6th Critical Multicultural Counselling & Psychotherapy Conference: Metissage, Mestizaje, Mixed “Race”, and Beyond

Posted in Canada, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, Media Archive on 2011-05-06 01:47Z by Steven

6th Critical Multicultural Counselling & Psychotherapy Conference: Metissage, Mestizaje, Mixed “Race”, and Beyond

Centre for Diversity in Counselling & Psychotherapy
University of Toronto
2011-06-07 through 2011-06-08

Keynote Presentation: Contemporary Multiple Heritage Couples, Individuals, and Families: A Generation with Diverse Views and Varied Experiences.

Mark Kenney, Adjunct Professor
Chestnut Place College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Kelley Kenney, Professor of Counseling & Human Services
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania

The five conference themes are as follows:

  1. Mixed “race”/multiracial identities and their development: current research (trends, methodological issues, etc.) and suggestions for future research
  2. Intersection of mixed “race” and other socially constructed identities (class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.)
  3. Counselling practice with interracial couples: current research; clinical issues; therapeutic issues surrounding counsellor attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skill sets; current counselling practice; suggestions for future research and practice.
  4. Counselling practice with mixed “race”/multiracial individuals (including children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly): current research; clinical issues; therapeutic issues surrounding counsellor attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skill sets; current counselling practice; suggestions for future research and practice.
  5. Counselling practice with mixed “race” families (including extended families of interracial couples and families that adopt transracially): current research; clinical issues; therapeutic issues surrounding counsellor attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skill sets; current counselling practice; suggestions for future research and practice.

For more information, click here.

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Blending together

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2011-05-05 22:07Z by Steven

Blending together

The Stanford Daily
Stanford University
2011-05-05

Ashley Menzies

These students are part of the growing country-wide phenomenon of individuals who identify themselves as “mixed race.” The number of people who check both the black and white boxes has increased by 134 percent to 1.8 million since the 2000 census, the first time it allowed such an option. Among American children, the multiracial population has increased nearly 50 percent to 4.2 million since 2000.

“The growth of this population is clearly a trend that will surely increase every decade into the 21st century,” wrote history professor Al Camarillo in an email to The Daily.

At Stanford, this rise in the mixed-race population may finally create a multicultural community in which mixed-race students feel they can belong.

Multiracial associations have in recent years been popping up on college campuses all around the country. These organizations aim to promote multicultural awareness and provide students with a safe environment to discuss multiracial issues. Many Stanford students were surprised that an organization for mixed-race students does not exist on campus…

…Assistant professor of English Vaughn Rasberry also observed a change in norms concerning racial identity. In Rasberry’s opinion, the increase of individuals in America identifying themselves as mixed race is not just the result of a sociological trend, but “also registers some dissatisfaction with conventional racial or ethnic categories.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs on 2011-05-05 02:08Z by Steven

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

Princeton University Press
2011
248 pages
6 x 9 | 7 color illus. 16 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-691-14031-5

Michael Keevak, Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages
National Taiwan University

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase “yellow peril” at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.

Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Read the introduction here.

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Carlos Hoyt to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Posted in Audio, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2011-05-04 05:13Z by Steven

Carlos Hoyt to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #204 – Carlos Hoyt
When: Wednesday, 2011-05-04, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Carlos Hoyt

Carlos Hoyt is the creator the site Race Trancenders which is created for individuals (like himself) who are commonly ascribed to the black or African American race, but who do not subscribe to any notion of race whatsoever.  He is also a researcher seeking to provide a voice for other individuals.

To read more about his study, click here.

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Secret Asian Woman

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Audio, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-05-04 04:56Z by Steven

Secret Asian Woman

Stage and Studio
with Dmae Roberts
2011-03-03

Independent Producer Dmae Roberts presents Secret Asian Woman, a half-hour personal exploration of identity and Mixed Race. Through her personal story, Dmae charts four decades of a search by multiracial peoples for a name. The politics of calling out racism has changed through the years as has identification. In this half-hour documentary, Dmae talks with other Mixed Race Asian women with identities not easily recognized and addresses with humor the complexities involved in even discussing race.

Secret Asian Woman was produced by Dmae Roberts, with editorial consultation by Catherine Stifter and damali ayo. Original music by Clark Salisbury. Additional music by Teresa Enrico and Portland Taiko. Interviews with Velina Hasu Houston, Rainjita Yang Geesler, Julie Thi Underhill and Patti Duncan. Funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council Individual Artist program. You can learn more by going to Dmae Roberts’ website.

To listen to the broadcast, click here.

