Mixed Race Studies

Natasha Trethewey Presents Final Lecture as U.S. Poet Laureate, May 14

News from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
2014-04-17

Natasha Trethewey will conclude her tenure as the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress with an evening lecture in the Coolidge Auditorium on May 14.

The lecture will start at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 14, in the Coolidge on the ground floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. A book signing and reception will follow. The event is free and open to the public. Tickets and reservations are not required, but early arrival is strongly recommended.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said “Natasha Trethewey’s final lecture as Poet Laureate marks the conclusion of a remarkable two terms. Throughout that time her commitment and her enthusiasm have elevated the position, and the art.”

In her first term as laureate, from 2012 to 2013, Trethewey spent five months in residency in the Poetry Office at the Library of Congress, meeting with members of the general public. In her second term, from 2013 to 2014, she launched a signature project: a series of on-location reports with the PBS NewsHour called “Where Poetry Lives.” The series has featured poetry programs and workshops with Alzheimer’s patients in Brooklyn, N.Y.; middle-school students in Detroit, Mich.; medical students in Boston, Mass.; and teenagers of the King County Youth Services Center in Seattle, Wash. For more information, visit www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/where-poetry-lives/.

The lecture on May 14 will include Trethewey’s reflections on the state of poetry based on her experiences during her office hours and the filming of “Where Poetry Lives.” She also will consider the legacy of poets like Robert Penn Warren on the laureateship; the role of the poet as public intellectual; and the role of poetry in the remembrance of and reckoning with our national past—with particular focus on the 50th anniversary of milestones in the Civil Rights Movement.

When Trethewey was named Poet Laureate in 2012, Billington called her “an outstanding poet/historian in the mold of Robert Penn Warren, our first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.”

Trethewey is the author of four poetry collections, including: “Thrall” (2012); “Native Guard” (2006), winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002); and “Domestic Work” (2000). She is also the author of a nonfiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (2010).

Her many honors include the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012, Trethewey was appointed Poet Laureate of Mississippi, and her term as state laureate has coincided with her laureateship at the Library—a first for the position…

Read the entire press release here.

Talking Mixed-Race Identity with Young Children

Hyphen—Asian Americans Unabridged
2014-05-06

Sharon H. Chang

“Mom, am I White?”

A few weeks ago, when I got this question from my four-year-old, I wasn’t sure what to say. Technically my son is “biracial” — but that label does him a severe representative injustice, because his bloodline is actually Japanese, Taiwanese, Slovakian, German, French Canadian, British, and Welsh. He also does not possess a parent of just one race and a parent of another race, as if often assumed when people hear the term “biracial”—because both my husband and I are mixed-race Asian/White too. For these reasons, I much prefer to describe us, and our son, as multiracial.

I write about and research race, families, and children, with an especial focus on multiraciality. I don’t believe in avoiding race talk with my child, though I do try to discuss it in age-appropriate ways. I’ve tried to stand by my conviction that it’s better he learn how to think and talk about these issues within the family first, rather than have normative ideals force-fed down his throat by everyone else when he walks out the door. That said, I wasn’t fully prepared when he turned to me and asked, “Mom, am I White?”…

Read the entire article here.

The Theme of “Passing” in the Novels of James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen

International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS)
Volume 1, Number 4 (2014)
pages 53-58
ISSN: 2348-0343

Dinesh Babu. P.
Department of English
Ramanujan College (University of Delhi), Kalkaji, New Delhi, India

The depiction of the experience of a very fair-skinned person of some “coloured” background who successfully passes into white society was a recurrent theme in early African American writings. In this paper an attempt is made to look at, and compare and contrast, two African American novels, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) and Passing (1929) which deal with the theme of passing, written by James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen, a Black man and a Black woman writer. This paper analyses how the two novels reject the rules of colour division, rules which demand that one accepts a position within a predetermined hierarchy.

Read the entire article here.

Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 by Dagmar Schultz (review)

African Studies Review
Volume 57, Number 1, April 2014
pages 237-238
DOI: 10.1353/arw.2014.0038

Patricia-Pia Célérier, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 is a 79-minute documentary in English and German, directed and produced by Dagmar Schultz. An academic and close friend of Lorde’s, Schultz also co-edited (with May Opitz and Katharina Oguntoye) the book Farbe Bekennen: Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986; translated as Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), which marked the beginning of the “Afro-German movement.” Schultz contributed her own archival video and audio recordings and footage to the documentary, adding testimonies from Lorde’s colleagues, students, and friends. Released in 2012, twenty years after Lorde’s death, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 is an homage to the African American writer’s tremendous contributions as well as a useful complement to two other documentaries: A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995) by Ada Gray Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, and The Edge of Each Other’s Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde (2002) by Jennifer Abod. Schultz’s film has attracted significant attention and received the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Barcelona Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 focuses on an understudied period in the life of the prolific author and activist, the time when she traveled between the U.S. and Germany to lecture and visit friends. It features her relationship to the black diaspora and her mentoring role in the development of the antiracist struggle and the Afro-German movement before and after the German reunification. In true feminist fashion, the documentary links the personal and the political, representing Lorde’s ongoing fight against cancer, her inspiring presence at feminist consciousness-raising meetings, her carefree dancing at multiracial lesbian parties, and her partnership with the poet Gloria I. Joseph.

