Mixed Race Studies

Selected Writings on Race and Difference

Duke University Press
April 2021
376 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1166-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1052-4

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities
Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Professor of American Studies
Graduate Center, City University of New York

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall’s contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race Is the Prism / Paul Gilroy
• Part I. Riots, Race, and Representation
  • 1. Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation [1959]
  • 2. The Young Englanders [1967]
  • 3. Black Men, White Media [1974]
  • 4. Race and “Moral Panics” in Postwar Britain [1978]
  • 5. Summer in the City [1981]
  • 6. Drifting into a Law and Order Society: The 1979 Cobden Trust Human Rights Day Lecture [1982]
  • 7. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media [1981]
• Part II. The Politics of Intellectual Work Against Racism
  • 8. Teaching Race [1980]
  • 9. Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society [1977]
  • 10. “Africa” Is Alive and Well in the Diaspora: Cultures of Resistance: Slavery, Religious Revival and Political Cultism in Jamaica [1975]
  • 11. Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]
  • 12. New Ethnicities [1983]
  • 13. Cultural Identity and Diaspora [1990]
  • 14. C. L. R. James: A Portrait [1992]
  • 15. Calypso Kings [2002]
• Part III. Cultural and Multicultural Questions
  • 16. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1968]
  • 17. Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998]
  • 18. Why Fanon? [1996]
  • 19. Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about “Race”? [1997]
  • 20. “In but Not of Europe”: Europe and Its Myths [2003]
  • 21. Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities [2006]
  • 22. The Multicultural Question [2000]
• Index
• Place of First Publication

Critical Mixed Race Studies Book Talk Series: Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future

Critical Mixed Race Studies Association
2021-05-06, 13:30Z (09:30 EDT)

There is a photo of both authors in the upper right-hand corner of the flyer. Jennifer Patrice Sims (left) and Chinelo L. Njaka (right) are pictured outdoors from the waist up and standing in front of a sand-colored brick wall. Dr. Sims wears a pink cardigan sweater over a white collared shirt and glasses. Dr. Njaka wears a blue cardigan sweater over a white collared shirt with a ditsy floral print. They are both smiling.

Our next CMRS Book Talk is right around the corner! We’re featuring Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future, by Dr. Jennifer Patrice Sims and our very own Chinelo L. Njaka. Join live and be part of the Q&A!

Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future
By: Jennifer Patrice Sims and Chinelo L. Njaka
Recipient of the 2020 Mid-South Sociological Association Stanford M. Lyman Distinguished Book Award

Jennifer Patricia Sims, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Taking mixed-race people as her main focus, Dr. Sims’ research examines racial construction, perception, and identity. She is the editor of The Sociology Of Harry Potter (Zossima Press, 2012)

Chinelo L. Njaka, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is the Founder/Director of Peckham Rights! and an independent social researcher. Dr. Njaka is also a United Nations fellow for People of African Descent. Her research examines racialisation processes across different national, institutional, and organizational contexts; with a focus on the African Diaspora in Europe and human rights.

To register, click here.

Natalie Morris: “Ideas of mixedness are binary and centred around whiteness”

Substack
2021-04-19

Isabella Silvers

Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to journalist and author Natalie Morris, who is of Jamaican and white British heritage. I first came across Natalie with Mixed Up, a series on Metro exploring the nuances of mixed identity. Continuing this vital conversation, Natalie has just released her first book, Mixed/Other: Explorations of Multiraciality in Modern Britain. Read on to hear Natalie share her own experiences, plus what she hopes everyone can take from her important work.

The author of Mixed/Other on the duality of holding two truths simultaneously and the isolation of being mixed

How do you define your ethnicity?

My dad’s family is Jamaican and my mum is white British, so I say I say mixed or mixed and Black. I’m trying to move away from ‘mixed-race’ as it implies a kind of essentialism.

The terminology changes and develops, which is good, but it can be tricky to keep up with that. There’s no wrong or right way to describe yourself, but it’s important to be open to those changes. It’s important that people also listen to what mixed people want – so many things are forced on you when you’re mixed, and it can be hard to push back against that…

Read the entire interview here.

