Mixed Race Studies

“My life has gotten white”: Zadie Smith’s Erotics and Ethics of Upward Mobility

C21 Seminar Series 2015-16
Centre for Research in Twenty-first Century Writings
University of Brighton
Falmer Campus
101 Mayfield House
Brighton, United Kingdom
2015-11-09, 17:00-18:30Z

Sarah Brophy, Professor of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

In a 2011 Guardian article “Where are Britain’s black authors?,” novelist Catherine Johnson discusses the boom in white-authored stories about “other races and cultures,” suggesting that “the words of a white author are a comfortable buffer, a reassurance that nothing in the story will be too shocking, too hard to understand; the author is like you, and you can trust him or her to tell you this story in familiar terms.” Conspicuously absent from Johnson’s discussion is Zadie Smith, the young mixed race author from North London who burst on to the literary scene with a historic advance contract for the manuscript of the acclaimed White Teeth (2000). How does the case of Smith potentially reroute Johnson’s critique? Building on Zadie Smith’s comments in a publicity interview for her latest novel NW (2012) that “my life has gotten white compared to the life I grew up with. Because of the world I work in—it’s white,” this paper considers the dilemmas of upward mobility and whiteness as they have come to bear on Smith, who articulates and negotiates these pressures in a range of life writing modes (especially personal essays and autobiographical fiction)…

For more information, click here.

Why Germany’s latest Nazi satire ‘Heil’ isn’t brave enough

Deutsche Welle
2015-07-16

Sarah Hofmann

An unlikely spokesman Neo-Nazi boss Sven (left, played by Beno Fürmann) celebrates a victory. He kidnapped Afro-German author Sebastian Klein (played by Jerry Hoffmann), who suffers from amnesia after behind hit on the head. Klein starts mimicking everything the neo-Nazis say.

An Afro-German starts talking like a neo-Nazi after the right-wingers beat him up in the new film satire, “Heil.” If Germany is going to laugh about Nazis, it should have a better reason to, says DW’s Sarah Hofmann.

It starts with a shock and the text “Deutschland 1945” on a black board. Cut. Historic footage of a Hitler speech. Cut. Piles of corpses in Bergen-Belsen. Cut. “Deutschland 1945” on a black board. Cut. One of the main characters in the film, a neo-Nazi, spraying “Wheit Pauer” – presumably intended to read “White Power” – and a swastika on a wall.

The first sequence in the film “Heil” lasts only five seconds. But the scenes are powerful. The audience stops laughing when the images jump from 1945 to 2015.

As a German in the audience, I find myself asking: Is that ok? Can images of Nazi crimes be used to evoke laughter without offending the victims? I decide that, yes, it can. But with one caveat: It has to hurt.

If the humor is black, then it should be bad.

How far can clichés be taken?

Nevertheless, even in 2015, Nazi jokes shouldn’t be turned into slapstick in Germany – and that’s the problem with “Heil.” The plot cannot be summed up in a few lines. It opens in Prittwitz, a fictional East German village that fulfills every cliché and is controlled by neo-Nazis. Afro-German author Sebastian Klein has a reading scheduled in this very town. Shortly after he arrives, he is beaten up and kidnapped by a bunch of neo-Nazis. The slapstick element comes when Klein suffers from amnesia after being hit on the head and mimics everything the neo-Nazis say for the rest of the film.

In talk shows, Klein rants xenophobic slogans. It’s a victory for neo-Nazi boss, Sven, who is competing with other neo-Nazi groups: the new Nazis in the West and the Nipsters. The latter dress like hipsters and know their way around social media, which gives them an advantage over the backward twits from Prittwitz. Then there are the local gangs that are just waiting for an opportunity to march into Poland again.

And Sebastian? His pregnant girlfriend – the epitome of the well-situated, hip Berlin mom – comes looking for him…

Read the entire article here.

Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex and Afro-Religiosity

Palgrave Macmillan
July 2015
216 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781137454171
Ebook (EPUB) ISBN: 9781137454195
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781137454188

Montré Aza Missouri, Associate Professor in Film
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Contributing to emerging scholarship on representations of race, gender, sexuality and religion in film and media, Black Magic Woman focuses on the ‘tragic mulatto‘ stereotype that is conventionally portrayed as a character tormented by issues of racial and cultural ambiguity. Montré Aza Missouri explores the journey of the ‘mulatto‘ from ‘tragic’ to ’empowered’ through the character’s adherence to Yoruba-Atlantic religions such as Cuban Lucumí, Puerto Rican Santería and American Voodoo. From this religious transformation, the ‘tragic mulatto’ becomes the Black Magic Woman, a signifier of a New World cultural identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – From ‘Tragic Mulatto’ to Black Magic Woman: Race, Sex and Religion in Film
• Chapter 1. Womanism and Womanist Gaze
• Chapter 2. Beauty as Power: In/visible Woman and Womanist Film in Daughters of the Dust
• Chapter 3. Passing Strange: Voodoo Queens and Hollywood Fantasy in Eve’s Bayou
• Chapter 4. I’ll Fly Away: Baadasssss Mamas and Third Cinema in Sankofa
• Chapter 5. Not Another West Side Story: Nuyorican Women and New Black Realism in I Like It Like That
• Chapter 6. It Is Easy Being Green: Disney’s Post-Racial Princess and Black Magic Nostalgia in The Princess and the Frog
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index

AfroLatin@s in Action: Making a Difference through Research, Education & the Arts

Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
New York, New York 10012
Thursday, 2015-10-15, 18:30-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

Join us for a discussion led by AfroCuban author, bibliographer, and activist Tomás Fernandez Robaína on the crucial role of books in the advancement of Black advocacy movements throughout the Americas.

Learn about the Forum’s new projects aimed at increasing AfroLatin@ visibility and representation. These initiatives include raising the AfroLatin@ count in the 2020 census; developing a national network to promote and support AfroLatin@ Studies; and preparing a retrospective exhibition on the work of photographer Tony Gleaton. Find out how you can play a role in making a positive change. Come ready to take action!

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, both at NYU.

For more information, click here.

12 British Poets Share Their Favourite Poems For #NationalPoetryDay

BuzzFeed
2015-10-08

Fiona Rutherford, BuzzFeed News Reporter
London, England

…3. Rachel Long

Amaal Said

Age: 26

Themes in your work: Sexuality, growing up, hurt, mixed parentage, love, eating disorders, death, dreams.

Favourite poem: Impossible to choose. I’ve sat here for a half hour with fingers over keys or in my hair. I can’t call it between: “In The Book of The Disappearing Book” by John Gallaher, “The Ugly Daughter” by Warsan Shire, “Snow” by David Berman, “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds, and “Of August” by Karen McCarthy Woolf.

What comes to mind when you think of the word “light”? Marlboro, that sunrise, a macro photograph of oestrogen taken by science photographer Lennart Nilsson that looks like a firework. It was stunning to see, and to know that we have this exploding, all the time, on the inside of our bodies…

…5. Hannah Lowe

Tim Ridley

Age: 39

Themes in your work: Working-class lives, multiculturalism, London, migration, diaspora.

Favourite poem: “The Mercy” by Philip Levine – one of many favourites.

What comes to mind when you think of the word “light”? Funnily enough, electric lights come to mind rather than daylight. I’m thinking of the way we light the night. It must be living in London… street lights, neon signs, security lights. From my back window I look out over Wood Green and Tottenham, all the way to Walthamstow, and there’s a real clatter of light out there, from houses and flats, office blocks, sometimes a star or two…

Read the entire article here.

‘One Drop of Love’

The Sophian: The Independent Newspaper of Smith College
Northampton, Massachusetts
2015-09-24

Eliza Going, Contributing Writer

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni performed her well-known one-woman play challenging the construct of race, “One Drop of Love,” on Sept. 18 and 19 in the Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre. In this show, she not only tells the story of her own experiences with race as a multicultural woman, but she also gives a taste of many different incidents experienced by people of varying ages, backgrounds and cultural identities through the ups and downs of their most intimate relationships.

The play is presented in two formats. In one, DiGiovanni plays a variety of different characters talking conversationally about their experience with race; in the other, she jumps through U.S. history as a census taker. A projector lights up a simple white screen with the year and race section of the corresponding census…

Tying the census into the play introduces a political component that connects the stories of racial injustice to a tangible account of the government’s inattention toward racial or cultural identity. Only in 2010 [2000] did it become possible to check more than one box on the census. “I’m glad she connected the personal and the political in this way because, to me, they’re inextricably linked, and one can’t talk about one without the other,” Elizabeth Haas ’17 said…

Read the entire review here.

