Mixed Race Studies

The Latinos Of Asia

Think
KERA
Dallas, Texas
2016-11-14

Krys Boyd, Host and Managing Editor

Filipino Americans are classified by the U.S. Census as Asian. But because of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, many Filipinos also feel part Latino. This hour, we’ll talk about how skin color, history and other factors contribute to cultural identity with sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo, author of “The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race” (Stanford University Press).

Download the episode (00:48:18) here.

Being Blackanese: The Evolving Embrace of Self and Community

College of San Mateo
CSM College Center Building 10, Room 193
1700 West Hillsdale Boulevard
San Mateo, California 94402 USA
Friday 2016-11-18, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Being Blackanese: The Evolving Embrace of Self and Community brings together an award winning literary artist, a scholar activist, and an independently published author in an examination and affirmation of Black Japanese American life. The “Blackanese” experience – of a world where divisiveness remains common and cultural ambiguity can equate to invisibility within one’s own communities – will be exposed through readings, presentations and Q&A.

Featuring readings and presentations by:

• Alyss Dixson will read from “The Club”, her short fiction piece about Ai, a determined Black Japanese girl who decides to sneak a ride on her father’s old Harley until an encounter with a thief puts her between fear of the stranger and fear of her dad’s punishment.
• Fredrick Cloyd will read selections from his memoir, Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, covering his struggles as a half-Black Japanese boy born of an African American military father and that of his mother who was looked down upon for having a child by an American, as well as his life as an Amerasian after migrating to the United States.
• Ramon Calhoun will read excerpts from his independently-published novel, Blackanese Boy, the coming of age story of Rafael Halifax. Raised by a single mother, Rafael tries to cope with and understand the complexity of his mixed-identity, born of his Japanese American mother and Black father, an infrequent yet powerful presence in his life.

The readings will be followed by a Question & Answer session facilitated by Dr. Frederick Gaines, Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies, College of San Mateo.

For more information, click here.

Artist, surfer Kip Fulbeck to exhibit work at MSU

Times Record News
Wichita Falls, Texas
2016-11-03

Richard Carter, Special to the Times Record News

Kip Fulbeck

Kip Fulbeck grew up in Hawaii as the child of a Chinese mother and a white American father.

In elementary school, children would come up to him and ask, “Who are you? What are you?” It was an experience that stuck with him, said Midwestern State University art professor Gary Goldberg, and as Fulbeck developed as an artist, he reflected on those experiences.

An exhibit of Fulbeck’s artwork, “Hapa,” opened earlier this week at the Juanita and Ralph Harvey Art Gallery in the MSU Fain Fine Arts Center. The exhibit of photographic works runs through Dec. 2.

Fulbeck will be at a reception at the gallery from 3-5 p.m. Nov. 11 and will then lecture at 7 p.m. that evening as part of the MSU Artist Lecture Series in Akin Auditorium…

Read the entire article here.

50 years ago: Tucson couple broke down barriers to interracial marriage

Arizona Capital Times
2009-11-01

Luige del Puerto

Henry Oyama was beaming as he led his new bride from the altar of St. Augustine Cathedral in Tucson 50 years ago. She was wearing a traditional white wedding dress, and her left hand was grasping the right arm of her man.

The photos taken that day might leave the impression nothing was out of place, as if it was any other marriage ceremony. But in 1959 the country was on the brink of a major cultural shift to eliminate racism, and the Oyamas had just fought a landmark court battle to overturn an Arizona law that prohibited interracial marriage.

Because Henry Oyama is of Japanese descent and Mary Ann Jordan was white, together they broke down the race-based law that was intended to keep them apart.

The law itself made it illegal for a Caucasian to marry a non- Caucasian, so Oyama felt the onus was on the white person who wanted to marry someone of another race.

“Naturally, the criticism would come more to her,” Oyama said, adding that Mary Ann’s parents believed at the time that their daughter was making herself a target.

The 83-year-old Oyama knows better than most what it’s like to be a target. He spent two years in an internment camp at the beginning of World War II, and he later served the United States as a spy in Panama…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Sympathizer,’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Book Review
The New York Times
2015-04-02

Philip Caputo

The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras.

That outlook is reflected in the literature — and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction. Among all those volumes, you’ll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler’s “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain” comes to mind) with Vietnamese characters speaking in their own voices.

