Search results

Mixed race studies is one of the fastest growing, as well as one of the most important and controversial areas in the field of race and ethnic relations. Bringing together pioneering and controversial scholarship from both the social and the biological sciences, as well as the humanities, this reader charts the evolution of debates on 'race' and 'mixed race' from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The book is divided into three main sections:tracing the origins: miscegenation, moral degeneracy and geneticsmapping contemporary and foundational discourses: 'mixed race', identities polit

Examines diasporic constructions of gender, selves, & communities among metisse, or mixed-parentage, women in Bristol, UK, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted 1990-1992. In narratives, participants spoke of their past & how it was connected to their present lives. It is shown that the memories of these women serve to preserve & reinterpret past cultures, while also providing a forum in which to offer cultural critiques of their contemporary lives. Several vignettes from the narratives are presented to demonstrate the complex manner in which the women locate themselves in both colonial & postcolonial contexts. Moreover, their very complexity is taken to challenge the static & unitary notions of the English African diaspora often developed by historians. Though historians often speak of such diasporic individuals as orphans, these women's narratives show that they resist an orphan consciousness. Instead, they reinsert themselves as active subjects into the narratives of their new communities just as they gesture backward to their old communities. 93 References. D. Ryfe

ABSTRACTThis article assesses anthropological thinking about the race concept and its applications. Drawn from a broader national survey of geneticists' and anthropologists' views on race, in this analysis, we provide a qualitative account of anthropologists' perspectives. We delve deeper than simply asserting that "race is a social construct." Instead, we explore the differential ways in which anthropologists describe and interpret how race is constructed. Utilizing the heuristic of constructors, shifters, and reconcilers, we also illustrate the ways in which anthropologists conceptualize their interpretations of race along a broad spectrum as well as what these differential approaches reveal about the ideological and biological consequences of socially defined races, such as racism in general and racialized health disparities in particular. [race concept, social construction, racism, health disparities]

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Globalization and the Transformations of Race -- PART I DIASPORIC MOVEMENTS, MISSIONS, AND MODERNITIES -- Missionary Positions -- History at the Crossroads: Vodú and the Modernization of the Dominican Borderlands -- Diaspora and Desire: Gendering ''Black America'' in Black Liverpool -- Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space: Writing History Between the Lines -- ''Mama, I'm Walking to Canada'': Black Geopolitics and Invisible Empires -- PART II GEOGRAPHIES OF RACIAL BELONGING -- Mapping Transnationality: Roots Tourism and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Heritage -- Emigration and the Spatial Production of Difference from Cape Verde -- Folkloric ''Others'': Blanqueamiento and the Celebration of Blackness as an Exception in Puerto Rico -- Gentrification, Globalization, and Georaciality -- Recasting ''Black Venus'' in the ''New'' African Diaspora -- ''Shooting the White Girl First'': Race in Post-apartheid South Africa -- PART III POPULAR BLACKNESSES, ''AUTHENTICITY,'' AND NEW MEASURES OF LEGITIMACY -- Havana's Timba: A Macho Sound for Black Sex -- Reading Bu√y and ''Looking Proper'': Race, Gender, and Consumption among West Indian Girls in Brooklyn -- The Homegrown: Rap, Race, and Class in London -- Racialization, Gender, and the Negotiation of Power in Stockholm's African Dance Courses -- Modern Blackness: Progress, ''America,'' and the Politics of Popular Culture in Jamaica -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index