Mixed Race Studies

Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency: Performative Reflections on Black Masculine Identity

Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies
Volume 4, Number 3
pages 377-404
DOI: 10.1177/1532708603259680

Bryant Keith Alexander, Acting Dean and Professor of Communication Studies
California State University, Los Angeles

This performative article uses the trope of “passing” as reference to crossing racial identity borders as well as to intra/interracial issues of identity and authenticity. Passing is constructed as a performative accomplishment and assessment by both the group claimed and the group denied. This article is structured around three divisions—passing as cultural performance, the social construction of identity, and the quest for self-definition of socially mediated expectations. All issues are centered within the specific concerns of Black masculine identity. In the process, the essay also seeks to establish the notion of an integrative ethnography of performance that envelops the critique of a performance as a part of the overall textual presentation of experience.

Read or purchase the article here.

PSU MFA Monday Lecture Series: Laylah Ali

Portland State University Campus (at the corner of SW Broadway & Hall)
Shattuck Hall Annex
1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198
Portland, Oregon
2011-01-31, 19:30-20:30 PST (Local Time)

Laylah Ali, Associate Professor of Art
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Free to the public

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and a MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Laylah Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).

PSUs Art Dept. offers free public Art lectures almost every Monday night of the school year. Local, National and International, interdisciplinary artists visit Portland to speak about their work.

The PMMNLS is supported in part by: PICA, Portland Center for Public Humanities, Wealth Underground Farm, Bear Deluxe Magazine, Northwest Film Center. If you or your organization is interested in becoming supporters of the PMMNLS please contact the art department.

For a complete list of MFA Monday Night Lectures please click here.

The Other Hafu of Japan

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanses Daily News
2011-01-14

Brett Fujioka, Rafu Intern

A new documentary examines the lives of racially mixed individuals as they explore their own identities.

Is a ship the same if you take it apart piece by piece and replace its frame? No simple answer exists, as anyone who has tackled this philosophical Rubik’s cube knows.

The ethno-national equivalent to this riddle grows exceedingly more complicated with the swelling number of international unions each year. Statistics in 2004 chart that 1 in 15 marriages in Japan were international and that 1 in 30 children born there possesses a parent of non-Japanese descent. Japan’s ethnic constituency is rapidly changing and its people may need to rethink what it means to be Japanese in a country where blood and national identity are considered one and the same.

The same applies for the hafu (mixed Japanese) community. The lives for each individual half-Japanese vary from person to person and the filmmakers for the upcoming documentary, “Hafu,” and their subjects best represent this.

“Hafu” is the tentative title for an upcoming documentary in Japan following the lives of several half-Japanese individuals as they explore their identities.

Both Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi spent most of their lives away from Japan. Takagi is half Spanish and stayed in Madrid, Sydney, Washington D.C., and Ottowa due to her diplomat father’s itinerant career. She eventually completed her higher education at the Francisco de Vitoria, Complutense and Waseda Universities before finally returning to Japan.

Nishikura, likewise, lived her childhood spread throughout the world. She stayed in Beijing, Manila, Honolulu, DC, Berlin, London, and Los Angeles and graduated from New York University.

“Lara and I have unusual stories and come from international backgrounds,” said Nishikura in an interview with the Rafu. “I don’t know if that’s representative of a lot of the mixed Japanese community.”

There’s a reason why they’re so hesitant to pinpoint a grand narrative for the hafu experience. There is no all-encompassing hafu story and the eclectic subjects of the documentary are indicative of this…

Read the entire article here.

Dominica in Brooklyn

The New York Times
2011-01-13

Carol Vogel, Art Reporter

The Brooklyn Museum has acquired an 18th-century painting by Agostino Brunias, a little-known London-based Italian artist. Around 1764 the British government sent Brunias to the West Indies to document one of that empire’s newest colonies, Dominica. Depicting two richly dressed mulatto women on a walk accompanied by their mother and children—all members of the island’s colonial elite—the painting also shows eight African servants on a sugar plantation.

“We have a large West Indian community,” said Richard Aste, the museum’s curator of European art. “When I saw it, it just screamed Brooklyn. We were looking for something from the 18th century, and we didn’t have anything like this.”

Mr. Aste first saw the painting in Paris in September at the booth of the London gallery Robilant & Voena at the Biennale des Antiquaires. The dealers had bought it from Sotheby’s after the painting failed to sell at auction a year ago. It had belonged to Jayne Wrightsman, a collector and a longtime trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While the Brooklyn Museum will not say what it paid for the painting, Sotheby’s was estimating it would bring $200,000 to $300,000. The museum has titled the canvas “Free Women of Color With Their Children and Servants in a Landscape,” and it will go on view on March 7.

Brooklyn Museum Acquires 18th Century Painting by Agostino Brunias Depicting Colonial Elite

artdaily.org: The First Art Newspaper on the Net
2011-01-18

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.