Hollywood has been still more Americentric. In films like “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon,” the Vietnamese (often other Asians portraying Vietnamese) are never more than walk-ons whose principal roles seem to be to die or wail in the ashes of incinerated villages.

Which brings me to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s remarkable debut novel, “The Sympathizer.” ­Nguyen, born in Vietnam but raised in the United States, brings a distinct perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light…

…Duality is literally in the protagonist’s blood, for he is a half-caste, the illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother (whom he loves) and a French Catholic priest (whom he hates). Widening the split in his nature, he was educated in the United States, where he learned to speak English without an accent and developed another love-hate relationship, this one with the country that he feels has coined too many “super” terms (supermarkets, ­superhighways, the Super Bowl, and so on) “from the federal bank of its ­narcissism.”…

Read the entire review here.

The Sympathizer

Grove Press
April 2015
384 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0802123459
Paperback ISBN: 978-0802124944

Viet Thanh Nguyen

• Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
• Winner of the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
• Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
• Winner of the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
• Winner of the 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (Adult Fiction)
• Winner of the 2016 California Book Award for First Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Daily Beast, Kansas City Star, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Guardian, National Post, MPR News, Amazon, Slate, Flavorwire, Entropy, Quartz, and Globe and Mail

A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In dialogue with but diametrically opposed to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, this novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s astonishing novel takes us inside the mind of this double agent, a man whose lofty ideals necessitate his betrayal of the people closest to him. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race

Oxford University Press
2016-10-31
376 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780190625696

Edited by:

H. Samy Alim, Professor of Education; Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics (by courtesy)
Stanford University

John R. Rickford, J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities
Stanford University

Arnetha F. Ball, Professor
Stanford Graduate School of Education
Stanford University

• Brings together a critical mass of scholars to form a new field dedicated to theorizing and analyzing language and race together-raciolinguistics.
• Breaks new ground by integrating the deep theoretical knowledge gained from race and ethnic studies, and the ethnographic rigor and sensibility of anthropology, with the fine-grained, detailed analyses that are the hallmark of linguistic studies
• Takes a comparative, international look across a wide variety of sites that comprise some of the most contested racial and ethnic contexts in the world, from rapidly changing communities in the U.S. and Europe to locations in South Africa, Brazil, and Israel
• Builds upon and expands Alim and Smitherman’s ground-breaking analysis to form a new field dedicated to racing language and languaging race.

Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race. The book brings together a team of leading scholars-working both within and beyond the United States-to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguistic analyses, chapters cover a wide range of topics including the language use of African American Jews and the struggle over the very term “African American,” the racialized language education debates within the increasing number of “majority-minority” immigrant communities as well as Indigenous communities in the U.S., the dangers of multicultural education in a Europe that is struggling to meet the needs of new migrants, and the sociopolitical and cultural meanings of linguistic styles used in Brazilian favelas, South African townships, Mexican and Puerto Rican barrios in Chicago, and Korean American “cram schools,” among other sites.

With rapidly changing demographics in the U.S.-population resegregation, shifting Asian and Latino patterns of immigration, new African American (im)migration patterns, etc.-and changing global cultural and media trends (from global Hip Hop cultures, to transnational Mexican popular and street cultures, to Israeli reality TV, to new immigration trends across Africa and Europe, for example)-Raciolinguistics shapes the future of studies on race, ethnicity, and language. By taking a comparative look across a diverse range of language and literacy contexts, the volume seeks not only to set the research agenda in this burgeoning area of study, but also to help resolve pressing educational and political problems in some of the most contested racial, ethnic, and linguistic contexts in the world.