Why celebrating ‘mixed-race beauty’ has its problematic side

The Guardian
2021-04-08

Natalie Morris

Kim Kardashian West at a Paris Fashion Week event on 2 March 2020. Photograph: Marc Piasecki/WireImage

The trend personified by the Kardashians is driven by the aesthetics of ambiguity – and proximity to whiteness

I was insecure about how I looked when I was younger. My hair was frizzy and embarrassingly enormous. My bum stuck out too much. My lips were too big. My thighs were too big.

Everything about me – specifically my racialised features as a Black mixed woman – felt “too much”. I remember the distinct feeling of wanting to shrink myself, melt myself down into something neater, smaller, sleeker – which is how I saw my white friends, and the beautiful white people on TV.

Then, in my early 20s, soon after moving to London from my home in Manchester, I began to notice a shift in how beauty was being represented. Suddenly, faces, hair and bodies that looked like mine were plastered on shop windows, grinning down from billboards, smizing (smiling with their eyes) from the pages of magazines. Every other TV ad featured mixed models or an interracial family.

White influencers began plumping their lips, baking their skin, braiding their hair, even undergoing invasive surgical procedures to create curves where none existed. The things about myself I had wanted to disguise or alter in my youth were now in vogue – and I struggled to get my head around that. How did it become “trendy” to look like me? And should I feel pleased about it?…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed/Other: Explorations of Multiraciality in Modern Britain

Trapeze
2021-04-15
240 pages
eBook ISBN-13: 978140919716
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781409197140
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781409197225

Natalie Morris

An exploration of what it means to be mixed race in the UK today.

• How does it feel when your heritage isn’t listed as an option on an identification form?
• What is it like to grow up as the only person in your family who looks like you?
• Where do you belong if you are simultaneously seen as being ‘too much’ of one race and ‘not enough’ of another to fit neatly into society’s expectations?

The mixed population is the fastest-growing group in the U.K. today, but the mainstream conversation around mixedness is stilted, repetitive and often problematic. At a time when ethnically ambiguous models fill our Instagram feeds and our high street shop windows, and when children of interracial relationships are lauded as heralding in the dawn of a post-racial utopia, journalist Natalie Morris takes a deep dive into what it really means to be mixed in Britain today.

From blackfishing to the fetishisation of mixed babies; from the complexities of passing and code-switching to navigating the world of work and dating, Natalie explores the ways in which all of these issues uniquely impact those of mixed heritage. Drawing from a wealth of research, interviews and her own personal experiences, in Mixed/Other, Natalie’s aims to dismantle the stereotypes that have plagued mixed people for generations and to amplify the voices of mixed Britons today, shining a light on the struggles and the joys that come with being mixed.

Meghan Markle, The Royal Family, Right Wing Media Animus and The Specter of Deeply Entrenched Racism!

Medium
2021-03-11

Elwood Watson, Ph.D., Professor of African American and Gender Studies, Post-WWII U.S. History
East Tennessee State University

It didn’t take long for the right-wing media, here in America and in Britain, to gin up their propaganda/outrage machine towards Meghan Markle, better known as The Duchess of Sussex. “Unreasonable,” “entitled,” “ungrateful,” “spoiled,” “Liar! Fake Outrage!” “Fights, Camera, Action,” “Megxile,” “So Who is The Royal Racist?” and so on. Hell, perennial Meghan Markle antagonist and fierce critic, Piers Morgan, literally screamed and stomped off of the set of the program Good Morning Britain. It was a meltdown of epic proportions for all to see.

They were savvy enough not to refer to her as “uppity,” a word reserved for Black people who anger racist, White people by taking them out of their comfort zones. These are the Black folks who upset White bigots by “doing their own thing on their own terms” and, in essence, by telling such Whites to “Go to hell!” Some in the right-wing media would have liked to have called her a “n*gger bitch,” though they know that would have resulted in some consequences, even in our current climate of over racial animus…

Read the entire article here.

