Mixed Race Studies

An Essentially American Narrative

The New York Times
2013-10-11

Nelson George

A Discussion of Steve McQueen’s Film ‘12 Years a Slave’

Amid comic book epics, bromantic comedies and sequels of sequels, films about America’s tortured racial history have recently emerged as a surprisingly lucrative Hollywood staple. In the last two years, “The Help,” “Lincoln,””Django Unchained,””42” and “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” have performed well at the box office, gathering awards in some cases and drawing varying degrees of critical acclaim.

The latest entry in this unlikely genre is “12 Years a Slave,” the director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir. A free black man living in Saratoga, N.Y., Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into brutal servitude in the Deep South. During his ordeal, he labors at different plantations, including the one owned by the sadistic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who has a tortured sexual relationship with the slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o).

Following a buzzed-about preview screening at the Telluride Film Festival and the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival, “12 Years a Slave” arrives in theaters Friday amid much online chatter that it may be headed for Oscar nominations. But Mr. Ejiofor, who portrays Northup, and Mr. McQueen, known for the bracingly austere “Hunger” and “Shame,” both say that getting audiences to see an uncompromisingly violent and quietly meditative film about America’s “peculiar institution” is still a challenge even with the presence of a producer, Brad Pitt, in a small role.

While the material was developed by Americans (including the screenwriter John Ridley) the director and most of the major cast members are British, a topic of concern among some early black commentators.

On a sweltering afternoon in SoHo last month, the author and filmmaker Nelson George led a round-table discussion at the Crosby Street Hotel with Mr. Ejiofor and Mr. McQueen. Joining them to provide a wider historical and artistic context were the Columbia University professor Eric Foner, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” among other books; and the artist Kara Walker, whose room-size tableaus of the Old South employing silhouettes have redefined how history and slavery are depicted in contemporary art and influenced many, including the “12 Years a Slave” production team. Current civil rights issues including the New York police practice of stop and frisk, recently declared unconstitutional; sexuality and slavery; Hollywood’s version of American history; and the themes of Obama-era cinema were among the topics of the sharp but polite dialogue. These are excerpts from the conversation…

Q. I wanted to start with contemporary analogues. One thing that came to mind was stop and frisk, a way the New York City police could stop a black or Latino male. I thought of Solomon as a character who, for a lot of contemporary audiences, would be that young black person. [To Mr. McQueen and Mr. Ejiofor] When you were seeking a way into the slave story, was what happens now part of that?

Steve McQueen Absolutely. History has a funny thing of repeating itself. Also, it’s the whole idea of once you’ve left the cinema, the story continues. Over a century and a half to the present day. I mean, you see the evidence of slavery as you walk down the street.

What do you mean? 

McQueen The prison population, mental illness, poverty, education. We could go on forever…

…Servitude and Sexuality 

There’s a lot of things to say about sex in the film, but one of the things that is going to leap out is Alfre Woodard’s character [Mistress Shaw, described in the book as the black wife of a white plantation owner]. 

McQueen In the book, she doesn’t say anything. I had a conversation with John Ridley, and I said: “Look, we need a scene with this woman. I want her to have tea.” It was very simple. Give her a voice.

Walker It’s not that it was that uncommon. That planter would be sort of the crazy one, the eccentric one, and she’s getting by.

Ejiofor It was against the law to marry, but it did happen.

Foner There were four million slaves in the U.S. in 1860 and several hundred thousand slave owners. It wasn’t just a homogeneous system. It had every kind of human variation you can imagine. There were black plantation owners in Louisiana, black slave owners…

…Solomon has a wife beforehand. In the film it seems as if he lived with Eliza [a fellow slave]. Then obviously [he has] some kind of relationship with Patsey, a friendship. But I wondered about Solomon’s own sexual expression. 

Ejiofor  His sexuality felt slightly more of a tangent. I think the real story is where sex is in terms of power.

Foner Remember, this book is one of the most remarkable first-person accounts of slavery. But it’s also a piece of propaganda. It’s written to persuade people that slavery needs to be abolished. He doesn’t say anything about sexual relations he may have had as a slave. There’s no place for such a discussion because of the purpose of the book.

Walker But in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” [by Harriet Ann Jacobs] and other slave narratives written by women, that’s always kind of the subtext, because there are children that are produced, relationships that are formed or allegiances that are formed with white men in order to have freedom.

Foner  Harriet Jacobs was condemned by many people for revealing this, even antislavery people.

Walker Yes, but it’s always the subtext. Even “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It’s like, there’s little mulatto children, and that’s the evidence…

Read the entire interview here.

