Mixed Race Studies

Kip Fulbeck: Part Asian, 100% Hapa

University of North Carolina
FedEx Global Education Center
2009-07-01 through 2009-10-31
08:00 to 21:00 (ET Local Time)

For this exhibition of portraits, artist Kip Fulbeck traveled the country photographing Hapa of all ages and walks of life. Once a derogatory label derived from the Hawaiian word for “half,” the word Hapa has been embraced as a term of pride for many whose mixed-race heritage includes Asian or Pacific Rim ancestry. Fulbeck’s work seeks to address in words and images the one question that Hapa are frequently asked: What are you? By pairing portraits of Hapa unadorned by make-up, jewelry and clothing along with their handwritten statements on who they are, Fulbeck has produced powerful yet intimate expressions of beauty and identity. “kip fulbeck: part asian, 100% hapa” is organized by the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California. It is supported in part by the James Irvine Foundation and is part of the Global Education Distinguished Speakers Series.

For more information, click here.

Miscegenating the Discourse: Mixed Race Asian American Art and Literature

Jessica Hagedorn In Conversation with Wei Ming and Laura Kina
As part of The President’s Signature Series 2009-2010

2009-10-22 at 18:00 CDT (Local Time)
DePaul University Art Museum
2350 N Kenmore

This event is co-sponsored by Asian American Studies, The Cultural Center, English, The President’s Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, OMSA, and The Women’s Center.

What does it mean to be a Mixed Asian American Writer/Artist?

Mixed Race Studies scholar Wei Ming Dariotis, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies San Francisco State University, and Laura Kina, DePaul University Associate Professor Art, Media, & Design, Vincent dePaul Professor & Director Asian American Studies, will take on identity, categorization, and issues specific to Asian American mixed heritage populations in their dialogue with award winning writer, screenwriter and performer, Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, Danger And Beauty, and editor of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. Her next novel, Toxicology, will be published by Viking Penguin in 2011.

This event is free and open to the public.

Race, Mixed Race and ‘Race Work’ in Japanese American Beauty Pageants

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Montreal Convention Center
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2006-08-10

Rebecca King-O’Riain, Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland

Long-standing debates within critical race theory about the efficacy of the concept of ‘race’ have posited the mixed race experience as an illustration of the flexible and multiple nature of this socially constructed concept (Gans 2005). However, mixed race studies (Root 1996; DuBose and Winter 2002) themselves have shown that mixed race does not mean ‘no-race’.  There persists, even in mixed race research, the notion of race as a concept where racial meaning is congealed and tied through its supposed association with the body to biology.  Using ethnographic fieldwork in Japanese American beauty pageants, this paper illustrates that the mixed race body invites us to examine more carefully race work – a concept that I introduce to explain how people exert effort to try to keep their own biological notions of race (typically references to looks or physical appearance) in line with their thinking about culture (i.e. full blooded people of color have culture, whites don’t). I look at multiple levels of social interaction in order to shed light on how race is socially and politically constructed in a world where race has gone underground and is more difficult to detect and trace – a world where there can be “racial intent without race” (Ignatiev 2004).

To read the entire paper, click here.

Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 30, Issue 5 (September-October 2007)
Pages 391-403
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2007.07.003

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

This qualitative analysis of interviews with women of Thai and non-Thai parentage throws into question the current celebration of Eur/asianness and multiraciality.  The study describes multiracialisation as an ambivalent and differential process of categorisation which mobilises essentialist ideas of ‘stock’ and ‘breeding’.  A far cry from historical notions of ‘mixed-race degeneracy’, interviewees emerged from this process the ‘best of both worlds’. However, beside the ‘good mix’ there ran the spectre of the ‘bad mix’, and some had more access to celebratory identities than others. Celebratory notions of Eur/asian femininity were further qualified by the competing discourse of the ‘Thai prostitute’.  The precariousness with which interviewees could access normative ideals of desirability was especially visible in narratives of masculinity, non-white parentage, gender variance and childhood.  The article ends by advocating, in the place of a power-evasive celebration, challenges to the multiple overlapping power relations which underlie all acts of evaluation.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black Chinese: History, Hybridity, and Home
(Original Title: Black Chinese: Historical Intersections, Hybridity, and the Creation of Home)

