an important discourse in struggles to define the nation-state, with prostitution and disease as central themes. In the twentieth century social historians have demonstrated the differential gender impacts of economic and technological change brought by development projects, industrialization, and shifting strategies of multinational corporations. The most striking contributions of recent books on gender in Latin America include the continuing significance of honor after independence. Motherhood is another recurring theme in writings about women and their history in Latin America.

A Racial Paradise? Race and Race Mixture in Henry Louis Gates' Brazil

In this documentary, Henry Louis Gates explores the extent to which the notion of being a racial paradise applies to Brazil. He introduces Brazil's contradictions of being the last country to aboli...

Searching for novel sources of field resistance to Ug99 and Ethiopian stem rust races in durum wheat via association mapping

Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici, the causative agent of stem rust in wheat, is a devastating disease of durum wheat. While more than 50 stem rust resistance (Sr) loci have been identified in wheat, only a few of them have remained effective against Ug99 (TTKSK race) and other durum-specific Ethiopian races. An association mapping (AM) approach based on 183 diverse durum wheat accessions was utilized to identify resistance loci for stem rust response in Ethiopia over four field-evaluation seasons and artificial inoculation with Ug99 and a mixture of durum-specific races. The panel was profiled with simple sequence repeat, Diversity Arrays Technology and sequence-tagged site markers (1,253 in total). The resistance turned out to be oligogenic, with twelve QTL-tagging markers that were significant (P < 0.05) across three or four seasons. R (2) values ranged from 1.1 to 11.3 %.Twenty-four additional single-marker/QTL regions were found to be significant over two seasons. The AM results confirmed the role of Sr13, previously described in bi-parental mapping studies, and the role of chromosome regions putatively harbouring Sr9, Sr14, Sr17 and Sr28. Three minor QTLs were coincident with those reported in hexaploid wheat and five overlapped with those recently reported in the Sebatel × Kristal durum mapping population. Thirteen single-marker/QTL regions were located in chromosome regions where no Sr genes/QTLs have been previously reported. The allelic variation identified in this study is readily available and can be exploited for marker-assisted selection, thus providing additional opportunities for a more durable stem rust resistance under field conditions.

NUESTRA AMÉRICA COMO PLATAFORMA DE LA EDUCACIÓN EN EL CONTINENTE

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Race and Character in Cien años de soledad

For AndyCien anos de soledad has been viewed through many prisms but in critical readings of the novel there is very little focus on the question of race. The narrative arguably presents the novel's events through a European filter, or Pseudo-European presumed whiteness.1 A reading is sensitive to race shows racial mixture most often intersects with illegitimacy in Cien anos de soledad. White women are instrumental in policing racial hierarchy; black women are relegated to the margins of the socius, most particularly to brothels. Vivir para contarla, Garcia Marquez's 2003 autobiography, provides unsettling insights into how the Nobel laureate transmuted his experience of coastal Caribbean race relations into his novel.White identity is evident throughout the first two chapters of Cien anos de soledad. In the opening chapter Macondo's founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, expresses contempt for the past and the Spanish Conquest haunts his movements, not as an epoch of terror but as an age of heroism, irretrievably lost. According to Avery Gordon, haunting describes how that which appears not to be there is often a seething (8). Gordon's analysis examines the invisible or uncanny historical presence of ostensibly silenced or marginalized people. Victors and conquerors haunt history as well. This is apparent in Jose Arcadio Buendia's explorations in the first chapter, in which the founder of Macondo discovers the remains of a Spanish galleon and a suit of armor from a previous heroic age. These refer to a golden age of discovery, upheld by ethnic Europeans in Latin America as justification for claims of patrimony. The golden age of discovery and exploration has been lost to the villagers of Macondo. They inhabit an isolated and degraded reality, in which the monumental object of the Spanish Conquest may only be recovered piecemeal, if at all. 2The predominantly Spanish ancestry of Macondo's family of leaders is never in doubt. Ursula Iguaran's great-grandfather was Aragonese and Jose Arcadio Buendia's was criollo cultivador de tabaco (CA 103). In the United States, creole connotes racial mixture whereas its Spanish homophone criollo refers to a native-born person of European ancestry, although the term is misleading. The ancestors of Ursula and Jose Arcadio lived on land nominally shared with the original inhabitants: del mar, en una rancheria de indios pacificos (CA 102). The Buendias' Spanish forebears leave an indelible stamp on a territory which once belonged to indigenous inhabitants: antigua rancheria que los antepasados de ambos transformaron con su trabajo y sus buenas costumbres en uno de los mejores pueblos de la provincia (103). A central myth of whiteness, as Richard Dyer notes, is its claim to aspiration and enterprise (21-23). Enterprising ancestors notwithstanding, the tale of the Buendias illustrates a criollo anxiety regarding whiteness and reproduction. Inter-racial sexuality, as Dyer brilliantly argues, threatens whiteness because bodies. ..can no longer guarantee their own reproduction as (25). In Garcia Marquez's novel, the copulation of white bodies eventually leads to bestial offspring. Due perhaps to the limited availability of socially acceptable (white) partners, the descendants of the Aragonese Spaniard and the criollo tobacco planter are threatened by endogamy, incest, and monstrosity. In warnings to her great-great-grandson, Ursula states the danger clearly: mujeres de la calle, que echaban a perder la sangre; las mujeres de la casa, que parian hijos con cola de puerco (CA 503).In the prehistory of Macondo, Ursula's attempt to avoid bearing children with tails leads to violence: Jose Arcadio Buendia murders the man who mocks his childless marriage. Prudencio Aguilar's return as a ghost precipitates the Buendias' journey across a Latin American wilderness: despues de varios meses de andar perdidos por entre los pantanos, lejos ya de los ultimos indigenas que encontraron en el camino, acamparon a la orilla de un rio pedregoso cuyas aguas parecian un torrente de vidrio helado (108). …

