Mixed Race Studies

Half-Caste and Other Poems

Hodder Literature
2005-09-15
Paperback: 80 pages
19.4 x 12.2 x 0.8 cm
ISBN-10: 0340893893
ISBN-13: 978-0340893890

John Agard

‘Half-Caste’, the title poem of this collection, is one of the set poems for GCSE English for AQA A, the largest spec with 375,000 candidates. But its influence and presence extends well beyond the ‘AQA’ schools, making John Agard one of the most popular, well-known and respected poet-performers on the schools circuit.

Through his 45 poems, John Agard explores a wide variety of themes: racial harmony, tension and diversity; war and religion; society, patriotism and politics; as well as more personal ideas on relationships, love and attraction. This is all delivered with a range and depth in terms of content, language, poetic form and technique that will engage and motivate KS3 and KS4 pupils while developing their understanding. An ideal collection to sit at the heart of a scheme of work on cross-cultural themes.

Table of Contents

And All Was Good
My Move Your Move
Union Jack and Union Jill
Half-caste [Read here.]
Rainbow
Tongue
A Word
Message From Your Mobile
Right-On Mr Left
Smoke-loving Girl Blues
Angels For Neighbours
Flag
A Vampire’s Priorities
A Hello From Cello
The Hurt Boy and The Birds
Boomerang
That Mouth
Behold My Pen
Punctuating The Silence
Poetry Jump-Up
Follow That Steel Pan
Coal’s Son and Diamond’s Daughter
A Date With Spring
volte For Your Local Shadow
Twins
Quest
Clouds
The Ozone Liar
Cowtalk
Who’ll Sve Dying Man?
For the Record
One Question From A Bullet
A Hand On A Forehead
Not Arms
Checking Out Me History
Toussaint L’Overture Acknowledges Wordsworth’s Sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Overture’
Windrush Child
Crybaby Prime Minister
Skin
A Social Skeleton
The Giant With A Taste For Mongrel Blood
Behind The Menu
Salt
Coal
Marriage of Opposites
Notes

Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Also published in the United States by Harvard University Press as Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line)

Routledge
2004-08-26
424 pages
Trim Size: 234X156
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-34365-7

Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory
The London School of Economics and Political Science

In this provocative book, now reissued with a new introduction, Paul Gilroy contends that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modern democracy.  He compels us to see that fascism was the principal political innovation of the twentieth century – and that its power to seduce did not die in a bunker in Berlin.

Between Camps addresses questions such as:

• Why do we still divide humanity into different identity groups based on skin colour?
• Did all the good done by the Civil Rights Movement and the decolonization of the Third World have such little lasting effect?

Gilroy examines the ways in which media and commodity culture have become pre-eminent in our lives in the years since the 1960s and especially in the 1980s with the rise of hip-hop and other militancies. With this trend, he contends, much that was valuable about black culture has been sacrificed in the service of corporate interests and new forms of cultural expression tied to visual technologies. He argues that the triumph of the image spells death to politics and reduces people to mere symbols.

At its heart, Between Camps is a Utopian project calling for the renunciation of race. Gilroy champions a new humanism, global and cosmopolitan, and he offers a new political language and a new moral vision for what was once called ‘anti-racism’.

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.

The Loving opinion treated race as a monolithic and meaningful category, even though the realities of the case itself subverted this account. The litigation arose in Caroline County, Virginia, a place called the “passing capital of America” because so many light-skinned blacks were mistaken for whites. In addition, the Jeters made clear that “Richard [wasn’t] the first white person in our family,” suggesting that Mildred’s own racial background was complex.

Rachel F. Moran, “Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences,” (Wisconsin Law Review, Issue 2, 2007), 241-281. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265218010_Loving_and_the_Legacy_of_Unintended_Consequences.

The Identity Development of Biracial Children and Society’s Impact Thereon

Workshop by Francis Wardle
1989-03-04
18 pages

Francis Wardle

This document is taken from a workshop presentation focusing on the identity development of biracial children. The confusion of the academic community concerning this topic is emphasized. Three main aspects are examined: (1) “What is the identity process of any child?”; (2) “What is society?”; and (3) “How does society impact the developmental process?”. The identity process is outlined as beginning at birth, when the infant first develops trust and bonds with his or her parent or caregiver. The developmental levels of infancy, young children from birth to five years of age, and adolescence are highlighted. A question and answer section is included in which the author responds to questions dealing with lack of acceptance of interracial marriages and relationships; biracial children’s identity, development, and attitudes; teachers who are uncomfortable with teaching biracial children; and other children’s reactions to biracial children.

Read the entire paper here.

Barack Obama’s Improbable Election and the Question of Race and Racism in Contemporary America

Journal of Black Studies
January 2010
Volume 40, No. 3

Guest Editor
Pamela D. Reed, Assistant Professor of English Composition and Africana Literature
Virginia State University

The Journal of Black Studies has now issued two special issues on President Barack Hussein Obama. “The Barack Obama Phenomenon” (Mazama, 2007) examines the historic candidacy of the then Illinois Senator. The present issue explores Obama’s nascent presidency and matters of race and racism, both in the run-up to and in the wake of his landmark victory.

Try as one might, it is not possible to minimize the centrality of race in all areas of American life, even now. Indeed, since the inception of the American republic, built on the backs of enslaved Africans, race and color have been the ultimate determinants of socioeconomic status. For over four centuries, dating from around the mid-15th century, millions of Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean, and scores of them were brought to the United States, where their forced labor provided the engine for the American capitalist machine…

…Whatever the case, W. E. B. Du Bois’s prescient statement (1903) regarding the problem of the color line in the 20th century is no less true today—even as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. Be that as it may, Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th President of these United States. As a result, scholars will undoubtedly dissect his election and his presidency for the foreseeable future. We begin that process herein.

