Mixed Race Studies

Mixed: Documentary to Explore Interracial Families

American University
Washington, D.C.
2016-12-15

Gregg Sangillo, Online Writer

School of Communication professors Leena Jayaswal (l) and Caty Borum Chattoo (r) are making a film about interracial families in the United States.

It took a while for documentary filmmakers Leena Jayaswal and Caty Borum Chattoo to realize that they were part of their own story. They’re both in interracial marriages with biracial children, and that’s the subject of their upcoming film, Mixed.

“Everybody kept telling us this film is about the two of you. And we said, ‘No, it’s not.’ But then somebody would say, ‘Why are you making this film?’” Jayaswal recalls.

The documentary is a travelogue—talking with people in Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, and Los Angeles, among other places—but Jayaswal and Borum Chattoo are inextricably linked to the subject matter at hand.

“It’s a journey film about the two of us finding mixed-race stories across America,” says Jayaswal, an associate professor at American University’s School of Communication.

Throughout the process, they’ve discovered so much more about their country—and themselves. “We actually had all these questions. How does mixed-race identity develop? So we talked to a psychologist about that. What’s the media representation? So we talked to a bunch of Hollywood people. So we’re finding those answers,” says Borum Chattoo, an executive in residence at SOC…

Read the entire article here.

Guest DJ Xenia Rubinos Spins Music From Solange To Ravel

alt.Latino: Latinx Arts and Culture
National Public Radio
2017-01-04

Felix Contreras, Host

Xenia Rubinos plays Guest DJ on this week’s episode of Alt.Latino. Courtesy of the artist

Vocalist Xenia Rubinos ended 2016 with a bang: Her album Black Terry Cat was singled out in best-of-the-year lists by NPR Music, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. That kind of recognition is a major deal for an independent artist with a one-of-a-kind artistic vision.

Alt.Latino first recognized that vision back in 2012, when we featured a track from Rubinos’ first self-released EP, Magic Trix. After we first heard Black Terry Cat earlier this year, we rushed her and her band into our office for a mesmerizing Tiny Desk concert that only hints at the magic of her live show…

Read the entire article and listen to the show here.

The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race [Review]

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 3, Issue 1, (January 2017)
pages 145-146
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216676788

Emily Walton, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Anthony Christian Ocampo, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $22.95. ISBN 978-0-8047-9754-2

“For the first time ever, I felt like I was reading about my life,” my Filipina student told me when returning my copy of The Latinos of Asia. Her reaction highlights a major strength of Anthony Ocampo’s new book: It weaves an untold story. Though Filipinos are one of America’s longest-residing ethnic groups, academic and popular discourse provide little understanding of factors shaping their identity. Ocampo highlights the lived experiences of Filipino Americans as they navigate the multiple structures influencing their identities—legacies of colonization by both Spain and the United States, neighborhood environments, and educational institutions—structures that operate differently depending on one’s stage in the life course. On this front, The Latinos of Asia is a considerable achievement. Because of its broad accessibility, Ocampo’s book fills an important gap in our knowledge about an often-overlooked group while also providing a foundation for understanding the “unwritten rules of race.”

Ocampo’s book begins with a historical analysis of four centuries of colonial and dictatorial regimes in the Philippines. Having spent more than 300 years as a colony of Spain, today the Philippines is the only majority Roman Catholic society in Asia, Spanish words are embedded in Filipino languages, and there is a deep cultural focus on family as the center of social life. The subsequent 50 years of U.S. colonial rule resulted in continued subjection to extensive “civilization” projects for “America’s little brown brothers.” Most consequential was the complete overhaul of the educational system, which established English as the primary language of instruction. Independence from colonialism in 1946 was ultimately bittersweet, however, as it ushered in a period of poverty in the Philippines. Centuries of colonial rule had depleted the country’s rich natural resources, facilitated the underdevelopment of the national economy, and created a large pool of educated workers facing limited labor market opportunities. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos stepped in with promises of economic reform and established a labor migration program that funneled skilled Filipino workers throughout the world…

Read the entire review here.

Remapping Race on the Human Genome: Commercial Exploits in a Racialized America

Praeger
January 2017
310 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4408-3063-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4408-3064-8

Judith Ann Warner, Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M International University, Laredo, Texas

Do the commercial applications of the human genome in ancestry tracing, medicine, and forensics serve to further racialize and stereotype groups?

