Racial Mixing Research Articles

Taylor G. Petrey, Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism

Reviewed by: Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism by Taylor G. Petrey Jonathan S. Coley Taylor G. Petrey, Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter, LDS Church) represents one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. Yet, scholars of gender, sexuality, and religion have often neglected the LDS Church in favor of a focus on Protestant and Catholic religious traditions. In this landmark work, Kalamazoo College associate professor of religion Taylor G. Petrey weaves together insights from an impressive array of primary sources to document LDS leaders’ teachings and political activism related to gender and sexuality. The result is one of the most fascinating scholarly books that I have read in some time. One of the book’s core arguments is that, during the post-World War II period, LDS leaders taught that God intended for there to be separate races, two distinct genders, and a single type of family (the heterosexual, nuclear family). However, LDS leaders urged members to take active steps to guard against the mixing of races, the erosion of gender differences, and the possibility of same-sex attraction precisely because they believed that race, gender, and sexuality are malleable and subject to change. For example, with regard to gender, some LDS leaders once taught that, prior to existing on earth, humans existed as “intelligences” (entities that have not yet taken any spiritual or fleshly form) in a pre-mortal realm. These intelligences [End Page 139] only received genders when they became “spirits” in this pre-mortal realm. Furthermore, according to one prominent theologian, God does not “coerce anyone in the moment of [spirit birth] to being male or female. Instead…pre-mortal agency and proclivities influenced which spirits became males and females” (41). In short, since humans freely “choose” their gender in their pre-mortal existence, they cannot rightly protest their gender roles while on earth. Although this theology was eventually rebutted, it serves as evidence for the fluidity of gender within LDS theology. Historically, some LDS leaders have also argued that gender difference does not necessarily persist in the afterlife. Instead, only people who reach the highest level of the celestial kingdom have the ability to retain their gender and remain married. Otherwise, “those who do not dwell in the highest kingdom will lose the power of procreation” and their “bodies will be marked and will function differently,” essentially becoming a third sex (44). In a similar fashion, LDS theology suggests that sexuality is subject to change. Church leaders have often taught, for example, that parents must perform appropriate gender roles in order for their children to develop attraction to a different sex. Ex-gay organizations like Evergreen were established for Mormons who were attracted to the same sex and wished to become straight. Even after the LDS Church largely abandoned ex-gay programs, acknowledging that people may not be able to change their sexual orientation on earth, church leaders began teaching that faithful members could essentially become straight and obtain a spouse when they enter the afterlife. In short, although LDS leaders do not share the normative views of academic queer theorists, LDS teachings are surprisingly “queer” in that they acknowledge the instability and fluidity of gender and sexuality. Perhaps the most fascinating material in the book (at least from my vantage point as a sociologist of religion and social movements) pertains to how LDS teachings about gender and sexuality have influenced political actions and how the LDS Church’s political engagement has, in turn, influenced its teachings about gender and sexuality. During the immediate post-World War II period, LDS leaders promoted what they called the patriarchal order of marriage in which men were expected to rule over their families and women were told to submit to their husbands’ authority. However, after the LDS Church joined the movement to defeat the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution, church leaders were forced to defend their beliefs about gender in the public sphere and, in turn, shifted toward a more moderate position on gender and marriage. Instead...

Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture

Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture

Decolonising the retail business management curriculum in the higher education sector

