Mixed Race Studies

Vienna to London: Black to Mixed-Race

Afropean: Adventures in Afro Europe
2015-03-19

Annina Chirade

I was born in Vienna, a place which has historically been a frontier between Eastern and Western Europe. I was primarily brought up in London, a city whose population reflects the reaches of the British Empire. It is also the place my parents forged new homes having left their respective homelands. My father is from Ghana and ethnically Asante (one should really say he is Asante first and foremost). My mother is a child of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and my grandmother’s post-war exile from Sudetenland – her homeland. I’m mixed-race, even though the term never seems to capture the overlapping cultural and personal narratives that exist inside of myself and my family. As a child in the ‘90s, I went back and forth between being black in Vienna and mixed-race in London…

Read the entire article here.

Putting History in Its Place: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo

Contemporary Women’s Writing
Volume 9 Issue 3 November 2015
pages 433-448
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpv003

Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies
University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, London, to an English mother of Irish descent and a Nigerian father, who had immigrated to the UK. She has been actively publishing since the release of her first book of poetry, Island of Abraham (1994). She has published six other works since: the semiautobiographical Lara (1997); The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a novel in verse, based in Roman Londinium; Soul Tourists (2005), a hybrid of poetry and prose that explores the spectral black history of Europe; Blonde Roots (2008), a satirical novel that inverts the historical realities of the transatlantic slave trade; Hello Mum (2010), an epistolary novella that explores a fourteen-year-old boy’s sense of disenfranchisement and the consequent lure of gang culture; and, most recently, Mr. Loverman (2013), the story of a closeted homosexual Trinidadian-British Londoner, who must confront the damage perpetuated by his own silences. Evaristo has served as coeditor of two literary anthologies: NW15 (Granta/British Council, 2007) and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). As editor, she has been instrumental in both mentoring and promoting the visibility of black British writers. In 2010, she guest-edited an issue of Wasafiri, entitled Black Britain: Beyond Definition, that celebrates contemporary black writing in the UK. Her 2012 guest-edited volume of the UK’s leading poetry journal Poetry Review, entitled Offending Frequencies, features more poets of color than any previous single issue. In September of 2014, she investigated the publishing industry’s attitude toward women of color as guest editor of Mslexia. She currently works as a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University, where, in 2011, she instituted the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Two of her works have been adapted for radio: The Emperor’s Babe for BBC 1 (2012) and Hello Mum for BBC 4 (2012). She was elected Fellow of the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed race identity and counselling

Therapy Today
Volume 26, Issue 10 (December 2015)
pages 16-20

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Nicola Codner describes her own identity as a mixed race woman and calls on counsellors to learn more about the psychosocial needs of our third largest ethnic minority group

I felt compelled to submit an article to Therapy Today because I’m aware that, as a mixed race woman (of black Jamaican, Nigerian and white British heritage), every time I pick up a copy of the journal I’m scanning for articles on mixed race identity and counselling/mental health. I rarely find anything on the topic and when I do it tends to be a mere few lines or paragraphs that only acknowledge the lack of attention paid to this group. This is disappointing and frustrating. Mixed race identity and issues are so invisible in the counselling world, despite the fact that this section of the population is the fastest growing and the third largest ethnic minority in the UK.

Dialogue around issues affecting mixed race children, adults and families, is increasing slightly in the UK but it is still insubstantial. I notice in the US (where the mixed race population is also quickly increasing) this is a different story. Research on the mixed race population is more abundant and counsellors are being made aware that they need to be able to consider the needs of this part of the population and be able to show specific competence in working with this group. Research in the UK is minimal and counselling books that focus exclusively on mixed race people are absent. As noted by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, social policy makers are taking a slow-paced approach to including mixed race Britons, despite the fact we are the country with the most mixed relationships in the developed world.

