Mixed Race Studies

Bob Marley ‘blacked up’ to blend in

The Independent
2010-12-04

Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent

Reggae superstar Bob Marley suffered due to his mixed-race background

Bob Marley preached inner peace and serenity to the masses, but was so racked by angst over his race that he used shoe polish to blacken his hair, according to a new book.

Such insecurities, during Marley’s teenage years in Kingston, Jamaica, contrast strongly with the reggae superstar’s image around the world.

…Marley’s widow, Rita, is quoted in the book—entitled I and I: The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh and Wailer—as saying that her husband was so racially sensitised and aware of bullying for having a fairer complexion that he asked her to “rub shoe polish in his hair to make it more black; make it more African.”

The author, Colin Grant, has interviewed members of Marley’s inner circle for the book, released in January [2011]. These include Marley’s late mother Cedella Booker and Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records.

Grant explained: “When Marley moved to Trench Town in Kingston aged 13 he was thought of as a white man and would have got a lot of grief for that.”…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality

University of Texas Press
December 2010
183 pages
62 b&w illus, 14 color photos
7 x 10 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-292-72324-5

Anita González, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Theatre Arts
State University of New York, New Paltz

Photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer
Foreword by Ben Vinson III

While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves to be either black or African. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as having a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—of dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal the influence of African people and their cultural productions on Mexican society.

In this work, Anita González articulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. Festival dances and, sometimes, professional staged dances point to a continuing negotiation among Native American, Spanish, African, and other ethnic identities within the evolving nation of Mexico. These performances embody the mobile histories of ethnic encounters because each dance includes a spectrum of characters based upon local situations and historical memories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ben Vinson III
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Framing African Performance in Mexico
• Chapter 2: Masked Dances: Devils and Beasts of the Costa Chica
• Chapter 3: Archetypes of Race: Performance Responses to Afro-Mexican Presence
• Chapter 4: Becoming National: Chilena, Artesa, and Jarocho as Folkloric Dances
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality, as the title suggests, is a book about dancing. But more important, it is a book about how dance reflects on social histories and relationships. The photographs and text document how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. The idea of Afro-Mexico is, in some ways, an enigma. While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves either black or African. Instead, members of this ethnic population blend into the national imagination of Mexico as a mixed-race country. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This construct obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal that African people and their cultural productions have consistently influenced Mexican society…

…Race in the Americas

The concept of race is continually being redefined. “Race” troubles academic theorists and affects popular social conceptions about origins and nationality. Political events like the rise of Barack Obama challenge existing myths about race and bring to questions the realities of racial mixtures in the Americas. In both local and global communities public understandings about blackness greatly influence who African Diaspora people think they are. Clearly, those who reside in Mexico are Mexican. However, self-perceptions influence both self-esteem and the sense of belonging. Recently, I was traveling by airplane to Costa Chica and picked up a copy of the magazine Intro*, which services the Oaxacan coast. Inside was a story about a surfer named Angel Salinas, an Afro-Mexican from Mancuernas, Pinotepa Nacional. Salinas is a surfing star who has won national and international tournaments. But he wears a wrestler’s mask to cover his face when he appears in public. The article states that the surfer wears the mask as “a result of some advice that his mother gave him when he didn’t appear in magazines because of his dark skin; he decided to do something that would make him different and that would show a Mexican cultural icon. Now he is known as ‘the masked surfer.'” Angel Salinas feels the need to cover his face in order to feel Mexican. Although Mexico is a country where, at first glance, the races have mixed to become a “cosmic race,” there are still urgent social discrepancies that manifest as internalized or blatant racism. This discrepancy between public policy and daily practices influences the kinds of lives that contemporary Afro-Mexicans lead…

Casta Paintings: Inventing Race Through Art

The Tavis Smiley Show
National Public Radio
2004-06-30

Mexican Art Genre Reveals 18th-Century Attitudes on Racial Mixing

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is hosting the first-ever major exhibition paintings that reflect what many upper-class Spaniards thought about race, class and skin color during the 1700s, when Mexico was a colony of Spain. NPR producer Nova Safo reports on the controversial exhibit.

The genre of art, called casta, reveals more about prejudices in Spain at the time than the reality in Mexico. One portrait of a family, used as the centerpiece of the LACMA exhibit, is typical of the genre: A mother with snow-white skin, a dark-skinned father and a daughter with skin tone in between the two appear as prosperous and well-dressed.

But the title of the portrait is curious: “De Espaniol y Albina, Torna Atras”—literally, “From a Spaniard and Albino, return backwards.” The prevailing theory at the time was that albinos were thought to be part African. So the union of an albino with a Spaniard was actually seen as a step backward, towards African heritage…

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the story (00:05:26) here in Real Media or Windows format.

Video from 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul now available on iTunes U

If you missed the Nov 5-6, 2010 “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies” conference or any of the keynote talks or the welcoming address, you can now download the videos via Apple’s iTunes U.

