Mixed Race Studies

‘Belle’ breaks through the aristocratic color barrier

USA Today
2013-07-21

Bryan Alexander

British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw used to envy her classmates from the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London as they moved on to perform in lavish English period dramas. But as an actress of color, she found it difficult to land such historic roles.

“I was somewhat frustrated, I have always loved period dramas and my friends were in these gorgeous-looking Jane Austen adaptations,” says Mbatha-Raw, 30. “I would be like, ‘I have all of this training, when will I get a chance to explore that side?’ ”

Mbatha-Raw, who has held roles in several TV series and was a supporting player in the 2011 Tom Hanks vehicle Larry Crowne, finally has found her opportunity in Belle (opening May 2, 2014). It’s the exceedingly rare story of a mixed-race woman who transcended the lily-white aristocracy of 18th-century England.

Belle is inspired by the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, who was born as the result of an affair between British naval officer Capt. Sir John Lindsay and an African slave woman who died when Belle was young. Lindsay (Matthew Goode) beseeched his uncle, the Earl of Mansfield and England’s Lord Chief Justice (Tom Wilkinson), to raise his mixed-race daughter in the manner befitting his aristocratic bloodline — unheard of in England at the time…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about ‘Jews’ in the Twenty-First Century

Berghahn Books
May 2013
398 pages
bibliog., index
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-892-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85745-893-3

Edited by:

Efraim Sicher, Professor of Comparative and English Literature
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and “Jews”, and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors—leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies—discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.

Contents

• Foreword / Sander Gilman
• Introduction: Rethinking Discourses about “Jews” / Efraim Sicher
• PART I: JEWS AND RACE IN AMERICA
  • Chapter 1. “I’m not White – I’m Jewish”: The Racial Politics of American Jews / Cheryl Greenberg
  • Chapter 2. Reflections on Black/Jewish Relations in the Age of Obama / Ibrahim Sundiata
  • Chapter 3. Stains, Plots, and the Neighbor Thing: Jews, Blacks and Philip Roth’s Utopias / Adam Zachary Newton
  • Chapter 4. Spaces of Ambivalence: Blacks and Jews in New York City / Catherine Rottenberg
  • Chapter 5. African-American Culture, Anthropological Practices and the Jewish “Race” in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men / Dalit Alperovich
  • Chapter 6. Jewish Characters in Weeds: Reinserting ‘Race’ into the Postmodern Discourse on American Jews / Hannah Adelman Komy Ofir and Shlomi Deloia
• PART II: JEWS AS BLACKS / BLACK JEWS
  • Chapter 7. A Member of the Club? How Black Jews Negotiate Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism / Bruce Haynes
  • Chapter 8. Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel: The Discourses of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Racism / Steven Kaplan
  • Chapter 9. Black-Jews in Academic and Institutional Discourse / Yonah Zianga
  • Chapter 10. The “Descendants of David” of Madagascar: Crypto-Judaic identities in 21st century Africa / Edith Bruder
• PART III: DISCOURSES OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES
  • Chapter 11. After the Fact: “Jews” in Post-1945 German Physical Anthropology / Amos Morris-Reich
  • Chapter 12. Genes as Jewish History?: Human Population Genetics in the Service of Historians / Noa Sophie Kohler and Dan Mishmar
  • Chapter 13. Sarrazin and the Myth of the “Jewish Gene” / Klaus Hödl
  • Chapter 14. Blood, Soul, Race, and Suffering: Full-Bodied Ethnography and Expressions of Jewish Belonging / Fran Markowitz
  • Chapter 15. Jews, Muslims, European Identities: Multiculturalism and Anti-Semitism in Britain / Efraim Sicher
  • Chapter 16. Brothers in Misery: Re-connecting Sociologies of Racism and Anti-Semitism / Glynis Cousin and Robert Fine
  • Chapter 17. Race by the Grace of God: Race, Religion, and the Construction of “Jew” and “Arab” / Ivan Davidson Kalmar
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Missing faces

The Guardian
2007-03-23

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

As the United Kingdom marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade tomorrow, Jackie Kay challenges fellow Scots to acknowledge their forebears’ part in this shameful history and reflects on the ordeal suffered by her ancestors

We’re perhaps over-fond of dates, of going round in circles of a hundred years to mark the birth of, or the death of, trying to grasp, as we all get older, what time means. Anniversaries give us the perfect excuse to try and catch up on what we already should have caught up on. Anniversaries afford us a big noisy opportunity to try and remember what we should not have forgotten.

