Mixed Race Studies

Ellen Gallagher at Tate Modern

The Telegraph
2013-05-02

Alastair Smart, Arts Editor of the Sunday Telegraph

In this solid retrospective, America’s Ellen Gallagher subtly mixes pretty abstraction with reference to her black heritage, says Alastair Smart.

I sometimes feel sorry for artists today. Not in the sense that I’d make a £2 monthly donation for their welfare or anything.

Rather that today’s artist is expected to produce work that’s not just visually striking but conceptually clever. Brains must match looks, and woe betide anyone whose art isn’t deemed “deep” enough to inspire reams of post-structuralist theory.

America’s Ellen Gallagher, now the subject of a Tate retrospective, negotiates this tightrope better than most. Drawing on her mixed-race heritage (with a father from the Cape Verde Islands), she infuses works of minimalist abstraction with subtle references to black history.

Watery Ecstatic, her ongoing series of watercolours and incised paper collages, features all manner of delicately-rendered marine life: from eels, jellyfish and seaweed to fantastical sea monsters. Their intricacy recalls that of old whalers’ scrimshaw – with an unexpected twist…

Read the entire review here.

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. [Book Review]

The Journal of San Diego History
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer 1981)

W. Michael Mathes (1936-2012), Professor of History
University of San Francisco

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. By Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodríguez O. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. 362 pages.

In general, Mexico’s colonial past has been interpreted as a negative experience by modern scholars. Within Mexico this interpretation is based primarily upon political concepts which idealize pre-Cortesian culture and condemn Spain as a cruel, autocratic nation which forcefully imposed itself upon Aztec civilization through bloody conquest. Foreign scholars either adhere to this “Black Legend” concept or, in a more revisionary sense, simply condemn colonialism as an institution. This new study presents a positive approach to the three centuries of Spanish domination in Mexico as an integral part of national evolution, not as a better-to-be forgotten period of darkness.

The basis for the development of Colonial Mexico, New Spain, is seen as mestizaje, the fusion of Indian and European culture which began with the conquest in 1519. In that Aztec and Spanish society shared more similarities than differences, mestizaje produced a dynamic new race, referred to by José Vasconcelos as “Cosmic,” the “Mexican.” As an integral part of society within New Spain, the mestizo is seen as the prime mover of economic growth and cultural homogeneity…

Read the entire review here.

Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Tate Modern: Exhibition
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
2013-05-01 through 2013-09-01

Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the mid-1990s. Her gorgeously intricate and highly imaginative works are realised with a wealth of virtuoso detail and wit. This is her first major solo exhibition in the UK, providing the first ever opportunity to explore an overview of her twenty-year career.

Gallagher brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film and animation. The exhibition explores the themes which have emerged and recurred in her practice, from her seminal early canvases through to recent film installations and new bodies of work.

In her series of wig-map grid collages, Double Natural, POMP-BANG, and eXelento, Gallagher has appropriated and incorporated found advertisements for hair and beauty products from the 1930s to the late 1970s from publications such as Ebony, Our World, and Black Stars. These advertisements fostered ideals in black beauty through wigs and hair adornments, which Gallagher has then recontextualised, collaging the Afro wig elements and embellishing them with plasticine. As she comments: ‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’…

For more information, click here.

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico

University of California Press
December 1980
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520042803

Colin M. MacLachlan, Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Jamie E. Rodríguez, Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

“The Forging of the Cosmic Race” challenges the widely held notion that Mexico’s colonial period is the source of many of that country’s ills. The authors contend that New Spain was neither feudal nor pre-capitalists as some Neo-Marxist authors have argued. Instead they advance two central themes: that only in New Spain did a true mestizo society emerge, integrating Indians, Europeans, Africans, and Asians into a unique cultural mix; and that colonial Mexico forged a complex, balanced, and integrated economy that transformed the area into the most important and dynamic part of the Spanish empire.

The revisionist view is based on a careful examination of all the recent research done on colonial Mexican history. The study begins with a discussion of the area’s rich pre-Columbian heritage. It traces the merging of two great cultural traditions—the Meso-american and the European—which occurred as a consequence of the Spanish conquest. The authors analyze the evolution of a new mestizo society through an examination of the colony’s institutions, economy, and social organization. The role of women and of the family receive particular attention because they were critical to the development of colonial Mexico. The work concludes with an analysis of the 18th century reforms and the process of independence which ended the history of the most successful colony in the Western hemisphere.