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Intermarriage versus Miscegenation

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2011-05-04 04:08Z by Steven

We have noted important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related but separate social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. Whereas all these topics deal, on some level, with racial-boundary crossing, the implications for the boundaries themselves and the racialized social structure are not consistent. For example, intermarriage may be an indicator of healthy race relations, but this is certainly not the case with miscegenation, especially in a context of high racial inequality. Whereas intermarriage has the potential to directly challenge, shift, or loosen racial boundaries, the informal practices of miscegenation are less likely to do so.

Edward E. Telles and Christina A. Sue, “Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative Perspective,” Annual Revuew of Sociology, Volume 35 (2009): 129-146. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134657.

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Has perception of biracial women changed in modern times?

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-05-04 02:19Z by Steven

Has perception of biracial women changed in modern times?

SMU Daily Campus
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
2011-05-03

Victoria Ahmadi

As a biracial woman myself, I find it essential that society become better informed of the life-altering consequences that biracial individuals are forced to deal with.

While the media’s perceptions of identity shift, young women of mixed racial backgrounds are quickly becoming much less of the minority in society. America is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by a change in social views, immigration, and intermarriage. For some time in history, the question of “What Are You?” was much less complicated than it is today. Biracial women struggle with the idea of truly belonging to either race.

According to data collected by the Census in 2008 and 2009, those categorized as “mixed race” are steadily becoming one of the fastest growing demographic groups. In 2010, it has been recorded that 2.9 percent of Americans consider themselves as being two or more races. There has been a 32 percent increase in those in this category since 2000.

What is the significance of these statistics? The growing trend of biracial women feed into the growing trend of a number of other things: including the way the media defines beauty, politics, and religion.

Dr. Angela Gillem and Dr. Cathy Thompson’s Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race, examines how physical appearance, cultural knowledge, and cultural stereotypes affect the experience of mixed-race women in belonging to, and being accepted within, their cultures…

The authors implies that people (women) who don’t fit into a defined racial category threaten the psychological and sociological foundations of the “we” and “they” mentality that determines so much of an individual’s social, economic, and political experience in the United States…

Read the entire article here.

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Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. Münster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Passing, United States on 2011-05-03 02:50Z by Steven

Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. Münster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]

Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies
Volume 26, Number 1 (2004)

Isabel Soto García
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia  (UNED)

In her wide-ranging and ambitious work Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies, Mar Gallego refers to W. E. B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness as “influential.” The reference is, at the very least, an understatement. Du Bois’ articulation of the African American experience, famously declared in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as straddling, or simultaneously occupying, both sides of the perceptual divide—the unremitting sense of “twoness . . . two warring ideals in one dark body (11)”—is arguably the theoretical paradigm against which twentieth century African American expressive culture, particularly written culture, has been interpreted. Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Paul Gilroy, all prominent late twentieth-century theorists of the experience of New World Africans, explicitly acknowledge an indebtedness to Du Bois. Without the Duboisian precedent, these writers would possibly not have elaborated their respective theories of call-and-response (Stepto 1979), signifying (Gates 1988) and the black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)—all theories which are predicated on notions and strategies of doubleness; one may assume they would have formulated them differently.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868, one year after the First Reconstruction Act granting, among others, the right to vote to black males in Confederate States. His formative years, then, coincided with this initial period of postbellum optimism and progressive legislation, as well as post-Reconstruction reaction, culminating in such Supreme Court rulings as the notorious “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. Where Plessy and other court decisions erected a de jure wall of containment between black and white Americans and encoded the segregationist principle, Du Bois countered with double consciousness, taking the reader as it were beyond the veil—or at least lifting it to reveal what lay on the other side. That a potential white readership be invited to partake of African American consciousness is in and of itself a radically subversive gesture. If we are given the wherewithal to experience reality as an African American (“an American, a Negro”), then Du Bois is making a brazenly transgressive proposition: an invitation to engage in a sort of literary miscegenation.

Miscegenation or, in nineteenth-century terms, amalgamation, is the transgression at the heart of a rich body of writing that coincided with the first third of Du Bois’ life and the period—Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction—that preceded the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. This fiction was coincidentally organized around the literary embodiment—the mulatto—of Duboisian double consciousness, while it similarly subverted the artificial binarism encoded in Plessy. The mulatto genre can be said to date back at least to Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s short story “Le Mulâtre” (1837), considered the earliest known work of African American fiction. William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) is held to initiate the genre by an African American writer in English. Clotel is representative of a further, related tradition, that of the passing novel, with its eponymous heroine crossing racial as well as gender lines (gender and racial passing is a frequent trope in antebellum slave narrative: see, for example, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom [1860] and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861]).

Read the entire article here.

