Mixed Race Studies

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (review) [Sheffer]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2012
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2012.0061
pages 203-205

Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

Julia H. Lee’s Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 offers new insights on how African American and Asian American identities were defined in relation to one another during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. As Lee explains, the book seeks to show how “American identity emerges from the interplay between the fantasies of the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’” (5). Lee focuses on iconic texts and court cases, as well as lesser-known novels, memoirs, and films in order to show how widely the trope of interracial encounter traveled, and how varied were its permutations.

Interracial Encounters follows from a recent wave of works committed to comparative and interethnic analysis, such as Vijay Prashad’s Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2001), Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen’s edited collection AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (2006), Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (2009), and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials’s Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (2011). These books continue the ground-breaking work of Werner Sollors and Elizabeth Ammons to see patterns across ethnic literary traditions while carefully attending to the particular ways American ethnic and racial identities have been negotiated in relationship to other minority groups. Lee maintains the specificity of each group’s experiences in the United States and offers an important contribution to the study of American racial formation.

Lee makes coherent sense out of the complex and contradictory laws, court cases, and racial ideologies of the period she analyzes. Her re-reading of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is particularly impressive, providing a powerful contribution to the scholarship of this pivotal court case while also shedding new light on its influence on literature and culture. Interracial Encounters does not oversimplify or selectively celebrate scenes of inter-racial solidarity; instead, Lee shows the “multiple logics of exclusion”  that were deployed in the period (5). While she provides ample evidence of cross-racial identification, she also illustrates the pattern of one group demanding inclusion at the expense of the other. Interracial Encounters reveals the tensions and alliances between Asian Americans and African Americans, as well as these groups’ shifting relationship to normative whiteness. For example, her readings of the films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Cheat (1915) illustrate the contradictory ways African American and Asian American racialization appeared in popular cultural texts.

Lee is attuned to the complexity in how racial ideologies affect minority populations whose rights were (and still are) unevenly recognized and enforced. As she notes, “an American national identity was natural, desirable, universal—and utterly impossible for African Americans and Asians to attain” (10). While underscoring the US historical context for African American and Asian American literary production, Lee also traces the transnational and at times post-national implications of Afro-Asian encounters. Racial ideologies travel beyond the nation’s borders, particularly in this period when the US became a global superpower.

The introduction lays out Lee’s major claims and the theoretical concepts undergirding her work. Chapter Two contextualizes Asian American and African American racialization in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly through the spatialization of the segregated train car, a site central to Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapter Three continues the discussion of segregated train travel by analyzing key scenes in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Wu Tingfang’s memoir America, through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (1914).

Chapter Four addresses the transnational and imperial dimensions of racialization and orientalism as illustrated by the writings of the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian-American sisters Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far). By studying their fiction and nonfiction set in the US and Jamaica, Lee shows the women’s competing strategies for asserting their status as representative Americans. Edith Eaton depicts Asian Americans and African Americans (and Afro-Caribbeans)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America’s Future?

Social Forces
Volume 73, Issue 4 (1995)
pages 1365-1383
DOI: 10.1093/sf/73.4.1365

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Rowena Fong, Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Professor in Services to Children and Families
University of Texas, Austin

Americans are rapidly becoming an ethnically plural people. Not only are there many different peoples in the U.S., but a sharply increasing number of individuals are coming to have and to recognize multiple ethnic strains within themselves. The current literature on ethnicity is inadequate, for it assumes that people have only single ethnic identities when, in fact, many people, like Pacific Islander Americans, have long held multiethnic identities. Drawing on survey data and interviews as well as literary sources, this article analyzes the features of Pacific Islander American multiethnic identity: it is situational; individuals commonly simplify their ethnicity in practical living; and people with multiple ancestries are admitted to group membership on much the same basis as people with single ancestries. The bases of Pacific Islander American ethnicity include ancestry, family, practice, and place.

Read or purchase the article here.

