Mixed Race Studies

Last Child

Henry Holt and Company (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2005
240 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages,
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8050-7739-1, ISBN10: 0-8050-7739-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-4299-3709-2, ISBN10: 1-4299-3709-2

Michael Spooner, Director
Utah State University Press

A mixed-race girl must grow up quickly when danger threatens her world

Rosalie’s biggest problem used to be her own divided feelings. The constant tug-of-war between her white half and her Native American half is hard. She even has two names: Rosalie when she’s at the fort with her father and Last Child when she’s in the village with her mother.

But now a steamboat has carried smallpox into Rosalie’s world—and the Mandans have no resistance to the disease. Suddenly the name Last Child is all too real.

Set during the smallpox epidemic of 1837, this is the powerful story of a mixed-race girl fighting her way into adulthood against all odds.

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance

Palgrave an (imprint of Macmillan)
May 2007
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-1-4039-8640-5, ISBN10: 1-4039-8640-1

Lynette Goddard, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre
Royal Holloway, University of London

Staging Black Feminisms explores the development and principles of black British women’s plays and performance since the late Twentieth century. Using contemporary performance theory to explore key themes (such as migration, motherhood, sexuality, and mixed race identity), it offers close textual readings and production analysis of a range of plays, performance poetry and live art works by practitioners, including Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, Valerie Mason John, Winsome Pinnock, Jacqueline Rudet, Debbie Tucker Green, Dorothea Smartt, Su Andi, and Susan Lewis.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: HISTORY AND AESTHETICS
  • Black British Women and Theatre: An Overview
  • Black Feminist Performance Aesthetics
• PART II: PLAYS
  • Winsome Pinnock’s Migration Narratives
  • Jacqueline Rudet (Re)Writing Sexual Deviancy
  • Jackie Kay and Valerie Mason-John’s Zamis, Lesbians and Queers
• PART III: PERFORMANCES
  • Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troops
  • Solo Voices: Performance Art, Dance and Poetry
• PART IV: CONCLUSIONS
  • Black Feminist Futures?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Harvard University Press
February 2012
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
17 halftones, 1 line illustration, 1 map
Hardcover ISBN 9780674047747

Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law
University of Michigan

Jean M. Hébrard, Historian and Visiting Professor
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
University of Michigan

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family’s quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.

Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie’s great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.

Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

Halfbreed

University of Nebraska Press
1973
157 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6311-6

Maria Campbell

“I write this for all of you, to tell you what it is like to be a Halfbreed woman in our country. I want to tell you about the joys and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustration and the dreams. . . . I am not bitter. I have passed that stage. I only want to say: this is what it was like, this is what it is still like.”

For Maria Campbell, a Métis (“Halfbreed”) in Canada, the brutal realities of poverty, pain, and degradation intruded early and followed her every step. Her story is a harsh one, but it is told without bitterness or self-pity. It is a story that begins in 1940 in northern Saskatchewan and moves across Canada’s West, where Maria roamed in the rootless existence of day-to-day jobs, drug addiction, and alcoholism. Her path strayed ever near hospital doors and prison walls.

It was Cheechum, her Cree great-grandmother, whose indomitable spirit sustained Maria Campbell through her most desperate times. Cheechum’s stubborn dignity eventually led the author to take pride in her Métis heritage, and Cheechum’s image inspired her in her drive for her own life, dignity; and purpose.

Bettez to discuss experiences of mixed race women

The Southern Illinoisan
2011-10-28

Christi Mathis, Staff Writer
University Communications at SIU Carbondale

CARBONDALE – Silvia C. Bettez will present “But Don’t Call Me White: Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics” on Tuesday, Nov. 1, at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
 
The guest lecture in Wham Building, Room 219, is set for 3:30 to 5 p.m. and everyone is welcome to attend. Bettez is an assistant professor of cultural foundations of education in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s School of Education.
 
The basis of her presentation is her recently released book of the same title. Bettez extensively interviewed 16 women of mixed race, all having one white parent and one parent of color. She considers the women “secret agent insiders to cultural whiteness,” with the experiences and ability to offer unique insights and perspectives that they see in light of their lives as mixed race individuals. Bettez will discuss “the hidden dynamics of oppression and privilege along the lines of race, class, gender and sexuality.”…

Read the entire article here.