This book explores the ethical debates at the intersection of race, ethnicity, national origin, and DNA analysis, enabling readers to gain a better understanding of the human genome project and its impact on the biological sciences, medicine, and criminal justice.

Genome and genealogical research has become a subject of interest outside of science, as evidenced by the popularity of the genealogy research website Ancestry.com that helps individuals discover their genetic past and television shows such as the celebrity-focused Who Do You Think You Are? and Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. Applications of DNA analysis in the area of criminal justice and the law have major consequences for social control from birth to death. This book explores the role of DNA research and analysis within the framework of race, ethnicity, and national origin—and provides a warning about the potential dangers of a racialized America.

Synthesizing the work of sociologists, criminologists, anthropologists, and biologists, author Judith Ann Warner, PhD, examines how the human genome is being interpreted and commonly used to affirm—rather than dissolve—racial and ethnic boundaries. The individual, corporate, and government use of DNA is controversial, and international comparisons indicate that regulation of genome applications is a global concern. With analysis of ancestry mapping business practices, medical DNA applications, and forensic uses of DNA in the criminal justice system, the book sheds light on the sociological results of “remapping race on the human genome.”

Features

• Provides historical background on the human genome in the modern context of the social construction of race and ethnicity
• Examines the use of overlapping racial-ethnic and geographical origin categories to situate ancestry, health risk, and criminal profiles in a stereotyped or discriminatory manner
• Argues for a re-examination of genome research to avoid racialization

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen

Dartmouth College Press
2017-01-03
296 pages
10 illus.
6 1/8 x 9 1/4″
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5126-0019-3
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5126-0018-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5126-0020-9

Samuele F. S. Pardini, Associate Professor of Italian
Department of World Languages and Cultures
Elon University, Elon, North Carolina

A bracingly original dialogue on modernity, class, and difference in the 20th century

In the Name of the Mother examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. Samuele Pardini links African American literature to the Mediterranean tradition of the Italian immigrants and examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. This volume emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• New World, Old Woman: Or, Modernity Upside Down
• Rochester, Sicily: The Political Economy of Italian American Life and the Encounter with Blackness
• Structures of Invisible Blackness: Racial Difference, (Homo)Sexuality, and Italian American Identity in African American Literature during Jim Crow
• In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Gun: Modernity as the Gangster
• In the Name of the Mother: The Other Italian American Modernity
• The Dago and the Darky: Staging Subversion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Kamala Harris sworn in as first Indian American senator and California’s first black senator

The Los Angeles Times
2017-01-03

Sara D. Wire, Congressional Delegation Reporter

Before friends and family in a packed chamber, Kamala Harris was sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator Tuesday morning. She became the first black woman the Golden State has sent to the Senate and the first Indian American to ever serve in the body.

Harris, 52, a Democrat from Los Angeles, was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden shortly after 9 a.m. PT as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her new Senate colleagues looked on. Harris’ husband, Los Angeles attorney Doug Emhoff, her stepchildren, brother-in-law Tony West, sister Maya Harris, extended family as well as several state officials from across the country who traveled to celebrate with the now former state attorney general watched from the gallery.

“Whatever advice she wants, all she has to do is ask,” Feinstein said. “I have said to her that I would like to have a close relationship.”

Feinstein and Harris met repeatedly in the weeks since the election, with Feinstein sharing advice on how to set up the largest Senate office in the country, including how to deal with the up to 100,000 emails, letters and phone calls that can come into a California senator’s office in a given week.

Harris, one of seven new senators, replaces Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, who retired after 24 years in the Senate…

Read the entire article here.

Still ‘Krazy’ after all these years: A life of George Herriman, pioneering comic writer and N.O. exile

The New Orleans Advocate
2016-12-05

Susan Larson, Host, The Reading Life
WWNO-FM, New Orleans

George Herriman, from Michael Tisserand’s Krazy Kat bio of George Herriman

For Michael Tisserand, as for most of us, the love of comics came early in childhood.

His mother took him to the library, where he discovered 741.59, the beloved Dewey Decimal System classification where comics were shelved. Years later, during his post-Katrina exile in Chicago, Tisserand would take his own young son to an exhibit of comics at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

“I was carrying my son in my arms then — he’s 6′-4″ now — and reading the captions out loud. I was feeling the New Orleans exile at that point, and I could imagine the way Herriman felt as a 10 year-old in Los Angeles, and I was looking for a New Orleans story. This was a story about New Orleans that I could tell from Chicago.”