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil

Stanley Blake’s discussion of the construction of northeastern racial identity is a valuable addition to a field that tends to privilege the history of Brazil’s economically dominant center-south. Given the centrality of Gilberto Freyre’s work in establishing the parameters from which most studies of race in Brazil begin, a history of racial identities focusing on Freyre’s home state of Pernambuco seems, if anything, long overdue. Blake’s thesis — that the northeast and nordestinos became symbols of racial mixture and regional backwardness in contradistinction to the whiter and more economically developed center-south — comes as no surprise. What is new is the historic specificity that Blake brings to this topic, demonstrating the variable impact of both rapidly evolving intellectual trends and the political and economic exigencies of the time. He also asks questions that are seemingly obvious yet have hitherto gone unanswered: How did the nordestino come to replace the coastal European as the quintessential Brazilian type by the 1920s and 1930s? And why did this happen when the northeast was suffering political and economic decline?To answer these questions, Blake covers key political and intellectual developments such as the abolition of slavery and the emergence of the fields of legal medicine, criminal anthropology, psychiatry, eugenics, and public health; structural economic inequities that intensified under the First Republic (1889 – 1930); and the rising corporatist tendencies of the Vargas era (1930 – 45). Blake documents multiple instances of how medical researchers struggled to reconcile data that did not support their preconceived notions about the relationship of race to disease. Public health practitioners and researchers typically linked malnutrition and endemic disease to the ignorance of the poor. They highlighted structural inequalities at their own peril. For example, Ulysses Pernambu-cano, a physician and bureaucrat who ran the state’s mental asylum, was dismissed from public employment due to a combination of leftist political tendencies and research that increasingly favored class-based explanations for mental illness over race-based ones. Gilberto Freyre, who was Pernambucano’s cousin, experienced a similar intellectual and political trajectory from his apologist stance on slavery in Casa grande e senzala (1933) to his more pointed critique of sugar monoculture and associated socioeconomic inequities in Nordeste (1937).Blake also argues convincingly that Pernambucan intellectuals were not simply peripheral and passive consumers of mainstream ideas about racial science. Rather, they transformed these concepts to meet local needs, for example, in translating the Stanford-Binet IQ test for regional use. Despite limited public funds, Pernambucan researchers compiled extensive biotypological data sets and employed standardized testing of all sorts on populations who had little choice in the matter — students, soldiers, and prisoners. Some of these research projects yielded tangible improvements in the form of effec tive public health outreach and education. Other studies merely reinforced elite prejudices by confirming that nordestino bodily proportions made them especially “adept at laboring in a stooped position” (p. 211). Additionally, many state-run initiatives arguably were more concerned with surveillance of poor nonwhites than health delivery. A case in point was the mandate that obliged Afro-Brazilian religious sects to register with the state’s Mental Hygiene Service in order to practice their faith free from police repression. In exchange, they had to submit to the intrusive gaze of the scientific observer who then made pronouncements about their subnormal intelligence and racial primitivism.While this book is superb in the details, Blake’s overarching thesis that the nordes-tino became a distinct racial category by the 1930s remains more suggestive than conclusive. This may derive, in part, from Blake’s explicit refusal to define nordestino, a legitimate intellectual choice made due to the multiple meanings the term assumed over time. However, this choice contributed to lack of clarity about how the category of the purportedly stoic, backward, ignorant sertanejo of the interior (imagined as white or mestiço) could come to coexist with the coastal Afro-Brazilian candomblé practitioner within the single racial category of nordestino. While corporatist statesmen like Agamemnon Magalhães sought to erase racial difference as a means to achieve social harmony, this was accomplished by actively repressing Afro-Brazilian sects to the point of insisting that the state’s population was 100 percent Catholic. Rather than incorporating Afro-Brazilians as nordestinos, they were systematically erased as a formal category, much in the same way that ideologies of mestizaje in Mexico and elsewhere in Spanish America destabilized the category of Indian. The Pernambucan case, therefore, seems more like a conflation of the categories of sertanejo and nordestino than the creation of a new overarching category. These conceptual reservations aside, this book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of how regional and national identity formation intersects with the process of state building. Blake also provides a nuanced intellectual, cultural, and political history of a region understudied within twentieth-century Brazilian history.

