Mixed Race Studies

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays

Peter Lang Publishing Group
March 2008
221 pages
Paparback ISBN: 9978-0-8204-8806-6

Edited by:

Tracey L. Walters, Associate Professor of Literature
Stony Brook University

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays is a timely collection of critical articles examining how Zadie Smith‘s novels and short stories interrogate race, postcolonialism, and identity. Essays explore the various ways Smith approaches issues of race, either by deconstructing notions of race or interrogating the complexity of biracial identity; and how Smith takes on contemporary debates concerning notions of Britishness, Englishness, and Black Britishness. Some essays also consider the shifting identities adopted by those who identify with both British and West Indian, South Asian, or East Asian ancestry. Other essays explore Smith’s contemporary postcolonial approach to Britain’s colonial legacy, and the difference between how immigrants and first-generation British-born children deal with cultural alienation and displacement. This thought-provoking collection is a much-needed critical tool for students and researchers in both contemporary British literature and Diasporic literature and culture.

Table of Contents

• Tracey L. Walters: Introduction
• Matthew Paproth: The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith
• Ulka Anjaria: On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith
• Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: The Impossible Self and the Poetics of the Urban Hyperreal in Zadie Smith’s “The Autograph Man”
• Maeve Tynan: “Only Connect”: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Raphael Dalleo: Colonization in Reverse: “White Teeth” as Caribbean Novel
• Susan Alice Fischer: “Gimme Shelter”: Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Tracey L. Walters: Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels
• Sharon Raynor: From the Dispossessed to the Decolonized: From Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Lexi Stuckey: Red and Yellow, Black and White: Color-Blindness as Disillusionment in Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Kris Knauer: The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation
• Z. Esra Mirze: Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”
• Katarzyna Jakubiak: Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of “White Teeth”

The age of Obama: The changing place of minorities in British and American society

Manchester University Press
2010-04-01
192 pages
234x156mm
Hardback ISBN: 9780719082771; Paperback ISBN: 9780719082788

Tom Clark, Columnist
The Guardian

Robert D. Putnam, and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy
Harvard University

Edward Fieldhouse, Professor of Social and Political Science and Director of the Institute for Social Change
University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Drawing on collaborative research from a distinguished team at Harvard and Manchester universities, The age of Obama asks how two very different societies are responding to the tide of diversity that is being felt around the rich world. Guardian journalist Tom Clark, Robert D. Putnam – best-selling author of Bowling Alone – and Manchester’s Edward Fieldhouse offer a wonderfully readable account. Like Bowling alone, The age of Obama mixes social scientific rigor with accessible charts and lively arguments. It will be enjoyed by politics, sociology and geography students, as well as by anyone else with an interest in ethnic relations.

Injustice, it turns out, still blights the lives of many UK and US minorities – particularly African Americans. And there are signs the new diversity strains community life. Yet in both countries, public opinion is running irreversibly in favour of tolerance. That augurs well for the future – and suggests a British Obama cannot be ruled out.

Table of Contents

Summary
1. Introduction: the diversity revolution 
2. Two concepts in two countries: race and migration
3. Home truths: how minorities live
4. The rickety ladder of opportunity: minorities and work
5. Mosaic or cracked vase? Diversity and community life
6. Distorting mirrors: media framing and political debate
7. Tidal generation: politics and deeper currents of public opinion
8. Concluding thoughts: making a success of the revolution
Bibliography
Index

Interview with Ngozi Onwurah

African Women in Cinema
African Literature Association Conference
April 1997
East Lansing, Michigan

Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,  2000.

In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.  You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.

As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats.  Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that’s the priority at that particular event.  Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker.  Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.

As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania.  The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make the films for are different.  So, in terms of who I am on a professional level, it gets very complicated.

It is less complicated on a personal level.  On a personal level, I know who I am; I know where I am from.  But in terms of talking about it, you cannot lump together a woman who lives in London, who gets funding from the BBC to make films, with someone who is living in Nigeria, where literally the budgets, the facilities, everything, would be completely different in terms of how she has to work.  So it gets complicated and sometimes I don’t think there is enough differential made between black people or people of African descent working outside of Africa and people of African descent working in Africa.  It is two different experiences.

In terms of how you bring your identity into your work, would you say that your work often centers around being of mixed race within the context of being British as well as Nigerian?

The fact that I have a white mother and a black father is essential to my identity.  Obviously, it gives me a unique perspective politically.  Politically I am black; emotionally I’m black.  But once you say that “unequivocally, I’m black,” there are specifics that come out of the fact that I have a white mother and a black father and that I lived half my childhood in Africa and half my childhood in an all-white neighborhood in Newcastle in England, that give me a specific viewpoint on everything I see.