BROOKLYN, NY.—The Brooklyn Museum has acquired, by purchase from the London gallery Robilant + Voena, Agostino Brunias’s (1730-1796) 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 will go on view 2001-03-07.]

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 documents colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants by their fitted European dresses…

Read the entire article here.

Student director tackles ‘mixed race’ issues

Daily Titan
California State University, Fullerton
2009-05-17

Sean Belk

From hapa to mestizo to mulatto, ‘Half ‘n’ Half’ acts out stories and history of miscegenation. Bright colorful faces peered through shadows of the low-lit set.

The multi-cultural group of student actors then formed a circle, surrounding an infant, and simultaneously shouted, “What would it be like to shake someone’s hand and not know what they are?”

Then, the set went dark.

It was a small 30-minute production, but the subject matter touched on a big topic that some feel has gone under-reported – the aspect of growing up as two races and the discrimination that can go along with it.

The short sketch was part of the Cal State Fullerton Theatre and Dance Department’s Spring 2009 One Act performances, May 8 and 15 in the Arena Theatre, where advanced directing students presented short plays they had been working on throughout the semester for an audience of friends, family and faculty.

“Half ‘n’ Half,” an adaptation from a 1998 compilation of essays written by 17 writers and edited by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, was the only play with an original script adapted from a book. The play was partly written and directed by Lissa Supler, a 25-year-old senior theatre directing major.

Half Filipino and half caucasian, Supler wanted to both share her experience on the subject of being a “mixed race” and also educate people about the history of miscegenation, a term once used to describe interracial marriages that were illegal in the United States until a Supreme Court ruling in 1967…

Read the entire article here.

A Free Man of Color [Theater Review]

The Faster Times
2010-11-18

Johnathon Mandell

Opening Date: 2010-11-18
Closing Date: 2011-01-09

Written by John Guare
Directed by George C. Wolfe

As “A Free Man of Color” begins, its hero, an ex-slave, is a bewigged, bejeweled fop who is the wealthiest and most sexually desirable man in New Orleans. Like the character, the play seems to have everything going for it: deeply talented creators, an exciting cast, splendid costumes, a fascinating period in American history. By the end of the play, the character has been destroyed, in a harrowing half hour that is the dramatic and theatrical highlight of the piece. Long before that end, however, the average theatergoer is likely to feel let down by John Guare’s new play. If it frustrates our expectations, “A Free Man of Color”—ambitious, inventive, daring, sprawling—is an honorable failure with much to recommend it, even while it is difficult to sit through.

Set largely in New Orleans between 1801 and 1806, but wandering around the world, the play, which has now opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, presents the complex intrigue surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, and imagines the effects of these actual historical events on fictitious characters.

The historical tidbits sprinkled throughout the play are tantalizing, especially those with contemporary parallels. To pick one of the more obscure examples: If the 21st century has civil unions for gay people, early 19th century New Orleans had plaçage, an arrangement between a white man and a woman of color…

Read the entire review here.

The Quadroon Ball on stage one week only Oct. 13-17 [2010]

Lone Star College
The Woodlands, Texas
2010-09-22

Lone Star College-CyFair Drama Department presents Damon Wright’s play “The Quadroon Ball” on stage Oct. 13 through Oct. 17 [2010].

“The Quadroon Ball” is a moving drama taking place in New Orleans just prior to the Civil War.  It focuses on the women of mixed race who were prized for their beauty and yet regarded as second-class citizens, said LSC-CyFair Director Ron Jones. The play traces the life of a beautiful Quadroon woman (one quarter black and three quarters white) whose life is affected both by the man of royalty who loves her and the presence of slavery in society.

With a cast of 22 community and college actors, this poignant and elegant story begins as Jeanette is introduced at a cotillion for women of her stature and continues for 20 years, marking her rise to fame and her ultimate demise.

According to The New York Times, “Damon Wright’s ‘The Quadroon Ball’ is an intelligent, affecting new play about race, family, honor and freedom.”  Jones adds that this play is for mature audiences only due to adult subject matter and graphic language.

Hypodescent: New Work by Gabriel Mejia

University of Wisconsin, Madison
George L. Mosse Humanities Building
7th Floor Gallery Room 7240
455 North Park Street
2010-12-11 through 2010-12-16

Gabriel Mejia

All events are free and open to the public.

Closing Reception: 2010-12-16, 19:00-21:00 CST (Local Time).

A meditation on identity and the social constructs of racial assignment. Featuring printmaking and video installations by 2nd year MFA graduate student, Gabriel Mejia.

For more information, click here.

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

Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference
University of California, Riverside
Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy
2011-03-10 through 2011-03-12

Laura Kina, Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design and distinguished Vincent de Paul Professor
DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

Gina Osterloh, Artist
Silverlens Gallery, Manila Philippines
François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

“War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art” investigates the construction of mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American (or, controversially, “Hapa”) identity in the United States. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” “War Baby/Love Child” examines how, or even if, mixed Asian Americans are addressing their hybrid identities in their artwork.

For more information, click here.