Playwright Sarah Rutherford: ‘Middle-class, mixed-race families are invisible on our stages’

What’s on Stage
London
2013-10-10

Editorial Staff

As her new play Adult Supervision premieres at the Park Theatre, playwright Sarah Rutherford discusses multiculturalism in modern Britain

What’s Adult Supervision about?

It’s set in 2008 and it’s about a white ex-lawyer, Natasha, who’s adopted two children from Ethiopia. As a parent who likes to do things by the book, she’s decided that it’s important for the kids to get to know the handful of other ‘children of colour’ at their very smart private school. Natasha seizes on the opportunity of the US election to invite the mothers of these children to a drinks party, but things start to go awry as the Obamatinis flow and inhibitions are shed.

Why did you set it on the night of Obama’s election?

I have such vivid memories of that night, and although it was historic for everyone, I think many communities—‘parents of children of colour’ being one—took it as a kind of personal victory. It was an incredibly heady moment—suddenly anything seemed possible—and it’s an interesting time to look back on from the perspective of today, when the US seems to be going into meltdown and November 2008 looks like an almost innocent time.

Would you describe it as a comedy?

Yes—a comedy drama. But the laughs in it come mostly from character, from truth (truths you may not have heard spoken out loud before) and from discomfort, rather than from gags.

How has your personal experience influenced and shaped the play?

Hugely. I’m married to a man of Jamaican origin and am the mother of two amazing mixed-race children, although they go to a much more diverse school than the one in the play. Some of the more jaw-dropping dialogue in the play is actually pretty much verbatim stuff that has been said to me over the years; other material has come from things that I’ve thought or sensed but that have gone unsaid…

Read the entire interview here.

Who stole all the black women from Britain?

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2013-10-17

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

…Here in the UK, the  visibility of black women in representations of mainstream Black British culture is such that you might be forgiven for thinking we are an endangered species. The near erasure of Black British women from this terrain which is in the main dominated by black men and white women, is rarely commented upon, despite its prominence.  What is actually going on here? Is this some manifestation of the quite frankly ridiculous Eldrige Cleaver quote above. Or is it something else?.

The (ahem) ‘urban’ (we know what they really mean) landscape that provides the basis of so much of Britain’s somewhat depressing representations of mainstream youth culture borrows heavily from black culture, yet sometimes seems entirely devoid of black women. The characters who populate this world are black men and white women. Access may be permitted to the occasional mixed-race girl but beyond this tokenism this is the white woman’s world!

From movies such as Kidulthood, to the presenters of the Kiss FM Takeaway show, who typify this phenomenon, the symbols of ‘Urban’ or Black British youth culture are routinely Black men and their white female partners…

Read the entire article here.

Rethinking race, racism, identity and ideology in Latin America

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36,  Issue 10, 2013 (Special Issue: Rethinking Race, Racism, Identity, and Ideology in Latin America)
pages 1485-1489
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.808357

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

This special issue explores ideas of race and racial hierarchy in Latin America in the twenty-first century. By examining the intersection between racialization and processes of identity formation, political struggle, as well as intimate social and economic relations, these essays question how and to what extent traditional racial ideologies continue to hold true. In so doing, we consider the implications of such ideologies for anti-racism struggles. This collection of articles provides a unique insight into the everyday lived experiences of racism, how racial inequalities are reproduced, and the rise of ethnic-based social movements in Latin America. The qualitative nature of the projects allows the authors to advance our understanding of how racial ideologies operate on the ground level. The geographic diversity of the articles – focusing on Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica and Cuba – enables a greater understanding of the distinct ways that racial ideologies play out across different settings.

Race and national ideologies in the Americas are inextricable. The ideas and practices of race were essential to the conquest and colonization of the Americas (Smedley 2007). As European colonizers and settlers shaped the western hemisphere into nations, distinct racial ideologies emerged alongside national ideologies. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies provides us with new insights into how race and national ideologies continue to shift in Latin America, in the context of a globalizing world.

During the nineteenth century, Latin American countries began to break away from their colonial past and form independent states. Intellectual and political elites across Latin America preoccupied themselves with building national unity (Knight 1990). In these nation-building projects, national leaders had to contend with European scholars who denounced their racial degeneracy due to extensive racial mixing (Stepan 1991). Latin Americans could not simply ignore European arguments about racial inferiority as these arguments were central to scientific and medical discourses. Thus, they chose to counter European intellectuals’ claims about their inferiority and argue that racial mixture was not only beneficial, it was the hallmark of Latin American nations. During the twentieth century, ideologies of whitening, mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), blackness, indigeneity and racial democracy informed national ideologies across Latin America. Instead of countering ideas of white supremacy espoused by European intellectuals, Latin American intellectuals and political leaders embraced white supremacy and worked to facilitate and justify a system of pervasive race and colour stratification whereby darker-skinned people, typically with more notable indigenous and African features, occupy the lower rungs of the racial ladder, and those of primarily European descent are at the top…

Read the entire article here.

