For my final paper, I would again like to look at the story told by Carlos Cortes except I would like to compare his experiences to those of Barack Obama in Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father. In doing so, I hope to explore how adolescence and going off to college play these key pivotal points in the lives of these young men and shape their racial/ethnic identity development. During adolescence, there is a social pressure in school and from friends while this simultaneous pressure from parents comes in the form of expectations. What is interesting in both cases is that neither fits the traditional African-American and White paradigm: Carlos has a Jewish mother and Mexican father while Obama has an African father and a White mother. Putting these experiences in conversation, I seek to highlight what it is about these critical periods that leads to racial/ethnic identity development (or perhaps what other factors complicate this such as Obama growing up without a strong fatherly presence versus Carlos having both parents present throughout his life).
The secondary sources will serve to provide the framework for the typical African-American and White interracial relationship paradigm and show how these cases deviate from that. I hope to also find possibly some research in psychology or sociology to speak to the importance of such developmental periods to identity (e.g. perhaps peer influences during the adolescent period strongly shape the view of the self). I hope to use them to provide the baseline and support my claims that Obama and Carlos perhaps do not fit the typical paradigm because of their parents' racial backgrounds and the children of such unions grapple with perhaps different issues in order to develop their identity.
Bibliography:
Primary Sources
Cortes, Carlos E. Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time. Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2012. Print.
Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers, 2004. Print.
Secondary Sources
Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Romano, Renee Christine. Race Mixing: Black-white Marriage in Postwar America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 2003. Print
Dear Marcus,
ReplyDeleteThis is a fascinating topic. I particularly like your decision to focus on the memoirs of two men whose identities do not fit with the black/white interracial relationship paradigm. Focusing on two specific moments -- adolescence and leaving for college -- is a great way to narrow your topic. You have chosen a very useful set of sources to explore this topic.
As we discussed in office hours, you'll also want to keep the gender of the authors in mind. To what extent are their racial identities shaped by their gendered identities? I see that you are already sensitive to the differences in these memoirs -- Obama's experience growing up without his father and Cortes's experience of having the presence of a strong father figure in his life.
Good luck! You are off to a great start! Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.
Very best,
Prof H
P.S. There is an essay in a collection by Robert Stepto called, "W. E. B. Du Bois, Barack Obama, and the Search for Race, Schoolhouse Blues," that might be very helpful to you. The essay begins, "The schoolhouse episode is a staple event in African American narratives no doubt because it is remembered or imagined as a formative first scene of racial self-awareness." If the library does not have a copy of the book, Robert Stepto, A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama, you are welcome to borrow it from me.
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