Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories

A special issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (16 July 2020) | Viewed by 75617

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
Interests: race and multiraciality; comparative race and culture; sociological theories of race

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Assistant Editor
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
Interests: race, ethnicity and nation; racialization and criminalization; Black and African diasporic resistance to racial oppresion; immigration

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Assistant Editor
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
Interests: race, ethnicity and nation; whiteness; immigration; conversation analysis

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Assistant Editor
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
Interests: race and multiraciality; reproduction; science and technology studies

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Genealogy invites essays on the topic, “Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories”. Manuscripts may focus on families with spouses of different designated racial groups who may also have children who are understood to be multiracial as well as multigenerational mixed-race families that celebrate the multiraciality in their genealogy. The common denominator would be to explore how families with multiracial (or mixed-race) members (whether parents, siblings, or both/all) narrate their family histories (with a special focus on how they frame/reframe the salience of race and ethnicity in the process). The editorial team hopes to provide a wide spectrum with regard to discipline or sub-discipline and invites contributions that strengthen and broaden the framework for genealogy studies. Some potential areas of focus may include the following, although other submissions are welcome and encouraged:

  • Role of race and multiraciality family narratives about origin, place, and ties to homeland
  • Roots and racial discovery as it relates to genealogical findings relating to race
  • Tri-racial isolates and mixed race/multiracial settlements and communities
  • Family origin confirmation
  • Impact of family genealogy on identity and culture
  • Genealogy and connection to place and historical moments
  • Narratives/discoveries of racial passing
  • Writing/rewriting family histories, reframing memory and oral history
  • Race, gender, class, and power in multiracial family histories
  • Racial categorization, multiraciality, and using census data in genealogical searches
  • Racialized migration histories/patterns and racial mixing
  • The role of hypodescent in racialized family narratives and preserving racial identities
  • The role of cultural practices in preserving racial identities and family narratives
  • The impact of differences in racialized physical expression/embodiment within multiracial/interracial families on family dynamics
  • How families that use genealogy to construct racial narratives and identities navigate issues around biology and race
  • How members of multiracial/interracial families frame interracial intimacy and relationships
Dr. G. Reginald Daniel
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Multiracial
  • Biracial
  • Mixed race
  • Mixed Race Studies
  • Interracial marriage
  • genealogy studies
  • identity
  • narrative
  • family history