The Impact of Internet Publishing and Online Communications on Mixed-Race Discourses

The Asian American Literary Review
Special Issue on Mixed Race, Volume 4, Issue 2 (Fall 2013)
Mixed Race is an Inbox: pages 127-136

Steven F. Riley, Creator
MixedRaceStudies.org: Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience

Glenn C. Robinson, Creator
MixedAmericanLife.us: Mixed Culture | Mixed Heritage | Mixed Identity

Steven F. Riley, creator of MixedRaceStudies.org, and Glenn C. Robinson, creator of MixedAmericanLife.us first met (virtually) in the chat-room of the March 16, 2011 episode of Mixed Chicks Chat and have corresponded with each other ever since. They have met each other in person at the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival in Los Angeles in 2011 and 2012.

Riley has received many comments describing how his MixedRaceStudies.org has become an integral part of college courses. Robinson’s sites are an open forum for dialog and social sharing, and have a steady growth of followers. Here, they continue their conversations about mixed race and technology.

Purchase the issue here.

Special Issue on Mixed Race [The Asian American Literary Review]

The Asian American Literary Review
2013-08-06

AALR’s special issue on mixed race, coming in Fall 2013, is not simply a reexamination of race or a survey of mixed voices, important as both are. We envision our role as that of provocateur–inspiring new conversations and cross-pollinations, pushing into new corners.

All contributions to the issue are collaborative, “mixed” in nature, bringing together folks across racial and ethnic boundaries, across disciplines, genres, regions, and generations. We solicited work from artists and writers, historians and activists, race scholars and filmmakers, teachers and students, among others. The idea is a network of original projects that not only map out multiracialism past and present but also break new ground.

[My coauthored essay with Glenn C. Robinson, titled “The Impact of Internet Publishing and Online Communications on Mixed-Race Discourses” is part of the issue.]

For more information and the Table of Contents, click here.

Booker, Winning Rocky Senate Bid, Gets a Job to Fit His Profile

The New York Times
2013-0-16

Kate Zernike

Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark easily won New Jersey’s special Senate election on Wednesday, finally rising to an office that measures up to his national profile.

He will arrive in Washington already one of the country’s most prominent Democrats, and its best-known black politician other than President Obama, who backed him aggressively. Mr. Booker’s fund-raising prowess puts him on course to lead his party’s campaign efforts in the Senate, and he has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick for 2016.

With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Mr. Booker had 55 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Steve Lonegan, a Republican former mayor of Bogota, N.J., and state director of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, according to The Associated Press. Still, the campaign gave a wider audience to certain facets of Mr. Booker that long ago began to prompt eye-rolling among his constituents…

Read the entire article here.

Irish and white-ish mixed “race” identity and the scopic regime of whiteness

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 27, Issue 4, October–November 2004
pages 385-396
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2004.10.007

Angeline D. Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts, Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom

When speaking about the paradoxical “invisibility” of whiteness, I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to “make whiteness strange”, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of whiteness with unquestioned normality with the human condition Dyer points out that the unspoken understanding that whiteness is not a “raced” condition has very specific implications for the balance of power. “There is no more powerful position than being ‘just’ human. The claim of power is the claim to speak for the commodity of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race” (Dyer, 1997, p. 2). Like blackness, whiteness is not reducible to a matter of simple visual appearance. However, when historical and political circumstances allow the conflation of the so-called “ideals” of whiteness–Enlightenment ideals such as literacy, civilisation, artistic creativity, scientific excellence, power, dignity, assumed superiority and so on—with a particular “race” or skin color (here, “white”), things start getting dangerous. The visual becomes vital, and the optical surface of the “raced” subject is imbued with I hyper-significance that can be very uncomfortable to wear. When this subject is of mixed “race” and thus occupies a range of different possible positions within, without, around and between the binary categories, difficulties can arise.

I use the term “mixed race” mindfully, aware that the term is contested by some, while others warn against its reference to die unscientific non-sense of “race” (Gilroy, 2000). Therefore, for the purposes of this article only, I want to define “mixed race” people as the offspring of one white and one non-white parent. If racialized society relies on the false foundational Logocentric binary “black white”, then it follows that it will taxonomize its subjects accordingly. Sander H. Gilman points out that, “. . .in this view of mankind, the black occupied the antithetical position to the white on the scale of humanity.” (Gilman, 1985, p. 231).