Slavery is one of those subjects we all think we know about. Men were shipped, packed like sardines, as in that famous drawing by Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist. The Africans sold their own people – this gets mentioned so often, as if the reiteration of African complicity diminishes responsibility. But what spirit, eh, the African people? Mind you, there’s always been slavery, the ancient Romans were at it, etc etc. We are closed to any more detail; we don’t want to know. We don’t want to imagine how slavery would affect each of the five senses. Too much information fills ordinary people, black and white, with revulsion, distaste, or worse, induces boredom. We think we’ve heard it all before…

Read the entire article here.

Scottish people’s DNA study could ‘rewrite nation’s history’

The Guardian
2012-08-14

Charlotte Higgins, Chief Arts Writer

Evidence of African, Arabian, south-east Asian and Siberian ancestry in Scotland, says author of book tracing genetic journey

A large scale study of Scottish people’s DNA is threatening to “rewrite the nation’s history”, according to author Alistair Moffat.

Scotland, he told the Edinburgh international book festival, despite a long-held belief that its ethnic make-up was largely Scots, Celtic, Viking and Irish, was in fact “one of the most diverse nations on earth”…

Read the entire article here.

Anglo-Indians: Is their culture dying out?

BBC News Magazine
2013-01-03

Kris Griffiths

A product of the British Empire, with a mixture of Western and Indian names, customs and complexions, 2,000 Anglo-Indians are to attend a reunion in Calcutta. But their communities in both the UK and the subcontinent are disappearing, writes Anglo-Indian Kris Griffiths.

Southall in west London is home to Britain’s first pub accepting rupees, railway station signs in English and Punjabi, and main thoroughfares alive all year with street food stalls, colourful saris and Bhangra music.

It’s my hometown, where I spent my first 20 years among the country’s most concentrated population of Indians, but as one of the minority 10% white British inhabitants. Indeed, I was the only white person on my avenue in the years before I left.

My mother is Anglo-Indian, raised in Jamshedpur, near Calcutta, before moving eventually to London’s own “Little India”. After she married a Welshman, I and my siblings were born fair with blue eyes.

We are symptomatic of the biggest problem facing the global Anglo-Indian community – it is dying out. In the UK and the Commonwealth, it is losing its “Indianness”, while back home in India its “Anglo” element is fading…

…The definition of Anglo-Indian has become looser in recent decades. It can now denote any mixed British-Indian parentage, but for many its primary meaning refers to people of longstanding mixed lineage, dating back up to 300 years into the subcontinent’s colonial past.

In the 18th Century, the British East India Company followed previous Dutch and Portuguese settlers in encouraging employees to marry native women and plant roots. The company would even pay a sum for every child born of these cross-cultural unions.

By the late 19th Century, however, after the Suez Canal’s construction had made the long journey shorter, British women were arriving in greater numbers, mixed marriages dwindled and their offspring came to be stigmatised by many Indians as “Kutcha-Butcha” (half-baked bread).

When the British finally departed in 1947 they left behind a Westernised mixed-race subpopulation about 300,000-strong who weren’t necessarily glad to see them leave…

Read the entire article here.

Mary Seacole: The Black Woman Who Invented Modern Nursing

Basic Books
2004-11-19
288 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780786714148; ISBN-10: 078671414X

Jane Robinson

She was a black woman, and she flouted convention. In an age that put ladies in the parlor and preferred them to be seen and not heard, she was nursing the British wounded, not in hospital wards with Florence Nightingale but on the Crimean battlefields—and off them, she was running a restaurant and hotel. She purveyed homemade pickles in England; she mined for gold in Panama. For unabashed individuality, Mary Jane Grant Seacole knew no peer. Yet Punch, the Times, the Illustrated London News all ardently touted her, and Queen Victoria herself entertained her. Mary Seacole—childless widow of Horatio Nelson’s godson and “good ole Mother Seacole” to the soldiers at Sebastopol—was Britain’s first black heroine, and this robust, engaging biography by social historian Jane Robinson shows why. In a narrative driven by colorful adventure, Robinson charts Seacole’s amazing odyssey from her native Kingston, Jamaica, to her adopted London, via Panama, where she lent her doctoring and nursing skills to catastrophic outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, and the Crimea, where she founded the famous British Hotel. Seacole makes numerous other eventful stops along the way, and everywhere, even in the face of disappointment, disaster, and loss, her indomitable spirit prevails.

Hay winner’s search for identity

BBC News
2003-05-27

A first-time writer who travelled halfway round the world to trace her roots has won the Welsh Book of the Year award at the Hay Festival.

Charlotte Williams’ tale of her search for her identity, entitled Sugar and Slate, took her to three different continents.

Ms Williams, who has Welsh, African and Latin American heritage, wrote the book following trips across the world to find more about her background.

She overcame challenges from 60 other writers to claim the £3,000 first prize.

The daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and a black father from Guyana in the Caribbean, Ms Williams said the journey to research her past became a confrontation with herself and the idea of Welshness.

In the book she recalls feeling as a child growing up in Llandudno, north Wales, that “somehow to be half-Welsh and half Afro-Caribbean was to be half of something but never quite anything whole at all”…

Read the entire article here.

Interview with Louisa Adjoa Parker

The writer is a lonely hunter
2012-01-10

Gail Aldwin

Louisa is a writer, poet and Arts Project Co-ordinator who has lived in the West Country since she was 13. Her first poetry collection, Salt-sweat and Tears was published by Cinnamon Press to critical acclaim in 2007. She has also written a book and exhibition about the history of African and Caribbean people in Dorset over the past 400 years, both entitled Dorset’s Hidden Histories. Louisa has recently worked on a project using images and stories to celebrate multi-ethnic Dorset. Funded by Arts Council England and Dorset County Council, the exhibition and book is called All Different, All Dorset was launched in September 2011. Louisa is passionate about equality and the Arts, and hopes to inspire people from a range of backgrounds to become interested in writing.  

Let’s start with your writing journey

I wrote a few adventure stories when I was about six, which my mum said were like Enid Blyton books and I still have a poem written at that time. When I was a teenager I kept a diary for three years and wrote about everything that happened to me. As an adult, I turned to letter writing to try to sort out problems with relationships. In 2002, I went to Exeter University to complete the degree I’d started with the Open University, and I began writing poetry alongside the essays and coursework. I was encouraged by Selima Hill and I had a poem published in a magazine. Getting published was exciting and encouraged me to write more. I realised I had a lot to say about being dual heritage and growing up in white communities. My Dad is Ghanaian and came to England in the late 60s for education and he met and married my mum and had three children with her. We lived in Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, and then when my Dad left we moved to Devon. Growing up knowing only the white side of my family was weird. No one wanted to talk about my background. Writing helped me to explore unresolved issues around my identity. It helped me come to terms with some of the things that had happened, racism and domestic violence…

Read the entire interview here.

Looking back at lives of black GIs in Dorset

Dorset Echo
Weymouth, Dorset, England
2013-06-12

James Tourgout

A NEW exhibition is highlighting the stories of black soldiers in Dorset during World War Two.

It explores the lives of African American servicemen who headed to Dorset to train for D-Day and is showing at Weymouth library until June 14.

It comes in the week following the 69th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France.

The exhibition—entitled 1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset—was successfully launched last May at Walford Mill Crafts in Wimborne. Louisa Adjoa Parker, a Dorchester writer and poet of British and Ghanaian heritage, carried out the research into this part of local history, which has been little explored so far…

Louisa specialises in local black history and has written several books and exhibitions exploring the presence of black and minority ethnic people in Dorset. Louisa said: “This local history has not been explored in great detail until recently, and is arguably an important part of Dorset’s heritage.

“It was important to gather the stories now, as the GIs’ children and the local people who remember the GIs are getting older. “The African Americans’ presence here left behind a lasting legacy—cultural influences, memories and stories that have been passed down in families and become part of local folklore, and a number of their children as a result of relation-ships with local women.”

Read the entire article here…

Ethnic minorities: defining ethnicity and race

The Scottish Public Health Observatory
Ethnic Minorities
Last Updated: 2012-03-06

Ethnicity

Ethnicity has been defined as:

“the social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a mix of cultural and other factors including language, diet, religion, ancestry and physical features traditionally associated with race”. (1)

Ethnicity is essentially self-defined and may change over time. Classification of ethnicity is essentially pragmatic, based on categories that include common self-descriptions, are acceptable to respondents and that identify variations that are important for research or policy. There is increasing recognition that people may want to identify themselves with more than one ethnic group, and the “mixed” category introduced in the UK 2001 Census attempts to do this. The standard classification of ethnic group in the UK is that used in the 2011 Census (which was slightly different in each of the four countries of the UK). Ethnicity is different from country of origin, since many countries include more than one ethnic group.

Race

The concept of race is controversial. It is difficult to define a rationale for racial categories and there is no consistent agreement about an objective set of categories. Classifying individuals by their physical appearance and skin colour is unreliable and of questionable validity. Genetic studies have found some evidence of broad “continental” groups which are genetically similar.(2,3) However, there is little evidence that these correspond to commonly perceived racial categories.(4) There is wider genetic variation between individuals within one “racial” group (such as “white”) than there is between such “racial” groups (5)—indeed 93% to 95% of genetic variation is within population groups. Despite these difficulties, the term race is still widely used in legal and policy contexts…

Read the entire article here.