Mixed Race Studies

Blackness, Koreanness, and Han: Unmasking Race in Korean Hip Hop

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 54, Issue 2, March 2023
pages 136–156
DOI: 10.1177/00219347231153169

Hyein Amber Kim, Teaching Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York

Previous studies have analyzed Korean hip hop through the lens of authenticity, language, and cultural hybridity, but not through the lens of race. One of the main characteristics of hip hop culture is that it emerged in the form of resistance against dominant hegemony and as a form of resistance to systemic injustice; however, it is difficult to find K-hip hop artists that defy the racial supremacy of Koreanness and racism through their art. This article utilizes Yoon Mi-rae, who is half-Black and half-Korean, as a significant text to explore how race plays a role in Korean society and how Blackness, Koreanness, and han intersect in the K-hip hop scene. Utilizing the concept of community cultural wealth, interest convergence principle, and Koreanness, the study analyzes how Yoon Mi-rae’s “Black Koreanness” was consumed by Korean media and music industry, and how Yon Mi-rae, as an embodiment of Blackness and Han, uses hip hop and her intersectionality as a tool of resistance to both the mainstream American and mainstream Korean racial ideology and discourse. With the growing influence and popularity of K-hip hop globally, the article problematizes the message K-hip hop is reflecting and sending the world about race.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘She had to hide’: the secret history of the first Asian woman nominated for a best actress Oscar

The Guardian
2023-03-07

Andrew Lawrence
Beaufort, South Carolina

Merle Oberon, a pick for best actress in 1936, was born in Bombay and spent her career passing for white

Magazine writers didn’t know what to make of Merle Oberon when she took Hollywood by storm in the 1930s. One writer described her as “bizarre, bewildering, and different”, while others marveled at her “delicate” oval face, “eloquent” emerald eyes, “bright red lips” and “alabaster” skin.

Though her 1936 best actress Oscar nomination for the coming-of-age drama The Dark Angel affirmed her place in a league with Katharine Hepburn and the eventual winner, Bette Davis, the glamor paragons of the day, it was only later that the world discovered Oberon was a south Asian woman passing for white…

Read the entire article here.

A Real Negro Girl: Fredi Washington and the New Negro Renaissance

Oxford University Press
2023-10-02
320 Pages
25 black and white illustrations
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780197626214

Laurie A. Woodard, Assistant Professor of History
City College of New York, New York, New York

• First biography of dancer, actor, and activist Fredi Washington
• Highlights the role of the performing arts in the history of the New Negro Renaissance, which has tended to be focused on literary arts
• Focuses on an African American who could have but chose not to “pass“

The first biography of performing artist, writer, and civil and human rights activist Fredi Washington.

Following Fredi Washington’s debut in her first dramatic role in 1926, Alfred Spengler of the New York North Side News reported that she was “astonishingly pretty for a real Negro girl.” Throughout her career, Washington was vulnerable to discrimination because her near-white skin and hazel eyes, coupled with her self-identification as Negro, cast her as too physically white to play black and too culturally black to play white. The multifaceted Washington was of course a great deal more than her looks; she was a performing artist, a writer, and a civil and human rights activist. Embracing the genres of dance, theater, and film, she used her talent, creativity, and determination to sustain a thirty-year career in the arts and in labor and political activism during the New Negro Renaissance and beyond.

Although Fredi Washington has been largely forgotten, A Real Negro Girl shows that, at the zenith of her career, she was a household name in the black community, well known in mainstream America, and a darling of the European press. Most famous for her role in the film “Imitation of Life,” she was a part of a cohort that included Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Delving into her professional and personal experiences in Harlem, nationally, and internationally, this book illuminates Washington’s significance to the New Negro Renaissance and reveals the vital influence of black performing artists and of black women on the movement. Over the years, Washington expanded her social and political consciousness and anti-racism activism, encompassing journalism, labor organizing, protests, and support of progressive politics. As a founder and executive director of the Negro Actors Guild of America, she sought to protect black artists from professional exploitation and physical abuse.