This article critiques the retail business management curriculum as currently offered in the Higher Education (HE) sector. The study used an exploratory qualitative approach, which involved conducting telephone interviews with a purposively selected sample of 25 participants conversant with the phenomenon studied, retail management practitioners, students and curriculum review experts. This was augmented by secondary literature. The study found out that by and large the retail business management (RBM) curriculum that is currently rolled out in the HE sector is largely based on Western epistemologies. The knowledge economy that is consumed by the recipients of the RBM curriculum in the HE sector is mainly from American and European academics and that is at the expense of the local or indigenous knowledge. It was found out, that the majority of the curriculum recipients do not identify with the current curriculum because it is divorced from their lived experiences that include their culture in particular their languages, beliefs and values. The study avers that indigenous knowledge systems were left out in the process of the RBM curriculum development and that partly explains its alienation from the lived realities of the local students and academic staff. The study therefore recommends that the current RBM curriculum needs to be effectively decolonised and the starting point for this decolonisation process is the involvement of all stakeholders in the curriculum development process. Secondly, the use of diverse educators to reflect the country’s racial mix is recommended. The study also recommends the convening of all stakeholder curriculum review engagements, the use of a local knowledge economy and local languages in teaching and learning of the RBM curriculum.

Disentangling the effects of unobserved factors on seatbelt use choices in multi-occupant vehicles

Despite the proven effectiveness of seatbelt use in reducing traffic casualties, not wearing a seatbelt still contributes to a substantial proportion of fatal crashes worldwide. This problem has raised the need to better understand factors contributing to seatbelt use, particularly in multi-occupant vehicles. Among these factors, behavioural determinants of seatbelt use are difficult to measure and their data are not readily available. These behavioural factors may have shared influences on vehicle occupants, causing their seatbelt use choices to be correlated. These complexities have prevented a comprehensive understanding of seatbelt use choices in the literature.This study aims to fill this gap by developing an econometric model that explains seatbelt use choices in multi-occupant vehicles. A set of binary logit models are constructed for seatbelt use choices and their utilities are correlated across vehicle occupants. A new latent variable representing the unobserved factors or ‘atmosphere’ of the vehicle is then incorporated into the model. The model is empirically tested using seatbelt use data from Tennessee, United States. Results indicate that vehicle body type and time of the day are significantly associated with seatbelt use. In addition, the collective seatbelt use in a vehicle is influenced by the unobserved atmosphere in the vehicle. Age, alcohol and drug consumption, higher proportion of old population and white racial mix, higher income per capita, and higher education levels are factors contributing to this latent atmosphere.

Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë'sWuthering Heights

Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë's<i>Wuthering Heights</i>

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

PEMBUDAYAAN KONOTASI “BAHASA JIWA BANGSA”: REFLEKSI IDENTITI KEBANGSAAN KE ARAH SINERGI SOLIDARITI DAN HARMONISASI RAKYAT MALAYSIA

This paper discusses the culture connotation of “Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa” (Language is the Soul of the Nation) as a reflection inseminating element that symbolises the solidarity of the national language of the Malay language in order to achieve synergies harmonisation Malaysians. The arguments were highlighted with the aim of exploring the experience of Malaysia as a country famous for its unique racial mix but had to face various challenges in order to uphold the mother tongue. Secondary data content analysis methods utilise the results of the journals’ conclusions, reports, books, interviews, online news, and other printed materials. Underlying the background of the inaugural study, the selection of significant issues discussed and justified included arguments such as (i) Attitude, awareness, commitment, and responsibility of the community towards a consensus on national language empowerment, (ii) Social media phenomenon, and the influence of mass media in sustainability national language, (iii) The negligence preservation of the artworks production and national literature and (iv) The vital role of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) (Institute of Language and Literature) in promoting the cultivation of the connotation of “Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa”. The goal of the dispute through discussion emphasised the relevance of the drafting of the National Language Act 1963/67 which proves the state’s commitment to maintaining the continuity of the status of the Malay language through enforcement of legislation. The future direction of such a study should focus on the essence of further debate to support the mother tongue as one of the greatest treasures and heritage for Malaysians.

