Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial relationships were “notorious” at the neighborhood level. But we have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships, especially from freedwomen’s and children’s points of view.

  • Racially mixed children make up the fastest growing youth demographic in the U.S., and teachers of diverse populations need to be mindful in selecting literature that their students can identify with. This volume explores how books for elementary school students depict and reflect multiracial experiences through text and images. Chaudhri examines contemporary children’s literature to…

  • The film Kiku and Isamu (1959) was one of the first cinematic depictions of mixed-race children in postwar Japan, telling the story of two protagonists facing abandonment by two different Black GI fathers and ostracism from Japanese society. Bringing together studies of the representations of the Hapa Japanese experience in culture, Hapa Japan: Identities &…

  • Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” is one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen—I would have stayed in the theater in New York to see the film again if the next showing had not been sold out. The newly released film powerfully illustrates, through James Baldwin’s prophetic work, that the insanity now…

  • Historically, mixed couples and people of mixed descent have been seen as a problem, in popular culture as well as in academic literature. ‘Ethnically’ and ‘racially’ mixed relationships were described as dominated by power imbalances and as devoid of love. This perspective was brought to bear upon relationships and marriages in colonial times and in…

  • Among the events that helped to crystallize what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance was a dinner, in March, 1924, at the Civic Club, on West 12th Street. The idea for the dinner was initially hatched by Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League…

  • Ashley Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland. She holds a BFA in Fine Art, an MA and an MFA in Community Art, which she earned at MICA. A member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she has been active in the Baltimore Lumbee community for many years. Her involvement in…

  • What the #ThankYouLovings campaign gets wrong about interracial couples and the future of America Fusion 2016-12-09 Tahirah Hairston FOCUS FEATURES Last month, Loving, a biopic about Mildred and Richard Loving—the couple at the center of the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision which struck down bans on interracial marriage in 1967—was released nationwide. June 12th,…

  • The genre and literary trope of passing, most commonly expressed in characters who are “legally” black but who are able to pass for white, is a popular narrative that runs throughout American fiction from the mid-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. The importance of the passing narrative rests is in its ability to expose how race is…

  • The ‘Failed’ Project of Blackness in Contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican Discourse A Contra corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America Volume 5, Number 3, Spring 2008 pages 243-251 Sonja Stephenson Watson, Director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program; Associate Professor of Spanish University of Texas, Arlington Escritura afropuertorriqueña y modernidad (2007),…