Mixed Race Studies

My Day at the 5th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-10-14

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Saturday morning, June 16, 2012: I take the Metro from North Hollywood to the Tokyo Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles. My destination is the 5th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival at the Japanese American National Museum and the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. This is a three-day event, but I can be there for just this one day, and my first goal is to meet Steven Riley, the creator of the website, Mixed Race Studies.

I have not attended an event centered upon the mixed experience in many years. I walk through the glass doors. The volunteer staff is welcoming and energetic. The imagery is colorful, ambiguous, and stimulating. The overall vibe is positive and hopeful, and for a moment I am taken aback to how I felt at my first mixed-experience event, the 2000 Harvard-Wellesley Conference on the Mixed Race Experience.

Skeptics say that this type of event, which brings together individuals of diverse mixes and backgrounds, is unsustainable. Do Hapas, blacklicans, latalians, jewasians, and standard black/white multiracials really have that much in common? Apparently many do, and this Festival holds together amazingly well and continues to grow thanks to the diligence, intelligence, and creativity of its founders, Fanshen Cox and Heidi Durrow.

The artists/writers whom I see present or talk to this day have strong personal voices and are very talented at what they do. Overall, their work complicates received understandings of multiracial identity, experience, and art…

Read the entire article here.

Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship Trainee [Critical Mixed-Race Studies]

University of Southern California
USC Laboratory and Research Jobs
2012-10-10

The University of Southern California (USC), founded in 1880, is located in the heart of downtown L.A. and is the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. As an employee of USC, you will be a part of a world-class research university and a member of the “Trojan Family,” which is comprised of the faculty, students and staff that make the university what it is.

The Center for Japanese Religions and Culture (CJRC) in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California invites applications for a one-year Andrew Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars on the Comparative Study of Cultures Postdoctoral Fellowship, beginning Fall 2013. The fellowship has an annual salary of $45,000 with benefits. The field of specialization is Critical Mixed-Race Studies (area and period open). The Fellow will be given research space at CJRC, and will be expected to participate in the Mellon Foundation’s John E. Sawyer Seminar series, “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach,” organized by CJRC. The Fellow must have a Ph.D. in hand, and should be within 5 years of receiving the Ph.D., at the beginning of the appointment. To apply, please submit an application letter, a CV, a brief description of your research (including both the dissertation and current/future projects), and a dossier of three letters of recommendation to Kana Yoshida at: mailto:cjrc@dornsife.usc.edu.

In order to be considered for this position, applicants are also required to submit an electronic application through the USC Jobs Web site, https://jobs.usc.edu/.

Review of applications will begin on Jan. 1, 2013, though applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

USC strongly values diversity and is committed to equal opportunity in employment. Women and men, and members of all racial and ethnic groups, are encouraged to apply.

For more information, click here.

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe

Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland
2012-10-14 through 2013-01-21
Open Wednesday-Sunday, 10:00-17:00 ET (Local Time)
Telephone: 410-547-9000

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, an unprecedented exhibition, explores the world of Renaissance art in Europe to bring to life the hidden African presence in its midst. During the first half of the 1500s, Africa became a focus of European attention as it had not been since the time of the Roman Empire. The European thirst for new markets already in the mid 1400s drove the Portuguese (and subsequently the English and Dutch) to explore the establishment of new trading routes down the west coast of Africa and, by the turn of the new century, into the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa brought the Turks into military and political conflict with European interests. These elements, along with the importation of captured Africans as slaves, primarily from West Africa, increasingly supplanting the trade of slaves of Slavic origin, resulted in a growing African presence in Europe.

1. Annibale Carracci (attributed). Portrait of a Black Servant (Fragment of larger portrait), ca. 1580s, oil on canvas, 24 x 12 in. (60.96 x 30.48cm). Leeds, private collection. 2. Jacopo da Pontormo. Portrait of Maria Salviati de Medici and Giulia de Medici, ca. 1539, oil on panel, 34 5/8 x 28 1/16 in. (88 x 71 cm). The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 3. German or Flemish. Portrait of a Wealthy Black Man, ca. 1540, oil on panel, diameter 11.7 in. (29.7 cm). Private Collection, Antwerp.

The first half of the exhibition of approximately 75 works explores the historical circumstances as well as the conventions of exoticism that constituted the prism of “Africa” through which individuals were inevitably perceived.

