Mixed Race Studies

Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62

The New York Times
2010-03-27

Margalit Fox

The prominent American poet Ai, whose work — known for its raw power, jagged edges and unflinching examination of violence and despair — stood as a damning indictment of American society, died on March 20 in Stillwater, Okla. She was 62 and lived in Stillwater.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of previously undiagnosed cancer, said Carol Moder, head of the English department at Oklahoma State University, where Ai had taught since 1999.

Born Florence Anthony, the poet legally changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese, as a young woman. She received a National Book Award in 1999 for “Vice: New and Selected Poems,” published that year by W. W. Norton & Company.

Her other books include “Sin” (1986), “Fate” (1991), “Greed” (1993) and “Dread” (2003). A posthumous volume, “No Surrender,” is to be published by Norton in September…

…Though Ai’s work was determinedly not autobiographical, its concern with disenfranchised people was informed, she often said, by her own fractional heritage. Many poems could be read as biting dissertations “On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish,” as the title of a 1978 essay she wrote in Ms. magazine put it. (The proportions are telling, too, for not quite adding up to a complete person.)…

…Florence Anthony was born in 1947 in Albany, Tex., and reared mostly in Arizona by her mother and stepfather. For years her biological father’s identity was kept from her. She later learned, as she wrote in an autobiographical essay in the reference work Contemporary Poets, that “I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Double Vision

The Walrus
July/August 2012

Emily Landau, Lecturer
Department of History
University of Maryland

Poet Pauline Johnson enthralled Victorian theatregoers with a stereotype-smashing spin on her Mohawk-English heritage. Along the way, she became Canada’s first postmodern celebrity

In late 1892, Emily Pauline Johnson, a prim thirty-one-year-old bluestocking, made her first appearances as her alter ego, Tekahionwake, decked out in a leather dress, moccasins, and all the other accoutrements a Victorian audience might expect a Native woman to wear. For the better part of the previous year, Johnson, a half-Mohawk, half-English poet, had been reciting her work in the salons of English Canada. She was building momentum in the world of letters for her romantic naturalist ballads, and was renowned for her beauty, her striking stage presence, and her impassioned recitals. She had developed a niche as one of Canada’s most accomplished New Women, a cohort of late nineteenth-century feminists who were shedding the sexist shackles of the era. But as her act gathered steam, she created the onstage persona of Tekahionwake, an exaggerated, heightened riff on existing stereotypes, but also an ambassador to familiarize theatregoers with the conditions suffered by Native women.

She ordered a buckskin costume from the Hudson’s Bay Company; ironically, she couldn’t find an authentic outfit on the Six Nations reserve outside of Brantford, Ontario, where she grew up. The dress came with moccasins and a beaded belt adorned with moose hair and porcupine quills. She tore off one sleeve and replaced it with rabbit pelts, then completed the outfit with a hunting knife. (She would later add a bear claw necklace, a wampum belt, and a Huron scalp that had belonged to her grandfather.) Johnson’s audiences ate it up, and she became one of the country’s first celebrities, her distinctive costume generating the same tittering, slightly scandalized, and utterly enthralled reactions as Madonna’s cone bra or Lady Gaga’s meat dress would provoke a hundred years later.

For the next seventeen years, Johnson toured the world as Tekahionwake. She was billed by her promoter, Frank Yeigh, as the Mohawk Princess (a marketing ploy she used throughout her career), and although her branding played into the stereotypes, her stories broke them down. Her tales and poems gave agency to First Nations women, hooking her audience with a mix of poise and campy histrionics. In a trademark flourish, she shed the buckskin during intermission and returned in a staid silk evening gown and pumps, eliciting gasps from spectators as they marvelled at the transformation. The two modes of dress served as an external manifestation of Johnson’s own dual identity: the name Tekahionwake, which she came to use in both her performances and her published poetry, means “double life” in Mohawk…