Concentrating on the visual, this article intends to use the figure of the mixed “race” subject to investigate the particular scopic regime of whiteness. I wish to consider some of the things that the dominant scopic regime accords visibility to, and some of those it does not. Clearly, what ends up being seen and the various interpretations the afforded depend largely on cultural registers, power relations, and epistemologies that continually shift the white phenotype of Irish people, for example, was all but “invisible” to the white scopic regime of the 19th Century Britain. The racist caricaturing of the Irish that is now so well documented…

Read or purchase the article here.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee (review)

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 16, Number 3, October 2013
pages 340-342
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2013.0025

Caroline H. Yang, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, English
University of Illinois, Chicago

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937, by Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011. xi + 219 pp. ISBN: 9780814752555.

That 1896 is a defining year in the history of segregation and unequal citizenship in the United States is obviously common knowledge in critical race studies. What Julia Lee teaches us about the moment in Interracial Encounters is probably not: that the Chinese figured significantly in Plessy v. Ferguson as a crucial component in both the majority and dissenting opinions on whether or not segregation based on race—specifically, blackness—was constitutional. According to Lee, the discourse of what it meant to be Chinese was influential to the definition of what it meant to be black, as both opinions adjudicated the placement of black bodies on a black–white racial binary through the figure of the Chinese. Naming the Plessy case as “the document that most dramatically reveals the ways that the figure of the Negro and the Asiatic were intertwined in this period” (42), Lee suggests in the rest of her book that 1896 was significant in not only instituting segregation but also inaugurating a particular brand of misreading. And this common misreading about the Plessy case has glossed over and continues to make invisible what she calls “encounters” between African Americans and Asians during this time, encounters wrought by the complexities of the historical moment following black emancipation and enfranchisement, as well as labor migrations from Asia.

Interracial Encounters demonstrates that not accounting for the significance of Chineseness in how blackness was defined in the Plessy case had a critical role in how race was understood in the United States for much of the twentieth century. In this way, Lee’s close reading of the Plessy case speaks to her book’s methodological interventions. It shows the importance of literary studies in not just historical analyses of texts that have been read heretofore as concerning only blacks and whites but also Afro-Asian critique. As part of a vibrant and rising field of study that teases out Afro-Asian connections and disconnections, Lee’s book makes clear why many of its proponents are Asian Americanists whose approach to critical race studies is shaped by their understanding of the vicissitudes and contradictions of the Asian racial form in the United States. Quite simply, the reading practice developed in Lee’s book is original and insightful, and it brings to light figures and forms in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literatures that have often been rendered as insignificant nonpresence unrelated to other racialized figures.

With a deep interest in writing a “historicizing project” (9), Lee points to a wide-ranging archive of minstrel show sheet music, political cartoons, and films, as well as literature, to explain that African Americans and Asians were the most rampantly compared minority groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also writes that the process of racializing the two groups was mutually constitutive and essential in the creation of the “fantasy of modern American identity” (21). Despite this, Lee argues that if and when they are remembered together in this period, they are seen as either antagonistic opposites or natural allies bonded together in solidarity based on shared experience of discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Against this way of thinking, Lee argues that we need to study not just the hegemonic ways in which blackness and Asianness became meaningful but also the ways in which African American and Asian American literatures contributed to and challenged the process of racial meaning making.

As such, save for one substantive chapter that explores the representations of African Americans and Asians in dominant popular culture from the Reconstruction period to the early twentieth century, all of the book’s chapters call attention to the formal strategies of literary texts by wide-ranging authors of color such as Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Nella Larsen, Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang. Lee’s focus on these texts and authors decenters whiteness as ostensibly the a priori authentic embodiment of citizenship into which minority groups were trying to assimilate. In turn, the texts decenter the nation as a privileged site of identification as they underscore the “multilateral nature of racial encounters” (43).

Certain parts of the book illustrate just how complex and ambitious Lee…

Cory Booker wins New Jersey Senate race

The Washington Post
2013-10-16

Sean Sullivan

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a rising national Democratic star, was elected to the U.S. Senate Wednesday and will become New Jersey’s first ever African American senator.

Booker defeated Republican Steve Lonegan, a former mayor of Bogota. With 58 percent of the vote counted, the Associated Press called the contest for Booker, who was carrying 56 percent of the vote.

When Booker is sworn in, the Democratic Caucus will once again hold a 55-45 advantage over the GOP Conference. Booker will fill the seat once held by Frank Lautenberg, a long-serving Democratic senator who died in June. Gov. Chris Christie appointed fellow Republican Jeff Chiesa to be Lautenberg’s interim replacement.

Booker, 44, will become the chamber’s second African American member along with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)…

Read the entire article here.