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature by Yogita Goyal

Reviewed by: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature by Yogita Goyal Raquel Kennon (bio) Goyal, Yogita. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Africa is a charged symbol in Black Diaspora studies. In Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature, Goyal argues that the vibrant black Atlantic scholarship of the last fifteen years tends to oversimplify or ignore the meaning of Africa in its debates. Since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), scholars have seized this theoretical model for their book titles and as the organizing principle of their research, and yet failed to reach a consensus on the borders of this conceptual framework. As Jonathan Elmer pointedly asks, “What exactly, is the ‘black Atlantic’?” Situating what she calls the “sign of Africa” at the center of her work and debunking the image of Africa as a “dark” mythical past, Goyal theorizes that Africa is “constitutive of black modernity” (7). This engaging book argues that Gilroy’s black Atlantic, which shuns “the continuing lure of ethnic absolutism” and focuses on hybridity, “leaves little room for Africa” (225). Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature poses the crucial question: What is Africa to the black Atlantic? In the book’s introduction, Goyal suggests that Africa powers the imagination and political vision of two key diasporic figures: Marcus Garvey and Frantz Fanon. Goyal sets out to “excavate a larger tradition of diasporic debate over Africa” by focusing on “three distinct features of their imagination—the synthesis of national and transnational concerns, the centrality of Africa, and the significance of romance and realism” (7). Goyal links Garvey’s grandiloquent language and theatricality with diasporic romance and Fanon’s focus on revolution with nationalist realism. While the book’s main argument hinges on the distinction between the literary genres of realism and romance, Goyal announces that this is not a book concerned with the definition of key terms. The terms diaspora and romance, for example, represent an “infinitely large body of intellectual work” and an “array of meanings” (13) with “untidy” distinctions between key words (55–56). Citing romance as the “paradigmatic genre of the diaspora” (14), this compelling investigation centers on “the ways in which romance produces Africa in the diasporic imagination” (10). [End Page 466] To explore the relationship between romance and the production of Africa, Goyal constructs a “black Atlantic canon” composed of the writings (magazine fiction, novels, philosophical texts) of black intellectuals from the United States, Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean from the late-nineteenth century to the late-twentieth century. These authors include Pauline Hopkins, Caryl Phillips, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, Marcus Garvey, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Ama Ata Aidoo. With theory and close readings meticulously interwoven, Goyal develops a nuanced argument that links literary genre with theories of diaspora and the black Atlantic over six chapters. One of the book’s strongest claims is that diaspora does not discard the nation; that is, “nation and diaspora are mutually constitutive” (16). Much of Goyal’s book coheres around exposing the places where “broad oppositions fail to capture the nuances” of complex ideas such as tradition, the nation, the “sign of Africa,” the West, the black Atlantic world, the colonial encounter, diaspora, pan-Africanism, etc. (106). It is surprising, then, that Goyal organizes each chapter title around a dichotomous relationship between two key terms, reinforcing these oppositions. Arranged in chronological order, the first two chapters begin with readings of early-twentieth-century texts. Chapter 1 “From domestic allegory to imperial romance: Pauline Hopkins and racial mixture” reads Hopkins’s 1903 Of One Blood as an “imperial romance” of Africa promoting racial purity, a significant departure, Goyal notes, from the celebration of mixed-race characters in Hopkins’s early work. The book’s second and longest chapter, “From double consciousness to diaspora: W. E. B. Du Bois and black internationalism” explores the classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk and the 1928 fictional text, Dark Princess. Goyal argues that Du Bois vacillated “between realism and romance to articulate African American identity as marked by double consciousness, he also theorized Africa as both the...