11. Cristovao de Morais. Portrait of Juana of Austria with her Black Slave Girl,1555, oil on canvas, 39 x 31 7/8 in. (99 x 81 cm). Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels. 12. Paolo Veronese. Study of a Black Boy Eating, ca. 1570s, black and white chalk on paper, 6 x 7 in. (15.5 x 20 cm). Mia Weiner, Norfolk, Connecticut. 13. Bronzino (workshop replica). Portrait of Duke Alessandro de Medici, ca 1553, oil on tin, 5 7/8 x 4 in. (15 x 12 cm). Uffizi, Florence. 14. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Two Flemish Peasants (Africans), ca.1564-5, etching, ca. 5 x 7 3/8 in. (13/3 x 18.7 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

In the second half, attention shifts to individuals, focusing on portraits. These often very sensitive images underscore the role of art in bringing people from the past to life. While some Africans played respected, public roles, the names of most slaves and freed men and women are lost. Recognizing the traces of their existence is a way of restoring their identity…

For more information, click here.

Scot Nakagawa: Dismantling the Fulcrum of White Supremacy

GRITtv
2012-08-24

Laura Flanders, Host

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Parner
ChangeLab

Race, according to activist and writer Scot Nakagawa, was an idea created originally to justify the enslavement of a people, and has displayed pernicious staying power in the centuries since. That’s why, as Nakagawa explains in this video with Laura Flanders, he believes that his liberation and the liberation of all people of color in the United States is tied to the liberation of African-Americans. For Nakagawa, anti-black racism is “the fulcrum of white supremacy.”

ITYC Audio Journal #2: What Are You?-Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations

Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color
2012-10-07

Michelle McCrary, Host

Last Thursday, I attended an event at the Brooklyn Historical Society for their “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations” series called What Are You? The panel tackled the this perpetual question often aimed at people who are perceived to be ethnically ambiguous.

Presenting their own encounters/experiences with the “what are you?” question were Angela Tucker, creator of the webseries Black Folk Don’t; Heidi Durrow, author of the New York Times Bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and co-host of Mixed Chicks Chat; Jen Chau, founder of Swirl, Inc.; Erica Chito Childs, author of Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture and Ken Tanabe, founder of Loving Day.

Here, in this second installment of ITYC Audio Journal, I share details about the panel discussion and some of my personal thoughts about race, identity and “what are you?”

Download the audio here (00:40:48).

A Vanishing Race

Chronicles of Oklahoma
Volume 4, Number 1 (June, 1926)
pages 100-115

G. A. Crossett, Editor
Caddo Herald

One of the largest and most intelligent tribes of original American Indians in the United States today is the Choctaws, who inhabit the southeastern portion of Oklahoma.

The Choctaws formerly occupied the central and northern portions of Mississippi. At the time of the war of the American Independence they numbered about twelve thousand. They early made friends with the white settlers, and rarely gave serious trouble to their white neighbors. They were loyal to the United States Government.

AIDED JACKSON

In the War of 1812, the Choctaws furnished a large regiment of soldiers to the American army, commanded by Andrew Jackson. Their outstanding leader was a young man named Apushmataha. He was unlettered, but a brilliant leader of men; strong and wise in council, eloquent and convincing in speech. He made a journey to the neighboring tribes of Cherokees, Creeks and Chickasaws, and won them over to the cause of the Americans in this campaign. It was during this campaign that he and Andrew Jackson became fast friends—a friendship that continued as long as both men lived. He was with Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and his men gave a good account of themselves, being expert marksmen with their popular weapons, the rifle.

Later years saw Apushmataha the spokesman of his people in Washington, before the Interior Department and Congress. His intimacy and friendship with Jackson was renewed when that warrior became president. It was during this period that agitation for removal of the Indian tribes from the southeastern states began. The white settlers had found the soil good, and wanted it all for themselves…

…By nature the Choctaws were roving, loved the field and forest, the great outdoors. He liked the dew, the big wide places; he built his houses far apart. He communed with his God, Chiowa, he called Him, in His vaulted dome; he felt the pull of the Great Spirit in the outdoors. Not many fullbloods are left. He had mixed his blood with the white, until they truly are a, vanishing race. He has taken on white man’s ways; he has accepted his God; he has taken his language; he has built homes like his white brothers. He is no longer pure American in his blood. Now he lives like the white man. He has as many characteristics as there are people. He has take on the good and the bad. He is simply now like the average American white man.