…With her curly brown hair, grey eyes, and light skin, Johnson could have passed as white, but throughout her life she insisted on asserting her Mohawk heritage. Her need to exaggerate her nativeness in her persona was a conscious act, but it was also likely born of the fact that Indigenous people were — and still are — the only racial group to be legally mandated in Canada. First Nations people had to prove their heritage by establishing that they were biologically descended from a member of an Indian band, which entitled them to certain rights and protections, but diminished their individual agency and relegated them to being glorified wards of the government. (Even the blood-determined “science” of status wasn’t fixed: a Native woman could lose those protections by marrying a non-Native.)…

Read the entire article here.

The nation’s poet

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Personal Journeys
2012-10-06

Rosalind Bentley, Arts and Culture writer

Personal Journeys is a new weekly feature for readers who like good writing and good story-telling

The National Book Festival along the Mall in Washington is thronged with readers and authors who’ve come to revel in the written word on this fall day in 2004.

Just three years old, the festival has been forged by first lady Laura Bush and the Library of Congress in the belief that literature is a living thing, that the right words, composed in just the right way, can push a life forward.

To the podium steps poet Natasha Trethewey.

Her work illuminates people in the shadows: a seamstress stitching her way through segregation; an early 20th-century prostitute so fair skinned she can pass for white; a dock worker’s wife who keeps her husband’s supper warm as she waits for him well into the night.

Into some of her poems she has woven her own complex story: the blending of the black and white blood that made her; her blood tie to her native Mississippi; the blood of her mother, cruelly spilled.

What binds the characters? It is that in the body of American letters, they have routinely been pushed to the edge of the page by other protagonists deemed more “universal.” This day Natasha reads poems that bring their marginalized stories to the center…

…2012: It’s May. Natasha is the incoming chair of the creative writing program at Emory University and the newly minted poet laureate of her home state of Mississippi. She gets an unexpected call from the Library of Congress. Billington and his colleagues have been following her work since her first reading at the book festival. They are impressed with her 2007 collection, “Native Guard.” They are also taken with “Beyond Katrina,” her 2010 meditation on the psychological and structural wreckage dotting Mississippi’s Gulf Coast landscape years after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.

Billington believes the time for this kind of poet is right now. She is only 46 and in the prime of her artistic life. This will signal that the library is looking forward. He offers her the highest United States honor a poet can achieve, poet laureate of the nation.

Saying yes isn’t hard, though the honor humbles her, even makes her a little nervous…

…Sept. 13, 2012: The audience in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington leaps to its feet. Applause crashes against the stage where a black woman in a dark dress stands, her hands clasped to her heart. Today, she looks as though she might burst with joy. This is U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, about to officially open the library’s literary season with a reading. She has come to tell an American story….

Read the entire article here.

Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany

University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender
Multicultural Community Center, Hearst Field Annex-D
2012-09-25, 12:40-14:00 PDT (Local Time)

A reading by Ika Hügel-Marshall

Ika Hügel-Marshall was the child of an African-American serviceman and a white German woman. Born and raised in post-Hitler Germany, she tells about her experience of anti-Black racism and how she came to terms with her identity as an Afro-German. Only at the age of 39 she met other Afro-Germans and was involved in setting up the “Initiative of Black Germans” (ISD). In 1993, she found her father in Chicago and met him and his family—a most profound experience.

For more infomation, click here.

White Mothers of Biracial Sons and Daughters in U.S. Schools:  Colliding, Colluding, and Contending with White Privilege

Jennifer Little, a Ph.D. candidate in the Leadership for the Advancement of Learning and Service program at Cardinal Stritch University, is looking to build out her list of mothers to interview for her dissertation—which is titled “White Mothers of Biracial Sons and Daughters in U.S. Schools: Colliding, Colluding, and Contending with White Privilege”

The purpose of this study is to collect and examine descriptions and portrayals from White mothers of biracial sons and daughters of their interactions with the teachers and principals who work at the public schools in the United States (US) that their children attend. The research questions are:

1. What common discourse components are contained in their descriptions?
2. How do the location differences among the mothers play a role? How do mothers who live in locations where the majority of residents self-identify as White compare to locations where the majority of the residents are not White?
3. How do the mothers’ depictions of the interactions compare to the teachers’ and principals’ portrayals?