Luxury housing and gentrification in New York City, 2010-2019

ABSTRACT In recent years, New York City has experienced a boom in high end “luxury” construction. This paper maps the spatial expansion of the luxury housing market, using a GIS analysis of over 50,000 high-end real estate sales. It analyzes how the building boom contributed to super-gentrification, the further upgrading of already gentrified neighborhoods. The luxury housing market grew 102% during the 2010s, following two spatial patterns: an intensification of luxury development in already-affluent neighborhoods (especially on the west side of Manhattan) and an expansion into more recently gentrified neighborhoods (especially in northern and central Brooklyn). The luxury market is concentrated in areas that have 81% higher incomes and 31% more white residents that the rest of the city, though new luxury construction occurred in areas with a more diverse racial and class mix. While luxury development has expanded into marginally less-elite neighborhoods, it typically occurs in already gentrified places.

Impure at the Origins

ABSTRACTAlthough race mixing is often treated as a marginal matter or a transgression against dominant racial logic, this article argues that mixed-race bodies and interracial sexuality are central to the invention of whiteness and the origin of the white settler state in several ways. Race mixing is at the foundation of the modern conception of race; at the material and political origin of the white settler state; and serves as the grounding against which cultural and legal categories of race are articulated. The conceptual history of race looks to mixed-race bodies as the means to define race and delimit races. The colonization and economic success of the white settler state in the United States depended on mixed-race individuals who served as emissaries and interpreters, while interracial sexuality was central to the economy of slavery. Dominant conceptions of whiteness, and of the identity of the white settler state, rely on the scrutiny of mixed bodies as a means of racial demarcation. Mixed race histories and subjects are of central interest to studies of the invention of whiteness and processes of racialization.

Revisiter les récits fondateurs dans Absalom, Absalom! de William Faulkner et “Sons of the Conquistador” de Carlos Fuentes

In William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! and Carlos Fuentes’s short story “Sons of the Conquistador”, personal and national destinies collide as the authors write their own critical versions of foundational fictions. The stories explore the relationships between brothers, and between fathers and sons against the background of the growth of two multiracial regions: the American South around the time of the Civil War and Mexico at the beginning of Spanish colonization. Both works feature a type of founding father: Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, and the self-made planter Thomas Sutpen. As in racial romances, the authors reflect on miscegenation and mestizaje, but choose to focus on two sets of half-brothers: a biracial elder son and a younger white heir, the son of a different mother. Faulkner’s multiple narrative voices intertwine the taboo of incest with that of racial mixing, producing a multi-layered novel where the perspective of incestuous miscegenation causes the downfall of the Sutpens, but where incest also allows for an evocation of interracial love. Fuentes, who felt a kinship between his Mexico and Faulkner’s South, chose to retain both the strong erotic tones and the dialogic form of Absalom, Absalom! in a simpler narrative structure. If Faulkner and Fuentes’s depictions of racial mixing eventually diverge, they both revisit the history of their country to explore the complexity of interpersonal relationships and the possibility of living in a multiracial nation. Glissant’s concept of creolization eventually provides an alternative reading to the pessimism that concludes both stories.

Rethinking the “buffering” theory of neighborhood racial transition

AbstractIn metropolitan areas with significant numbers of Latinx and Black people, Santiago (1991) hypothesized that Latinx groups may “buffer” white neighborhoods from Black ones. Farley and Frey (1994, https://doi.org/10.2307/2096131) subsequently suggested that Latinx and Asian groups provide a social or spatial “buffer” that enables White and Black neighborhood coresidence. In predominantly White spaces, increases in the neighborhood shares of Latinx and Asian populations moderates White resistance to the presence of Blacks, and this helps explain growing neighborhood racial diversity in the United States. This essay suggests expanding the thesis in several ways. We first consider reversing the theory wherein Latinx and Asian groups provide a “buffer” enabling White and Black coresidence because Blacks are cushioned from the actions of Whites. This view requires us to include not only White tolerance but also White intolerance in the buffering logic. Second, we point out that racially mixed neighborhoods may also come about because people want to live in such diverse environments. Third, this leads to a consideration of processes of neighborhood racial mixing that include the roles of real estate markets actors in shaping neighborhood outcomes as well as the motivations of Latinx, Asian, and mixed‐race populations.

