Mixed Race Studies

2013-03-06

My name is Nina Robinson, a third year photography student at Glamorgan University. To form part of the research for my dissertation about mixed-race identity, I am looking for British mixed-race girls aged 16-25 to fill in my questionnaire. It’s a good way to express your opinions and feelings, be part of a project and help out a student!

Please email me at njrobinson@hotmail.co.uk if you are interested.

Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series

Weisman Art Museum
University of Minnesota
333 East River Road
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
(612) 625-9494
2013-02-16 through 2013-05-12

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

Join us for a talk with Laylah Ali on March 7, 2013.

WAM is pleased to present Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series. This is the first time the Greenheads series, created between 1996 and 2005, is being shown as a comprehensive body of work. Forty-three of the exquisitely rendered gouache paintings—from a total of more than eighty—have been gathered from collections here and abroad to chronicle the series’ development.

The figures inhabiting Ali’s works—the Greenheads—are enigmatic, round-headed beings of indeterminate sex and race who inhabit a regimented, dystopian world where odd and menacing, though sometimes strangely humorous, encounters prevail.

This exhibition will allow viewers to examine the evolution of Ali’s series. While the early paintings frequently focus on physically aggressive exchanges between groups of figures, these interactions are later replaced by individuals—alone or in small groups—who witness the prelude to, or aftermath of, a charged encounter. As the series continues, more and more of the figures’ anatomy is pruned away, as if the artist is examining how much can be taken out—such as arms, feet, skin color—while still communicating thought, emotion, and social status.

This exhibition was organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota Department of Art…

For more information, click here.

60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman

The New York Times
2005-01-23

Edward Lewine

Ellen Gallagher dabbed a swirl of gray watercolor onto the delicate pencil drawing she had just sketched of a furry hamster. Late December sunlight radiated through the windows at Two Palms Press, the SoHo printmaking studio where she has spent the last 18 months preparing a work comprising 60 collage prints. Titled “DeLuxe,” it is the subject of its own show at the Whitney Museum, opening this week.

Weeks remained until “DeLuxe” had to be delivered, and the mood in the lower Broadway loft was intense. One artist glued toy eyeballs onto a collage; another placed wig shapes made of plasticine clay onto a different collage; while a master printer was in a darkroom reproducing pages from black magazines like Ebony, Sepia and Our World that dated from the 1930’s through the 1970’s.

Reserved in manner, with a sonorous voice and a girlish laugh, Ms. Gallagher seemed relaxed despite her looming deadline and pleased to see the first copy of “DeLuxe” nearing completion. (The set of 60 collages will be printed 20 times in a numbered edition.)

“I love this moment,” she said. “It is sort of delicious. You have come through the agonizing part, when you are trying to articulate what you want to say but can’t. You have made your ideas visible.”

Until recently, Ms. Gallagher, 39, had charted a quiet if successful course as an artist, mostly as a painter whose work plays with ideas about race. In the past year, however, her career has gained momentum. Major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art have bought paintings; and the technical virtuosity of “DeLuxe,” the subject of her first solo show in a New York museum, is generating buzz…

…Many curators praise Ms. Gallagher for her ability to discuss race without being pompous and for the way she balances ideas with technique. “She’s masterful at creating tension between form and content,” said Elizabeth Smith, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which bought a Gallagher painting last year.

Not all agree. Ms. Gallagher has been faulted for what some critics see as a certain facile quality. Writing in The New York Times about Ms. Gallagher’s winter 2004 show at the Gagosian Gallery, Ken Johnson called her paintings and collages “visually catchy” but “too obvious.”

Ms. Gallagher said she draws such criticism because her material makes people uncomfortable. “Somehow in America black artists aren’t allowed to use banal images of blackness,” she said. “On the other hand, the idea of something black and inscrutable is also very disturbing.”…

…Ms. Gallagher was raised in Providence, R.I. Her mother was white, her father black. Her father, a professional boxer, was rarely around, she said, and died in 1998.