Mestizaje and Public Opinion in Latin America

Latin American elites authored and disseminated ideologies of mestizaje or race mixture, but does the general population value them today? Using the 2010 Ameri- cas Barometer, we examined public opinion about mestizaje in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using survey ques- tions that modeled mestizaje both as a principle of national development and as tolerance for intermarriage with black or indigenous people. We found that most Latin Americans support mestizaje, although support varies by country and ethnicity. Across countries, we fi nd partial evidence that the strength of earlier nation-making mestizaje ideas is related to support for mestizaje today, and that strong multicultural policies may have actually strengthened such support. Ethnoracial minorities showed particular support for the national principle of mestizaje. Finally, we discovered that the national principle of mestizaje is associated with more tolerant attitudes about intermarriage, especially in countries with large Afro-descendant populations.

Nature and Nurture in Jorge Amado’s Tent of Miracles

GIVEN recent advances in the field of genetics, interest in the relation between biology, or human Nature if you will, and Society, or Nurture, has gained momentum, calling into question previous critical approaches that rejected biological influences out of hand. To illustrate the issues this has raised, I have chosen Jorge Amado de Faria's (1912-2001) Tent of Miracles (1969). This because not only does Amado's piece capture the cultural Zeitgeist of its times, it also, inadvertently I imagine, undermines them. I say inadvertently because Amado takes his ideas from a social constructivism we can trace back to Gilberto Freyre, and before him to Franz Boas. In the novel, Amado makes a social constructivist case in favor of miscegenation, the mixing of the races, and against these gregationist, white, Catholic, and Eurocentric ruling class of Brazil. His proxy for this alternative mixed society is the Afro-Brazilian religious construction known as candomble. Essentially the idea is that a homogeneously mixed society will resolve all social problems, primarily by eliminating divisive class and racial tensions. Paradoxically, the solution offered is predicated on biology, and so undermines a pure form of either constructivism or biologism. An example of Amado's strategy appears when the liberal white professor Frago Neto asks mulatto protagonist Pedro Archanjo how he can reconcile science and candomble. Archanjo first tries to combine these seeming contradictions into a mulatto or mixed epistemology, and then accuses the white Professor of having a narrow, rational, way of thinking. He says I'm a mixture of men and races; I am a mulatto, a Brazilian ... man is still alive in me, somewhere beyond the reach of my will, because he and I were the same person for so long (315). With the reference to his past genetic heritage in evolutionary time, Primitive man, Archanjo brings biology and genetics into the discussion. Though later in the novel Archanjo, and Amado through him, appear to argue in favor of a Boasian cultural relativism, this relativism is always undermined by Archanjo's emphasis on racial mixing, with race defined in genetic terms. Here, then, and throughout the novel, Amado's great difficulty is that of reconciling biology with social constructivism. This difficulty stems from the intellectual history of the times. As is well known, Amado was much influenced by Gilberto Freyre, who was in turn a student of Franz Boas. In 1911, with the publication of Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Franz Boas effectively eliminated the role of genetic inheritance in human behavior from the debates of the day. Boas's position was, in part, a reaction to a line of scientific thought that ran from Darwin's purely biological position to Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, from there to Francis Galton's eugenics, and finally on to Nazi distortions of Galton's ideas. When the truth about the Nazi eugenics programs began to surface, all biological explanations of human behavior became suspect, at best. The net result was that Boas's cultural relativism swept to victory in the human sciences--Emile Durkheim in sociology, Burrhus Frederic Skinner and John B. Watson in psychology, Margaret Mead in anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in linguistics, Freud in psychiatry, and so on. In fact, up to the present day, cultural relativism and social constructivism continue to form the theoretical underpinnings of the human sciences, while biological approaches languish in exile. In line with this thinking, Amado refers both to eugenics and to Boas repeatedly in Tent of Miracles (271; 169; 267) as he argues against both white supremacy and separatism and undying hatred between the races (186), and for racial equality. Indeed, it appears that Franz Boas himself was the model for the North American scholar who, in the novel, rediscovers Pedro Archanjo's lost works, one James D. Levinson of Colombia University: . …

The State of the Union: Toward a Biopolitics of Marriage

The State of the Union: Toward a Biopolitics of Marriage

Magnus Mörner (1924–2012)

Magnus Mörner (1924–2012)