The role of silver mining emerges as a major factor of Mexico’s great socio-economic achievement. The rich silver mines served as an engine of economic growth that stimulated agricultural expansion, pastoral activities, commerce, and manufacturing. The destruction of the silver mines during the wars of Independence was perhaps the most important factor in Mexico’s prolonged 19th century economic decline. Without the great wealth from silver mining, economic recovery proved extremely difficult in the post-independence period. These reverses at the end of the colonial epoch are important in understanding why Mexicans came to view the era as a “burden” to be overcome rather than as a formative period upon which to build a new nation.

Contents

• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
  • 1. The Setting
  • 2. Ancient Mexico
  • 3. The Mexica-Aztecs
  • 4. The Birth of New Spain, 1519-1530
• Part Two
  • 5. The Institutional Process
  • 6. The Economy
  • 7. Society
  • 8. Women and the Family
• Part Three
  • 9. Rationalization, Reform, and Reaction
  • 10. The Process of Independence
  • 11. A Rejected Legacy
• Bibliographical Essay
• Sources for Illustration
• Index

‘One Drop of Love’ Creates Ripple Effect at UCSB

The Bottom Line
Weekly Newspaper of Associated Students, UC Santa Barbara: News, Features, Video & Investigative Journalism for UCSB
2013-05-13

Yuen Sin, Staff Writer

The personal is very much the political, as actress-playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni illustrated through her solo show “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.” The show was performed at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center on May 7.

First formulated as a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis project, “One Drop of Love” began as Cox DiGiovanni’s personal attempt to revive her estranged relationship with her Jamaica-born father, who failed to show up at her wedding years before.

What ensued was a powerful multimedia, one-woman play laced with wit, warmth, and depth that fused her fragmented experiences with racial and cultural dispossession into a coherent narrative. The multidimensional show traversed back into the years of Cox DiGiovanni’s family history to untangle the weight of the socio-political events that have inevitably contributed to a crucial part of her identity and self-perceptions today…

…Cox DiGiovanni slipped in and out of multiple roles with dexterity, first imperiously bearing down at the audience as an anonymous U.S. Census Bureau officer, and then staggering affectionately across the stage with a lilting accent as her grandmother, revealing through her impressions the fluid and ultimately arbitrary nature of identity labels.

Her personal trajectory of “placelessness”—not seeing herself as “black” enough to join the Black Students Union, and yet having candy vendors in Cape Verde, West Africa, come up to her (while on a pilgrimage of sorts to trace back her African roots and understand her father’s pan-African attitudes) to ask her why she was so “white”—was interspersed with scenes that traced the evolution of the practice of racial categorization by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contrast brought to the forefront her sense of frustration from continually being racially defined by others, and the puzzling practice of placing someone in the category of “black” as long as they possessed even “one drop” of Negro blood—hence the play’s title.

At the post-show dialogue with UCSB’s professor of sociology G. Reginald Daniel, Cox DiGiovanni reiterated the importance of engaging in “scary conversations about race and racism,” reflecting that her work producing and performing “One Drop of Love” completely transformed the nature of her family relations after their involvement in her show…

Read the entire review here.

Ellen Gallagher: wigs, waterworlds and Wile E Coyote

The Guardian
2013-05-07

Bim Adewunmi

Adverts from black magazines, Plasticine, eyeballs – in the work of Ellen Gallagher, it’s all woven together into something new. Bim Adewunmi visits her chaotic Rotterdam studio

Throughout our interview, Ellen Gallagher makes frequent trips to a large bookcase on the other side of her studio, pulling out items she thinks are relevant and interesting. By the time I leave, I have a list of names written down on a piece of paper: people from the realms of visual art and literature whose work Gallagher implores me to seek out.

Overlooking the port of Rotterdam, her studio is a whitewashed space bathed in light, with vast windows and occasional glimpses of passing clouds via skylights. It is busy and not especially tidy: the artist’s red, paint-spattered desk is cluttered with books, little knives and intricate paper cutouts. You get the impression, however, that she knows where things are. On the walls are a couple of newer paintings: abstract, blue, serene. On a low table, there are proofs of the catalogue for AxME, her new show at the Tate Modern in London. Its title is a play on the fictional Acme corporation that supplied Wile E. Coyote with mail-order gadgets in the cartoon Roadrunner, as well as a reference to the African-American vernacular for “Ask me”.