Obama and hip-hop: a breakup song

The Washington Post
2015-09-25

Erik Nielson, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts
University of Richmond

Travis L. Gosa, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Erik Nielson is an assistant professor of liberal arts at the University of Richmond. Travis L. Gosa is an assistant professor of Africana studies at Cornell University. Their book, “The Hip Hop & Obama Reader,” will be published in October.

In 2008, Barack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip-hop — a genre typically viewed as politically radioactive because of its frequently controversial themes and anti-establishment ethos — in his campaign. Equally remarkable was the extent to which hip-hop artists and activists, often highly skeptical of national politicians, embraced him in return. As a result, for the first time it appeared we were witnessing a burgeoning relationship between hip-hop and national politics.

As we approach the 2016 election, however, this relationship is all but gone. Ironically, Obama — often called the first “hip-hop president” — largely is to blame.

This is especially disappointing in light of Obama’s 2008 run for office, when he encouraged artists such as Jay Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs to campaign for him, referenced rap music in his interviews and speeches, played rap at his events and openly contemplated a space for hip-hop in an Obama White House. In one of the lasting images of the campaign, Obama stood in front of an audience in Raleigh, N.C., and referenced Jay Z’s 2003 track “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” to raucous applause. In that moment, voters had every reason to believe that hip-hop indeed would have a seat at the table in an Obama administration…

Read the entire article here.

Black No More? The Recent Recognition of Mixed-Race Identity

Acta Philologica
Issue 45 (2014)
pages 78-84

Joanna Chojnowska, Assistant Professor
American Literature Section, Department of Modern Philology
University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Artykuł omawia relatywnie niedawną zmianę, jaka zaszła w kategoryzacji tożsamości rasowej w USA. Tradycyjnie postrzegani i identyfikujący się jako podgrupa Afroamerykanów zgodnie z zasadą „jednej kropli krwi”, dawni „Mulaci” zyskali w ciągu ostatnich dziesięcioleci nowe możliwości definiowania swej tożsamości rasowej dzięki teoriom postetniczności i hybrydowości, tożsamości „new mestiza” i wpływom świata latynoskiego. Jednocześnieujawniły się głosy krytyki wobec porzucenia esencjalistycznego postrzegania rasowości. Porównując przeciwstawne stanowiska w tej sprawie, artykuł przedstawia różne możliwości (auto)identyfikacji rasowej w USA.

For most of the history of the United States, the racial categorization of mixed black/white persons was illogical and often contradictory (Sollors, “Introduction” 6). Generally speaking, people with any percentage of black ancestry were most commonly classified simply as black (according to the “one-drop rule” imposed by whites), and, at times, recognized as a separate subgroup within this category. Interestingly, black and biracial people internalized the “one-drop” thinking, and by the 1920s people were unlikely to identify themselves as mulattoes (Pabst 199–200; Morton 116). This situation remained largely unchanged until the 1990s, which witnessed a noticeable shift towards acceptance and even celebration of mixedness (Hollinger 1370). This article aims to demonstrate how the new approaches to mixed race – postethnicity, hybridity and “mestizaje” – have complicated the traditional “either-or” racial division in the United States. It also argues that the long-established racial ideas – the “one drop” thinking and essentialism (albeit in a modified form) – are still strongly present in the American racial discourse. Comparing opposing stances on this matter, the article illustrates different possibilities of racial self-identification in the United States.

Since the 1990s, popular and academic interest in multiracialism has been growing (Elam xiii). For the first time since 1920, mixedness was also officially recognized by the state in the National Census 2000 (Zack 15). In the words of Patricia Morton, “American scholars are not only exploring the contemporary role of mulattoes, but also recognizing their historical existence and roots. [. . .] Americans of mixed black-white ancestry are no longer the most invisible ‘invisible man’ of American history” (122). Studies and anthologies on mixed race published in the last decade of the 20th century include such important works as: Racially Mixed People in America (1992) and The Multiracial Experience (1996) by Maria P. P. Root, Race and Mixed Race (1993) and American Mixed Race (1995) by Naomi Zack, as well as Neither Black nor White yet Both (1997) and Interracialism (2000) by Werner Sollors. The critical attention to the notion of mixed race continues unabated into the new millennium. Recent works include: Mixing It Up (2004) edited by SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Zack, Complicating Constructions (2007) edited by David Goldstein, The Souls of Mixed Folk (2011) by Michele Elam and Crossing B(l)ack (2013) by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins. Significantly, a growing body of such critical works is written by multiracial persons…

Read the entire article here.