Interview with Zara Paul: A Future Leader

London School of Economics
2011-10-26

Zara Paul recently graduated from LSE. She has been listed among the top 100 black graduates of the UK in the Future Leaders magazine 2011-12. In this interview she talks about her time at LSE, her passion for music, what being mixed race means to her and how she sees herself as being ‘massive’ in the next 10 years.

How did you feel when you heard that you had been selected among the top 100 black graduates of the country?

I felt absolutely brilliant! It didn’t sink in until I went to the actual Future Leaders event. I was surrounded by so many intellectuals and academics and politicians. I thought it was a great privilege. I couldn’t believe it…

…Tell us about your family history. Where do you trace your ‘roots’ to and are those ‘roots’ part of your identity?

My mum is Scottish-Irish and my dad is Jamaican. In my school, as a mixed race person coming from a council estate, I always stood out. I think that made me a bit stubborn, it made me think I am still going to be a little nightmare but I am also going to be smart and get my A levels and GCSEs behind me. I think being stubborn is a really good thing, to a degree. I did my dissertation on whether your identity changes dependent on your location. In a rural area, you may be black; in a multicultural area, you are who you are.

Do you believe in celebrating your mixed race status?

I love being mixed race. I can fit into so many social groups, most people can’t do that; so it’s something I think I should embrace. For example, when I did research into the riots, people found talking to me easier because of my mixed race status. In my heart however, I did think that when we are talking about equality why do we have to have separate awards for ‘black graduates’?…

Read the entire interview here.

Black devils, white saints and mixedrace femme fatales: Philippa Schuyler and the winds of change

Critical Arts
Volume 25, Issue 3 (2011)
Special Issue: The Afropessimism Phenomenon
pages 360-376
DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2011.615140

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

This article sheds new light on abstract definitions of Afropessimism by analysing the self-fashioning of Philippa Schuyler in southern and central Africa during the Cold War. Schuyler had achieved prominence as an African-American child prodigy in the 1930s and 40s, and a peripatetic concert pianist in the 1950s, before becoming an ultra-conservative writer who opposed African decolonisation in the 1960s. Rather than relying on the tired cliché of the American tragic mulatto to explain Schuyler’s existential choices, or limiting the scope of her story to an (Afro)Americocentric frame, this article argues that her virulent anti-black racism threatened purportedly respectable forms of colonial whiteness. In doing so it uses a New Historicist approach to contend that pessimistic positions about resistance can be combined with the study of practices that unveil the ironies and limits of power. In addition, it addresses Frantz Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the woman of colour and the white man,’ and argues that Fanon’s work in the 1950s and 60s can be used to question Schuyler’s desire to 1) condemn the ‘force vitale’ of Negritude, 2) praise white colonialists and 3) adopt an ‘off-white’ identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Clench: What are You Fighting For?

Commissioned By: Runnymede Trust-UK’s Leading Race Equality Think Tank
2011
Written and directed by Riffat Ahmed
Produced by Shane Davey, Courtney Edwards, Riffat Ahmed and Fabien Soazandry of Davey Inc
Running Time: 00:15:39

Starring: Hussina Raja as Ash
With: Kevin Morris, Jeff Caffrey, Afreen Mhar, Allan Hopwood, and Danny Randall

Made as part of the Runnymede Trust’s Generation 3.0 project, which looks at how racism can be ended in a generation, this short film tells the story of Ash, a mixed-race girl from Old Trafford, Manchester.

On a youth referral scheme, we see Ash travel to the iconic Salford Lads Club where she takes up boxing as a way of dealing with her troubled past. By portraying Ash’s experience of the sport, the film highlights how the boxing ring can be a neutral space where race and neighbourhood politics are left outside.

The film looks at not only Ash’s own experience of racism, but also the preconceptions she holds about other people and places.

Clench demonsrates how boxing can become the ultimate visual tool for communication between generations, highlighting that every person has a story to tell regardless of how they look.