Now, years after chasing the story across the country, Tisserand has produced the first full-length biography of a great New Orleans character and an original American artist in “Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White” (HarperCollins, $35).

Herriman (1880-1944) was born in New Orleans to a Creole family, free people of color who moved to California in search of better educational opportunities. There, Herriman began to pass as white, which he did for the rest of his life…

Read the entire article here.

Call For Papers: Spaniards, Natives, Africans, and Gypsies: Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance

2016-10-16

K. Meira Goldberg, Visiting Research Scholar
Foundation for Iberian Music
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10016

Prof. Walter Clark, Director
The Center for Iberian and Latin American Music
Department of Music
University of California
900 University Avenue
Riverside, California 92521

Antoni Pizà, Director
Foundation for Iberian Music
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10016
apiza@gc.cuny.edu

The Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California at Riverside, and the Foundation for Iberian Music at The Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a conference on the transatlantic circulation of malagueñas and zapateados at University of California, Riverside on April 6–7, 2017.

In the inaugural conference in this series, Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and Gypsies: The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song, and Dance, we gathered in New York to explore the fandango as a mestizaje, a mélange of people, imagery, music and dance from America, Europe, and Africa, whose many faces reflect a diversity of exchange across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. At that conference, we considered the broadest possible array of the fandango across Europe and the Americas, asking how the fandango participated in the elaboration of various national identities, how the fandangos of the Enlightenment shed light on musical populism and folkloric nationalism as armaments in revolutionary struggles for independence of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how contemporary fandangos function within the present-day politics of decolonialization and immigration. We asked whether and what shared formal features—musical, choreographic, or lyric—may be discerned in the diverse constituents of the fandango family in Spain and the Americas, and how our recognition of these features might enhance our understanding of historical connections between these places. We hoped with that pioneering effort to gather international, world-renowned scholars to open new horizons and lay the foundation for further research, conferences, and publications. We are immensely proud of that 2015 gathering, and of the two published editions of its proceedings: in bilingual form in the Spanish journal Música Oral del Sur (vol. 12, 2015) and in English (forthcoming 2016 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

But the inaugural conference merely set the first stone. All of the participants in the 2015 meeting agreed that conversations should continue, relationships should develop, and that many questions and avenues of research remain. We are therefore pleased to issue a call for papers for the upcoming conference on two nineteenth-century forms related to the fandango—at least in their standing as iconic representations of Spanishness: malagueñas and zapateados.

How do these forms comprise a “repertoire” in performance theorist Diana Taylor’s sense of the term as enacting “embodied memory” and “ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge,” allowing for “an alternative perspective on historical processes of transnational contact” and a “remapping of the Americas…following traditions of embodied practice”? The Center and the Foundation invite interested scholars, graduate students, and practitioners including musicians and dancers to propose presentations on all subjects related to malagueñas and zapateados. Although we are not limited to them, we expect to gain special insight into the following topics:

1. From their virtuoso elaborations in flamenco song, to the solo guitar rondeñas of “El Murciano,” from the 1898 La malagueña y el torero filmed by the Lumière brothers to Denishawn’s 1921 Malagueña, from Isaac Albéniz’s iconic pianistic malagueñas to the interpretation by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona which, as Walter Clark observes, became a global pop tune, how do malagueñas address the aspirations of growing middle-class concert audiences on both sides of the Atlantic?
2. How do they reflect and crystalize prevailing yet contested notions of what is “Spanish”?
3. How, in the transgressive ruckus and subversive sonorities of Afro-Latin zapateados circulating through, as performance scholar Stephen Johnson says, the ports, waterways, and docks of the Black Atlantic may we describe the race mimicry inherent in nineteenth-century performance?
4. What is the relationship of zapateado with tap and other forms of percussive dance in American popular music?
5. And how in the roiled and complicated surfaces of these forms may we discern the archived rhythmic and dance ideas of African and Amerindian lineage that are magical, or even sacred?
6. How do zapateado rhythms express the tidal shift in accentuation of the African 6/8 from triple to duple meter described by Rolando Perez Fernandez?
7. How did the zapateados danced in drag, in bullrings and ballets, resist nineteenth-century gender codes?
8. What secrets are held in the zapateados performed on a tarima planted in the earth and tuned by ceramic jugs in Michoacán?
9. In light of compelling research by Andrés Reséndez and Benjamin Madley into the devastating history of enslavement and genocide of indigenous peoples of the Americas, what new considerations arise with regard to best practices for historiographically aware nomenclature? How should we view and use words like “Indian,” “Native,” “mestizo,” “criollo,” etc.?