Royal family’s ‘post-racial’ fantasy unravels

Cable News Network (CNN)
2021-03-08

Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies
Birmingham City University

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and the Duchess of Sussex depart after their wedding ceremony at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018.

(CNN) When Harry and Meghan walked down the aisle, surrounded by examples of #BlackExcellence, and being serenaded by a gospel choir on May 19, 2018, it was meant to mark a new era in race relations. Even the royal family was being “modernized,” dragged into the 21st century showing just how far we have come. Right wing papers like the Daily Mail even heralded the Markles’ remarkable achievement of going from “cotton slaves to royalty” in just 150 years. The only surprise is how quickly this post-racial fantasy unraveled, culminating in Sunday’s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey, revealing the harrowing time Markle says she endured as a serving royal…

Read the entire article here.

They Were Black. Their Parents Were White. Growing Up Was Complicated.

The New York Times
Book Reviews
2021-02-23

Bliss Broyard

Georgina Lawton (Left), Rebecca Carroll (Right) Jamie Simonds/Loftus Media, Laura Fuchs

Georgina Lawton, Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2021)

Rebecca Carroll, Surviving the White Gaze, A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021)

For most of us, racial identity is a combination of inheritance (you are what your parents are) and influence (you’re a product of where and how you were raised). But what if you are raised by people who didn’t look like you, in communities where you were the only one, steeped in a culture whose power was amassed through your oppression?

In a pair of new memoirs — “Surviving the White Gaze,” by the American cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, and “Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong,” by the British journalist Georgina Lawton — two women recount growing up as Black girls with white parents who loved them deeply but failed them miserably by not seeing and celebrating them for who they were…

Read the review of both books here.

Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong

Harper Perennial (an imprint of Harper Collins)
2021-02-23
304 pages
5x8in
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780063009486
E-book ISBN: 9780063009493
Audiobook ISBN: 9780063009509

Georgina Lawton

Raised in sleepy English suburbia, Georgina Lawton was no stranger to homogeneity. Her parents were white; her friends were white; there was no reason for her to think she was any different. But over time her brown skin and dark, kinky hair frequently made her a target of prejudice. In Georgina’s insistently color-blind household, with no acknowledgement of her difference or access to black culture, she lacked the coordinates to make sense of who she was.

It was only after her father’s death that Georgina began to unravel the truth about her parentage—and the racial identity that she had been denied. She fled from England and the turmoil of her home-life to live in black communities around the globe—the US, the UK, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Morocco—and to explore her identity and what it meant to live in and navigate the world as a black woman. She spoke with psychologists, sociologists, experts in genetic testing, and other individuals whose experiences of racial identity have been fraught or questioned in the hopes of understanding how, exactly, we identify ourselves.

Raceless is an exploration of a fundamental question: what constitutes our sense of self? Drawing on her personal experiences and the stories of others, Lawton grapples with difficult questions about love, shame, grief, and prejudice, and reveals the nuanced and emotional journey of forming one’s identity.

A Family History of British Empire

Black Perspectives
2021-02-05

Mary Hicks, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and History
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

“Where are you from?”—The deceptively simple question looms over the sprawling narrative of Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the newest work by Black feminist theorist, literary critic, and historian Hazel Carby. This historical and existential query frames Carby’s gripping exploration of her ambivalent relationship to idealized “Britishness” as the child of a white, working-class Welsh mother and a Black, Jamaican father born in 1940s London. The omnipresent demand by strangers that she produce a satisfying account of her origins exemplifies her experiences as an unlocatable and thus unimaginable subject (98). Her own emotionally charged childhood memories ground Carby’s evocative examination of the intertwined nature of intimacy, race, and labor in the British Empire, stretching from the period following World War II back to the revolutionary wars of the late eighteenth century.

Imperial Intimacies begins with the Gramscian imperative to reconstruct, and at times invent, one’s personal genealogy, not only in fact but in feeling…

Read the entire review here.