Artists explore the image of mixed race Asian-Americans in DePaul exhibit

Medill Reports, Chicago
2013-04-18

Zhiyu Wang

Medill Reports is written and produced by graduate journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill school.

In college, Wei Ming Dariotis used to want a T-shirt with “war baby” on the front and “love child” on the back. That way whenever people asked her “what are you?” she could just point to the T-shirt and say, “take your pick.”

Now her imaginary T-shirt has turned into an actual exhibition. The “War Baby/Love Child” show at DePaul University features artworks from 19 contemporary artists, all of whom are of mixed heritage, meaning either they are mixed-raced or they are transracial adoptees.

“This is part of a beginning that people can see visually what it means to be mixed raced,” said Debra Yepa-Pappan, a Jemez Pueblo and Korean artist who lives in Chicago.

The title “War Baby/Love Child” comes from the experience Dariotis, co-curator and associate professor of Asian-American studies at San Francisco State University, had when she was young. When she said her mom is Chinese and her father is Greek /Swedish /English /Scottish /German /Pennsylvania Dutch, people would always ask, “did your parents meet in the war?”…

Read the entire article here.

Results from the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment

U.S. Census Bureau
Technical Briefing
2012-08-08
62 pages

What is the AQE?

The 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) focused on improving the race and Hispanic origin questions by testing a number of different questionnaire design strategies…

Overview of Technical Briefing

• (AQE) Goals and Research Strategies
• Methodology
• Race and Hispanic Origin Questionnaires
• Reinterview Study
• Focus Groups
• Major Findings
• Recommendations

Goals and Research Strategies

• Increase reporting in the standard Office of Management and Budget (OMB) race and ethnic categories
• Lower item nonresponse to the race and Hispanic origin questions
• Improve the accuracy and reliability of race and ethnic data
• Elicit the reporting of detailed race and ethnic groups

…Detailed Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Maintains all original race and Hispanic origin checkboxes

…Streamlined Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Removes specific national origin checkboxes; presented as example groups
• Streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories…

…Very Streamlined Approach

• Part 1 – Very streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Part 2 – Examples for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Write-in areas for specific race(s), origin(s), or tribe(s)

…

Read the entire report here.

Owning my Whiteness, Becoming an Ally

The Race Card Project: Six-Word Essays
By Michele Norris
2013-04-17

Becky Christensen
Ann Arbor, MI

Despite growing up in a somewhat racially diverse area in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had never thought about the privileges I had based on being White until I read Peggy McIntosh’s “White: Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” in graduate school. Since then, I’ve been actively exploring and acknowledging my Whiteness and am involved with social justice efforts on campus to help others become aware of their own racial identities as well as the systems of power and oppression in our society.

Author takes on modern myths about race

Skokie Review
Chicago, Illinois
2013-04-05

Mike Isaacs

he 8-year-old girl who had difficulty breathing had been misdiagnosed for a long time, but then a technician looked at her X-ray and asked incredulously why she had not been treated for cystic fibrosis.

The reason was because she was black, and cystic fibrosis was thought to be a white people’s disease. The technician had never met the girl when he asked his question.

“It’s bad medicine to look at someone’s race and say you should get this test or that test, because you may be completely wrong,” said distinguished author and educator Dorothy Roberts.

To Roberts, who penned “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-Create Race in the 21st Century,” this is just one example of a distorted view of science and race playing out today.

“There’s no such thing as a white disease or a black disease or an Asian disease,” Roberts said during a provocative talk Sunday at Skokie’s Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago. “That doesn’t make sense, because there’s no gene that belongs to a particular race that doesn’t belong to other races.”

She argues that the tie between biology and race is a myth that has been resurrected again, this time with the help of a false reliance on modern-day science…

…Some of the same theories from the era of eugenics, she said, are being resuscitated in 21st century science.

