Mixed Race Studies

Allyson Hobbs discusses A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Monday, 2016-04-11, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University Allyson Hobbs discusses the paperback release of her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

About A Chosen Exile

Countless African Americans have passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and communities. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile. This history of passing explores the possibilities, challenges, and losses that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

For more information, click here.

Voices of Diversity Presents “One Drop of Love” at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center

Jeanné Wagner Theatre
Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center
138 West 300 South
Salt Lake City, Utah 84101
Tuesday, 2016-03-29, 18:00-20:00 MDT (Local Time)

10th Anniversary of the Social Justice Lecture Series: Allies for Equity
Presented by Voices of Diversity of The University of Utah/College of Social Work
2015-2016

One Drop of Love is a multimedia solo performance by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. This extraordinary one-woman show incorporates filmed images, photographs, and animation to tell the story of how the notion of “race” came to be in the United States and how it affects our most intimate relationships. A moving memoir, One Drop of Love takes audiences from the 1700s to the present, to cities all over the U.S., and to West and East Africa, where Fanshen and her father spent time in search of their “racial” roots. The show encourages everyone to discuss “race” and racism openly and critically.

The performance will be immediately followed by a 30-minute Q&A with the artist. All are invited to stay after the show for a reception celebrating 10 years of the Social Justice Lecture Series: Allies for Equity!

• All events in this series are free and open to the public
• 2 NASW-endorsed CEUs will be available for $10 per event
• For more information, please call (801) 581-8455.

Screening and Discussion of Race: The Power of an Illusion, Episode 1

Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Monday, 2016-03-28, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Join us for the first in a series of screenings and discussions of the thought-provoking PBS series Race: The Power of An Illusion, which uses science, history, and more to dispel the many myths and misconceptions surrounding the concept of race. Post-screening discussion led by Erica Chito-Childs, author, CUNY sociology professor, and leading researcher on issues of race.

For more information and to reserve tickets, click here.

Who is Black? Who is Indian? State/Federal Acknowledgment and the Politics of Racial Purity

Arizona State University
West Hall, Room 135
Tempe, Arizona
2016-03-21, 16:30-18:00 MST (Local Time)

Arica Coleman, adjunct lecturer, Center for African Studies, Johns Hopkins University African and African American History, Widener University, will discuss the politics of racial purity in state and federal acknowledgement policies for American Indian populations with known or perceived black ancestry. Racial purity, as first defined by whites and later adopted by many tribal nations, means the absence of blackness, and remains an implicit aspect of the state and federal acknowledgement processes. It has proven troublesome to many tribes in the East where extensive interracial intimacies among blacks, whites and Indians occurred. Using case studies, Coleman will focus on the questions, how do notions of racial purity affect state and federal acknowledgement processes? How has it influenced historical and contemporary views of the social phenomena of Black–Indian relations, Black–Indian familial ties, and “Black Indian” identity?

This lecture is part of the African and African American Speakers series and is also sponsored by the Center for Indian Education in the School of Social Transformation.

For more information, click here. View the flyer here.

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile, in conversation with Helena Brantley

Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, California 94025
Tuesday, 2016-03-15, 19:30 PDT (Local Time)

Presented by Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler’s Books

Join us for a look back at the history of racial passing, and a topical discussion of race and identity problems in America today.

For centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community, almost always for the benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility. But along with these brighter possibilities came grief, loneliness, and isolation that often outweighed the rewards. A Chosen Exile is a beautiful, extensively researched book, with historical photographs and over 82 pages of notes.

As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.

Allyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. Hobbs teaches courses on African-American history, African-American women’s history and 20th century American history. Her research interests include American social and cultural history, racial mixture, identity formation, migration and urbanization, and the intersections of race, class and gender.

Helena Brantley is the founder of Red Pencil Publicity + Marketing, working with both publishers and authors. Previously, she managed publicity campaigns for HarperCollins. She is a proud alumna of the Stanford Publishing Course. Helena tweets and posts about books and other interesting things on Twitter and Instagram.

For more information, click here.