Incorporating close readings of images and films, interviews, and fan mail, as well as writings by and about Washington, A Real Negro Girl highlights Fredi Washington as an influential actor in the African American quest for civil and human rights.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: The Roots of the New Negro Renaissance
• Chapter 2: Dancing All Day: Reading Blackface and Black Bodies
• Chapter 3: Boxers, Blacks, and a Real Negro Girl: White Expectations and Imagined Conceptions of Authentic Blackness
• Chapter 4: Race, Place, and Miscegenation: Fredi Washington in Imitation of Life
• Chapter 5: Beyond the Footlights: New Negro Performing Artists and More Tangible Forms of Activism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

The Reinvented Life of Belle da Costa Greene

Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
2023-02-14 through 2023-05-14

2023-02-01

Spring 2023 Exhibition and Programming related to Belle da Costa Greene, famed librarian for J.P. Morgan and expert on incunabula.

One of the most well-known American librarians and experts in illuminated manuscripts (incunabula) in the early-mid twentieth century, Belle da Costa Greene helped build the renowned Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Indeed, she was known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.” Greene also summered annually with the Vanderbilts in their “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island. She began her career as the personal librarian of financier John Pierpont Morgan, one of the richest men in Gilded Age America. She ended it as the library’s first director from 1924-48.

Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879, the green-eyed Greene was the daughter of the first African American graduate of Harvard College. She also belonged to the colored elite in Washington, DC. She accessed the rarefied worlds of the Morgans and Vanderbilts by “passing” as a white woman. In exploring her reinvented life, this month-long series of events will engage questions of race, color, class, gender, and passing.

For more information, click here.

A Woman You Should Know — Rita Rio the Sweetheart of Swing

Medium
2018-03-12

Leslie Zemeckis

What started as a publicity stunt surprisingly led to a fulfilling career as “the outstanding orchestra leader” of a popular all-girl band.

She was born Eunice Westmoreland in Miami, Florida in 1914. She would use many names during a diverse career as a showgirl, musician, orchestra leader and actress. Both her parents were of African American heritage and she was gorgeous.

Moving to Philadelphia her father ran a restaurant where as a young girl Eunice began entertaining the customers. As a teenager she became Una Villon and danced as a chorus girl in nightclubs, including Nil’s T. Granlund’s Paradise Restaurant, one of the premier entertainment venues in Manhattan. Granlund, nicknamed N.T.G. was a friend of movie star Jean Harlow, whose career he helped advance. He would be responsible for hiring innumerable chorus girls who would dance onto fame and fortune. The Paradise would feature the likes of fan dancer Sally Rand and silent movie star Lina Basquette. N.T.G.’s partner, or benefactor, was Charlie Sherman who would later be found buried under quick lime at an abandoned barn, on property formerly owned by a mobster associated with a New York gang, the Amberg mob. Sherman had last been seen leaving the Paradise…

Read the entire article here.

Ruth Ann Koesun, Versatile Ballet Theater Dancer, Dies at 89

The New York Times
2018-02-14

Anna Kisselgoff

Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in American Ballet Theater who epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chicago. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her goddaughter, Ellen Coghlan.

Because of her lyrical style in ballets like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s “Undertow,” which depicts a young murderer’s development.

Contemporary ballet makers favored her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreographer and future film director, cast her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s etchings. She portrayed a dead woman who is tossed around by her partner in choreographed movements that suggested she was inert…

…Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15, 1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a Chinese physician in Chicago’s Chinatown, and the former Mary Mondulick, who was of Russian descent…

Read the entire obituary here.

The Wind at My Back: Resilience, Grace, and Other Gifts from My Mentor, Raven Wilkinson

Grand Central Publishing (an imprint of Hachette Book Group)
2022-11-15
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781538753859
Ebook ISBN-13: 9781538753866
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549160080

Misty Copland with Susan Fales-Hill

From celebrated ballerina and New York Times bestselling author Misty Copeland, a heartfelt memoir about her friendship with trailblazer Raven Wilkinson which captures the importance of mentorship, shared history, and honoring the past to ensure a stronger future.

Misty Copeland made history as the first African-American principal ballerina at the American Ballet Theatre. Her talent, passion, and perseverance enabled her to make strides no one had accomplished before. But as she will tell you, achievement never happens in a void. Behind her, supporting her rise was her mentor Raven Wilkinson. Raven had been virtually alone in her quest to breach the all-white ballet world when she fought to be taken seriously as a Black ballerina in the 1950s and 60s. A trailblazer in the world of ballet decades before Misty’s time, Raven faced overt and casual racism, hostile crowds, and death threats for having the audacity to dance ballet.