Music: Sam Baws
Director of Photography: Jake Scott
Sound Design: Ashley Charles
Editor: Vid Price

Supporting Cast: Ezzo DeVaugn, Billy Wain, Kane Hannaway, Charell Anerville, Philip Mulher, Adam Crosby, Sam Walker, Rico Stewart, Dan McCan, Anna Baatz, and Patrick O’Brien

Gaffer: Gwyn Hemmings
Focus Puller: Matt French
Second AC/DIT: Jan Koblanski Bowyer
Sound Recordist: Shaun Hocking
Make up: Sophie Mechlowitz and Leah Tesciuba
Red Camera: HH Films Manchester
Anamorphic Lenses: Nick Gordon Smith
Lighting: Arri Manchester
Colourist: Martin Southworth @ Nice Biscuits

Shot on location in Manchester, England

She Just Loved Baseball

Black Athlete Sports Network
2010-02-28

Bill Carroll

NEW YORK—Effa Manley was seemingly yet another “lost” pioneer in Negro Leagues Baseball before being posthumously honored in 2006 with induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

She was part of a class of players and executives selected by a special committee chaired by former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent. But a plaque for the only woman inducted in the Hall of Fame barely touches the surface of an often controversial life.

Manley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Bertha Ford Brooks, was of German and East-Indian descent. Bertha, who was a seamstress, gave birth to Effa after becoming pregnant by her wealthy White employer, John M. Bishop.

Bertha’s husband, Benjamin Brooks, who was Black, sued Bishop and received a settlement of $10,000 before he and Bertha divorced.  Bertha later remarried, and Effa was raised in a household with a Black stepfather and Black half-siblings.

Inheriting somewhat dark skin from her mother, she chose to live as a Black person, leading most people to assume her stepfather was her biological father and to classify her as Black.

After graduation from high school in Philadelphia, she moved to New York to work in the millinery business. She met Abe Manley, an African-American man 24 years older than she, at the 1932 World Series at Yankee Stadium, where she had gone to see her favorite player, Babe Ruth…

…The Newark Eagles were founded in 1936 when the Newark Dodgers merged with the Brooklyn Eagles. The Eagles sported the likes of Hall-of-Famers Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, and Willie Wells.  The Eagles shared Ruppert Stadium with the Newark Bears, beginning in 1936…

…In addition to managing her baseball team, Manley was also a social activist for Civil rights. She organized a boycott of Harlem stores when they wouldn’t hire Black salesclerks. It took only six weeks for the stores to give in.

As a result, one year after the boycott, 300 stores employed Blacks. She held an “Anti-Lynching Day” at Ruppert Stadium and was treasurer for the Newark chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)…

Read the entire article here.

First woman among 17 elected to baseball Hall

Associated Press
2006-02-27

TAMPA, Fla.—Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame when the former Newark Eagles executive was among 17 people from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues chosen Monday by a special committee.

“This is a historic day at the Hall of Fame,” shrine president Dale Petroskey said. “I hoped that someday there would be a woman in the Hall. It’s a pretty proud moment.”…

…Manley co-owned the New Jersey-based Eagles with her husband, Abe, and ran the business end of the team for more than a decade. The Eagles won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946—one year before Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color barrier.

“She was very knowledgeable, a very handsome woman,” said Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, who played for the Eagles while the Manleys owned the team, as did Don Newcombe and Larry Doby.

“She did a lot for the Newark community. She was just a well-rounded, influential person,” Irvin said. “She tried to organize the owners to build their own parks and have a balanced schedule and to really improve the lot of the Negro League players.”

Manley was white but married a black man and passed as a black woman, said Larry Lester, a baseball author and member of the voting committee.

“She campaigned to get as much money as possible for these ballplayers, and rightfully so,” Lester said.

Manley used baseball to advance civil rights causes with events such as an Anti-Lynching Day at the ballpark. She died in 1981 at age 84.

“She was a pioneer in so many ways, in terms of integrating the team with the community,” said Leslie Heaphy, a Kent State professor on the committee. “She’s also one of the owners who pushed very hard to get recognition for Major League Baseball when they started to sign some of their players.”…

Read the entire article here.