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

24 pages, 4906 KiB  
Article
Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’
by Chamion Caballero
Genealogy 2019, 3(2), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020021 - 17 Apr 2019
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 47560
Abstract
The popular conception of interraciality in Britain is one that frequently casts mixed racial relationships, people and families as being a modern phenomenon. Yet, as scholars are increasingly discussing, interraciality in Britain has much deeper and diverse roots, with racial mixing and mixedness [...] Read more.
The popular conception of interraciality in Britain is one that frequently casts mixed racial relationships, people and families as being a modern phenomenon. Yet, as scholars are increasingly discussing, interraciality in Britain has much deeper and diverse roots, with racial mixing and mixedness now a substantively documented presence at least as far back as the Tudor era. While much of this history has been told through the perspectives of outsiders and frequently in the negative terms of the assumed ‘orthodoxy of the interracial experience’—marginality, conflict, rejection and confusion—first-hand accounts challenging these perceptions allow a contrasting picture to emerge. This article contributes to the foregrounding of this more complex history through focusing on accounts of interracial ‘ordinariness’—both presence and experiences—throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when official concern about racial mixing featured prominently in public debate. In doing so, a more multidimensional picture of interracial family life than has frequently been assumed is depicted, one which challenges mainstream attitudes about conceptualisations of racial mixing both then and now. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories)
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16 pages, 909 KiB  
Article
Transracial Families, Race, and Whiteness in Sweden
by Sayaka Osanami Törngren, Carolina Jonsson Malm and Tobias Hübinette
Genealogy 2018, 2(4), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2040054 - 11 Dec 2018
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 5119
Abstract
In this article, we use the results from two studies, one on interracial relationship and the other on transnational adoption, to explore how notions of race and ethnicity shape family policies, family building and everyday life in Sweden. Transnational adoption and interracial marriage [...] Read more.
In this article, we use the results from two studies, one on interracial relationship and the other on transnational adoption, to explore how notions of race and ethnicity shape family policies, family building and everyday life in Sweden. Transnational adoption and interracial marriage in Sweden have previously never been compared in research, even though they both are about transracial family formation. By bringing these two topics together in a critical race theory framework we got a deeper understanding of how transracial families are perceived and affected by societal beliefs and norms. The analysis revealed a somewhat contradictory and complex picture on the norms of family formation. The color-blind ideology that characterizes the Swedes’ self-understanding, together with the privileged position of whiteness in relation to Swedishness, makes the attitude towards different forms of transracial families ambivalent and contradictory. Transracial children and their parents are perceived differently depending on their origin and degree of visible differences and non-whiteness, but also based on the historical and social context. Since family formation involves an active choice, the knowledge and discussion on how race and whiteness norms structure our thoughts and behavior are essential in today’s multicultural Sweden. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories)
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20 pages, 4460 KiB  
Article
Queer Genealogies across the Color Line and into Children’s Literature: Autobiographical Picture Books, Interraciality, and Gay Family Formation
by Cedric Essi
Genealogy 2018, 2(4), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2040043 - 20 Oct 2018
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 6255
Abstract
Life writing scholar Julia Watson critiques the practice of genealogy as “in every sense conservative” (300) because it traditionally charts and enshrines a family’s collective biography through biologistic, heteronormative, and segregated routes. My Americanist contribution, however, zooms in on a recent development of [...] Read more.
Life writing scholar Julia Watson critiques the practice of genealogy as “in every sense conservative” (300) because it traditionally charts and enshrines a family’s collective biography through biologistic, heteronormative, and segregated routes. My Americanist contribution, however, zooms in on a recent development of autobiographical works that establish narratives of origin beyond normative boundaries of race and heterosexual reproduction. A number of predominantly white queer parents of black adoptees have turned their family history into children’s read-along books as a medium for pedagogical empowerment that employs first-person narration in the presumable voice of the adoptee. In Arwen and Her Daddies (2009), for instance, Arwen invites the reader into a story of family formation with the following opening words: “Do you know how I and my Dads became a family?” My analysis understands these objects as verbal-visual origin stories which render intelligible a conversion from differently racialized strangers into kin. I frame this mode of narration as ‘adoptee ventriloquism’ that might tell us more about adult desires of queers for familial recognition than about the needs of their adopted children. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories)
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20 pages, 254 KiB  
Article
Ethnic and Racial Identity in Multiracial Sansei: Intergenerational Effects of the World War II Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans1
by Karen L. Suyemoto
Genealogy 2018, 2(3), 26; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2030026 - 6 Aug 2018
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 8290
Abstract
This paper reflects on ways in which intergenerational familial experience of the Japanese American World War II mass incarceration may have differentially affected the ethnic and racial identity development of multiracial Sansei (third generation Japanese Americans). I begin with a brief review of [...] Read more.
This paper reflects on ways in which intergenerational familial experience of the Japanese American World War II mass incarceration may have differentially affected the ethnic and racial identity development of multiracial Sansei (third generation Japanese Americans). I begin with a brief review of the literature related to the effects of the camps on Nisei, integrating psychological understandings of racial and ethnic identity development, contextual history, and research on the psychological effects; I focus here on effects for Nisei that have been connected to their intergenerational interactions: distancing from Japanese American heritage and identity, silence about the camp experience, and the negotiation of racism and discrimination. I turn then to the primary focus of the paper: Using a combination of autoethnographical reflection, examples from qualitative interviews, and literature review, I engage in reflective exploration of two ways in which intergenerational effects of the camp experience influenced Sansei racial and ethnic identities that vary among monoracial and multiracial Sansei: familial transmission of Japanese American culture by Nisei to Sansei, and the intergenerational effects and transmission of racial discrimination and racial acceptance. I conclude with reflections on intergenerational healing within Japanese American families and communities, and reflections on the relation of these dynamics to current issues of racial justice more generally. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories)
15 pages, 1441 KiB  
Article
How the Use by Eugenicists of Family Trees and Other Genealogical Technologies Informed and Reflected Discourses on Race and Race Crossing during the Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed-Race in 1920s and 1930s Britain
by Peter J. Aspinall
Genealogy 2018, 2(3), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2030021 - 5 Jul 2018
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 6634
Abstract
In the 1920s and 30s, significant empirical studies were undertaken on mixed-race (‘hybrid’) populations in Britain’s seaport communities. The physical anthropologists Rachel Fleming and Kenneth Little drew on the methods of anthropometry, while social scientist Muriel Fletcher’s morally condemnatory tract belongs to the [...] Read more.
In the 1920s and 30s, significant empirical studies were undertaken on mixed-race (‘hybrid’) populations in Britain’s seaport communities. The physical anthropologists Rachel Fleming and Kenneth Little drew on the methods of anthropometry, while social scientist Muriel Fletcher’s morally condemnatory tract belongs to the genre of racial hygiene. Whether through professional relationships, the conduct of their work, or means of disseminating their findings, they all aligned themselves with the eugenics movement and all made use of pedigree charts or other genealogical tools for tracing ancestry and investigating the inheritance of traits. These variously depicted family members’ races, sometimes fractionated, biological events, and social circumstances which were not part of genealogy’s traditional family tree lexicon. These design features informed and reflected prevailing conceptualisations of race as genetic and biological difference, skin colour as a visible marker, and cultural characteristics as immutable and hereditable. It is clear, however, that Fleming and Little did not subscribe to contemporary views that population mixing produced adverse biological consequences. Indeed, Fleming actively defended such marriages, and both avoided simplistic, ill-informed judgements about human heredity. Following the devastating consequences of Nazi racial doctrines, anthropologists and biologists largely supported the 1951 UNESCO view that there was no evidence of disadvantageous effects produced by ‘race crossing’. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories)
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