Growing up, Ms. Gallagher said, she learned to navigate the worlds of her mother’s blue-collar, Irish family, her father’s family of recent immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands and the homes of her friends, many of them African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

“Double Natural”

Yale University
Department of African American Studies
81 Wall St., Gordon Parks Room 201
2013-01-24, 11:45-13:15 EST (Local Time)

Ellen Gallagher, Hayden Visiting Artist
Yale University Art Gallery

Ellen Gallagher breaks the boundaries of traditional art by using materials and found images in unexpected ways. Her work often looks at how African Americans have been represented and stereotyped. She also explores her own identity and experience as an American woman of African and Irish descent. In DeLuxe (2004-2005), Gallagher experimented with printmaking by using materials including Plasticine and glitter to transform old advertisements for beauty products targeted at African Americans into a work of art.

Co-sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Dept. of African American Studies.

One Drop of Love: Debut Performance

Arena Theater
California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State University Drive [Directions] [Map]
Los Angeles, California 90032
Saturday, 2013-03-09, 20:00 PST (Local Time)

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator
Jillian Pagan, Director

One Drop of Love is a solo show by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni that journeys from Jamaica to Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Michigan, and East and West Africa from 1790 to the present to explore how ‘race’ affects our most intimate relationships.

For more information, click here.

US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey on the legacy of the Civil War

The Washington Post
2013-01-30

Ron Charles

One hundred and fifty years later, Americans are still fighting the Civil War, US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey said at the Library of Congress on Wednesday. The field of battle is now historical memory, and gatling guns have been replaced by symbols, but the contest over what sort of nation this will be — and was — continues, according to the 46-year-old poet.

Before a standing-room-only crowd of 300 people, Trethewey focused her remarks on Walt Whitman’s complicated response to black soldiers. Her lecture — in association with the Library’s “Civil War in America” exhibit — elegantly blended scholarship, cultural criticism and poetry…

…When she toured historic sites in her native Mississippi, where “the dead stand up in stone,” she found the same act of erasure still being carried out by memorials, plaques and even tour guides working for the Park Service. The record is “rife with omission and embellishment” that keeps “blacks relegated to the margins of historical memory,” she said. The Daughters of the Confederacy worked diligently to make sure that Americans remember the Civil War “only in terms of states’ rights, not in terms of slavery.”

Trethewey’s lecture this week was a kind of homecoming. Ten years ago, she conducted research on black soldiers in the Library of Congress and composed parts of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, “Native Guard,” in the Main Reading Room. Her most recent collection, “Thrall,” explores her life as the daughter of an African American woman and a white man, the poet Eric Trethewey…

Read the entire article here.

‘Romance of Race’ reveals rich cultural history

BGSU News
Bowling Green, Ohio
Thursday, 2013-02-14

A new book by Dr. Jolie Sheffer is further confirmation that one should never doubt the power of the pen. “The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1890-1930,” published in January by Rutgers University Press, explains the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of modern American multiculturalism.

Like their male counterparts Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo in Europe, these authors provided their largely middle-class, female readers an intimate and sympathetic look at people with whose lives they were otherwise unfamiliar. Through stories of romances between white men and minority women told in human terms, authors such as María Cristina Mena, Mourning Dove, Onoto Watanna and Pauline Hopkins created a vision of the United States as a mixed-race, even incestuous nation, says Sheffer, English and American culture studies…

Read the entire article here.

Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women in Poetry and Prose

Bamboo Ridge Press
1999
396 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0910043590; ISBN-13: 978-0910043595

Edited by:

Marie Hara

Nora Okja Keller

This book is out of print.