Born in Rhode Island in 1965, to a black father of Cape Verdean extraction and a white Irish Catholic mum, Gallagher studied writing before attending art school in Boston. She is probably best known in the UK for Coral Cities, which appeared at Tate Liverpool in 2007. The show featured Watery Ecstatic, a series of paintings inspired by the myth of Drexciya, or the Black Atlantis – an underwater city populated by the descendents of Africans thrown off slave ships. Gallagher’s fantastical lost souls and eerie sealife fascinated the writer Jackie Kay, who called her work “jazz on a huge canvas”. The playwright Bonnie Greer is a big fan, too…

Read the entire article here.

The Story of Fort Mosé

Freedom Road Productions
2013

Derek Hankerson, Director

Francisco Menendez (played by James Bullock)

This is the story of Fort Mosé and Francisco Menendez in St. Augustine, Florida.

slippery positions

The State
2013-05-17

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

As a self-defined Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet, Audre Lorde is the model representative for intersectionality. As such, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches has become a ubiquitous text in undergraduate courses, for the theory and practice of intersectionality; a way to look at what women’s studies scholar Leslie McCall calls “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations.” Put crudely, intersectionality is an idea used to explain the links between positions or configurations of oppression. What’s more, as a Caribbean-American (her parents were born in Barbados and Carriacou), we could say Lorde straddled two worlds—or perhaps none at all.

Lorde’s poetry as poetry and not as purely a feminist rubric, however, has been written about far less. In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, writer and scholar Alexis De Veaux describes the genesis of the poem “Sahara,” published in Lorde’s 1978 book of poems, The Black Unicorn, in a moment while Lorde was on a plane in 1977 that passed over the Sahara desert after making a stop in Madrid to refuel. The poet, flying from New York City, was on her way to Lagos, Nigeria for FESTAC, the Second World African Festival of Arts and Culture. Lorde’s trip to Nigeria is meaningful not simply because the plane ride—the birds-eye view of the vastness of the Sahara—inspired the homonymous poem. By 1977, Nigeria had emerged as what De Veaux calls the “richest black-ruled nation” in Africa because of oil wealth. Bringing together Black activists, academics, writers, artists and spectators, FESTAC acted as a transnational spectacle establishing new political, literary and racial grounds.

What’s most significant here is that despite the literal and symbolic coming together of a black diasporic vision in the name of arts and culture, Lorde stayed on the fringes and felt separate from some sense of a monolithic group identity, an identity based seemingly solely on race—and not gender or sexuality. Lorde’s participation and view on FESTAC is mostly shrouded in mystery but what we do have is the poem “Sahara.” I read “Sahara” through Lorde’s trip to FESTAC and thus, envision landscapes of diaspora as heterogeneous and transformative. Her hesitation toward FESTAC parallels the poem’s fluctuating hesitation toward the Sahara desert. I say hesitation rather than outright fear despite the all-encompassing terror that can be gleaned from Lorde’s approach to the masculine desert: “grief of sand… male sand / terrifying sand.” The hesitation emerges from the heterogeneous incarnations sand is allowed to take. Rocks, what sand is made of, take millions and millions of years to become sand, meaning the image of a desert can’t be separated from its process, from its formation through finely divided particles, a prolonged breaking down…

Read the entire article here.

What Obama must say to African-American grads

CNN Opinion
Cable News Network
2013-05-18

Paul Butler, Professor of Law
Georgetown University

—”My brothers.”

That is how President Obama should begin one of the most significant speeches of his presidency: the commencement address at Morehouse College this Sunday. Addressing the historically black all male institution gives Obama an opportunity to rectify his strategic neglect of African-Americans. In this high-profile talk to his own demographic, the president has some explaining to do.

Obama’s identity as a black man is usually communicated subliminally, with the swag in his walk, the basketball court on the East Lawn, the sexy glances at the first lady, his overall cool. Now, however, comes the time to be explicit: to speak out loud his affiliation, his fraternal pride and concern. That’s the good work that calling us “brothers” would do…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

DePaul Art Minute – War Baby/Love Child exhibition

DePaul Newsroom
DePaul Art Museum
2013-05-16

DePaul University Associate Professor Laura Kina discusses how art featured in the “War Baby/Love Child” exhibit helps to tell the story of mixed race Asian Americans and the complexities of their mixed-heritage identities, in the third installment of the DePaul Art Minute, which provides a forum for DePaul professors to relate their expertise to artwork at the DePaul Art Museum.