Race and Transatlantic Identities provides a rich overview of the complex relationship between the construction of race and transatlantic identity as expressed in a variety of cultural forms, refracted through different disciplinary and critical perspectives, and manifested at different historical moments. Spanning a period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributions provide a panorama of the wealth and variety of contemporary approaches to grappling with notions of race in a transatlantic context, raising questions about the permanence and fixity of racial boundaries. The volume, which focuses on the cultural sites where individuals construct and express their racial identities in the context of those boundaries, also explores strategies through which those boundaries are defined and redefined. The collection conducts this inquiry by juxtaposing essays on literature, history, visual arts, material culture, music, and dance in ways that encourage the reader to engage with concepts across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The articles in this book were originally published in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies.

The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge. After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation.

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans. Onkey examines how Irish and Irish-American identity is often constructed through or against African-Americans, mapping this through the work of writers, playwrights, political activists, and musicians.

Transatlantic, Transcultural, and Transnational Dialogues on Identity, Culture, and Migration analyzes the diasporic experiences of migratory and postcolonial subjects through the lenses of cultural studies, critical race theory, narrative theory, and border studies. These narratives cover the United States, the U.S.-Mexico border, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula and illustrate a shared diasporic experience across the Atlantic. Through a transatlantic, transcultural, and transnational lens, this volume brings together essays on literature, film, and music from disparate geographic areas: Spain, Cuba and Jamaica, the U.S.-Mexico border, and Colombia. Throughout the volume, the contributors explore intertextual transatlantic dialogues, and migratory experiences of diasporic subjects and queer subjectivities. The chapters also examine the use of language to preserve Latinx culture, colonial and Spanish cultural exchanges, border identities, and race, gender, identity, and cultural production. In turn, these diasporic experiences result from transatlantic, transcultural, and transnational phenomena that converge in a globalized society and aid in questioning the artificial boundaries of nation states.

"Race and Transatlantic Identities provides a rich overview of the complex relationship between the construction of race and transatlantic identity as expressed in a variety of cultural forms, refracted through different disciplinary and critical perspectives, and manifested at different historical moments. Spanning a period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributions provide a panorama of the wealth and variety of contemporary approaches to grappling with notions of race in a transatlantic context, raising questions about the permanence and fixity of racial boundaries. The volume, which focuses on the cultural sites where individuals construct and express their racial identities in the context of those boundaries, also explores strategies through which those boundaries are defined and redefined. The collection conducts this inquiry by juxtaposing essays on literature, history, visual arts, material culture, music, and dance in ways that encourage the reader to engage with concepts across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The articles in this book were originally published in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies. "--Provided by publisher.

Using both primary archival and printed sources, Mieko Nishida examines the perspectives of slaves, ex-slaves, and free-born people of color and the critical factors that affected their lives and self-perceptions. The book offers a new window on slave life in nineteenth-century Salvador, Brazil, and illustrates the difficulty of generalizing about New World slave societies.".

Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018 Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018 Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018 Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018 Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.

An account of the location of black intellectuals in the modern world following the end of racial slavery. The lives and writings of key African Americans such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas and Richard Wright are examined in the light of their experiences in Europe and Africa.

Discusses racial formation theory, the idea that race is a constructed identity dependent upon social, economic, and political factors.

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands. Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories. Contributors. Karen D. Caplan, R. Douglas Cope, Mariana L. R. Dantas, María Elena Díaz, Andrew B. Fisher, Jane Mangan, Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Matthew D. O’Hara, Cynthia Radding, Sergio Serulnikov, Irene Silverblatt, David Tavárez, Ann Twinam