Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race America: Identities and Culture

Fifteenth Annual American Studies Conference
Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55105
2014-02-27 through 2014-02-28

Keynote Address
Thursday, 2014-02-27, 18:00-19:30 CST (Local Time)
Alexander G. Hill Ballroom
Kagin Commons, Macalester

Keynote Speakers:

Ralina L. Joseph, Associate Professor of Communication
University of Washington

Author of: Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2012).

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Co-editor of: War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013).

Cover design by Ricardo Levins Morales

The American Studies Department at Macalester College is honored to host the 15th annual American Studies Conference, “Mixed Race America: Identities and Culture.”

Held every February during Black History Month, the conference brings renowned scholars to campus to present their work and engage with faculty, staff, students, alumni and Twin Cities residents. The conference seeks to highlight the links between scholarship, activism and civic engagement. Each year a different theme is selected based on pertinent issues.

The American Studies Department serves as the academic focal point for the study of race and ethnicity in a national and transnational framework.

For more information on the American Studies Department or this event, contact Kathie Scott at scott@macalester.edu.

For more information, click here. Read the program guide here.

Multiple (Eye)dentity Series: (1)ne Drop Rule w/ Yaba Blay

New York University
Kimmel Center for University Life
60 Washington Square Sout
Room 802
New York, New York 10012
Thursday, 2014-02-27, 17:00-21:00 EST (Local Time)

The Multiple (Eye)dentity Series is comprised of films, performances and speakers that showcase the ways in which art and media are platforms for creating dialogue, sharing personal narratives, exploring issues of identity and diversity, and encouraging activism and social change.

This session features Dr. Yaba Blay, creator of the (1)ne Drop Rule Project. Through this project, Dr. Blay, seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of Blackness as both an identity and lived reality. Featuring the perspectives of 58 contributors representing 25 different countries and countries of origin, and combining candid memoirs with simple, yet striking, portraiture, this multi-platform project provides living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. Although contributors use varying terms to self-identify, they all see themselves as part of the larger racial, cultural, and social group generally referred to and known as “Black.” They all have experienced having their identity called into question simply because they don’t fit neatly into the stereotypical “Black box” — dark skin, “kinky” hair, broad nose, full lips, etc. – and most have been asked “What are you?” or the more politically correct, “Where are you from?” numerous times by various people throughout their lives. It is through contributors’ lived experiences with and lived imaginings of Black identity that we are able to visualize multiple possibilities for Blackness above and beyond appearances.

Please stop by the 8th floor of the Kimmel Center to see a portion of the exhibit until mid March!

For more information, click here.

Hawai’i’s Interracial History, Culture, and Tradition: Construction and Deconstruction (Sawyer Seminar VIII)

University of Southern California, University Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2014-02-28, 09:00-13:00 PST (Local Time)

How are islands connectors of flows of peoples and culture? What types of constructions and deconstructions of race and identity have influenced Hawai’i’s interracial history? How might the past impact the future of racial/ethnic relations on the Hawaiian islands?

PRESENTERS

“Hybrid” and “Hapa”: Challenging the Construction of Hawai‘i as America’s Racial Laboratory

Maile Arvin, University of Santa Cruz, California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow; Ph.D. UC San Diego
Author of Pacifically Possessed: Scientific Production and Native Hawaiian Critique of the “Almost White” Polynesian Race (2013).

“Chinese-Hawaiian Hybrids,” “Hapa Haoles,” and Other Categories: Mixed Race and Racial Consciousness Across the Native-Settler Divide in Territorial Hawai‘i

Christine Manganaro, Assistant Professor
Maryland Institute College of Art
Author of Assimilating Hawai‘i: Racial Science in a Colonial Laboratory, 1919-1959 (forthcoming)

Respondent:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

For more information, click here.

“Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey” Performance by Elizabeth Liang

Arts at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Eastman Laboratories (Building 6)
2014-02-21, 18:00-20:30 EST (Local Time)

Written and Performed by Elizabeth Liang

Who are you when you’re from everywhere and nowhere? Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey is a funny and poignant one-woman show about growing up as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and New England.

