Mixed Race Studies

Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America

Basic Books an imprint of The Perseus Books Group
2006-12-28
302 pages
ISBN: 9780786718825
ISBN-10: 078671882X

Elliott Lewis

Television journalist Elliott Lewis weaves his memoirs as a black-and-white biracial American with the voices of dozens of multiracial people who are challenging how we think and speak about race today. “What are you?” This seemingly ordinary but politically charged question has become a touchstone for debate around race and ethnicity. Now, more than ever, mixed race Americans are calling themselves biracial and multiracial rather than feeling forced to choose only one race. Nearly seven million people checked more than one racial category in the 2000 US census, the first time in history Americans had the option to mark more than one box. With Fade, Lewis offers a comprehensive look at the multiracial state of the union. Here he speaks with dozens of individuals, tackling hot button issues such as the often complicated lives of multiracial people in communities of color, interracial dating, transracial adoption, and the birth of the multiracial movement. The author also shares his own moving — and often humorous — firsthand experiences with race, along with intimate stories from those at the forefront of nationwide efforts to formally recognize the multiracial population.

How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity

Temple University Press
1999
264 pages
6×9
EAN: 978-1-56639-651-6
ISBN: 1-56639-651-4

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Davis

This compelling account of racial identity takes a close look at the question “Who is a Latino?” and determines where persons of mixed Anglo-Latino heritage fit into the racial dynamics of the United States. The son of a Mexican-American mother and an Anglo father, Kevin Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this insightful book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino-Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, race relations, and affirmative action in contemporary United States.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
2. A “Latino” Law Student? Law 4 Sale at Harvard Law School
3. My Mother: One Assimilation Story
4. My Father: Planting the Seeds of a Racial Consciousness
5. Growing Up White?
6. College: Beginning to Recognize Racial Complexities
A Family Gallery
7. A Corporate Lawyer: Happily Avoiding the Issue
8. A Latino Law Professor
9. My Family/Mi Familia
10. Lessons for Latino Assimilation
11. What Does It All Mean for Race Relations in the United States?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sab and Autobiography

University of Texas Press
1993
185 pages
6 x 9 in.
ISBN: 978-0-292-70442-8

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga
Translated and introduced by Nina M. Scott

Eleven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin fanned the fires of abolition in North America, an aristocratic Cuban woman told an impassioned story of the fatal love of a mulatto slave for his white owner’s daughter. So controversial was Sab’s theme of miscegenation and its parallel between the powerlessness and enslavement of blacks and the economic and matrimonial subservience of women that the book was not published in Cuba until 1914, seventy-three years after its original 1841 publication in Spain.

Also included in the volume is Avellaneda’s Autobiography (1839), whose portrait of an intelligent, flamboyant woman struggling against the restrictions of her era amplifies the novel’s exploration of the patriarchal oppression of minorities and women.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Autobiography of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Sab
Notes
Works Cited

Read an excerpt here.

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

W. W. Norton
May 2006
240 pages
5.8 × 8.6 in
ISBN: 978-0-393-05890-1

Kym Ragusa, Professor of Nonfiction &  Professor Writing
Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina
Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Inistitute of Technology

A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty.

Kym Ragusa’s stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa’s working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them.

From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker’s observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa’s sensuous memories are a reader’s delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage.

Sugar & Slate

Planet Books
January 2002
192 pages
ISBN-10: 0954088107
ISBN-13: 978-0954088101
8.1 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches

Charlotte Williams, Professor of Social Work
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year, 2003

A mixed-race young woman, the daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and black father from Guyana, grows up in a small town on the coast of north Wales. From there she travels to Africa, the Caribbean and finally back to Wales. What begins as a journey becomes a fascinating confrontation with herself and with the idea of Wales and Welshness.

Sugar and Slate is a remarkable personal memoir that speaks to the wider experience of mixed-race Britons, characterised by its constant pull of to-ing and fro-ing, movement and dislocation, going away and coming back with always a sense of being ‘half home’. It is a story of Welshness and a story of Wales but above all a story for those of us who look over our shoulder across the sea to some other place.

Winnefred and Agnes: The Story of Two Women

Independent Publishing Group
September 2002
288 pages, Cloth, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
6 B/W Photos, 1 Chart, 1 Map
ISBN: 9780795701139 (0795701136)

Agnes Lottering

This is a rare, possibly the first, first-person account of being part of the group of mixed-race families who came into existence at Ngome in the province of KwaZulu-Natal when, in the late 19th century, well-to-do British and Irish traders took Zulu wives and adopted Zulu cultural practices, including polygamy. The author recounts her life and that of her mother in this true account of a Zululand family whose lives were touched in equal measure by tribal belief and Christianity, healing herbs, magical birds, and the tokeloshe, a mischievous creature surrounded by myth and sexual innuendo. It is also a tale of betrayal, grand passion, bewitchment, abuse, and the triumph of love. Part love story and family saga, part social history, it is above all a uniquely South African tale.

Agnes Lottering was born in Ngome Forest in 1937. Due to financial and other constraints, she never completed her schooling. Yet she is a gifted storyteller, telling her tale with freshness and authenticity. She lives in Durban, South Africa.