Contents

• Introducting Raciolinguistics: Theorizing Language and Race in Hyperracial Times / H. Samy Alim, Stanford University
• Part I. Languaging Race
  • 1. Who’s Afraid of the Transracial Subject?: Transracialization as a Dynamic Process of Translation and Transgression / H. Samy Alim, Stanford University
  • 2. From Upstanding Citizen to North American Rapper and Back Again: The Racial Malleability of Poor Male Brazilian Youth / Jennifer Roth-Gordon, University of Arizona
  • 3. From Mock Spanish to Inverted Spanglish: Language Ideologies and the Racialization of Mexican and Puerto Rican Youth in the U.S. / Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University
  • 4. The Meaning of Ching Chong: Language, Racism, and Response in New Media / Elaine W. Chun, University of South Carolina
  • 5. “Suddenly faced with a Chinese village”: The Linguistic Racialization of Asian Americans / Adrienne Lo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • 6. Ethnicity and Extreme Locality in South Africa’s Multilingual Hip Hop Ciphas / Quentin E. Williams, University of the Western Cape
  • 7. Norteno and Sureno Gangs, Hip Hop, and Ethnicity on YouTube: Localism in California through Spanish Accent Variation / Norma Mendoza-Denton, University of Arizona
• Part II. Racing Language
  • 8. Towards Heterogeneity: A Sociolinguistic Perspective on the Classification of Black People in the 21st Century / Renée Blake, New York University
  • 9. Jews of Color: Performing Black Jewishness through the Creative Use of Two Ethnolinguistic Repertoires / Sarah Bunin Benor, Hebrew Union College
  • 10. Pharyngeal beauty and depharyngealized geek: Performing ethnicity on Israeli reality TV / Roey Gafter, Tel Aviv University
  • 11. Stance as a Window into the Language-Race Connection: Evidence from African American and White Speakers in Washington, D.C. / Robert J. Podesva, Stanford University
  • 12. Changing Ethnicities: The Evolving Speech Styles of Punjabi Londoners / Devyani Sharma, Queen Mary, University of London
• Part III. Language, Race, and Education in Changing Communities
  • 13. “It Was a Black City”: African American Language in California’s Changing Urban Schools and Communities / Django Paris, Michigan State University
  • 14. Zapotec, Mixtec, and Purepecha Youth: Multilingualism and the Marginalization of Indigenous Immigrants in the U.S. / William Perez, Rafael Vasquez, and Raymond Buriel
  • 15. On Being Called Out of One’s Name: Indexical Bleaching as a Technique of Deracialization / Mary Bucholtz, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 16. Multiculturalism and Its Discontents: Essentializing Ethnic Moroccan and Roma Identities in Classroom Discourse in Spain / Inmaculada García-Sánchez, Temple University
  • 17. The Voicing of Asian American Figures: Korean Linguistic Styles at an Asian American Cram School / Angela Reyes, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
  • 18. “Socials”, “Poch@s”, “Normals” y Los de Más: School Networks and Linguistic Capital of High School Students on the Tijuana-San Diego Border” / Ana Celia Zentella, University of California, San Diego
• Index

Creative Self-Studio: Social Justice Storytelling

DePaul University Student Center (Lincoln Park)
Room 120 AB
2250 N Sheffield Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
Tuesday, 2016-10-25 09:40-11:10 CDT (Local Time)

Aisha Fukushima will discuss the role of the emcee in hip-hop culture as a story-teller and learn how hip hop story-telling can be used to critically explore questions of identity, inequality and liberation. Using creative techniques such as body percussion, attendees will practice solidarity building through movement. All levels of musical interest and experience welcome.

For more information, click here.

Jews Of Color Press For Acceptance

The New York Jewish Week
2016-10-06

Hannah Dreyfus, Staff Writer

The Changing face of the Jewish Community. JW

This the first of a two part feature on the changing face of the Jewish Community. Read part two here.

Hair has a lot to do with it, according to Sophia Weinstock.

Weinstock, 21, the daughter of an Ashkenazi father and African-American and Puerto Rican mother, first noticed her hair was different as a young girl growing up in the Orthodox community of Staten Island. Her dark, tightly bound curls, tinged with blond at the ends, resisted all efforts to be tamed, though she tried desperately to pull them back.

“People have always looked at my hair, even touched my hair, and said, ‘Wow, you look so ethnic!’” said the law school-bound Columbia University senior. “I hate that word. It’s like this encapsulating term for everything that is ‘other.’”…

Read the entire article here.

VIFF honours B.C. filmmakers Ann Marie Fleming, Kevan Funk, Julia Hutchings, Jessica Parsons, and Jennifer Chiu

The Georgia Straight
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2016-10-11

Charlie Smith

Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses won the prize for Best Canadian Film as well as the B.C. Film Award at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.

The Vancouver International Film Festival continues until Friday (October 14), but it has already handed out some major awards to Canadian filmmakers.

One of the big winners at a weekend gala was B.C. director Ann Marie Fleming for Window Horses. She took home the B.C. Film Award, which came with a $10,000 bursary from the Harold Greenburg Fund and a $15,000 credit in postproduction services from Encore.

Fleming was also honoured for Best Canadian Film, which was accompanied by a $10,000 award. It was presented by the Directors Guild of Canada…

Read the entire article here.