On another level, there are issues around a kind of polarization, especially in America, but also in England, though nowhere near to the extent as in America: The two races are incredibly polarized in America, there’s black and there’s white and they seem to very rarely mix.  They seem to very rarely live in the same neighborhoods, and that’s not the case in England.

If I had to choose…if someone says to me, choose…if there was a war between black people and white people and someone says choose who you are going to shoot, obviously I’d go over to the black side, but I don’t particularly want my mother to be my enemy and I think that informs a lot of what I do.  Basically, the woman, the person who has loved me most in my life—who has loved me more than Malcolm X, who has loved me more than Mandela, has loved me more than any person on the face of this earth—is my mother; second my grandmother.  These are two white women.  These are the people who have formed me.  And yet I am completely removed from them culturally and politically, there is a whole world between us.  This is a strange place to be.  It informs everything you do basically.

In the context of African cinema, how do you situate yourself as a filmmaker in terms of being African, in terms of being black British?  You talk about different hats, I had not before necessarily associated you as an African woman filmmaker, I am familiar with you more as a black British filmmaker.  A lot of your work appears to address your experiences as a black British, as a mixed-race woman, where, as the director of Monday’s Girls, you are viewed as an African woman filmmaker.

It’s more complicated than that.

Could you talk about these complicated identities?

It is incredibly complicated.  All I can say is that my whole life has been a training ground to live this life.  Basically, since I came out of my mother’s womb it’s been a chameleon situation for me.  It’s much more complicated than saying I have a lot of hats I wear.  I have a lot of hats I have to wear but I wear them all simultaneously…

Read the entire interview here.

Coffee Colored Children: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

Women Make Movies
England, 1988
23 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm/DVD
Order No. W99160

• National Black Programming Consortium, Prized Pieces
• San Francisco Film Festival, Golden Gate Award

This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage. Suffering the aggression of racial harassment, a young girl and her brother attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. Starkly emotional and visually compelling, this semi-autobiographical testimony to the profound internalized effects of racism and the struggle for self-definition and pride is a powerful catalyst for discussion.

The work opens with a video essay showing adults and children of many ethnicities interacting harmoniously to an upbeat and soulful song with a chorus about “coffee-colored people.” Through narration by her and her brother and dramatization, Onwurah relays incidents from her own childhood. She recounts the brutal and racist vandalization of her apartment. In reenactments, she is seen making up her face with white makeup and scrubbing her body in the bathtub with chemical abrasives. At the close of the piece, she and her brother stand in front of a fire, burning symbolic mementos of their pain and confusion over their own physical identities. “Melting pot,” she asks, “or incinerator?” The work is approximately 16 and one-half minutes long.

Director:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Producers:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

Editor:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Performers:
Onwurah, Madge
McKay, Haley
McKay, Michael
McKay, Anette
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Number 1 (2008)
pages 37-50
E-ISSN: 1536-0334 Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0004

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse.

Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled-the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”21 wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned.

Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautifuloperates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.” And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences.

Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost. . . but not quite” the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity.

Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model. But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”

Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned…

Read the entire article here.

A White Side of Black Britain: The Concept of Racial Literacy

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 27, Issue 6
November 2004
pages 878 – 907
DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000268512

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brave new world: The complicated side-effects of Britain’s mixed-race households

The Independent (UK)
2009-08-22

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Bev is beautiful, with silky black skin and thick hair she ties in a bunch at the top, spurting like a fountain. At 15, her face reminds me of the young and feisty Winnie Mandela. Dressed in denim, she is wearing lots of African bracelets and rings on her ears. And, incongruously, pearls, several strings looped around her high neck. Her face changes like an English summer – bright and sunny one minute, then suddenly dark, brooding and sometimes stormy. She wants to talk, she tells me, otherwise she will go crazy. And what Bev tells me is a part of one of the least reported stories of family life in modern Britain, remarkable and complex, and perpetually shifting.

“My family is messy,” she explains. “There’s been divorce, remarrying, separation, step-parents. It’s hard to talk about that when we are all trying to be polite, faking it all the time. I was in a mood the other day – you know, you get into a mood. My mum came into my room, held my elbow so hard it hurt, and whispered: ‘You’ll lose me this man, too, you stupid girl.’

“Then there is RACE!” she continues. “We are black-and-white and inbetweenies, but no one mentions that either. We have to pretend that mum’s latest guy is not white, and I am not brown, and there isn’t an issue here.”

She doesn’t even take a breath as all this tumbles out. Is he unkind to her? I ask gently

“No, he’s OK, I mean doesn’t hit me or anything. But he has no idea. Comes from Norfolk or something. My mum loves all that – his fancy accent and that. She even went to Wimbledon ‘cos he gets free tickets, and then both of them were moaning about Serena and Venus having a pushy dad, and my mum says something horrible about my ex-dad, and whitie nodded – he always nods, like Noddy. As soon as I have done my GCSEs I am out of here.”