The Wind at My Back tells the story of two unapologetically Black ballerinas, their friendship, and how they changed each other—and the dance world—forever. Misty Copeland shares her own struggles with racism and exclusion in her pursuit of this dream career and honors the women like Raven who paved the way for her but whose contributions have gone unheralded. She celebrates the connection she made with her mentor, the only teacher who could truly understand the obstacles she faced, beyond the technical or artistic demands.

A beautiful and wise memoir of intergenerational friendship and the impressive journeys of two remarkable women, The Wind at My Back captures the importance of mentorship, of shared history, and of respecting the past to ensure a stronger future.

‘It chips away at you’: Misty Copeland on the whiteness of ballet

Fresh Air
National Public Radio
2022-11-14

Terry Gross, Host

At first, Misty Copeland thought the pain she was experiencing was shin splits. It was 2012, and, after 12 years with the American Ballet Theatre, Copeland, one of the few Black dancers in the company, had finally landed her first leading role in a classical work.

“I knew how critical this moment was for my career,” she says. “If I had gone to the artistic staff or the physical therapists and said, ‘I’m in a lot of pain,’ they would have removed me from the rehearsals. And I would not have been able to perform. And I knew that had that happened, I wouldn’t be given the opportunity again.”

So she pushed on, dancing the principal role in The Firebird, despite the fact that the pain was becoming increasingly severe. Finally, toward the end of the company’s season, Copeland was diagnosed with six stress fractures in her tibia — three of which were classified as “dreaded black line” fractures, meaning that there were almost full breaks through the bone.

When the first surgeon warned her that she might never dance again, Copeland was devastated. “It was just like my whole world came crashing down,” she says. “I felt mostly like I was letting down the Black community.”…

Read the entire story here. Download the story (00:42:00) here.

Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz

University Press of Mississippi
November 2022
248 pages
1 table; 29 b&w figures; 20 musical examples
Hardcover ISBN: 9781496842404
Paperback ISBN: 9781496842428

Caroline Vézina
Montréal, Quebec, Canada

The first scholarly volume dedicated to French Creole music and its contribution to the development of jazz in New Orleans

During the formative years of jazz (1890–1917), the Creoles of Color—as they were then called—played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Indeed, music penetrated all aspects of the life of this tight-knit community, proud of its French heritage and language. They played and/or sang classical, military, and dance music as well as popular songs and cantiques that incorporated African, European, and Caribbean elements decades before early jazz appeared. In Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz, the author describes the music played by the Afro-Creole community since the arrival of enslaved Africans in La Louisiane, then a French colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, emphasizing the many cultural exchanges that led to the development of jazz.

Caroline Vézina has compiled and analyzed a broad scope of primary sources found in diverse locations from New Orleans to Quebec City, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Two previously unpublished interviews add valuable insider knowledge about the music on French plantations and the danses Créoles held in Congo Square after the Civil War. Musical and textual analyses of cantiques provide new information about the process of their appropriation by the Creole Catholics as the French counterpart of the Negro spirituals. Finally, a closer look at their musical practices indicates that the Creoles sang and improvised music and/or lyrics of Creole songs, and that some were part of their professional repertoire. As such, they belong to the Black American and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich cultural heritage of Louisiana.

“As if I Were an Illegal”: Racial Passing in Immigrant Russia

Cultural Anthropology
Volume 37, Number 4, November 2022
pages 653–678
DOI:10.14506/ca37.4.03

Lauren Woodard, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

This article examines how immigrants from post-Soviet countries engage in practices of racial passing to challenge ethnic stereotypes in Russia, the world’s fourth-largest migration destination. Ethnographic research reveals that immigrants shed signs of illegality to pass not necessarily as white, ethnic Russians (russkie) but instead as ethnically heterogeneous Russian citizens (rossiiane). The need to pass points to fundamental tensions within Russian society about belonging, tensions arising from a particular configuration of race, ethnicity, and language that emerged during the Soviet era. I show how ethnic Russianness operates akin to whiteness, the invisible ideal against which racialized bodies are marked, despite Soviet-era anti-racism campaigns and contemporary claims of Russia’s multiethnic diversity. This article contributes to scholarship analyzing migration and citizenship as racial projects by demonstrating how locally nuanced inflections of whiteness interact with global and transnational movements of white supremacy.

Read the entire article here.