HLA-B Allele, Genotype, and Haplotype Frequencies in a Group of Healthy Individuals in Colombia.

The sequencing of alleles of the HLA-B, a human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I gene, was established as the most polymorphic of chromosome 6 and of the entire human genome. In this locus, the HLA-B*27 allele is highly polymorphic and has clinical relevance. Literature about the subtypes and singular frequency of these alleles in Colombia's healthy population is scarce. The aim of this study was to establish the HLA-B allele, genotype, and haplotype frequencies in a healthy Colombian population and analyze their association with the sex and geographical distribution of the individuals studied. This is a nonexperimental and descriptive study. The data from whole-blood samples whose HLA genes were genotyped by protocol with the Luminex 100/200 xMAP technology were evaluated. HLA-B*27 positivity was confirmed by the new-generation sequencing technology. The associations between the HLA-B alleles and demographic variables were evaluated by χ2 and Fisher exact tests. Twenty-seven HLA-B genotypes were identified in 255 individuals, with the highest frequencies for HLA-B*35 (44.7%), B*40 (19.6%), and B*44 (16.8%). Additionally, 89 HLA-B alleles were found; the most common were HLA-B*35:01 (6.7%) and B*40:02 (6.5%). Nine individuals tested positive for the HLA-B*27 allele with genotype and allele frequencies of 3.5% and 1.8%, respectively; the HLA-B*27:05:02 subtype predominated. Here, we report the most common HLA-B allele, genotype, and haplotype frequencies in a healthy Colombian population group and analyzed their association with the sex and geographical distribution of the individuals studied. Results for the HLA-B*27 allele confirm racial mixing in Colombia with a high degree of Caucasian influence, as well as the repopulation of Colombia's central region, attributed to the migration phenomena. Results agree with data published in Colombia that was obtained from cord blood samples.

Race-Based Medicine: An Unscientific Proxy That Persists Racial Bias

Systems of racial classification have inherent incoherencies which have caused a misconstrued concept of race that requires amelioration in present-day society and medicine. Races like White and Black incorrectly generalize people based on arbitrary criteria that inevitably result in racial bias. Biological differences between people of different races do exist, however these differences do not constitute race per se, but localized interbreeding over time between people of a geographic location leading to traits becoming predominant in those respective populations. That is, biological differences arise due to evolutionary genetics, not inherent categories of mankind. Characteristics like skin color and hair texture are no more meaningful than other features that vary among human appearance, such as hair color, eye color, and height, since genetic difference is found in most biological aspects of the body with no regard to the arbitrary physiognomic and other visual differences that human culture perceives. The societal construction of race becomes further evident when evaluated for the mixing of races in which racial categories effectively dissolve. All humans correspond to the same species and share all the physiology and genetics that make us human. Fine-scale genetic variation of about 0.1% exists between populations and individuals, but society picks and chooses the phenotypes that it wishes to portray as distinctive groups of people. Medicine should include the genetics of difference when making clinical decisions without mistakenly reinforcing race due to its stigmatizing, prejudicing connotations and persistence of harmful racial bias. Many claimed racial biological differences, such as hypertension in African-Americans, are attributed more so to environmental conditions than to genetic factors. Medical differences can arise from inherited deleterious mutations of ancestral origin that were retained in certain areas and populations due to persistent, relatively isolated breeding. But to simply attribute observed differences in health to mere racial categories despite the biological inconsistency of race is to deny patients of their individuality and right to beneficence and justice. Instead, race-based medicine must be salvaged for more scientific practices that do not presuppose unethical racial difference but examine genetic difference in patients as individuals to alleviate racial health disparities.