The film highlights Lorde’s part in building bridges among women of color, feminist, and LGBT social justice movements, in “hyphenating” black Germans. In doing so, it contextualizes the history of major cultural shifts in the late ’80s/early ’90s in Germany. It speaks to audiences both familiar and unfamiliar with Lorde’s work by articulating themes that are at the core of the writer’s production: for instance, the meaning of intimacy and sharing, and the radical role a creative understanding of difference plays in personal and intellectual growth.

Although valuable as a testimonial and politically committed film, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 unfortunately lacks a strong coherent form, its point of view neither sufficiently clear nor technically grounded. Because the filmmaker does not provide a theoretical or narrative perspective (apart from documenting Lorde’s life), the archival images and interviews overtake the film, which in turn seems dated, as if it had been produced twenty years ago. The viewer is not pulled into the story early enough, and the editing does not compensate imaginatively for the somewhat haphazard manner with which the documentary proceeds.

Should we consider, nevertheless, that the historical and political value of such a film overrides issues of filmic quality and narrative coherence, especially because it was made on a tight budget and is a labor of love? A documentary cannot be considered as merely reproducing cultural (feminist, Afro-German, LGBT) meaning, but also as creating (new) meaning. Unfortunately, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 does not sufficiently demonstrate an awareness of the different ways of understanding and theorizing women’s lives that are available today. As a recording of social life and a travelogue, it does accomplish the two goals of the documentary genre: it informs and educates. Like feminist films of the 1970s, it celebrates the clamor of women’s voices and the rising up of women of color and gay women. It sheds light on the diversity of women’s lifestyles and choices and the issues in gay politics. But how do these images of Lorde inform our current understanding of feminism and feminist practices? What spaces does Lorde’s legacy occupy today? These questions are not answered by the film. In addition, because it does not suggest an awareness of the discursive and technical changes that have advanced the…

G.O.P. Hopeful Finds Tribal Tie Cuts Both Ways

The New York Times
2014-05-03

Jonathan Martin, National Political Correspondent

BARTLESVILLE, Okla. — T. W. Shannon will be Oklahoma’s first black senator if he wins the Republican nomination and is elected this November, but the quiet campaign stirring here about Mr. Shannon’s racial loyalties is not aimed at the African-American branch of his family tree.

Mr. Shannon, whose first name is Tahrohon, is a member of the Chickasaw Nation, the most influential tribe in a state where Native Americans are not merely the inheritors of a poignant history but also collectively constitute the state’s largest nongovernment employer outside of Walmart.

Most of those jobs are connected to Oklahoma’s 110-and-counting casinos, which are becoming as familiar here as oil derricks. Yet the gambling revenue that has showered millions on some of the state’s Native Americans has also bred resentment over the tribes’ expanding footprint. Now, as Mr. Shannon vies to make history, he has become both the political beneficiary of the tribes’ newfound wealth and a target for complaints about Native American sovereignty and possible competing loyalties…

Read the entire article here.

To the Manner Born?

The New York Times
2014-05-01

Manohla Dargis

‘Belle’ Centers On a Biracial Aristocrat in the 18th Century

No bodices seem to have been harmed, much less ripped, during the making of “Belle,” a period film at once sweeping and intimate, about an 18th-century Englishwoman who transcends her historical moment. Even so, peekaboo bosoms tremble throughout the movie amid the rustle of luxurious gowns and the gasps of polite company as conventions are crushed underfoot. Melodramatic and grounded in history, “Belle” is enough of an old-fashioned entertainment that it could have been made in classic Hollywood. Well, except for one little thing that would have probably given old studio suits apoplexy: The movie’s prettily flouncing title character is biracial.

You meet her as a child, just as she’s being taken by her father, a navy captain, Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode), from some shadowy mystery hovel to a large country manor. There, in an elegantly appointed room, the kind that announces the refinement of its inhabitants and whispers their entitlement, Sir John formally claims the child as his own and promptly hands her over to his uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson, very good), and Lady Mansfield (a dry, funny Emily Watson). The Lord and Lady keep their lips, necks and manners stiff, but take the girl in and raise her as their own — or almost. Soon she’s laughing in the garden, and then she’s a genteel beauty (a fine Gugu Mbatha-Raw) facing life as a black woman in a slave-trading country.

She’s based on Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804), the daughter of an African woman, Maria Bell, who was probably enslaved and maybe captured off a ship by Sir John. The details of their association and Bell’s life are murky, but when Dido was young, Sir John took her to Lord Mansfield, who raised her alongside another grandniece, Elizabeth Murray (played by a strong Sarah Gadon). In one account, Thomas Hutchinson, a governor of Massachusetts, described visiting the family: “a Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies” and later walked arm in arm with one. “She had a very high cap, and her wool was much frizzled in her neck,” Hutchinson wrote, “but not enough to answer the large curls in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel — pert enough.”…

Read the entire review here and watch an anatomy of a scene here.