Elizabeth Liang, like President Obama, is a Third Culture Kid or a TCK. Third Culture Kids are the children of international business people, global educators, diplomats, missionaries, and the military-anyone whose family has relocated overseas because of a job placement. Liang weaves humorous stories about growing up as an Alien Citizen abroad with American commercial jingles providing her soundtrack through language confusion, first love, culture shock, Clark Gable, and sandstorms…Our protagonist deals with the decisions every global nomad has to make repeatedly: to adapt or to simply cope; to build a bridge or to just tolerate. From being a Guatemalan-American teen in North Africa to attending a women’s college in the USA, Alien Citizen reflects her experience that neither one was necessarily easier than the other. She realizes that girls across the world are growing into womanhood in environments that can be hostile to females (including the USA). How does a young girl cope as a border/culture/language/religion straddler in country after country that feels “other” to her when she is the “other” Where is the line between respecting others and betraying yourself?

For more information, click here.

“The Red and The White: A Family Saga of the American West” presentation

New Mexico State University
Nason House
1070 University Ave
Friday, 2014-02-21, 13:00-14:30 MST (Local Time)

CLABS-Book Talk to be held Feb. 21

A Center for Latin American Border Studies-Book Talk titled “The Red and The White: A Family Saga of the American West” [on the book by the same name] by Andrew Graybill, William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21, at the Nason House. The event is free and open to the public. The Nason House is located on 1070 University Ave., across from FedEx Kinko’s.

At dawn on Jan. 23, 1870, 400 men of the Second U.S. Cavalry attacked and butchered a Piegan winter camp on the Marias River in Montana in one of the worst slaughters of Indians by American military forces in U.S. history. Come to avenge the murder of their father – a former fur trader named Malcolm Clarke, killed four months earlier by his Piegan wife’s cousin – Clarke’s own two sons rode with the cavalry that day and thus murdered their own blood relatives. Andrew R. Graybill places the Marias Massacre within a larger three-generation saga of the Clarke family, illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in the American West.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information click here.

Advancing Health Through A Racial Lens: The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

University of Maryland, College Park
Stamp Student Union
Banneker Room 2212
Thursday, 2014-02-20, 12:30-15:00 EST (Local Time)

Moderated by:

Dorothy Roberts J.D., Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002); and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Among her many public interest activities, Roberts serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

Distinguished University of Maryland Panelists:

“Racial Coping in African American Mothers & Adolescents”
Mia A. Smith Bynum, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Family Science

“Treating Difference: Race, Risk, and the Politics of HIV/AIDs Prevention”
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Ph.D., MPH, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

“Addressing Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease: Directions for the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act”
Gneisha Y. Dinwiddie, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of African American Studies

For more information, click here or here.

Mixed Roots Stories~ What’s Yours?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2014-02-19, 17:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us today as we meet the visionaries behind Mixed Roots Stories: Chandra Crudup, Mark Edwards and our very own, Fanshen Cox. Mixed Roots Stories (MXRS) is a new resource for teaching and learning about the Mixed Experience and is a creative and dynamic online and physical California Not-For-Profit dedicated to promoting artists and stories of all kinds that address Mixed experiences. “We are an interactive community, so input and collaboration with others is essential to our mission of Celebrating and Strengthening Diverse Mixed Communities through the Power of Sharing Stories.”

AND THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN:

There are a number of collaborative opportunities:

• YOU CAN Promote story ideas on the Mixed Roots Stories website
• YOU CAN Partner to plan and implement an event (for example MXRS is partnering with the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in bringing arts and cultural programming to the 2014 conference)
• YOU CAN Share the MXRS podcast
• YOU CAN Participate in the selection of the Mixed Roots Stories logo

PLEASE CALL IN TO SHARE YOUR MIXED ROOTS STORY.