Read the entire article here.

Representations of colonial intimacy in Anglo-Indian narratives

Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
2009
272 pages

Nandini Sengupta

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century manifestations of colonial intimacy in a range of texts produced by Anglo-Indians, capturing their colonial experience from the 1830s to the 1880s. Through these texts, I examine the ideological implications of interracial intimacy in a range of relationships that were established between the Indians and British in the ‘contact zone.’ The first two chapters examine the letters of Emily Eden and Fanny Parks to probe British women’s experience of India. I argue that the women forge an alternative space of intimacy that defies the notion that Anglo-Indian women remained on the periphery of Indian space as female ethnographers using their pen and pencil to engage in the act of colonial appropriation. Instead, such intimacies and attachments produce an alternative knowledge about India that expand our understanding of colonial interactions. In the third chapter, I read Philip Taylor’s novel Seeta (1872), which recuperates the events of the Sepoy Uprising of 1857. Taylor composes a story of interracial love and marriage between an English administrator and a Hindu widow. Probing the manifestations and ideological import of the sexual and emotional affinities for colonial relations in the moment of the Uprising, I argue that the interracial intimacy in the novel ultimately translates itself into an exercise of punishing the recalcitrant Indian man by embracing the compliant, loyal Indian woman. The final chapter continues the examination of interracial heterosexual intimacy through a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories contained in the volume Plain Tales from the Hills. In particular, I probe his delineations of interracial heterosexual intimacy between various officers of empire and socially marginalized Indian women belonging to different ethnic communities of India to construct an argument about the operations of class in colonial India.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Illustrative Material
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The British Woman Traveler in India: Diplomatic Intimacy and Hetero-Social Bonding in Emily Eden’s Up the Country
• Chapter Two: The British Woman Traveler in India: Cultural Intimacy and Interracial Kinship in Fanny Parks’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim In Search of the Picturesque
• Chapter Three: Interracial Love, Marriage and Female Friendship in Philip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta
• Chapter Four: “Behind the Wooden Gate”: Rudyard’s Kipling’s Stories of Love and Betrayal
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Curriculum Vita
• List of Illustrative Material
  • Page 50: Map of India in 1836
  • Page 89: Frontispiece from Fanny Parks’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque
• Acknowledgements

The Mayes

Chronicles of Oklahoma
Volume 15, Number 1 (March, 1937)
pages 56-65

John Bartlett Meserve

The saga of the Cherokees, from the dawn of their arrival in the old Indian Territory down to the present, is emphatically one of constant change in their social, economic, and political lives. The influence of the adventurous white men who intermarried and cast their fortunes among the Indians was very pronounced. The mixed blood descendants of those soldiers of fortune in numerous instances achieved wealth, distinction, and leadership among the Indians and strongly influenced their tribal life. Numerous families of prominence grew up among the mixed blood Cherokee Indians. These families, while none the less proud of their Indian blood, were and are today, capable, in many instances, of tracing an ancestry back to some early white colonial ancestor of more or less renown. The intermarriage of these families provoked a sort of aristocracy in the social and intellectual life of the Cherokees and today among them are families of the highest culture and refinement. They may have been clannish to a degree, but probably inherited this trait from the Scotch with whom they were largely intermarried. The Cherokees have their “first families” and most charming they are indeed. It is worthy of note that the Cherokee Nation had no principal chief of the full blood after the days of the adoption of its constitution in 1827. Its political affairs, after that time, were managed by shrewd, mixed-blood politicians bearing white men’s names and speaking the white man’s language and frequently, with scarcely enough Indian blood to evidence itself in their features.