The Hunter and the Farmer: Jean Toomer’s Depression-Era Masculinist Writings

AmeriQuests
Volume 6, Number 1 (2008)

Anastasia C. Curwood, Visiting Fellow
James Weldon Johnson Institute for Race and Difference
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

In 1937, after he had written the novel Cane, left the African-American culture of Harlem, studied under the mystic Georges Gurdjieff in France, lost his wife to childbirth, and married for the second time, Jean Toomer sought to publish a series of essays. The subjects varied, but the most common theme was masculinity—men’s prerogatives, natures, and responsibilities. He theorized women’s temperaments as well, but it was clearly the study of maleness that captured his attention.

Toomer’s interest was noteworthy given the fact that he became ever more concerned with sexuality and gender as he left behind his African-American identity. Toomer did not intend to “pass,” as is commonly assumed—he actually wanted to be raceless, or of the “American” race. In his adopted home in the Pennsylvania countryside, Toomer attempted to construct his life based entirely on his masculinity. In Toomer’s opinion, his entire household—his white wife, his light-skinned daughter, and various temporary occupants—was a social experiment in supporting his masculine genius and creativity.

This essay is an intellectual history of Toomer’s self-construction. Using his diaries and published and unpublished writings, I will explain how Toomer saw his own male identity and how, although he had renounced his blackness, his racial identity mediated his ideal of his gender.

Read the entire article here.

“Split At The Root”: The Reformation of The Mulatto Hero/Heroine

AmeriQuests (Online)
Vanderbilt University
Volume 6, Number 1
2008-11-18

Tia L. Gafford, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies
Mercer University

Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy offers a valuable insight on the development of a holistic and natural model for patriarchy in the 19th century. Harper combines normally diametrically opposed ideologies of masculinity and femininely in the characters of Dr. Frank Latimer and Iola Leroy who become cultural heros/heroines by embracing a Black consciousness. By addressing what she considers to be a more cohesive productive society, Harper contextualizes the mulatto racial and social visions against the backdrop of the post-Reconstruction South. Within this new radical mixed race, Dr. Latimer and Iola Leroy rescues this normative stereotypical version and redefines them as the pre-cursors of Alain Locke’s “New Negro.” By rejecting whiteness as a mean to emancipate themselves out of an otherwise racial bondage, Iola Leroy and Dr. Latimer embrace the “one drop” rule. By “casting themselves” into the racial “pot,” Harper sets the mulatto up to ideally “work for the people.”

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Double Take: The Art of Amalgam and stereo*type*

The Incluseum: Museums and Social Inclusion
2014-04-23

Aletheia Wittman, co-founder

In this post The Incluseum highlights the new work of some of Seattle’s industrious artist…

Two recent exhibits have disrupted the reliability of the first impression.  The artwork prompts a second, longer, deeper look.

Right now at Gallery4Culture (until Friday) you can visit Dave Kennedy’s Amalgam and experience a body of work that playfully and concisely draws attention to this process of destabilizing first impressions/assumptions. Large format photographs appear to be still lifes of immediately recognizable food items. With a closer gaze, the precise and deliberate sculpting of different types of edible organic matter to create a cohesive whole comes into focus.

The video work in Amalgam offers Kennedy’s take on the nature of his many layered and multiracial identity. A reminder that people, as well as art, can be stereotyped, labeled and generalized about – acts that are challenged by how Kennedy chooses to represent aspects of himself within his work; how he navigates through space, time and memory…

Read the entire article here.

Stunning Self-Portraits Make You Think Twice About Interracial Identity In South America

The Huffington Post
2014-04-25

Katherine Brooks, Arts & Culture Editor

Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão has been exploring themes of interracial identity through an unlikely medium—self-portraits. To confront and challenge concepts like colonialism and miscegenation in her home country, she turns her own visage into a canvas and translates the many skin colors that populate Brazil into a palette of paint. The result, “Polvo,” presents racial diversity through the face of one woman, daring the viewer to lose themselves in her nebulous color wheels.

Varejão sought inspiration from the 17th and 18th century practice of Spanish casta paintings, portraits that aimed to document the variety of skin colors in Latin America and reframe them in ways that sliced and diced mixed-race ethnicities into far more than black and white. “Mixing was the norm,” The Economist asserted in 2012, referencing the interracial mixing that occurred even during Brazil’s days of slavery. “The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.”

Defining the spectrum was a Euro-centric obsession, one that resulted in an elaborate system of castes—white Spanish at one end and those of African or indigenous descent at the other—that had social, cultural and economic implications. The lighter skinned individuals existed at the top of the socio-economic pyramid, with better jobs and higher standards of living, while their darker skinned counterparts sank to the bottom.

The legacy of this classification persists in Brazil, a country seen less as a “racial democracy” and more as a purveyor of segregation. And interracial identity remains a potent issue, particularly since black and mixed-race people officially outnumber white citizens, according to a 2010 census. “Brazil is a country where non-whites now make up a majority of the population,” NPR’s Melissa Block reiterated in a 2013 story. “It’s one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world; home to 97 million African descendants—the largest number of blacks outside Africa…

Read the entire article here.