Mixed Roots Stories’ very own: Chandra, Mark and Fanshen will join us to take your calls and tell us all about this amazing new resource.

WON’T YOU JOIN US?

Color Without Complex: A Conversation w/ Michaela Angela Davis & Dr. Yaba Blay

New York University, Washington, D.C.
Abramson Family Auditorium
1307 L Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20005
Tuesday, 2014-02-18, 18:30 EST (Local Time)

Michaela Angela Davis

Yaba Blay, Ph.D., Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

What exactly is Blackness? What does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? Who determines who is Black and who is not? Who’s Black, who’s not, and who cares? This discussion seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of Blackness as both an identity and lived reality.

Video streaming by Ustream

For more information, contact: NYU Washington DC Events at nyuwashingtondcevents@nyu.edu or 202-654-8300.

Miscegenating Racial Representations: Critical Mixed Race Strategies and the Visual Arts

College Art Association 102nd Annual Conference
Hilton Chicago
720 South Michigan Avenue
International South, 2nd Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60605
2014-02-15, 14:30-17:00 CST (Local Time)

Chairs:

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design
DePaul University

Margo Machida, Associate Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

This session will examine critical mixed race strategies for the miscegenation of racial representation in the visual arts. The 2000 U.S. Census was first to allow individuals to self enumerate as more than one race. Making multiracial populations visible both expanded the borders, blurred and posed a potential threat to existing monoracial categories. Beginning in the early 2000s there was a simultaneous neoliberal and conservative push for a postidentitarian/ postracial moment posed against the putative ossification of multicultural racial identity constructs. Curatorial frameworks and studio practices centered on race as a locus of investigation were challenged if not rendered invisible and seemingly obsolete. And yet race and attendant cultural issues have demonstrably remained pertinent for artistic production and analysis. A double tension has resulted in moves to both recognize the continuing importance of race and the critical push to reframe and disarticulate categories that cannot contain the complexity of increasingly miscegenated peoples, histories, and subjectivities. We will consider how dominant conceptions of race have changed (or not) in the visual arts as a result of the mounting discourses and bodies of artistic production that bring forward mixed race identity in various domestic, transnational and international contexts.

Beyond the Bronze Venus
Alison Fraunhar, Associate Professor of Art and Design
Saint Xavier University

Sensory Miscegenations: Representing Multiracial Bodies
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, California College of the Arts

Lacuna
Maya Isabella Mackrandilal, Independent Artist

Liminal Embodiments
Zavé Martohardjono, Independent Artist

Risky Subjectivity: Select Works by Korean Adoptee Artists
Eun Jung Park, Independent Scholar

A Breakdown & Discussion of Upcoming Events with Our Very Own, Steve Riley

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2014-02-12, 17:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

On Wednesday’s episode of Mixed Race Radio, Steve Riley (mixedracestudies. org) will join me to discuss some upcoming events and performances occurring all over the world. Whether you are in Chicago, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia, PA, there are things to do, places to go and people to meet.

If you are hosting an event or need someone to “go-with”, join us and share, share, share.

We’ve got updates from Laura Kina, Lisa Jones (Topaz Club), and Steve Riley. Oh yeah……If you reside in the Republic of Georgia, we’ll let you know where to go to get a mulatto spray tan….Yes, I said it!!!

You see we have a lot to discuss so please feel free to join us by dialing in or joining our chat room.

And don’t forget to tell a friend.

Also, we want to use this time to say “Thank You” to everyone who continues to follow us. You may have noticed that our site is missing a few episodes from the past few weeks. For anyone who doesn’t know, I’ve been broadcasting live from Northeastern Ohio since early January and Mother Nature continues to express her authority over all things by sending -35 degree temps and record snowfalls our way. Needless to say, when pipes burst, fire alarms begin to sound and therefore radio shows cannot be recorded. So, thank you for your continued support.

As long as Mother Nature allows, we will continue to bring you episodes that showcase some amazing people and even more amazing movements.

Keep the emails and phone calls coming.

WON’T YOU JOIN US?