New World babies as articulations of cultural difference

Note: This is heading in the direction of a preface or introduction to the book project. The image below is its starting place, at any rate. Would reading this make you want to read more? Comments welcome and encouraged.
Detail from a panel of Diego Rivera’s mural at the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City. [...]

The Book of the New World–some preliminary comments

To begin with, this passage from George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880):
Resolved, in other words, without being [Joseph] Frowenfeld the studious, to begin at once the perusal of this newly found book, the Community of New Orleans. True, he knew he should find it a difficult task–not only that much of it was in [...]

Black people in Faulkner’s world: Some passages from Faulkner, Mississippi

William Faulkner at Rowan Oak, his home outside Oxford, Mississippi, 1962. Photograph by Martin C. Dain. Image found here.
I’ve just finished having a look at Edouard Glissant’s book, Faulkner, Mississippi (you can find some preliminary comments over at my other blog). Short review: I don’t know if he’s right (see below), but [...]

A reading of a casta painting

(Note: This post, crossposted here, is part of a larger interest of mine in identifying the characteristics of visual and textual rhetorics of interracial mixing and seeing what larger conclusions we can draw from those characteristics.)
Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale, 2004). Amazon link here. Image found here.
Posts [...]

Initial response to “Miscegenation” post

[Update: some obvious errors corrected; some phrasing now (I hope) a little clearer]
I’m truly appreciative of the thoughtful, thorough, and challenging responses to my previous post. You have given me much to think about and re-think. I’ve been quiet on this end in part because of teaching duties but mostly because I needed [...]

“Miscegenation” as (a) “domestic issue”

It seems felicitous that I’m beginning this post on April 14: 180 years ago today, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language. I say this because the word “miscegenation,” whose usage in these pages I’ll be discussing here, is in every sense an American word. More about that later.
I’m writing [...]

On the “Primary Sources” page . . .

. . . the curious and interested can find the beginnings of a list of novels, short fiction and historical narratives, predominantly from the United States, in which miscegenation (racial or cultural) is a central theme or plot or narrational device. I encourage visitors here to offer suggested texts (which will eventually include films; [...]

Casta paintings

De Español y Negra, Mulato. Image found here.
The “Images” page for Domestic Issue now has three examples of casta paintings (one striking example of which you see here), a genre that was once quite popular during the colonial era but languished as an area of serious academic inquiry until the 1960s. The subject [...]

Barack Obama’s post-race politics, Part II

(Part I is here)
So how does Barack Obama articulate a post-race politics in a nation–in a hemisphere–whose history has been shaped by racial tension literally since before Columbus? Here in the speech Obama gave at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, he reframes the theme of race in [...]

Barack Obama’s post-race politics, Part I

(Originally posted at Blog Meridian–hence some of the internal links taking you there.)
“Old man, . . . have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?” –William Faulkner, “Delta Autumn”
Readers of this blog know that I have come to admire [...]