It was only in 2001 that the racial category of mixed race was added to the National Census of Population. The term is most commonly understood as applying to people who have one white parent and one parent from an ethnic minority. However, this traditional understanding of the term excludes those who have parents of different races where neither parent is white. Again, there is more dialogue around this in the US where it is more commonly acknowledged that our general understanding of who is included in the mixed race category needs to broaden. It’s also important to acknowledge that not all people who have parents of different races will identify as mixed race, which means the mixed race population could be larger in the UK than is currently observed (as an example, some people of black and white parentage may choose to identify solely as black). In addition some mixed race people are of more than two races which is often ignored…

Read the entire article here.

Let’s Talk Internalised Racism

Zusterschap: A blog for women who want to challenge social norms.
November 2015

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

All women have to check themselves for internalized misogyny because we live in a patriarchal society. Similarly, all people of colour have to check themselves for internalised racism due to living in a structurally racist society. While looking at internalised misogyny can be difficult, as a woman of colour I’ve noticed I find it much harder to talk about internalised racism – something about it feels more painful and taboo.

I’m scared of being judged about it by white people and people of colour and I feel ashamed of it in a way I don’t about internalised misogyny. I think this may be to do with the level of dehumanisation the black race has faced through slavery and colonisation so maybe there is something protective there about wanting to avoid the hurt that can come with digging up the topic. It’s quite possible after all that my Jamaican ancestors were slaves as Jamaica was a country which was colonised by the British. Also, I feel more vulnerable as a person of colour discussing internalised racism because I’m in a minority and minorities have to be strong in many ways to survive; it’s not easy to show how we’ve been wounded when we can feel precarious in society anyway. I think for many, part of the issue is not having the vocabulary to discuss the problem. In fact, I only learned the phrase ‘internalised racism’ a few years ago…

…As I got older I did start to accept my identity more – or at least I thought I did. I experienced more subtle racial oppression in upper school which centred mainly round my hair and sometimes my mixed race identity specifically. Some of this bullying came from not just white students but black students too. The stereotype that mixed race kids are cute and special in some way possibly buffered me from some suffering but I did not fit the stereotype of being mixed race and attractive. I had big frizzy hair, braces, glasses and my features were seen as more typically ‘black.’ Eventually, as a young woman, I ditched my glasses and braces and I managed to fit the stereotype of being mixed race and attractive more comfortably. However, what many people don’t realise is that if you embrace that stereotype to prop up your self-esteem in the face of racism it can have a nasty fallout for you. I know this because after years of hating my appearance and thinking I was ugly it seemed quite appealing to buy into the idea that being mixed race was somehow intrinsically beautiful…

Read the entire article here.

Revealed: How Britons welcomed black soldiers during WWII, and fought alongside them against racist GIs

The Telegraph
2015-12-06

Patrick Sawer, Senior Reporter

This was no ordinary Saturday night punch-up outside a pub.

At the height of World War Two, with the country gripped in a life or death fight for freedom against fascism and dictatorship, dozens of local drinkers fought alongside black soldiers against white Military Police officers harassing them outside a Lancashire pub.

It was just one extraordinary example of the active support shown by ordinary Britons for the thousands of black American troops stationed amongst them during the war – in stark contrast to the vicious racist abuse they received from their fellow countrymen.

The Lancashire riot was just one of hundreds of cases of simple humanity displayed by ordinary Britons towards black soldiers.

Details of the riot are revealed in a new book exploring the experience of black GIs stationed in Britain during the war.

While white GIs sought to have them banned from pubs, clubs and cinemas and frequently subjected them to physical and verbal assault, many ordinary Britons welcomed the black troops into their homes – and on several occasions physically stood up to their tormentors.

The book, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War, also reveals how in June 1943 there was a public outcry when four black servicemen were refused service in a bar in Bath, for no reason other than the colour of their skin…

…While most people have heard of the GI babies the US troops left behind, few have considered that many of these children were of mixed-race, the offspring of affairs between local white women and the black soldiers they encountered.

Many of those “brown babies” only came to know their fathers in later years, with some of their descendants now embarking on a search for their American grandfathers.