This country has more mixed-race families than any other in Europe. According to the latest social research, one in 10 young Britons lives in a mixed-race household and the number of bi-racial children is growing faster than any other “ethnic minority” group. We also have high divorce rates and – increasingly – step-families. Put all these factors together and you get a newish phenomenon: the rise of the mixed-race step-family. Social services, counsellors and academic researchers have not yet caught up with this social development. And those of us who find ourselves in these reconstituted multi-racial families make it up as we go along. I guess Bev’s mum and step-dad are having to do just that…

Read the entire article here.

Pathways to Permanence for Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnicity Children: Delemmas, Decision-Making and Outcomes

Research Brief
DCSF-RBX-13-08
October 2008
8 pages

Julie Selwyn
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

P. Harris
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

David Quinton
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

S. Nawaz
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

Dinithi Wijedasa
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

Marsha Wood
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

Recent research reviews stress the lack of information on permanency planning and pathways to permanence for black and minority ethnic (BME) children. Even basic data are missing and there are no available comparisons between children of different ethnicities. Delays differentially affect and disadvantage children of minority ethnic heritage but, beyond speculation, there are no data on the processes that underlie delays for them.

In this study differential planning and decision-making affecting the progress of BME children towards permanence will be compared retrospectively from case files with that of non-BME children over a two-year period in a sample of approximately 106 children looked-after continuously for over one year in three local authorities with high and contrasting BME populations. Progress towards permanence following a recent or current best-interests recommendation will also be tracked prospectively in a separate sample of approximately 200 BME children. For fifty of these, decision-making will be followed in real-time. Case-file data and interviews with social workers and their managers will be used. The outcomes for children of black, Asian and mixed heritages will be compared.

There will be two additional outputs: a conceptual and research review of matching – a likely key element in delay and differential pathways-; and a scoping review of current practice models for the recruitment and support of BME parents for BME children for whom permanence is the aim.

This study will provide essential new information relevant to the policy objectives of increasing the use of adoption as a permanency solution for children unlikely to return to their own families and reducing the delays in this process. With respect to the brief for this initiative, the study will:

• Investigate whether looked-after BME children are less likely to be placed for adoption and why they may wait longer for placement
• Examine the process affecting successful placement for them.
• Compare the placement pathways of Black, Asian and mixed parentage children.
• Compare three authorities will high but different BME populations.
• Examine how the government’s attempts to increase the use of adoption are being translated into practice with respect to BME children.
• Examine how social workers are applying the principles underlying adoption reform.
• Identify good practice models for the recruitment and support of BME adopters.

Read the entire paper here.

Vulnerable Multiracial Families and Early Years Services: Concerns, Challenges and Opportunities

Children & Society
Volume 10, Issue 4 (December 1996)
Pages 305 – 316
DOI: 10.1111/j.1099-0860.1996.tb00598.x

Margaret Boushel
Department of Social Work and Social Care
University of Sussex

In Britain, very young mixed-parentage children are more likely to receive state care than any other children. However, despite a dramatic increase in the number of multiracial families, their experiences have received little research attention. This article reviews the research on the experiences of vulnerable and poor multiracial families. Three areas of concern emerge—the relationship between family structure, locality and racism, disadvantage and oppression; the impact on family life of structurally reinforced and culturally defined gender roles; and the strengths and limitations of current early years research and practice. Suggestions are made about ways in which early years professionals might develop their practice with young vulnerable multiracial families.

Read or purchase the article here.

Deconstructing Binary Race and Sex Categories: A Comparison of the Multiracial and Transgendered Experience

San Diego Law Review
Volume 39, Number 3 (2002)
pages 917-942

Julie A. Greenberg, Professor of Law
Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego

This Article explores the potential difficulties that exist as legal institutions develop a classification of transgendered people, and suggests that an examination of how legal institutions have classified race and sex in the past can help shape the way that legal institutions shape transgendered classifications in the future. The article summarizes the development of race classifications for multiracial people. The author then examines the development of sex classifications for various legal purposes like marriage, identity, and the right to pursue discrimination claims. The author also examines how the medical community contributes to the stereotypical definitions of sex as binary and biologically determinable. The author then proceeds to evaluate some of the challenges that face the development of multiracial classifications, and how those challenges may affect the development of transgendered classifications. The author argues that in developing sex classification systems, legal institutions should be aware of the problems that can arise when seeking to adopt a single unified standard for determining sex, because where in some instances the acceptance of sex as a sociopolitical construct can promote greater acceptance of sexual minorities, it might also further contribute to discrimination.

Read the entire article here.