Between the World and Me: Empathy Is a Privilege

The Atlantic
2015-09-28

John Paul Rollert, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates have made race and empathy central to their writing, but their conclusions point in radically different directions.

Don’t despair. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, that’s what President Obama told him at the end of a White House meeting in 2013. Coates had criticized the president on his blog for favoring the rhetoric of black self-help over an honest conversation about structural racism. Having written and reflected extensively on race, Obama made it plain to Coates that he took exception to the critique, ending what must have been a tense conversation with his brief words of encouragement. The president reportedly took along Coates’s new book on his recent trip to Martha’s Vineyard. If he found time to read it, he knows the younger man didn’t take his advice to heart.

Obama is not an acknowledged interlocutor of Between the World and Me, but the book may be read as a skeptical reply to the putative power of empathy to transcend racial divisions—a leitmotif of Obama’s two books and a guiding conceit of his presidency. In The Audacity of Hope, the book Obama wrote in 2006 to test enthusiasm for a possible White House run, he describes empathy as both the “heart of my moral code” and a “guidepost for my politics.” Defining it succinctly as a successful attempt to “stand in somebody’s else’s shoes and see through their eyes,” Obama regards empathy not as an exceptional gesture but an organizing principle for ethical behavior and even a preferred way of being. By cultivating our capacity for empathy, he says, we are forced beyond “our limited vision.” We unburden ourselves of the trivial rigidities that divide us, allowing us to “find common ground” even in the face of our sharpest disagreements…

…Trauma is an irremediable fact of Coates’s work. “I am wounded,” he tells his son. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” The sentiment hints at another book Coates might have written, one that sees him transcend the crises of his youth for a new understanding in adulthood. That story is more or less the one Obama tells in Dreams of My Father, his first book and, like Coates’s, a lyrical memoir that presents the author’s life as an allegory for race in America. That the two men draw such divergent conclusions—Coates detects a “specious hope” in the picture of a white cop embracing a black boy after a Ferguson protest, whereas Obama considers the interracial harmony of his own family hope at its most audacious—is not merely the consequence of two very different sets of lived experience, but the lessons drawn from them and their implications for empathic transcendence.

Especially when juxtaposed with Between the World and Me, the chapters of Dreams of My Father that profile Obama’s adolescence are striking for the studied dispassion that has marked the president’s decisions in office and seems essential to his character. When he describes the racist episodes of his youth, it is not merely that they lack the “visceral” menace of Coates’s experience—he revealingly calls them a “ledger of slights”—they seem only to scratch him, they never scar…

Read the entire article here.

The Passing Paradox: Writing, identity & publishing while black

Fusion
2015-02-13

Stacia L. Brown

A wife lives in constant fear that her husband will discover she’s not who she claims to be. A black aspiring architect is mistaken for an ethnicity other than his own and is offered a job he never would’ve accessed had he corrected the error. A pregnant mother prays nightly that her baby’s skin won’t betray a bit of brownness. Such are the predicaments of characters in the early 20th century “passing narratives” I’ve loved since my days as an undergraduate English major.

To “pass,” as African American writers in the early 1900s defined it, was to choose to escape from the violence and discrimination attendant to blackness — a privilege possible only for those whose skin was light enough to pull it off. Peaking in popularity by the 1930s, passing narratives were often melodramatic and cautionary, detailing the myriad dangers of abandoning one’s black identity in order to take cover amid the white communities that systemically oppressed black citizens.

The penalty for being caught passing could be as merciless as emotional and physical abandonment or as cruel as a violent death. In Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, for instance, one of the story’s protagonists, Clare, either falls or is pushed from the top floor of a building during a party. Unbeknownst to her, her racist white husband has discovered her blackness through her light-skinned friend, Irene, who isn’t exactly passing. When he charges toward her stumbles out to her death.

Passing narratives not only interrogate the fluidity of racial identity and assess the stakes of racial allegiance, but also double as slow-burning thrillers: Race itself is the stalker, an implicit threat skulking in the backgrounds of seemingly contented, white identified lives…

Read the entire article here.