Mixed Race Studies

Identity, Discrimination and Violence in Bessie Head’s Trilogy

University of South Africa
November 2002
71 pages

Corwin Luthuli Mhlahlo

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the subject of English

This dissertation seeks to explore the perceived intricate relationship that exists between constructed identity, discrimination and violence as portrayed in Bessie Head’s trilogy from varying perspectives, including aspects of postcoloniality, materialist feminism and liminality.

Starting with a background to some of the origins of racial hybridity in Southern Africa, it looks at how racial identity has subsequently influenced the course of Southern African history and thereafter explores historical and biographical information deemed relevant to an understanding of the dissertation.

Critical explorations of each text in the trilogy follow, in which the apparent affinities that exists between identity, discrimination and violence are analysed and displayed.  In conclusion the trilogy is discussed from a largely sociological perspective of hope in a utopian society.

Read the entire thesis here.

Author Interview: Neela Vaswani

Sarabane Books
2010-07-19

The lovely Neela Vaswani takes a moment to chat with us about her new book, You Have Given Me a Country, out August 15 [2010].

Your previous book, Where the Long Grass Bends, was a collection of short stories with a strongly mythic cast, and your memoir is told in meticulously rendered vignettes. How did you move from fashioning fiction out of the tales of your childhood, to turning your childhood and young adulthood into a (nonfiction) tale?

When I write in any genre, the raw materials and techniques are the same—it’s just the approach that differs. Early in the book I say, “I pledge allegiance to story,” and that’s what I always aim to do, to honor the simplest and most valuable truth at the heart of any story…

Your background is Indian- and Irish-American—two intensively chronicled, often romanticized, identities. When the personal has so much overlap with the familiar, how did you confront the challenge of making your experiences read as yours?

The simplest thing I did was to focus on the particular way I see the world—as me, Neela, rather than as someone who is “half Indian, half Irish.”  Still, I had some negotiating to do.

At first, it was difficult for me to explore my Indian-American identity without falling into the same story-patterns and language as other Indian-American writers. I felt that same caution when writing about biracial identity; there has been so much written, especially recently, about our identity and experience. I wanted to try to speak from those traditions and shared experiences while also telling my story in a fresh way…

Read the entire review here.

The best fiction and poetry of 2010

The Washington Post
Friday, 2010-12-10

…THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, by Heidi W. Durrow (Algonquin, $22.95). When several family members fall off the roof of a Chicago apartment building, the sole survivor is biracial Rachel, who goes to live with her grandmother in an African American neighborhood. –Lisa Page…

Read the entire article here.

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.

Natasha Trethewey: 2010

Littoral: The Journal of Key West Literary Seminar
2010-03-17

Arlo Haskell

Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry, including Native Guard, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Domestic Work, which won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A native of Mississippi, a member of the Dark Room Collective, and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University, Trethewey’s work often shifts from the personal to the historical, confronting subjects that include the legacies of racism in America and her own experiences as a person of mixed race growing up in the deep South.

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Trethewey reads a selection of poems including “Limen,” “Genus Narcissus,” “Myth,” “Miscegenation,” “Taxonomy,” and “Knowledge: After a Chalk Drawing by J.H. Hasselhorst, 1864.”

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World (17:57) / 10.3 MB

“Mixed Race, White Mother: Love and Identity in the Age of Obama”

8th Floor, Raymond Hall
State University of New York, Potsdam
2011-03-22, 16:00 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Traci Fordham-Hernandez, Associate Professor of Performance and Communication Arts
St. Lawrence University

Part of the SUNY Potsdam Women’s and Gender Studies Anne R. Malone Lecture Series.

For more information, click here.

Half-Caste (An Excerpt)

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 1, (2008)
6 pages

Angela Ajayi

At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as “half-caste.” The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was used with frequency and ease to refer to those of us who had European mothers and African fathers in Nigeria.