Neighbourhood exceptionalism and racial liberalism in the Great Society city: integration as civic showpiece at St Louis’ LaClede Town

AbstractThis article analyses the role of LaClede Town, a nationally lauded housing development in St Louis (USA), in metropolitan and national contests over race, segregation and urban equity from the 1960s to 1990s. Built on the site of a massive slum-clearance project, the federally supported complex gained widespread fame for its startlingly heterogeneous racial mix and ostensibly colour-blind lifestyles. As the article argues, the quasi-utopian language applied to the neighbourhood illustrates the contours and limitations of a 1960s racial liberalism that sought to overcome structural inequalities through face-to-face neighbourly contact. Yet the project's 1990s demise signals that older ideology's supersession by a newly dominant urban neoliberalism.

Intra-Regional Migration: Puerto Rican and Dominican Migration to the United States Virgin Islands

Puerto Ricans and Dominicans have arrived in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI) primarily as economic or working-class immigrants on the sugar plantations and in the construction and tourism industry. Over time, these immigrants have used their disadvantaged positions to expand connections between friends and families in the USVI as well as in their departed homeland. Socially, they have maintained their mores and folkways, but Puerto Ricans have shifted away from their insular environment, merging their peasant and professional ways with black Virgin Islanders to form a new Porto-Crucian ethnic group. Racial mixing has become a part of the Puerto Rican experience in the Virgin Islands. In contrast, the Dominican immigrants continue to arrive with little capital and limited educational skills. Their main challenge is adjustment and integration in pursuit of economic security. The lack of well-paying jobs and a limited command of the English language explain why Dominicans are less economically successful than other ethnic groups. The Dominicans are building themselves and their community in the Virgin Islands, however. Both immigrant groups have maintained their native Spanish language, although not always in its original form.

Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica

This edited volume breaks new ground in critical food studies by exploring the allure that Africans, Indians, and Europeans held for ingested commodities such as alcohol, chocolate, peyote, sugar, and tobacco in Mesoamerica. The ability of these commodities to seduce peoples across racial and socioeconomic lines grants them a level of agency in their own right. Using consumption as an analytical tool helps the volume’s contributors illuminate the social meaning embedded within sensorial experiences. The book’s six chapters are grouped thematically into two sections, with the first foregrounding seduction and the second emphasizing substance.In the first section, Martin Nesvig considers how the meaning ascribed to hallucinogens such as peyote, teonanacatl, and ololiuqui changed over time, eventually leading to “a process of creolization” in the way that they were consumed in mainstream society (28). Although ritual specialists originally used hallucinogens to divine, heal, and interpret the cosmos, their consumption expanded to mixed-race peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, creating a hybrid Mexican custom. Stacey Schwartzkopf examines the production and ingestion of mead, wine, chicha, and aguardiente de caña among Maya peoples in colonial Guatemala. Schwartzkopf notes that the Maya resisted attempts to centralize alcohol production and that many Maya preferred sugar-based drinks over Spanish wine (60). Despite the fact that much of colonial society drank, colonial elites’ anxieties surrounding racial mixing prompted them to vigorously control the licensing of alcohol (67). Kathryn E. Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn investigate cacao usage in Central America and Mexico, tracking recipes to see how tastes traveled across the Atlantic and evaluating the palates of Mesoamericans and French, British, and Anglo-American colonists. Using GIS modeling, Sampeck and Thayn show that Maya and southern Nahua peoples shared similar preferences for cacao recipes and that most of Europe used British recipes as a base for their chocolate cuisine (89).In the second section, Joel W. Palka surveys tobacco cultivation and trade among the indomitable Lacandon Maya peoples in the late nineteenth century. Palka traces the social and economic changes that occurred due to the continued demand for the crop, including polygamy, a practice that increased the number of hands available to help with production. Moreover, Palka highlights the transformations in Lacandon religion as increased contact with outsiders elevated Akyantho, the god of trade and foreigners, over other deities (121). Joan Bristol discerns how elites projected their anxieties about racial purity onto the production and consumption of pulque in colonial Mexico. Bristol draws parallels between a drink known as coyote—made of pulque, dark honey, and palo de timbre—and the ethnonym coyote, used to describe a person that was “three-quarters indigenous and one-quarter Spanish” (135). According to colonial officials, the mixed nature of coyote drinks and people made them both inferior. Guido Pezzarossi employs Michel Foucault’s biopolitics to show how authoritarian governments stripped Indians of their political standing as vassals in colonial Guatemala (150). Pezzarossi uses his findings from archeological and historical research to show how alcohol, cacao, and sugar regulation in Guatemala intersected with the colonial government’s purported concerns for the health of native populations. This book’s fine forward by Marcy Norton and afterword by Carla D. Martin maintain that historians can deepen their understanding of subaltern agency by examining the purposeful attainment of heightened sensory states through seductive commodities since their consumption frequently provoked responses from powerful officials. In short, the many insights that the contributors provide in this bold volume should stimulate debate and produce new avenues of research for scholars of Mesoamerican and Latin American history and food studies.