Hey Mum, What’s a Half-Caste?

Independent Publishing Group
April 2010
316 pages, Trade Paper, 5.75 x 8.25
35 B/W Photos
ISBN: 9781921248030 (1921248033)

Lorraine McGee-Sippel

Compelling and honest, this memoir recounts the diffuse effects of a governmental policy that required the author’s adoptive parents to be informed of her Afro-American ancestry. Chronicling her personal search for cultural identity, this account also delves into indigenous studies, Australian history, and psychology. This remarkable story is simultaneously universal and deeply personal and will educate and inspire readers.

Lorraine McGee-Sippel is a descendent of the Yorta Yorta people from the Murray-Goulburn region on the Victorian-NSW border. She is a contributor to numerous anthologies and publications, and in 2008 she received the Inaugural Yabun Elder of the Year Award for her contribution to reconciliation and community work.

Lara

Bloodaxe Books
2009
192 pages
Paperback ISBN: 1 85224 831 9

Bernardine Evaristo

Lara is a powerful semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse based on Bernardine Evaristo’s own childhood and family history. The eponymous Lara is a mixed-race girl raised in Woolwich, a white suburb of London, during the 60s and 70s. Her father, Taiwo, is Nigerian, and her mother, Ellen, is white British. They marry in the 1950s, in spite of fierce opposition from Ellen’s family, and quickly produce eight children in ten years. Lara is their fourth child and we follow her journey from restricted childhood to conflicted early adulthood, and then from London to Nigeria to Brazil as she seeks to understand herself and her ancestry.

The novel travels back over 150 years, seven generations and three continents of Lara’s ancestry. It is the story of Irish Catholics leaving generations of rural hardship behind and ascending to a rigid middle class in England; of German immigrants escaping poverty and seeking to build a new life in 19th century London; and of proud Yorubas enslaved in Brazil, free in colonial Nigeria and hopeful in post-war London. Lara explores the lives of those who leave one country in search of a better life elsewhere, but who end up struggling to be accepted even as they lay the foundations for their children and future generations.

This is a new edition of Bernardine Evaristo’s first novel Lara, rewritten and expanded by a third since its first publication in 1997.

Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life

University of Arizona Press
1998
188 pages
5.0 x 8.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2270-5

Luis Alberto Urrea

Here’s a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the ‘hood, hoping for the American Dream.

…I’m not saying it’s our story. I’m not saying it isn’t. It might be yours. “How do you tell a story that cannot be told?” writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining. Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son’s ethnicity. “You are not a Mexican!” his mother once screamed at him. “Why can’t you be called Louis instead of Luis?” He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love. “I am nobody’s son. I am everybody’s brother,” writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war—both in the political arena and in their own homes—to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody’s Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.

Read an excerpt here.

Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference

Berg Publishers
September 2007
224 pages, bibliog., index
Paperback ISBN: 9781845202439
Hardback ISBN: 9781845202422
Ebook ISBN: 9781847883438

Mica Nava, Professor of Cultural Studies
University of East London

Cultural theorist Mica Nava makes an original and significant contribution to the study of cosmopolitanism by exploring everyday English urban cosmopolitanism and foregrounding the gendered, imaginative and empathetic aspects of positive engagement with cultural and racial difference.

By looking at a wide range of texts, events and biographical narratives, she traces cosmopolitanism from its marginal status at the beginning of the twentieth century to its relative normalisation today. Case studies include the promotion of cosmopolitanism by Selfridges before the first world war; relationships between white English women and ‘other’ men—Jews and black GIs—during the 1930s and 1940s; literary, cinematic and social science representations of migrants in postcolonial Britain; and Diana and Dodi’s interracial romance in the 1990s. In the final chapter, the author draws on her own complex family history to illustrate the contemporary cosmopolitan London experience.

Scholars have tended to ignore the oppositional cultures of antiracism and social inclusivity. This groundbreaking study redresses this imbalance and offers a sophisticated account of the uneven history of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Table of Contents

List of figures
Acknowledgements

I. INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 – Cosmopolitanism, Everyday Culture and Structures of Feeling: The Intellectual Framework of the Book

II. COSMOPOLITANISM AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE 1910s-1920s
Chapter 2 – The Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango
Chapter 3 – ‘The Big Shop Controversy’: Ideological Communities and the Chesterton-Selfridge Dispute

III. DIFFERENCE AND DESIRE IN 1930s-1940s
Chapter 4 – The Unconscious and Others: Inclusivity, Jews and the Eroticisation of Difference
Chapter 5 – White Women and Black Men: The Negro as Signifier of Modernity in Wartime Britain

IV. COSMOPOLITANISM IN POSTCOLONIAL BRITAIN
Chapter 6 – Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually: Race in Postwar Fiction, Film and Social Science
Chapter 7 – Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed: Romance, Race and the Reconfiguration of the Nation

V. CONCLUSION: ACTUALLY EXISTING COSMOPOLITANISM
Chapter 8 – A Love Song to our Mongrel Selves: Cosmopolitan Habitus and the Ordinariness of Difference

Bibliography
Index