For a long time—from early childhood to late teens—I accepted the word, not giving it much thought since it wasn’t necessarily used in a negative way. In fact, if you were “half-caste,” you were different in a way that was usually considered interesting and more attractive. The “half-caste” women, for instance, were often sought after and desired by Nigerians for love affairs; the men deemed good-looking. Or so I observed, growing up in Plateau State, Nigeria, where more than a handful of mixed-race families lived.

In the first decades following Nigeria’s independence from the British in 1960, many Nigerian men received scholarships to study in Europe and the former Soviet Union. They left for their studies—and some of them returned, after many years, with foreign wives. My father was one of these men who came home with a European wife. While studying veterinary medicine in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, he met my mother and married her in a tumultuous time of discrimination and racial prejudice against black students in the Soviet Union…

Read the entire excerpt here.

Alumni Profile • Angela Ajayi ’97

The Calvin Spark
The Magazine for Alumni and Friends of Calvin College
Fall 2005

Working at the big question

Who am I and how do I fit in this world?

While every person struggles with these questions, they come to Angela Ajayi ’97 with some particular twists. The daughter of a Nigerian veterinarian and a Ukrainian caterer, Ajayi attended Hillcrest International School in Jos, Nigeria, prior to coming to Calvin. She was encouraged to take a practical course through college, in order to assume a professional life upon her return to Nigeria. But the pre-dentistry major discovered in her English classes “something about literature that gave me a sense of being alive.” She struggled, she said, with what to do. “I was thinking about the future. What would I do with an English major? But passion won.”..

Read the entire article here.

‘You Can Get Lost in Cape Town’: Transculturation and Dislocation in Zoë Wicomb’s Literary Works

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (2008)
10 pages

María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, Professor of English
University of Córdoba

In Zoë Wicomb’s novels and short stories, main characters tend to share Wicomb’s coloured condition—mixed-race identity as defined by South African apartheid legislation—and her diasporic experience as a South African living in Scotland. Transculturation, dislocation and inbetweenness emerge as central notions for the experience of many of Wicomb’s characters, who often occupy an ambivalent and fluid space in which different cultural worlds and identities come into conflict and negotiation.

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation and Race: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally [A Tribute]

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
pages 1-5
E-ISSN: 1536-0334, Print ISSN: 0160-9009

Estelle B. Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

The following papers pay tribute to Peggy Pascoe’s [1954-2010] extraordinary book What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. They originated at a session held at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in January 2010 to explore the implications of Pascoe’s work for current histories of race and gender. Sitting in the audience, I enjoyed not only the roundtable but also the deep pleasure evident on Pascoe’s face as she listened to the presentations and to the discussion of the influence of her book on our scholarship and our teaching. Peggy Pascoe always makes us think harder, in her gentle and affirming ways. This session gave her a taste of the rewards sown by her latest scholarly achievement. I could sense that day that I shared with others in attendance a sense of pride and vicarious gratification that so treasured a colleague should be recognized in this way.

Both sweeping and detailed, What Comes Naturally constructs the dual histories of the criminalization of interracial marriage and the resistance to that process by individuals and social movements, spanning the century between the 1860s and the 1960s. Since its publication in 2009 the book has been widely honored. It has received both the Hawley Prize and the Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, both the Dunning and the Kelly Prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. The range of subjects covered by these awards is telling: economy, politics, or institutions; cultural history; women’s history or feminist theory; American history; sociolegal history. In short, this is a book that has already had a profound effect on the profession across its many specializations…

Articles

Legal Fictions Exposed
pages 6-14

Eileen Boris, Eileen Boris Hull Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law
pages 15-21

Jacki Thompson Rand, Associate Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

“The Relics of Slavery”: Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South
pages 22-30

Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Nikki Sawada Bridges Flynn and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 31-40

Valerie J. Matsumoto, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Therapeutic Culture and Marriage Equality: What Comes Naturally and Contemporary Dialogues about Marriage
pages 41-48

Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
City University of New York, Queens College

Social Movements, the Rise of Colorblind Conservativism, and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 49-59

Matt Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University