Here is a link to the following videos:

• November 5th (00:19:48): Welcoming Remarks by DePaul’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean Charles Suchar and conference organizers Camilla Fojas, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Laura Kina.
• November 5th (00:50:36): Keynote Address by Andrew Jolivette, “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation”
• November 6th(01:00:04): Keynote Address by Mary Beltrán, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”
• November 6th (00:57:08): Keynote Address by Louie Gong, “Halfs and Have Nots”

Please note that your computer must have Apple’s iTunes installed in order to view the video.  It can be download here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus
DePaul University Student Center
2250 N. Sheffield
Chicago, Illinois USA 60614
2010-11-05 through 2010-11-06

Sponsored by DePaul University Asian American Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies and co-sponsored by the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and the MAVIN Foundation.

“Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” the first annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 5-6, 2010.

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have reached a watershed moment, the 2010 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Fanshen Cox, Tiffany Jones, and myself will participate in a Greg Carter (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) moderated round-table discussion titled “Exploring the Mixed Experience in New Media” on 2010-11-05 from 10:15 to 12:15 CDT at the conference.

View the finalized schedule here.

Organizers:

Wei Ming Dariotis, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University, IPride Board
dariotis@sfsu.edu

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Mulatto Nation: An installation by Lezley Saar

The List Gallery at Swarthmore College
2003-02-28 through 2003-03-30

Lezley Saar

From: Mulattos at War: Battle of ‘Halfway’

Historian Lezley Saar, professor emerita from MU (Mulatto University) and a lifelong outspoken activist for the Mulatto Movement, traces the history of the Mulatto Nation from its bumpy beginnings to its conflicted present. She has codified the five stages of its history, depicted here in visual form, as follows: “Birth of a Nation”, “The Founding Mothers and Fathers of the Mulatto Nation”, “The Mulattoville Athenaeum”, “Alienation” and “Materialism and the Mulatto”. This site is dedicated to all the Mulattos, Quadroons, Octoroons, Lily-skins, Creoles, Cafe-au-Laits, Hybrids, Half-Breeds, and High Yellow House Niggers who have championed this great Nation.

For for information, click here.

Artist Ellen Gallagher humbled by new honor

The Providence Journal
2010-02-21

Bill Van Siclen, Journal Arts Writer

The first time her work appeared in a Whitney Biennial, the every-other-year exhibit that aims to take the pulse of contemporary art, Ellen Gallagher was just one of many up-and-coming artists vying for attention.

That was back in 1995, when Gallagher, a Providence-born painter and printmaker whose interests range from carpentry and scrimshaw to African-American history and culture, was barely out of art school.

Fifteen years later, Gallagher is Biennial-bound once again.

This time, however, she’s returning as a certified art star — someone whose work is avidly collected by major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Museum, and whose name is regularly mentioned alongside the likes of Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney. Even the Whitney Museum, which organizes the Whitney Biennial (and where the show’s 2010 edition opens Thursday), has several of her works in its permanent collection…

…WHILE MANY ARTISTS draw inspiration from a variety of sources, Gallagher’s reference points — everything from slavery to sea creatures to Sun Ra — seem particularly wide ranging. Then again, so is her background.

Born in 1965, Gallagher grew up in a biracial household headed by her father, an American-born Cape Verdean who traced his roots back to 19th-century whalers and who did odd jobs to support the family, including occasional stints as a professional boxer.

When he left suddenly, the burden of raising Gallagher fell on her mother, a white Irish Catholic who eventually saved enough money to buy a house in Providence’s Washington Park neighborhood…

Read the entire article here.

Scratching the surface: Artist Laylah Ali explores the social dynamics that lie beyond appearances

Boston Globe
2008-08-29

Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

WILLIAMSTOWN – Laylah Ali doesn’t let many people into her studio.

“It’s a private space,” the artist says, welcoming a visitor. “It’s like being in my brain. I’m inviting you into my private brain space – the chaos and the mess.”

As far as chaos goes, this isn’t bad. In the basement of a building on the outskirts of the Williams College campus, where Ali teaches art, an airy studio is filled with white illustrator’s tables. Colored pencils and squat bottles of ink clutter the tables. But what catches the eye are the drawings Ali has tacked to the white walls with pushpins: Portraits, made in her signature cartoon style, of haunted figures with garish headdresses, scarification, and false beards, and smaller drawings that feature ruminative lists with oddly adorned figures drawn over them…

…Growing up in Buffalo as the daughter of an African-American father and a white mother, Ali attuned herself early to social dynamics and covert aggression. The family lived in an all-white neighborhood.

“I was the only black kid in my school,” Ali says. “I’ve been able to negotiate different social places because of that. . . . More people are seeing this now because of Barack Obama, but there have always been biracial people in the US, with the ability to move between these worlds and notice what’s different and what’s not different.

“I developed heightened powers of observation not just from curiosity,” she adds, “but for survival.”

As a child, the artist saw implicit judgment many places, and it wasn’t always black and white.

“It’s not just race. It’s also class,” Ali points out. “My mom’s family had come from some money. It was gone, but they still had the idea of what it’s like to have nice silver, a nice oriental rug. They had an aspiration from what they had lost.

“Dad’s family was from the farming Mississippi South. He grew up working the land. I keep asking him questions and finding out more things. He walked five miles to school and had no electricity at home.”