Chinese America: History and Perspectives
Chinese Historical Society of America
2007-01-01

Wendy Thompson Taiwo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities & Social Sciences
Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York

In entering into the twenty-first century, one might affirm that the face of Chinese America has changed or has it? Chineseness has been constantly conceptualized through the measure of phenotype, the quantity of blood, the preservation of language, or the possession of surname.  But what happens when African American bodies and other nonwhite cultural sites are introduced into dialogue with Chineseness and Chinese American history in order to create a different story?…

…Regarding sexual relations, with the ban on immigration and entry of Chinese women into the country, Chinese men were encouraged to seek out arrangements with local women but with a catch.  Stringent antimiscegenation laws made this endeavor a severely limited one due to restrictions that made involvement with white women illegal. And so if not with white women, Chinese men took up freely with Spanish, indigenous, and African American women. (4) In terms of relationships built around the institution of the small Chinese store, it was found common for the owner to shack up with hired African American women who assisted around the store, many of these relationships having moved organically from employer-employee to that of live-in partner.

This added benefit of having an African American woman around the store begged to legitimize the Chinese store owner’s place within a black community where he made his business. It also opened up the opportunity for the Chinese owner to start a family where immigration blockage inhibited reentry or fatherhood within a Chinese family context. For most, it was a matter of a long gap in time until they returned to China, if they returned at all. Also of benefit was the African American female partner whose marriage promised small social accommodations, such as courtesy from whites when they learned of her last name, class, status, and relation…

…This is where my own personal investment in this topic comes from as it is not likely obvious from my name or in photographs where my mother is absent; it is that I am an African American Chinese living in the center of two cultural imaginations.

My birth occurred in January 1981 to a Burmese Chinese woman and her African American husband in the California Bay Area exactly fifteen years after antimiscegenation laws meant to prevent black-white sexual relations and intermarriage in the United States were struck down by a Supreme Court ruling in the case of Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I was born the eldest of three girls who all hold a different skin tone, phenotype, hair texture, and relationship to race and cultural identity. However, what we share is an individual relationship to Chineseness, a personal quarrel with having to prove that we owned a biracial space outside of a generalized assumption of what we were and where we should stay because of it.  Since childhood, we tended to identify culturally with our mother–who we spent most of our time with, who we felt comforted by, who we loved dearly, and who conversely saw her offspring as Chinese Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family

Korean Studies
Volume 32 (2008)
pages 56-85
DOI: 10.1353/ks.0.0010
E-ISSN: 1529-1529; Print ISSN: 0145-840X

Mary Lee, Director
Pacific Policy Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii

This article discusses the production of “mixed-race” subjectivity in South Korea.  It asks: how can we understand the lived experiences and histories of mixed-race people as integral to the logic of national governance, both past and present?  Instead of regarding mixed-race people in Korea as an aberration or regrettable phenomenon, this article contends that their “otherness” is an outcome of the intensions, contradictions, and insecurities of national governance which coheres around discourse and legislation on the family.  The testimony of various mixed-race people living in Korea reveals the racial, gendered, and sexual discursive modalities through which they were rendered outside the scope and meaning of Koreanness.  Their testimony also corresponds with the discursive limits set forth by the government, particularly in the establishment of laws that govern desired familial relations within the climate of Cold War militarism, industrialization, and the post-democratization era of globalization and official multiculturalism.  The longstanding and still practiced abjection of mixed-race people from South Korean society cannot be understood without exploring the intersection between a racial politics of “blood purity” and a gendered politics of patriarchy that works in service of an imagined Korean homogeneity.

Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of ‘Mixed Race’

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 35, Issue 1 (January 2009)
pages 115 – 132
DOI: 10.1080/13691830802489275

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

The celebration of ‘mixed race’ as the model ‘transgressive’ (post-)identity obfuscates the ambivalence at the root of this construct.  Far from ‘abolishing’ race or throwing it into crisis, ‘mixed-race’ bodies and minds continue to be evaluated as disparate, unwholesome and non-belonging, and appear to invite dissective reading practices such as stares, intrusive questions and comments which are commonly treated as a ‘normal reaction to abnormal bodies’. In this article I examine semi-structured interviews with 22 people of Thai and non-Thai parentage in Britain and Germany.  Drawing on Fanon’s existential phenomenology, I theorise interviewees’ everyday confrontations with intrusive reading practices of their bodies, origins, loyalties and families.  The persistence of pathologising discourses and practices on ‘mixed race’ renders celebratory notions of ‘hybrid border-crossers’ problematic.  Rather than a pre-social property of particular bodies which trigger intrusive labelling attempts, ‘ambiguous phenotype’ is socially produced in biologistic race discourses and violent reading practices. ‘Mixed race’ should be more aptly theorised as a dissective racialising technology which mobilises essentialised forms of knowledge and entitles some to gaze at and define others.   It is constituted in power relations which are socially produced and, hence, also open to contestation and change.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

Oxford University Press
October 2009
216 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195377361; ISBN10: 0195377362

Caroline Rody, Associate Professor of English
University of Virginia

In the wake of all that is changing in local and global cultures–in patterns of migration, settlement, labor, and communications–a radical interaction has taken place that, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, has shifted our understanding of ethnicity away from ‘ethnic in itself’ to ‘ethnic amidst a hybrid collective’.  In light of this, Caroline Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming ‘interethnic’.  Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, The Interethnic Imagination offers sustained readings of three especially compelling examples: Chang-rae Lee‘s ambivalent evocations of blackness, whiteness, Koreanness, and the multicultural crowd in Native Speaker; Gish Jen‘s comic engagement with Jewishness in Mona in the Promised Land; and the transnational imagination of Karen Tei Yamashita‘s Tropic of Orange.  Two shorter “interchapters” and an epilogue extend the thematics of creative “in-betweenness” across the book’s structure, elaborating crossover topics including Asian American fiction’s complex engagement with African American culture; the cross-ethnic adoption of Jewishness by Asian American writers; and the history of mixed-race Asian American fictional characters.

Features

• Examines three major yet under-studied contemporary Asian American novelists: Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Gish Jen.
• Considers major Asian American fiction alongside African American and Jewish American authors.
• In lucid writing, provides a valuable and innovative paradigm for interpreting the burgeoning field of ethnic literature in the U.S.

Feeling Ancestral: The Emotions of Mixed Race and Memory in Asian American Cultural Productions

positions: east asia cultures critique
Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2008
pages 457-482

Jeffrey Santa Ana, Assistant Professor English Department
Stony Brook University

The current era of war, militarism, and neocolonialism in the Pacific is a time in which capitalist expansion simultaneously generates and conceals the negative human consequences of globalization — for example, the tremendous upheaval and migration of Asian people. Diaspora, dislocation, exile, and immigration born of economic necessity are the depressing contradictions to a capitalist paradise that has been optimistically envisaged as the end of history.   Critics of globalization have theorized the ways in which the commercialization of human feeling conceals the anxieties, fears, and other negative affects that express the harsh underside of transnational capitalism.  Nowhere is this commercialization of emotion more obvious than in the marketing of multiculturalism and racial difference in global commerce. The commercial use of racial mixture is especially provocative in the way it signals, conditions, and manages distressing experiences, while assimilating them symmetrically and seamlessly into the transnational stage of capitalism. Clearly, racial mixture is a hot commodity in today’s global market. Particularly in North America, the fascination with and consumption of multiraciality is evident in the notable increase in scholarship about multiraciality in the academy and the profusion of mixed-race productions in the culture industry, both of which reflect the commercialization of racial mixture in a globalized world.

In the last ten years, there has been an explosion of cultural productions about mixed-race people, and particularly of multiracial Asian Americans. Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and Halving the Bones, Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets and Part Asian, 100 Percent Hapa, Paisley.

Hapa is a Hawaiian term used to describe a person of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander racial/ethnic heritage.

Wikipedia