Mixed Race Studies

Under the Moon’s Light

Directory of World Cinema
2011

English Title: Under the Moon’s Light
Original Title: Sous la clarté de la lune
Country of Origin: Burkina Faso, France
Studio: Les Films de la plaine, NDK productions
Director: Apolline Traoré
Producer(s): Idrissa Ouédraogo
Screenplay: Apolline Traoré
Cinematographer: Daniel Barrau
Editor: Lucie Thierry
Runtime: 90 minutes
Genre: Drama
Language: Moore (Moré), French
Starring/Cast: Rasmané Ouédraogo, Sylvain Lecann, Abdoulaye Koné, Tania Azar, Silvie Homawoo
Year: 2004
Volume: African / Nigerian

Reviewed by: Zélie Asava

Synopsis:

Sous la clarté de la lune interrogates African women’s personal and cultural histories and identities by foregrounding the experiences of mixed-race women and their families, thus exploring the history of interracial relationships in Africa and its diaspora. 

Its central story begins before the narrative starts, about 10 years earlier in a small village in Burkina Faso.  Patrick (Sylvain Lecann), a young white Frenchman steals his mixed-race daughter moments after her young Burkinabé mother has given birth.  As the film opens we see the child, who has been raised in France, return to her mother’s village with her father for what is supposed to be a brief encounter with her other home and family.  Her mother Kaya (Silvie Homawoo) has been mute since the incident.  The mixed-race daughter Martine (Tania Azar) hates the village and its inhabitants, thinking they are all inferior.  She believes her mother to be dead.   Her father Patrick treats the villagers as his servants.  The villagers have been waiting two years for an engineer and Patrick is in town to fix their water pump, as well as to discuss the past with Kaya.  While the locals may reject this white man because of the brutal history he left behind, they need his expertise and money.  The story thus has immediate resonances with Franco-African colonialism and neo-colonialism.

The film follows the three lead characters as they negotiate their differences to form a family.  A fourth key figure, Habib (Abdoulaye Koné), emerges as a young man in love with Kaya and through him spectators are introduced to village life, local systems of power and love, and come to realise that the story may also be read as a series of metaphors on issues of identity…

Read the entire review here.

Enka Superstar Jero: A Conversation and Mini-Concert

University of California, Berkeley
Wheeler Hall
2011-04-08, 20:00-21:15 PDT (Local Time)

Free and open to the public

The Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is proud to announce that Jero, the Japanese-African-American enka singer, has been selected as the winner of the 2nd annual Berkeley Japan New Vision Award. The Center will host an invitation-only award ceremony at 5:00pm on Friday, April 8, at the Doe Library Morrison Room on the UC Berkeley campus followed by a public on-stage interview and mini-concert at 8:00pm in Wheeler Hall.

Part Japanese and part African American, Jero (born Jerome Charles White) is enka’s rising star ever since his hit single Umiyuki burst onto the charts in 2008. His albums, Yakusoku (2009), Covers (2008), Covers 2 (2009), and Covers 3 (2010) have been widely acclaimed as he has revived interest in this music genre. Winner of the 2008 Best New Artist Award at the Japan Record Awards and the 2011 Berkeley Japan New Vision Award, he has also regularly appeared on Japanese TV and commercials as well as performing at the prestigious New Year’s Eve Kôhaku Utagassen concert twice.

The Berkeley Japan New Vision Award was established in 2009 to award an individual who has, in recent times, dramatically transformed our vision of Japan. Singing traditional Japanese ballads in an American idiom, not only has Jero rekindled an interest in enka among the younger generation of Japanese but he has also opened up the possibilities for fluent Japanese-speakers from around the world breaking into the entertainment and other industries in Japan. Given his mixed-race background, he has also become a symbol for the acceptance of a more multiethnic society for 21st-century Japan…

For more information, click here.

Brooklyn Museum Acquires Eighteenth-Century Painting by Agostino Brunias Depicting Dominica Mixed Race Colonial Elite

The Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
T(718) 638-5000, F(718) 501-6134
January 2011

Agostino Brunias (Italian, ca. 1730-1796), Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape, ca. 1764-1796, Oil on canvas, 2010.59, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange.

The Brooklyn Museum has acquired, by purchase from the London Gallery Robilant + Voena, Agostino Brunias’s (1730–96) painting Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape (circa 1764–96), a portrait of the eighteenth-century mixed-race colonial elite of the island of Dominica in the West Indies. Brunias, a London-based Italian painter, left England at the height of his career to chronicle Dominica, then one of Britain’s newest colonies in the Lesser Antilles.

The painting depicts two richly dressed mixed-race women, one of whom was possibly the wife of the artist’s patron. They are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with eight African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation, one of the agricultural estates that were Dominica’s chief source of wealth. Brunias documented colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants by their fitted European dresses.