Mixed-Race Politics: Bill de Blasio’s 2013 New York City Mayoral Campaign

University of Michigan
Haven Hall, Room 4701
505 State Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Monday, 2016-03-14, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Michelle May-Curry
American Culture

Please join the Black Humanities Collective as we workshop a presentation by Michelle May-Curry, a doctoral student in American Culture. Dinner will be served. Though RSVP’s are not required, they are encouraged. Graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty in and outside of the humanities are welcomed to attend.

This paper investigates the ways in which multicultural rhetoric situates black-white mixed-race individuals and their families as a bridge between disparate groups and ideologies. Using Bill de Blasio’s New York City Mayoral campaign in 2013 as a case study, I highlight specific media moments in which de Blasio’s children and his interracial marriage to a black woman are deployed as symbols of political (and by extension, racial) futurity. The key questions of this paper ask: How was mixed-race as a symbol deployed in the de Blasio campaign, particularly in the context of the family? What specifically did mixed-race symbolize in this political sphere? Did de Blasio’s family fight back against essentialized multicultural ideals or simply deploy them to capture the minority vote? In answering these questions I conduct a close reading of de Blasio’s well-known TV advertisement featuring his then 15-year-old son Dante, and put it in conversation with persistent racisms in the form of police brutality, an issue that was central to de Blasio’s campaign. This work engages topics at the intersection of critical mixed-race studies, performance studies, and visual culture, drawing upon and contesting current research that places mixed-race people at the forefront of a changing American demographic and political climate.

For more information, click here.

2016 Duke Global Brazil Conference

Duke University
Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (FHI Garage)
C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse
Durham, North Carolina
2016-03-04, 09:00-17:30 EST (Local Time)

Co-sponsored by FHI Global Brazil Lab and the Duke Brazil Initiative

Invited guests include:

• Keynote: Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman (USF) – The Color of Love in Bahia
• Dr. John Collins (CUNY) – Race, Violence, and the State in Bahia
• Dr. William Pan (Duke) – Environment and Health in the Amazon
• Dr. Bryan Pitts (U.Ga) – Sound and Politics
• Guilherme Andreas (JMU) – Flute recital with piano by Gianne Ge Zhu

For more information, click here.

Speaker: Allyson Hobbs

Colgate University
27 Persson Hall
13 Oak Drive
Hamilton, New York 13346
Monday, 2016-03-21, 16:15-18:15 EDT (Local Time)

Contact: Diane English 315-228-7511

Guest speaker Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Stanford University will give a lecture entitled: “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life”, Monday, March 21, 4:15-5:45 pm, in 27 Persson Hall. Her revelatory work of history explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions and it also tells a tale of loss. Hobbs teaches at Stanford University and writes for the New Yorker. Her book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root name A Chosen Exile as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.”

For more information, click here.

Allyson Hobbs: A Chosen Exile

Miami University
Room 1 Upham Hall
100 Bishop Circle
Oxford, Ohio 45056
Thursday, 2016-02-25, 17:00 EST (Local Time)

The E.E. McClellan Lecture in History

Allyson Hobbs is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. Her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present.

The book is winner of both the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history from the Organization of American Historians.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. Hobbs’s revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions, and also tells a tale of loss.

As racial relations in America have evolved, so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own…

For more information, click here.

9 Benefits of Being in an Intercultural Marriage

Masala Mommas: An Online Magazine for Today’s Moms with a South Asian Connection
2016-02-17

Alexandra Madhavan

My husband is from South India and I am Canadian. We are the living, walking, breathing epitome of cultural differences – he is Hindu, I am Catholic; he is a strict vegetarian, I am not; he comes from a huge traditional Iyengar family, I come from a very small Canadian family. We met and fell in love 10 years ago in college, and it still stands that he’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I fell in love with him because he was perfect for me – and he just happened to be from a completely different culture than my own.

Sure, we have had our challenges. There were difficulties being accepted by his family, we still have frequent misunderstandings, we get stared at a lot in public, and we feel a bit isolated in our journey as an intercultural couple because our mix is such a rarity. But our journey getting to know each other’s cultures has been beautiful, mind-blowing and so interesting.

For Example:…

Read the entire article here.