Table of Conents

• Pamela D. Reed – Introduction: Barack Obama’s Improbable Election and the Question of Race and Racism in Contemporary America. pp. 373-379.
• Philip S. S. Howard – Turning Out the Center: Racial Politics and African Agency in the Obama Era. 380-394.
• Christopher J. Metzler – Barack Obama’s Faustian Bargain and the Fight for America’s Racial Soul. pp. 395-410.
• Martell Teasley and David Ikard – Barack Obama and the Politics of Race: The Myth of Postracism in America. pp. 411-425.
• Thomas Edge – Southern Strategy 2.0: Conservatives, White Voters, and the Election of Barack Obama. pp. 426-444.
• Felix Germain – “Presidents of Color,” Globalization, and Social Inequality. pp. 445-461.
• Pearl K. Ford, Tekla A. Johnson, and Angie Maxwell – “Yes We Can” or “Yes We Did”?: Prospective and Retrospective Change in the Obama Presidency. pp. 462-483.
• David Mastey – Slumming and/as Self-Making in Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. pp. 484-501.

 
Read the entire introduction here.

…Finally, Rhinelander teaches us about the limited spaces that are available in society for recognizing families that are multiracial. Like many multiracial families, Alice’s family, the Joneses, existed within an American landscape that had no recognized place for them and their lives. Just like the one-drop rule was applied to individuals, it was applied to the Jones family during and after the Rhinelander saga. In other words, Elizabeth Jones’s legal and social classification as a white individual became “implicated by [the] brownness” of her family members, and the reality of her family’s existence as one that lived between two worlds, one white and one black, was erased. It had no place in 1920s New York society, and it placed them nowhere within the spectrum of American families. Today, this sense of family as defined by race persists. The lesson is so clear that even young children understand it. Just ask my husband, who is white and who is often asked as he drops off or picks up our children, who are racially mixed, black and white children, “why he does not match.” Or ask my daughter, who even at the age four, understood that there was no place for her family, often declaring that she wanted to paint her daddy “brown like Davey’s dad.” As Heidi Durrow has explained about the continuing “spaceless-ness” of interracial families in our society, “[w]hen race acts as the primary kinship identifier, the reality of [the multiracial] family dissolves.” It is important that we continue to explore and study cases like Rhinelander case, which serve as stark reminder of this dissolving multiracial family, and our need to create spaces for it…

Angela Onwuachi-Willig,  “A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander v. Rhinelander as a Formative Lesson on Race, Identity, Marriage, and Family,” California Law Review, Volume 95, 2007, University of Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 07-27.

I now see fluid identity as a strength. I like being able to move in and out of different communities, being able to express the cultural characteristics of my surroundings without much thought. Perhaps the best example of this came a few years ago while I was in line at Disneyland with a few friends. The women ahead of us were exchange students from Japan. We talked for the forty-five minutes or so it took to get on the roller coaster, and when we got off the ride, my friends commented on how I “became Japanese” as I talked with the students. “Your sentence structure changed. You bowed your head a lot. It was like you became a different person. Do you always do that around Japanese people?” Their questions truly caught me off guard, not because I felt insecure in who they perceived me to be, but because I really hadn’t noticed I did that. Fluid identity is just as it sounds: the ability to identify in a way that takes into account the cultural currents and adjust accordingly. The issues it raises permeate all aspects of who I am.

Amiko Matsumoto, “Fluid…: Identity In the Making,” The Vermont Connection Journal, (July 29, 2002).

Fluid…: Identity in the Making

The Vermont Connection Journal
The University of Vermont
2002-07-29

Amiko Matsumoto

I get the “what are you” question a lot. I usually get a warning that the question is coming: a tilt of the head, a squint of the eyes, a puzzled look as the wheels turn in my questioner’s head. She or he will try to figure out where I fit, what possible combination or part of the world looks like me. And when the search of the database ends without a satisfactory answer, my questioner will ask, “What are you?”

For a long time, I didn’t like this question because I didn’t have a neatly packaged answer. “My dad is sansei, a third generation Japanese American, and my mom’s ancestry goes back three generations to France and Switzerland,” I’d respond. Sometimes that answer would be satisfactory, but most often, it was not. “But what are YOU?” or “But you don’t look THAT Japanese” or even “Wow, your English is really good”—that’s what would usually follow.

When it did, I would feel like I had done something wrong, that I had failed, and that I should do more to explain myself. I wanted to be understood so badly that I sometimes tried to deny part of who I was in order to more successfully fit into someone’s perception of who I should be. But a few years ago, all of that changed. It wasn’t an overnight decision for me, but rather a process that was the result of many conversations, confrontations, and tears. At some point during my time in Burlington, I became comfortable with my biracial identity. More than comfortable, I became proud…

…I now see fluid identity as a strength. I like being able to move in and out of different communities, being able to express the cultural characteristics of my surroundings without much thought. Perhaps the best example of this came a few years ago while I was in line at Disneyland with a few friends. The women ahead of us were exchange students from Japan. We talked for the forty-five minutes or so it took to get on the roller coaster, and when we got off the ride, my friends commented on how I “became Japanese” as I talked with the students. “Your sentence structure changed. You bowed your head a lot. It was like you became a different person. Do you always do that around Japanese people?” Their questions truly caught me off guard, not because I felt insecure in who they perceived me to be, but because I really hadn’t noticed I did that. Fluid identity is just as it sounds: the ability to identify in a way that takes into account the cultural currents and adjust accordingly. The issues it raises permeate all aspects of who I am…

Read the entire article here.