In this collection of poetry, prose, and personal essay, both new and well-known women authors of mixed race ancestry examine history, culture, and identity using insight from the female psyche. Featured are writings by Ai, Cristina Bacchilega, Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Debra Kang Dean, Kiana Houghtailing Davenport, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Velina Hasu Houston, Cathy Kanoelani Ikeda, Carolyn Lei-lanilau, Susan Miho Nunes, Sigrid Nunez, Mindy Eun Soo Pennybacker, Michelle Cruz Skinner, Cathy Song, Adrien Tien, Kathleen Tyau, and twenty-five other writers.

Me: A Book of Remembrance

University Press of Mississippi
1997 (Originally published in 1915)
368 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0878059911 (9780878059911)
Paper ISBN: 087805992X (9780878059928)

Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954)

Afterword by:

Linda Trinh Moser, Professor of English
Missouri State University

A Chinese-Eurasian’s autobiographical novel tracing a woman’s dual quest for a writing career and romance

Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry.

In Me: Book of Rembrance her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but in the plot, as Nora journeys from her birthplace in Canada to the West Indies and to the United States, Eaton recounts her own early life and writing career. One of sixteen children, Nora leaves her destitute family in Quebec to earn a living. Only seventeen and with ten dollars in her pocket she sets sail for Jamaica and the chance to do newspaper work. Nora ends up in Chicago, moving from job to job, trying all along to sell stories she writes in her spare time. When she discovers that the man with whom she is in love is married, she moves to New York and gains achievement as a novelist. Against this nineteenth-century sensibility of Nora’s search for success and love, Eaton conveys the powerlessness of the typical young woman of the working class. Her autobiographical plotline discloses a remarkable secret, Eaton’s reticence about her own half-Chinese ancestry.

Despite the silence of the text, Me: A Book of Rembrance reveals turn-of-the-century views on race, gender, and class. In Jamaica Nora describes the racial inequities and disparities. Moreover, when she says, “I myself was dark and foreign-looking, but the blond type I adored,” she reveals the extent of her own internalized oppression. Although the author believes her own mixed ancestry precludes prejudice on her part, the text proves otherwise. Like other ethnic immigrants, Nora is indoctrinated into America’s Anglo preference.

The Fictive Flapper: A Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston and Cather

University of Maryland, College Park
2004
391 pages

Traci B. Abbott, Lecturer, English and Media Studies
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This study seeks to reevaluate the 1920s icon of assertive female sexuality, the flapper, as represented in the novels of four women writers. Although cultural images often designate, by their very construction, normal and alteritous social categories, I argue that the flapper’s presence and popularity encourage rather than restrict this autonomy for even those female populations she appears to reject, notably lower-class women, nonwhite women, and homosexuals. Specifically, the flapper was predicated upon the cultural practices and beliefs of many of the very groups she was designed to exclude, and therefore her presence attests to the reality of these women’s experiences. Moreover, her emphasis on the liberating potential of sexual autonomy could not be contained within her strictly defined parameters in part because of her success in outlining this potential. Each chapter then focuses upon images of black and white female sexuality in the novels, chosen for their attention to female sexual autonomy within and beyond the flapper’s boundaries as well as the author’s exclusion from the flapper’s parameters.  Nella Larsen’s Passing suggests that the fluidity of female sexual desire cannot be contained within strict dichotomies of race, class, or sexual orientation, and women can manipulate and perhaps even transcend such boundaries. Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life offers a critique of the flapper’s excessive emphasis on sexual desirability as defined by conspicuous consumption, maintaining that lower-class white and black women can and should have access to sexual autonomy, while Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston similarly questions the denigration of working-class and non-white women in this model with her affirming view of Janie Woods, but also complicates the cultural presumption that any woman can find autonomy within a heterosexual relationship if such relationships are still defined by conventional notions of gender power. Finally, Willa Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, contends modern black and white women have the right to control their own sexual needs within an unusual antebellum setting. Thus, all of these novel provide other models of sexual autonomy besides the white, middle-class, heterosexual flapper while harnessing the flapper’s affirming and popular imagery.

Read the entire dissertation here.