A critical discourse analysis approach is planned for examining the descriptions provided by the study participants. The study will interview White mothers of biracial sons and daughters attending public schools across the US. In order to support triangulation, interviews or focus groups with teachers and principals will also be conducted. All the interviews and focus groups will be video recorded. The analysis of the data collected will be completed by reviewing the videos.

If you or someone you know would like to participate in her study, or if you have questions please contact her via e-mail.

She plans to start the interviewing phase in January 2013. She plans to travel to several metropolitan areas around the United States to conduct the interviews. She also plans to video record the interviews for use in a documentary. Some interviews she may need to do via the internet.

The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930

Rutgers University Press
January 2013
240 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5462-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5463-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-5464-8

Jolie A. Sheffer, Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.

The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.

By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.

Poet to discuss biracialism during UHV/ABR Fall Reading Series

University of Houston-Victoria Newswire
Victoria, Texas
2012-09-20

Born to a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father, award-winning author Paisley Rekdal’s mixed heritage often influences her poetry and essay writing.

She will share her insights about biracialism on Sept. 27 as the second speaker in the University of Houston-Victoria/American Book Review Fall Reading Series. Rekdal also will give a reading of her poetry.

The event will begin at noon in the Alcorn Auditorium of UHV University West, 3007 N. Ben Wilson St. It is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

“Rekdal’s interesting mix of style and subject matter is a great addition to our reading series,” said Jeffrey Di Leo, ABR editor and publisher, and dean of the UHV School of Arts & Sciences. “As an Asian American, she gives a voice to a part of biracialism that is underrepresented and continues that theme to other subjects that are often overlooked.”

During the event, Rekdal plans on reading and sharing photographs from her latest book, “Intimate: An American Family Album.” The book is a hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, fiction and nonfiction with photography from Edward S. Curtis, a famous photographer of the American West and Native American people.

The book explores her father’s mixed-race marriage to her mother while paralleling it with stories about Curtis and his Indian guide, Alexander Upshaw. Rekdal found inspiration by looking at photographs from Curtis and imagined his life.

“It’s a memoir about my family, but it also talks about representation of mixed-race people or how they are not represented,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Intimate: An American Family Photo Album

Tupelo Press
April 2012
300 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-932195-96-5
Clothbound ISBN: 978-1-936797-08-0

Paisley Rekdal, Professor of English
University of Utah

Intimate is a hybrid memoir and “photo album” that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, Intimate creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal’s Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis’s murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

Theater; On Hearing Her Sing, Gershwin Made ‘Porgy’ ‘Porgy and Bess’

The New York Times
1998-03-29

Barry Singer

In his tragically short life, George Gershwin knew only one Bess, and this bittersweet fact has framed Anne Wiggins Brown’s life. She was that Bess in the original production of Gershwin’s operatic masterwork based on Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s theatrical adaptation of Heyward’s novel “Porgy.”

More than 60 years have passed since Gershwin’s death in 1937 from a brain tumor. Though singers of every race and nationality have by now assayed the role, Ms. Brown will always be the first, the Bess Gershwin himself chose in 1934.

“Bess is slender but sinewy; very black,” wrote the Heywards. “She flaunts a typical but debased Negro beauty.”

At 85, Ms. Brown still possesses the vibrancy and unaffected elegance that must have first inspired Gershwin. She is not, however, “very black.” For Gershwin that was never a problem. “I don’t see why my Bess shouldn’t be cafe au lait,” he told Ms. Brown before offering her the role.