The painting is a Caribbean version of contemporaneous English works made popular by artists such as William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough, whose art often depicts the landed gentry engaged in leisurely pursuits. Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape and other Caribbean paintings by Brunias celebrate the diversity of European, Caribbean, and African influences in the region.

Although Brunias was originally commissioned to promote upper-class plantation life, his works soon assumed a more subversive, political role throughout the Caribbean as endorsements of a free, anti-slavery society, exposing the artificialities of racial hierarchies in the West Indies. Among his supporters was Haiti’s liberator, François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, who wore on his waistcoat eighteen buttons decorated with reproductions of Brunias’s paintings.

Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape will go on view on March 7, 2011, in the European galleries, on the portraiture wall between contemporaneous female Spanish colonial and French subjects.

Sister Act
 
Gazette.Net: Maryland Community News Online
2011-03-02

Topher Forhecz, Staff Writer

Montgomery College and Doorway Arts Ensemble presents the sisterly story ‘Tether’

When Julie Taiwo Oni wrote the play “Tether,” she did so not only to examine her relationship with her twin sister Jessica Kehinde Ngo, but also to answer a recurring question.

“My whole life everyone’s like ‘What’s it like to be a twin?'” Oni says. “I wanted to write a play about it.”

Co-Produced by Doorway Arts Ensemble and Montgomery College’s Arts Alive Theatre Series, “Tether” premiered at the Studio Theater in the Cultural Art Center at Montgomery College on Feb. 18 and runs through March 13. Set on a tetherball court during the 1990s, “Tether” tells the story of biracial teenage twins Lach (played by Gwen Grastorf) and Lam (Jade Wheeler) as they learn about religion, boys and race. Although they are similar in many ways, Lach’s skin is white and Lam’s is black. Oni gave the twins different skin colors after reading an article on the condition…

Read the entire article here.

Doorway Arts Ensemble and Arts Alive Theatre present: “Tether”

Doorway Arts Ensemble
February 2011

Emily Morrison, Publicist
Office: 703-892-0801

sex, race, religion, tether ball… twin sisters are coming of age [2011-02-18 through 2011-03-13]

Bethesda, Maryland Doorway Arts Ensemble presents Tether, a World Premier play by Julie Taiwo Oni, co-produced with Arts Alive Theatre Artistic Director, Perry Schwartz as part of Montgomery College Silver Spring Arts Alive Theatre Series. This production marks the first presentation by a professional theater organization of a script that received development and a stage reading as part of the 2009 Inkwell’s Inkubator Festival in Washington, DC.

In Tether, Lach and Lam are 15 year old mixed race twins. Lach is white, Lam is black and both are obsessed with tether-ball. In this rhythmic drama, life is a back-and-forth game of rules and regulations, kissing boys, movie-talk and the roots of their religious upbringing. As the sisters come into their maturity and men enter the game, they must learn to tether without their counterpart. When an obstacle swings between them, they must begin to face and embrace the differences between each other in order to be true to themselves

The odds against of a couple having twins of dramatically different color are a million to one, each twin fertilized by different sperm with different genetic input from their parents. The phenomenon is extremely rare… there are only about 5 sets of mixed race twins living in the world today.

Runs February 18 through March 13, 2011.
Performances: Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sunday Matinee at 2pm
Monday, March 7 at 8 PM – Special Performance

Friday Feb 18 – Press Night – followed by reception (press are welcome to all performances)
Saturday Feb 19 – Q&A follows performance featuring the dramaturg, director, playwright and actors

TICKETS: $10 for general admission/$7 for students and seniors/$5 for MC Students, Faculty and Staff. Call 240-567-5775 or order online at www.tickets.com. All performances opening weekend are Pay What You Can.

LOCATION: The Studio Theater in the Cultural Art Center at Montgomery College Silver Spring 7995 Georgia Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20910 [map & directions]…

For more information, click here.

Red/Black: Related Through History

Eitejorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art
White River State Park
500 West Washington Street
Indianapolis, Indiana
2011-02-12 through 2011-08-07

Explore the interwoven histories of African Americans and Native Americans with Red/Black: Related Through History. This groundbreaking exhibition is the result of a partnership between the Eiteljorg Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Red/Black includes the NMAI panel exhibit IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas and portrays the shared experiences of African and Native Americans as allies and adversaries, through images, artifacts, film and more. The exhibition also explores issues of race and identity and the question: “Who am I and who gets to say so?” Red/Black will be supported by performances, genealogy workshops, lectures and other dynamic programming.
 
The story of this largely ignored subject is told through personal narratives, paintings, baskets, pottery, photographs and other rare items gathered from private collections and museums across the country. See a basket made by a Cherokee-owned slave and hear drum music with shared African and Native rhythms. Learn how the exhibit narrative relates to you, what we know about the past and how people judge one another…

For more information, click here.