Roberts isn’t saying, though that we’re all identical – one reason she isn’t keen on President Clinton’s famous declaration about the Human Genome Project that all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99 percent the same.

“It makes it sound like we’re all alike, and you can see that everyone isn’t alike,” she said. “There’s lots of genetic variation in the human species, but it’s not grouped into races.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial

Weekday with Steve Scher
KUOW.org 94.9 FM
Seattle News & Information
2013-04-15

Steve Scher, Host

Also this hour: Everett Herald reporter and columnist Jerry Cornfield catches us up on what’s happening this week in Olympia. Then, University of Washington Communication professor Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial.

The interview with Dr. Joseph begins at 00:13:30 and ends at 00:40:39.

When asked about what transcending blackness means, she replied, “I chose this phrase because I think it’s a really disturbing one; the notion that blackness is something that needs to be transcended, that needs to be gotten over. It is inevitably a lack, a slight, a mark as opposed to a positive, wonderful entity.”

Download/Listen to the interview here.

Opening 4/25: “War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”

DePaul Art Museum
Chicago, Illinois
2013-04-16

CHICAGO — The DePaul Art Museum explores the construction of mixed-heritage Asian American identity in the United States with “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” which opens April 25.

“It gives visibility to the increasingly mixed generation coming of age by highlighting artworks that map personal biography and the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity against U.S. and transnational histories,” said Laura Kina, exhibit curator. Kina is a Vincent de Paul Professor and founding member of Global Asian Studies at DePaul University, where she also is an associate professor of art, media and design in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. April 25 at the museum, located at 935 W. Fullerton Ave., just east of the CTA’s Fullerton ‘L’ stop. The museum is free and open to the public every day. The exhibition runs through June 30.

“Through traditional media as well as video, installation and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including U.S. wars in Asia, multiculturalism and identity politics, racialization, gender and sexual identity, citizenship and nationality, and transracial adoption,” said Kina. She co-edited a book of the same title with Wei Ming Dariotis, an associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Mequitta Ahuja, Albert Chong, Serene Ford, Kip Fulbeck, Stuart Gaffney, Louie Gong, Jane Jin Kaisen, Lori Kay, Li-Lan, Richard Lou, Samia Mirza, Chris Naka, Laurel Nakadate, Gina Osterloh, Adrienne Pao, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jenifer Wofford and Debra Yepa-Pappan…

Read the entire press release here.

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners (Biography): “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo,” by Tom Reiss

The Pulitzer Prizes
Columbia University
New York, New York
2013-04-15

For a distinguished and appropriately documented biography or autobiography by an American author, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo,” by Tom Reiss (Crown), a compelling story of a forgotten swashbuckling hero of mixed race whose bold exploits were captured by his son, Alexander Dumas, in famous 19th century novels.

For more information, click here.

JANM Show Looks at Mixed Ancestry

Los Angeles Downtown News
2013-04-15

Richard Guzmán

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES – The very title of the new Japanese American National Museum exhibit indicates the complex factors at play in a single community.

The show, Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History, examines the diverse history of the Japanese American community as well as the still evolving notion of family and race. It opened April 7 and continues through Aug. 25 at the Little Tokyo museum.

Through photos, videos, artifacts and paintings, the shows traces the history of mixed-race Japanese American families — hapa is a term for a person of mixed race who is part Asian or Pacific Islander — going back to the late 1800s. It also looks at the challenges these families faced due to segregation and laws that criminalized mixed race marriages.

It’s a history, said Duncan Williams, the exhibit co-curator, that is often plainly visible in the faces of biracial individuals. However, he said the topic is also invisible, since it is rarely discussed in open forums.

“One of the major points we’re trying to make is that increasingly the Japanese American community is changing,” said Williams, who is also director of the USC Center for Japanese Religion and Culture.

He said that by the next U.S. Census in 2020, it is expected that more than half of the members of the Japanese American community will identify themselves as multiracial…

Read the entire article here.