Whole-exome Sequencing of Prostate Cancer in Sardinian Identify Recurrent UDP-glucuronosyltransferase Amplifications.

Globally, prostate cancer is the third most common cancer in the world, and the second most common cancer in men. However, rates for incidence and mortality vary considerably with race, ethnicity, and geography. Over 97 significantly mutated genes that have been identified in prostate cancer; however, a lack of genomic prostate cancer studies focusing on different racial and ethnic groups and racial mixing pose a serious challenge to universalize these findings. The Sardinian population is an isolated Mediterranean population that has a high frequency of centenarians and a much lower incidence of prostate cancer than found in males in mainland Europe. Here, we conducted a genomic prostate cancer study on a Sardinian cohort diagnosed with local prostate cancer. Our data reveals a low rate of ERG fusion in Sardinian prostate cancer. Interestingly, we identified a novel BTBD7-SLC2A5 fusion that occurred in 13% of the patients. We also found that the UGT2B4 on 4q13.2 was amplified in 20% of the Sardinian patients but rarely amplified in patients of other population. These observations underscore the importance of the inter-population molecular heterogeneity of prostate cancer. In addition, we examined the expression of UGT2B4 in 497 prostate cancer patients derived from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. We found that high expression of UGT2B4 was associated with low-grade prostate cancer and upregulation of UGT2B4 in tumors was associated with upregulation of metabolism pathways such as 'de novo' IMP biosynthetic process, glutamine and monocarboxylic acid metabolism. These data provide insight into clinical relevance and functional mechanism of UGT2B4. Further understanding functional mechanism of UGT2B4 amplification and BTBD7-SLC2A5 fusion will aid in developing drugs to benefit the prostate cancer patients.