Seven Hours To Burn

Women Make Movies
USA/Canada, 1999
9 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm
Order No. W01699

Shanti Thakur

“A visually expressive personal documentary that explores a family’s history. Filmmaker Thakur mixes richly abstract filmmaking with disturbing archival war footage to narrate the story of her Danish mother’s and Indian father’s experiences. Her mother survives Nazi-occupied Denmark while her father experiences the devastating civil war in India between Hindus and Muslims. Both émigrés to Canada, they meet and marry, linking two parallel wars. Their daughter lyrically turns these two separate histories into a visually rich poem linking past and present in a new singular identity.” Doubletake Documentary Film Festival Catalogue

View the trailer here.

Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout

The New York Times
2009-07-29

Michael Cieply

LOS ANGELES — History repeats itself. But sometimes it needs a little polishing up from Hollywood.

Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.

The encounter has created unexpected bad blood over incidents that occurred—or not—more than 100 years ago. And it offers a glimpse of the way that show business and its values have become entwined with the academic book world and its decision-making process.

On June 23 Doubleday published “The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy,” a narrative history by the Harvard scholar John Stauffer and the Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins. The book, which on Monday was ranked No. 83 on Amazon’s best-seller list, presented Newton Knight, the leader of the renegade county, as a morally driven hero in the mold of John Brown—but whose appeal was enhanced by his romance with an ex-slave who, in the book’s account, became the love of his life as relations with his white wife cooled.

In the book’s acknowledgments, the authors thanked Mr. Ross, who they said had brought the idea to their editor, Phyllis Grann at Doubleday, and whose screenplay had served as “our impetus and our inspiration.”

This all came as a surprise to Victoria Bynum, a history professor at Texas State University, San Marcos. Her own book on the subject—“The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”—had been published eight years earlier by the University of North Carolina Press, which sold the film rights to Universal as material for Mr. Ross’s project in 2007…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Celebrities on Race, in their Own Words

Time Magazine: Healthland
2011-02-15

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

Who Are You?

If biracial and multiracial celebrities have anything in common, it is that they are often asked to explain themselves. That may sound familiar to any person of mixed ancestry for whom questions like “What are you?” and the slightly more delicate “Where are your parents from?” are the norm.

“Historically, racism is equated with segregation, separating people,” says Marcia Alesan Dawkins, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. “In turn, we think racial progress is racial mixing. But the problem is, [that progress is] still based on appearance.”

People who embody racial diversity can’t be expected to explain the concept to everybody else, but their thoughts on the matter are often illuminating. As Dawkins said, “It’s still important to bring issues of multiracial identity to the public’s attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Hollywood’s Whiteout

The New York Times
2011-02-11

Manohla Dargis

A. O. Scott

CRAMMED into this year’s field of 10 best picture Oscar nominees are British aristocrats, Volvo-driving Los Angeles lesbians, a flock of swans, a gaggle of Harvard computer geeks, clans of Massachusetts fighters and Missouri meth dealers, as well as 19th-century bounty hunters, dream detectives and animated toys. It’s a fairly diverse selection in terms of genre, topic, sensibility, style and ambition. But it’s also more racially homogenous—more white—than the 10 films that were up for best picture in 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first black American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind.” In view of recent history the whiteness of the 2011 Academy Awards is a little blinding.

Nine years ago, when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won his and her Oscars—he was only the second African-American man to win best actor, and she was the first African-American woman to win best actress—each took a moment to look back at the performers from earlier generations who had struggled against prejudice and fought to claim the recognition too often denied them…

…What happened? Is 2010 an exception to a general rule of growing diversity? Or has Hollywood, a supposed bastion of liberalism so eager in 2008 to help Mr. Obama make it to the White House, slid back into its old, timid ways? Can it be that the president’s status as the most visible and powerful African-American man in the world has inaugurated a new era of racial confusion—or perhaps a crisis in representation? Mr. Obama’s complex, seemingly contradictory identity as both a man (black, white, mixed) and a politician (right, left, center) have inspired puzzlement among his supporters who want him to be one thing and detractors who fear that he might be something else.

In their modest way American movies helped pave the way for the Obama presidency by popularizing and normalizing positive images of black masculinity. Actors like Mr. Poitier and Harry Belafonte made the leap, allowing black men to move beyond porters and pimps to play detectives, judges, the guy next door, the God upstairs and the decider in the Oval Office. At the same time, while the variety of roles increased, the commercially circumscribed representational conservatism of American cinema—with its genre prerogatives and appetite for uplift, its insistence on archetypes and stereotypes, villains and heroes—meant that these images tended to fit rather than break or bend the mold. Certainly this isn’t a cinema that jibes with what, in his 2007 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama called “the fluid state of identity.”…

Read the entire article here.