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Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies [Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2011-05-03 02:21Z by Steven

Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies [Review]

African American Review
Volume 38 (Winter 2004)
pages 720-723

Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies. Hamburg: Lit Verlag Munster, 2003. 214 pp.

Zhou Yupei

Until very recently, novels of passing that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance had been viewed as either assimilationist or collaborative with racist ideology. Mar Gallego’s Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an opposing view by providing a detailed account of the subversive and parodying strategies employed in novels by four representative and controversial African American writers: James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset. Gallego considers these authors’ parodying strategies as responses not only to social realities but to the idea of double consciousness and other literary traditions.

Gallego’s book opens with a rereading of Du Bois’s theory of “double consciousness” that reveals both the positive and the negative perspectives contained in the theory and connects it with the motif of passing. The positive refers to the notion of the “third self,” which results from the union of an African American ethnic identity and an American national identity, a notion that implies the possibility of a society in which African culture and American culture co-exist. The negative refers to the metaphor of the “veil,” which means the distorted and stereotypical image imposed upon African Americans, a metaphor that may produce negative duplicity in African American life. Gallego’s account of these contradictory perspectives achieves a dual purpose. First, it explains Du Bois’s inner conflict between his realistic conception of American society and his idealistic notion of double consciousness. Second, it alludes to the multiple and indeterminate character of double consciousness and links this notion to the Yoruba tradition of Esu-Elegbara, in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. locates the “Signifying Monkey,” and finally the idea of double-voicedness central to Bakhtin’s theories of “heteroglossia” and “dialogization.” Such connections expose the parodying nature of double consciousness in spite of the inner conflict contained in it. Gallego’s reading of the notion of double consciousness constitutes a reasonable starting point and a convincing rationale for Gallego’s argument that the novels of passing under study respond in a complex way to double consciousness and strategically hide their negative attitudes toward racism under the cover of various means of seemingly cooperative representations. Gallego also lays out a theoretical framework of exploration in his subsequent chapters, each of which locates a writer’s parodying strategies in the historical context of the representation of African Americans and in the literary context of the genres of Western literature employed and subverted by the writer.

To incorporate issues of race and gender, Gallego also identifies in the first chapter double consciousness with the feminist notion of “divided identity,” designating, as Mary Hairston McManus does, the latter as “double double consciousness.” Reviewing earlier African American feminist criticism, Gallego concludes that this discourse involves “the subversion, inversion or variation of other discourses that marginalize African American women.” This summary anticipates his statement that the characterization of Larsen’s and Fauset’s mulatta figures of passing also involves the subversion, inversion, or variation of other racist or sexist discourses in literary tradition.

Each subsequent chapter is devoted to one of the four authors. In chapter two, Gallego argues that James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) innovates the tradition of slave narratives by endowing it with subversive and ironic overtones, and revises Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness by calling into question the negative perspective of the theory. For Gallego, Johnson’s novel represents a new stage of the narrative tradition that traces its origin to Equiano’s “integrated narrative,” which integrates different voices, and Douglass’s “generic narrative,” which makes the narrator eventually dominate the different voices integrated by the narrative. Johnson uses such techniques as duality of voices, control over the narration, fictionalization of the narrative “I,” and rhetoric as a mask for subversion, techniques often found in either Equiano or Douglass. With these techniques Johnson effectively but trickily conveys his ironic and multivocal vision and makes his narrator successfully write himself into the text. The connection discovered by Gallego between Johnson’s text and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk leads to the conclusion that Johnson’s novel negates both the positive image of the “Talented Tenth” and the idealistic possibility of a “third self.” Gallego states that Johnson’s representation of the phenomenon of passing questions cultural and racial categories and promotes heterogeneity. With abundant historical and textual evidence, Gallego defines Johnson as an important African American writer who initiates a model for the depiction of the mulatto condition and anticipates other novels of passing in the following decade…

Read the entire article here.

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Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Posted in Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Monographs, Passing, United States on 2011-05-03 01:45Z by Steven

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Lit Verlag Munster
2003
224 pages
ISBN 3-8258-5842-1

Mar Gallego, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of Huelva (Spain)

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an insightful study of the significance of passing novels for the literary and intellectual debate of the Harlem Renaissance. Mar Gallego effectively uncovers the presence of a subversive component in five of these novels (by James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset), turning them into useful tools to explore the passing phenomenon in all its richness and complexity. Her compelling study intends to contribute to the ongoing revision of the parameters conventionally employed to analyze passing novels by drawing attention to a great variety of textual strategies such as double consciousness, parody, and multiple generic covers. Examining the hybrid nature of these texts, Gallego skillfully highlights their radical critique of the status quo and their celebration of a distinct African American identity.

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