The development of a typology for interracial relationships

This chapter examines the song cycle (also thought of as a monodrama or solo opera) by composer William Bolcom and playwright/librettist Sandra Seaton, From the Diary of Sally Hemings. The chapter includes a discussion of the DNA, kinship, and social controversies over the interracial pairing of Jefferson, a founder of the United States as a nation, and Hemings, his slave and consort. Through an analysis of the compositional genesis of the work, the text, and the music, this chapter also explores what is at stake for thinking about the breakdown of black-white racial categories. Extended references are made to Saartijie Baartman (the South African “Hottentot Venus”) and Edward Ball, the descendent of the Ball plantation who looked up interracial relationships with slaves in his family.

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Imperial Pressures, 1800–1812

Children of Uncertain Fortune ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469634432.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Daniel Livesay

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Social Power ◽

Mixed Race ◽

Interracial Relationships ◽

East India Company ◽

Institutional Pressures ◽

High Class ◽

Class Standing ◽

Blacks And Whites ◽

The Caribbean

This chapter chronicles the institutional pressures put on mixed-race migrants in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Although families continued to assist relatives of color—which included helping get them into the East India Company to advance their social standing—constricting notions of kinship and political wariness of African-descended people made it challenging for Jamaicans of color to thrive in Britain. Their attempts to assimilate were made more difficult by the growing calls of abolitionists and pro-slavery supporters to curtail interracial relationships in order to create a demographic separation between blacks and whites in the Caribbean. Within this abolitionist debate, Trinidad’s governor Thomas Picton went to court for having tortured a mixed-race girl named Louisa Calderon. Her arrival in Britain prompted a flurry of accusations that she had become pregnant by a Scottish protector, escalating the general public’s concern about mixed-race migrants and their impact on British demography. This chapter contends that by the early nineteenth century, high class standing and genetic connections to prominent Britons were losing their social power for Jamaican migrants of color.

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