“My family is very American,” she sums up…

Read the entire article here.

Mixedness and The Arts

Runnymede Thinkpiece
Runnymede Trust
July 2010
18 pages
ISBN: 978-1-906732-63-9 (online)
EAN: 9781906732639 (online)
ISBN: 978-1-906732-64-6 (print)
EAN: 9781906732646 (print)

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

This think piece explores the presentation of mixed-race identity in the sphere of arts and culture in the UK.

The piece examines some of the assumptions that surround mixed identity, and places them in a historical, political and policy context.

Taking contributions from practitioners in the arts, many of whom have engaged this issue directly, the report lays out the three key topics that arise from reflection on the debates:

Dr. Caballero frames her argument under the subheadings of Recognition of Experience; Negotiation of Complexity; and Politics of Ownership.

The debates identified by this think piece (and hopefully the ones sparked by it) are highly important to our understanding of racial dynamics in British society today.

Table of Contents

Contents
Foreword
Introduction
A note on terminology
1. Background: discussions of ‘mixedness’
2. The recognition of experiences
3. The negotiation of complexity
4. The politics of ownership
5. Summary and concluding thoughts
References

Foreword

The increasing visibility of mixedness and mixed people has led to a great deal of reflection on the nature of ethnic identities and their significance for society at large. In the light of census data predicting ‘mixed race’ becoming the largest ethnic minority group within two decades, there has been widespread debate about what this means for race and race relations in the 21st century. However debates on this subject rarely engage critically with the complexity that discussions of identity, let alone mixed ethnic identities truly deserve. The statistic above has often been accepted at face value with little thought devoted to teasing out exactly what such a ‘fact’ assumes about the nature of race, and whether these assumptions are ones that a modern, multi-ethnic nation is comfortable with.

In order to address this lack of nuance, Runnymede and the Arts Council have commissioned this thinkpiece by Dr Chamion Caballero. The piece examines some of the assumptions that surround mixed identity in Britain today, and places them in a historical, political and policy context. Taking contributions from practioners in the Arts, many of whom have engaged this issue directly; it lays out the three key topics that arise from reflection on the debates. Dr. Caballero argues that the first such issue is Recognition of Experience and whether the recognition of mixed experience is welcome or even necessary. Following on from this is the Negotiation of Complexity; many of the artists who commented stressed that representation of mixed identity must involve recognising the complex nuances inherent in that identity if it is not to become shallow, reductive, or irrelevant. The final issue, and perhaps the most loaded is the Politics of Ownership; who gets to define ‘mixedness’ and who gets to represent it, are sensitive issues that must be borne in mind, and many of the participants were wary of easy answers to these questions.

The debates identified by this think piece (and hopefully the ones sparked by it) are highly important to our understanding of racial dynamics in British society today. Questions of mixedness open up further questions not just about our concepts of race but of the nature of identity and its construction. Debates rage about the apparent failure of the multicultural project and its policy successors, about biological determinism and the role of genetics, about immigration and nationality, and about the role of art in a society facing economic strictures not seen in a generation. Deeper reflections upon concepts like race and identity, art and culture which underpin so many of these discussions could therefore scarcely be more timely. We publish this paper to encourage, rather than close down debate. We believe that it is important that we reflect on these issues and consider how best to ensure that policy and practice delivers for all if we are to become a successful multi-ethnic society.

Dr Rob Berkeley
Director, Runnymede

Read the entire report here.

Bruno Mars in Ascension

New York Times
2010-10-05

Jon Caramanica

When history books address the pop seismology of the early 21st century, a chapter will have to be set aside for a discussion of the Sheraton Waikiki in the late 1980s. That’s where Bruno Mars, then just a few years old, performed as part of a tourist-trap family band, singing doo-wop, Elvis and more. He even made a cameo as a baby Elvis in the 1992 film “Honeymoon in Vegas,” appearing as a bouffant-haired tyke in a blue jumpsuit, with a fierce hip shake.

“I can’t believe that’s my past,” Mr. Mars said in an interview before his first solo New York performance, a sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom in late August. “I wish I could tell you me and my rock band were traveling around, strung out. No, we were a family band. Straight Partridge Family.”

Still, there’s something to be said for learning a wide repertory at a young age, and also to feel no shame in people-pleasing. It’s made Mr. Mars, 24, one of the most versatile and accessible singers in pop, with a light, soul-influenced voice that’s an easy fit in a range of styles, a universal donor. There’s nowhere he doesn’t belong…

…But his placelessness hasn’t always been an asset. Born Peter Gene Hernandez, Mr. Mars is primarily of Puerto Rican and Filipino descent, which proved to be an obstacle in his industry dealings. “I was always like, girls like me in school, how come these labels don’t like me?” he said.

An early record deal with Motown went nowhere. Race was always a concern. “Sadly, maybe that’s the way you’ve got to look at it,” he said. “I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.” He named his debut EP, released this year, “It’s Better if You Don’t Understand”—a taunt.

“Don’t look at me—listen to my damn music,” he said. “I’m not a mutant.”…

Read the entire article here.