Miss Hervieux said: “Given the racial tensions that exist in Britain today, as in other countries, it is hard to believe that the UK was once a relative racial paradise for African Americans. Britons were willing to open their hearts and minds to fellow human beings who were there to help them…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Children: A Study of Identity

Unwin Hyman
July 1987
230 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0043701683
8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches

Anne Wilson (1955-)

Wilson’s research was conducted in England from October 1979 to May 1980 and focused on children of white/black (mainly West Indian) parentage. Using ‘snowball’ methods of recruitment, she was able to achieve a sample of 39 mothers and their 51 children of ages six to nine. The measurement instrument used with the children comprised 21 photographs, 14 of individual children and 7 of pairs of adults, and the book published the children’s and mothers’ interview schedules in its appendices…

Continue to read a synopsis of the book here.

‘We have a right to determine how our histories are told’: An interview with poet Toni Stuart

Goldsmiths University of London
News
2015-11-25

Sarah Cox

On Thursday 3 December the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies (CCDS) and Centre for Feminist Research host a spoken word performance by Toni Stuart: poet, festival organiser and educator, recently named on the South African Mail & Guardian’s list of inspiring young South Africans. Toni is also a Goldsmiths graduate, completing her MA Writer/Teacher with us this year as a 2014/2015 Chevening Scholar. We caught up with her to find out more about her work and Goldsmiths experience.

Toni was first introduced to Goldsmiths by friend and fellow poet Raymond Antrobus while he was studying for his MA Writer/Teacher here. Raymond was also taking part in our Spoken Word Educators Programme (SWEP), working with school children to develop their confidence, self expression, oral communication and literary skills.

Invited in to teach for the day at the school where Raymond was based, Toni got a taste for what being poet-in-residence was like and also learnt more about our MA – a course taught by the Departments of Educational Studies and English and Comparative Literature.

“It sounded like exactly what I wanted,” she says. “A course that allowed me to develop my creative writing and teaching practices simultaneously, with a specific focus on developing my own pedagogy and ‘poetry syllabus’. I don’t know of any other course like it in the world. And, the SWEP – started by Peter Kahn and now with Jacob Sam-La Rose as director – is the only one of its kind in the world as well.”

After her performance at Goldsmiths this December, Toni and her audience will be taking part in a discussion circle exploring the use of stories as medicine. As a 32-year old mixed heritage South African woman poet, she believes her work – and that of her generation – is to heal the wounds that they have inherited from their parents’ generation and from the past.

“Sometimes these wounds are apparent and we’re able to address them directly, other times they are unconsciously passed down through many generations,” she says. “My experience of working in the NGO sector in the past, and in the arts sector now, is that self-care is fundamental if we hope for our work to have a meaningful impact in our communities, and, that in order for our work to be sustainable we need to ensure we are taking care of ourselves first…

Read the entire interview here.

British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785-1835

Ashgate Publishing
November 2014
160 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4724-3088-5
eBook PDF ISBN: 978-1-4724-3089-2
eBook ePUB ISBN: 978-1-4724-3090-8

Kathryn S. Freeman, Associate Professor of English
University of Miami, Miami, Florida