Film Review – La Negrada

Film Review:La Negrada Javier Ramirez (bio) Directed by Jorge Pérez Solano, performances by Magdalena Soriano, Juana Mariche Domínguez, and Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera, Tirisia Cine, 2018. 104 mins. In preparation for the 2020 Census, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, or INEGI) conducted the Intercensal Survey (2015), and for the first time ever, included an afrodescendiente (Afro-descendant) category, a watershed moment for afromexicanos (Afro-Mexicans).1 Prior to 2015, Afro-Mexicans lacked constitutional recognition. The Mexican government quite literally did not count them in census data. Afro-Mexicans's invisibility dates back to the 1917 Constitution, which erased African heritage from a nascent Mexican identity.2 A postrevolutionary Mexican government furthered the erasure of Afro-Mexicans by unifying the country's heterogeneous population under the umbrella of mestizaje, a term that celebrates the racial mixing of indigenous and European ancestries.3 In 2013, after nearly fifteen years of campaigning, two organizations, Huella Negra (Black Footprints) and México Negro (Black Mexico), successfully challenged Mexico's anti-Black, mestizo national identity.4 Such efforts proved historic when Afro-Mexicans were afforded the ability to self-identity in a census survey, thus officially acknowledging their existence. Even with the Mexican government finally recognizing them, Afro-Mexicans remained largely invisible. Nowhere is their existence more marginalized than in Mexican cinema, where stereotypical representations frame Afro-Mexicans and, by extension, Blackness, as foreign to the Mexican popular imaginary. Producer and director Jorge Pérez Solano sought to correct the cinematic neglect of Afro-Mexicans. His movie La Negrada (2018) marked the Mexican film industry's first-ever feature-length movie comprised of an all-Black Latinx cast. The studio-driven fiction film offers a fascinating portrayal of an Afro-Mexican coastal community living in Costa Chica, an area in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The story chronicles the romantic entanglement of Magdalena (Magdalena Soriano) and Juana (Juana Mariche Domínguez), two estranged friends who share the same [End Page 503] lover, Neri (Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera).5 Tears in the marital dynamic appear after Juana's hospital stay reveals a terminal diagnosis. Magdalena hopes for a future of just Neri and herself, but he is unwilling to forgo his polygamist view on relationships. Ultimately, Juana's inevitable death realizes a new path for Magdalena, proving there is a life without Neri. Despite its narrative simplicity, La Negrada's slow cinema aesthetic pronounces the everydayness of the Afro-Mexican community. The film's opening moments features two semi-long takes, one with Neri fishing with his son and another of Sara (Sara Gallardo), Juana and Neri's daughter, casually walking between her home and her grandmother's house. Such stillness in the everyday accentuates the tranquility, colorfulness, and beauty of the Costa Chica region—home to many Afro-Mexicans. The quietude of the uncompressed shots also foregrounds the area's coastal acoustics, and in doing so, offers a sharp contrast to the noise-filled and fast-paced urban environment. Perhaps more importantly is how slowness allows viewers to contemplate the Afro-Mexican experience. In an effort to help her ailing mother, Sara travels to a nearby city in hopes of finding medicine that will minimize Juana's pain. Her return trip takes a turn for the worse when, at a migration checkpoint, a Mexican immigration officer orders Sara and several others off the bus. Because they lack IDs, Sara and two other gentlemen must "prove" their Mexican citizenship by singing the Mexican national anthem from a specific starting point. Only Sara is able to "prove" her Mexican citizen status. Elongated cinematic time in the scene, to quote Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, "encourages a mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a vehicle for introspection, reflection and thinking."6 In other words, temporal slowness urges viewers to contemplate the racist anti-Blackness that pervades Mexican societal structures. Linked closely to the film's slow cinema aesthetic is its borrowing of the cinéma vérité style. La Negrada is by no means a documentary, but the employment of an observational cinema technique serves the...

Emphasis and Elision: Early Modern English Approaches to Racial Mixing and their Afterlives

Emphasis and Elision: Early Modern English Approaches to Racial Mixing and their Afterlives

Unsettling the language of settlement: imaginaries of race and experiences of settlement in contemporary Bolivia

ABSTRACT This article seeks to bring into question some of the assumptions that lie behind what constitutes ‘settlement’ in settler colonial theory by focusing on the case of the recent history of Indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia. The first part of the article discusses two of the defining features which have characterised settler colonialism as a specific type of colonialism in the literature: the transformation of the land and the settler-native binary. I show that whilst most of the Latin American and Caribbean region has rightly been disqualified as settler colonial on both accounts, a closer look at the assumptions behind what constitutes settlement for settler colonial theory and the uneasy place of the Latin American and Caribbean region within this framework reveals a need to create a more nuanced, differentiated understanding of settlement which can help to analyse such cases. Focusing on the shift in racial discourses that took place with recent Indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia from the 1960s onwards and the legacy of discourses of racial mixing or mestizaje, the article seeks to show how narratives of race served to underpin and legitimise processes of settlement in this Andean country.