Paper presentations will be 20 minutes, with 10 minutes of discussion. We also welcome workshop-style presentations incorporating dance, music, and song. Please send a title and a 150-200 word abstract to K. Meira Goldberg at fandangoconference.cuny@gmail.com. by December 31, 2016.

A reflection on Barack Obama’s presidency

The Economist
2016-12-24

Barack Obama’s presidency lurched between idealism and acrimony but some of his accomplishments will endure

1 “A skinny kid with a funny name”

Watch it again. He is unusually stilted at the beginning, as you might expect of a debutant on the autocue and the national stage. But soon he finds his rhythm, those crescendos alternating with electric pauses, ecclesiastical notes chiming with his scholarly charisma in a musical voice. Grippingly, he recounts the story of his life, in his telling a parable of unity in diversity—a moral he was still pushing 12 hard, disillusioning years later. “We are Americans first,” he urged in the Rose Garden on the day after Donald Trump was elected.

In fact, by the standards Barack Obama subsequently set—in a presidency defined by its speeches, and perhaps to be best remembered for them—his turn at the Democratic convention in 2004 was mundane. But his ascent will still be dated from the moment he loped onto that stage in Boston, with the rangy gait that became as familiar as his smile: an unknown politician from Illinois, soon to be the country’s only African-American senator, before, in short order, becoming its first black president. The paean he offered to America, a country that had embraced him as “a skinny kid with a funny name”, was also a kind of dare; the self-deprecation camouflaged a boast, since many in his audience saw the obstacles he faced as clearly as he did. “I’m the African-American son of a single mother,” Mr Obama reportedly told Binyamin Netanyahu when, years later, Israel’s prime minister lectured him on the world’s hazards, “and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House.”

His presidency will be counted in speeches because its trials proved harder to overcome than the barriers he scaled to attain it. Often he spoke as no other president could, becoming, through his identity and eloquence, a receptacle for the hopes of Americans and of—and for—the world. Think of his speech in Berlin in 2008, when he extolled multilateralism and the rule of law, or his now-defunct conciliation in Cairo the following year. Think of his eulogy after the Charleston killings. Yet posterity might score him higher on a broader metric had he been as effective in the more intimate persuasions of Congress, as consistent in projecting empathy as at exhortation, or more resolute abroad; had he been as adept at championing legislation or facing down tyrants as he could be at stirring hearts…

Read the entire article here.

Leona Amosah, the Founder of SWIRL, Talks Diversity and Identity

Study Breaks
2016-12-28

Molly Flynn
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Celebrating Students with Interracial Legacies (SWIRL)

Amosah, a high-achieving senior at UNC Chapel Hill, created the organization to provide a community for students with multiracial and mixed-race identities.

While many college students occupy their time with binge-watching Netflix, binge-drinking at parties and binge-eating at their campus diners, Leona Amosah has chosen to indulge in things much more productive.

Amosah, a senior at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, seems to be involved in a little bit of everything. As a double major in Russian and Global Studies, Amosah spends her time not only in the books, but also involved in a wide range of campus groups. She actively participates in organizations such as Tarheel Outreach Program, Harmonyx A Capella group, Easing Students Abroad Entry (EASE), APPLES Service-Learning Program and Buckley Public Service Scholars, just to name a few.

But, her brainchild, as she calls it, is an organization that she started in August 2015. This past week, I had the opportunity to speak directly with Amosah and learn a little but more about SWIRL, which stands for Students with Inter-Racial Legacies.

Molly Flynn: What inspired you to start SWIRL?

Leona Amosah: I came up with the idea for starting SWIRL after watching a documentary called “Little White Lie.” It told the story of a Jewish woman [Lacey Schwartz] who grew up with a white identity, until she discovered that her biological father was black.

Throughout the film, she grapples with her mixed-race identity, discussing how she felt when she identified as white versus how she felt when she identified as black. I very much connected with the film as a person of mixed-race, and was sobbing by the end of it…

Read the entire interview here.