Yet color has haunted Ms. Brown’s career. In the segregated America of the 1930’s and 40’s, where could a classically trained African-American soprano hope to have a career? The only answer was abroad…

…She was born Annie Wiggins Brown in Baltimore in 1912. Her father, a doctor, was the grandson of a slave; her mother’s parents were of Scottish-Irish, black and Cherokee Indian descent. At 23, Ms. Brown was introduced to the world as an opera singer and an African-American in “Porgy and Bess.” Thirteen years later, in 1948, after more than a decade of concertizing and frustrated ambitions, she left America for Norway…

…”To put it bluntly, I was fed up with racial prejudice,” she explained, her English accented with Scandinavian inflections. “Though there is no place on earth without prejudice. In fact, a French journalist wrote an article during one of my tours there asking: ‘Why does she say she is colored? She’s as white as any singer. It’s just a trick to get people interested.’ Can you imagine? Of course I was advertised as ‘a Negro soprano.’ What is ‘a Negro soprano’?”…

…When the show’s closing notice was posted after 124 performances, the producers announced a tour with stints in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago, to be followed by a week at the National Theater in Washington. Ms. Brown was livid. The National Theater, she knew, was a segregated house.

“I told them: ‘I will not sing at the National. If my mother, my father, my friends, if black people cannot come hear me sing, then count me out.’ I remember Gershwin saying to me, ‘You’re not going to sing?’ And I said to him, ‘I can’t sing!’ ”

After protracted negotiations, the National, for one week only, became an integrated house. When the curtain came down on the final performance of “Porgy and Bess,” segregation was reinstated…

Read the entire article here.

Anne Wiggins Brown (1912-2009)

Afrocentric Voices in Classical Music
2012-01-29

Randye Jones

Soprano Anne Wiggins Brown was born on August 9, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland. (This year, rather than 1915, was confirmed by the singer herself.) Her father, Dr. Harry F. Brown, was a prominent physician and grandson of a slave. Her mother, Mary Wiggins Brown, was of African, Cherokee and Scottish-Irish ancestry. She and her three sisters were active in the musical and theatrical life of the racially segregated community. Brown described her early musical training:

I was always with music. My mother played and sang and she taught her four daughters very much about music. She was my first vocal teacher. In those days there was not much that an African-American could do in the theatre, except roles as a servant or something. I thought about being an opera singer but there also was the same difficulty. In those days the Metropolitan didn’t have any African-American singers.

Brown’s parents tried to enroll her in an area Catholic school, where they hoped to foster her musical talents. However, the school refused to admit an African American. After confronting similar discrimination years later when she applied to the Peabody School of Music, Brown was admitted to Morgan State College in Baltimore and attended Teachers’ College, Columbia University. She continued her classical vocal studies with Lucia Dunham at the Institute of Musical Art at the Juilliard School. Brown became the first African American to win Juilliard’s prestigious Margaret McGill scholarship…

…The song Anne Brown sang for Gershwin, “City Called Heaven,” became a standard of the soprano’s concert repertoire. Gershwin, hearing Brown’s performance of the spiritual, decided that she should be his Bess. The composer often invited Brown to sing not only Bess’s lines as they were written, but other characters’ parts. As work on the opera progressed, Bess’s role grew to the point that Brown suggested to Gershwin that the character’s name be added to the title  [“Porgy and Bess”]…

…Brown discussed the effects her skintone had on her career:

“We tough girls tough it out,” she said with a wry grin. “I’ve lived a strange kind of life—half black, half white, half isolated, half in the spotlight. Many things that I wanted as a young person for my career were denied to me because of my color. On the other hand, many black folks have said, ‘Well, she’s not really black.’ … Only when I went on a train or into a theater did I think about passing, and even then I didn’t consider it passing. I figured if I simply asked for a ticket it was their problem. Onstage, though, it they couldn’t take me as I was—the hell with them.”

Determined to escape the racism so prevalent in America, Brown travelled overseas in 1946…

Read the entire article here.