The Adair family was outstanding among the Cherokees. Two brothers, John and Edward Adair, Scotchmen whose father is reputed to have achieved much prominence in England during the reign of George III, came to America in 1770 and engaged in trading operations with the Indians and ultimately intermarried among the Cherokees in Tennessee. John Adair married Ga-hoga, a full blood Cherokee Indian woman of the Deer clan and his son, Walter Adair, known as Black Watt, was born on December 11, 1783 and became an active character among the Cherokees. Walter Adair married Rachel Thompson, a white woman, on May 13, 1804 and died in Georgia on January 20, 1835. Rachel Thompson was born in Georgia on December 24, 1786 and died near what is today Stilwell, Oklahoma, on April 22, 1876. Nancy Adair, a daughter of Walter and Rachel Adair was born in Georgia on October 7, 1808, married Samuel Mayes on January 22, 1824 and died in what is today Mayes County, Oklahoma on May 28, 1876 and is buried in the old family cemetery on the Wiley Mayes place some seven miles east of Pryor, Oklahoma…

Read the entire article here.

Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62

The New York Times
2010-03-27

Margalit Fox

The prominent American poet Ai, whose work — known for its raw power, jagged edges and unflinching examination of violence and despair — stood as a damning indictment of American society, died on March 20 in Stillwater, Okla. She was 62 and lived in Stillwater.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of previously undiagnosed cancer, said Carol Moder, head of the English department at Oklahoma State University, where Ai had taught since 1999.

Born Florence Anthony, the poet legally changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese, as a young woman. She received a National Book Award in 1999 for “Vice: New and Selected Poems,” published that year by W. W. Norton & Company.

Her other books include “Sin” (1986), “Fate” (1991), “Greed” (1993) and “Dread” (2003). A posthumous volume, “No Surrender,” is to be published by Norton in September…

…Though Ai’s work was determinedly not autobiographical, its concern with disenfranchised people was informed, she often said, by her own fractional heritage. Many poems could be read as biting dissertations “On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish,” as the title of a 1978 essay she wrote in Ms. magazine put it. (The proportions are telling, too, for not quite adding up to a complete person.)…

…Florence Anthony was born in 1947 in Albany, Tex., and reared mostly in Arizona by her mother and stepfather. For years her biological father’s identity was kept from her. She later learned, as she wrote in an autobiographical essay in the reference work Contemporary Poets, that “I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Let’s Not Be Boxed in by Color / Other Americans Help Break Down Racial Barriers

“Let’s Not Be Boxed in by Color”
The Washington Post, Outlook
1997-06-08
pages C3

“Other Americans Help Break Down Racial Barriers”
International Herald Tribune
1997-06-10
page 9

Amitai Etzioni, University Professor and Professor of International Affairs; Director, Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

In 1990, the Census Bureau offered Americans the choice of 16 racial categories. The main groupings were white and black, which 92 percent of the population chose. The remaining categories were Native American, Aleut and Eskimo, 10 variations of Asian and Pacific Islanders, and “Other.” Some 9.8 million Americans, or 4 percent of the total population, chose “Other” rather than one of the established mono-racial categories—as compared to fewer than 1 million in 1970.

This number will continue to expand. Since 1970, the number of mixed-race children in the United States has quadrupled to reach the 2 million mark. And there are six times as many intermarriages today as there were in 1960. Indeed, some sociologists predict that, even within a generation, Americans will begin to look more like Hawaii’s blended racial mix.

It’s time to acknowledge the increasing number of multiracial Americans—not only because doing so gives us a more accurate portrait of the population, but because it will help to break down the racial barriers that now divide this country. And the place to recognize these new All-Americans is with the next census in the year 2000. Although the actual count will not begin for another two years, the decision about which racial categories are to be used will be made this year — and it is already the subject of considerable controversy…

…Introducing a multiracial category would help soften the racial lines that now divide America by making them more like transitory economic differences rather than harsh, immutable caste lines. Sociologists have long observed that a major reason the United States experiences few confrontations along lines of class is that people in this country believe they can move from one economic stratum to another — and regularly do so. For instance, workers become foremen, and foremen become small businessmen, who are considered middle-class. There are no sharp class demarcation lines here, based on heredity, as there are in Britain. In the United States, many manual workers consider themselves middle-class, dress up to go to work, with their tools and lunches in their briefcases.

But confrontations do occur along racial lines in America because color lines currently seem rather rigid: Many members of one racial group simply couldn’t imagine belonging to another.

If the new category is adopted and, if more and more Americans choose it in future decades, it will help make America look more like Hawaii, where races mix freely, and less like India where castes still divide the population sharply. And the blurring of racial lines will encourage greater social cohesiveness overall…

Read the entire essay here.