In her study of newly recovered works by British women, Kathryn Freeman traces the literary relationship between women writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, otherwise known as the Orientalists. Distinct from their male counterparts of the Romantic period, who tended to mirror the Orientalist distortions of India, women writers like Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Sydney Owenson, Mariana Starke, Eliza Fay, Anna Jones, and Maria Jane Jewsbury interrogated these distortions from the foundation of gender. Freeman takes a three-pronged approach, arguing first that in spite of their marked differences, female authors shared a common resistance to the Orientalists’ intellectual genealogy that allowed them to represent Vedic non-dualism as an alternative subjectivity to the masculine model of European materialist philosophy. She also examines the relationship between gender and epistemology, showing that women’s texts not only shift authority to a feminized subjectivity, but also challenge the recurring Orientalist denigration of Hindu masculinity as effeminate. Finally, Freeman contrasts the shared concern about miscegenation between Orientalists and women writers, contending that the first group betrays anxiety about intermarriage between East Indian Company men and indigenous women while the varying portrayals of intermarriage by women show them poised to dissolve the racial and social boundaries. Her study invites us to rethink the Romantic paradigm of canonical writers as replicators of Orientalists’ cultural imperialism in favor of a more complicated stance that accommodates the differences between male and female authors with respect to India.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: British women writers and late Enlightenment Anglo-India: the paradoxical binary of Vedic nondualism and the Western sublime
• 1. The Asiatic Society of Bengal: “beyond the stretch of labouring thought sublime”
• 2. “Out of that narrow and contracted path”: creativity and authority in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah
• 3. Confronting sacrifice, resisting the sentimental: Phebe Gibbes, Sidney Owenson, and the Anglo-Indian novel
• 4. Female authorship in the Anglo-Indian meta-drama of Mariana Starke’s The Sword of Peace (1788) and The Widow of Malabar (1791)
• Epilogue: lost and found in translation: re-orienting British revolutionary literature through women writers in early Anglo-India
• Bibliography
• Index

PART 1: Dispatches from Dream City: Zadie Smith and Barack Obama

Electric Lit
2010-10-19

The Editor

Reading and re-reading Zadie Smith’s spookily empathetic essay about Dreams of My Father and the natural linguistic flexibility of the biracial, upwardly mobile figure, the inevitable thought occurred to me: Is Zadie Smith the Barack Obama of literature?

Consider the parallels between the two: both are biracial (Zadie Smith had a white English father and a black Jamaican mother). Both are precocious strivers who came from somewhat déclassé origins and rose to become shining examples of their respective countries’ meritocratic aspirations (Zadie Smith grew up in a council flat, the English equivalent of a housing project, and received a scholarship to Oxford). Both give evidence of having been closer to their white parent. Both seem to promise liberation from the bad faith that has existed on both sides of the color line since the start of the post-civil rights era. Both are figures who because they smoothly speak the language of progressivism (in Smith’s case, the language of progressivism is the language of avant-garde literature and abstruse academic theory) appear–or in the case of Obama, appeared–less cautious and conservative than they really are. Changing My Mind is the title of Zadie Smith’s collection of what she calls ‘occasional essays;’ it might as well be titled ‘Only Connect,’ to use the credo of her beloved E.M.Forster’s Howards End–like Forster and like Obama, Zadie Smith is a builder of bridges and a reconciler of the seemingly irreconcilable.

There is a remarkable essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” which is a kind of Beer Summit for contemporary fiction: on one side of the table is Joseph O’Neill, author of the Gatsbyesque 9/11 novel Netherland, on the other side is Tom McCarthy, writer of manifestos (still, after a century, a prerequisite for avant-garde credentials) and author of the astringently difficult novel Remainder…

Read the part 1 of the article here. Read part 2 here.

DNA study finds London was ethnically diverse from start

BBC News
2015-11-23

Pallab Ghosh, Science Correspondent

A DNA study has confirmed that London was an ethnically diverse city from its very beginnings, BBC News has learned.

The analysis reveals what some of the very first Londoners looked like and where they came from.

The first results are from four people: two had origins from outside Europe, another was from continental Europe and one was a native Briton.

The researchers plan to analyse more of the 20,000 human remains stored at the Museum of London.

According to Caroline McDonald, who is a senior curator at the museum, London was a cosmopolitan city from the moment it was created following the Roman invasion 2,000 years ago…

Early London: An artist’s impression of building work at the Roman Fort Wall in 200 AD (Museum of London, Peter Jackson)

“The thing to remember with the original Londoners is that they were not born here. Every first generation Londoner was from somewhere else – whether it was somewhere else in Britain, somewhere else on the continent somewhere else in the Mediterranean, somewhere else from Africa,” she said…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.