Mixed Race Studies

Living in Ambiguity with Carl Olsen

Mixed Race Radio
2012-09-05, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Carl Olsen
Colorado State Univeristy

Carl is a regular guest on Mixed Race Radio and self- identifies as Japanese and White. Originally Carl was going to discuss his experience being marked as white on a traffic ticket (that I got for speeding…).

Now however, I have invited Carl on to the show to discuss his thesis entitled, “Living in Ambiguity: Perceptions of Mixed Race and the Mixed Race Experience at Colorado State University.”

In addition, Carl is  conducting interviews with CSU students who self identify as having two or more races, checked the multiracial box on the admission form, and/or self-identify as mixed/multi/biracial.  Hopefully, this data will help Carl to  develop a model for creating a “Mixed Race Resource Center” of some sort, modeled after centers such as Black/African-American Cultural Centers, Asian/Pacific American Cultural Centers, etc. Carl is also serving as the advisor for SHADES of CSU, the mixed-race student organization on campus.

Carl has a perception survey to administer, and it’s one question: When you think of a mixed race/biracial/multiracial individual, what 5 words or phrases would you use to describe them?

I thought we could help him.

Play in your default player here.

Miss., US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to read poetry at JSU

Clarion-Ledger
Jackson, Mississippi
2012-08-21

Special to The Clarion-Ledger
 
Pulitzer Prize winner and current Mississippi and United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will read her poetry at Jackson State University at 3 p.m. Sept. 20 in room 166/266 of the Dollye M.E. Robinson College of Liberal Arts Building.

This event will be hosted by the Margaret Walker Center at JSU and is free and open to the public.

In January, Trethewey was named the Mississippi Poet Laureate for a four-year term. Soon after, she was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Trethewey is the first person to serve simultaneously as a state and U.S. laureate.

Read the entire article here.

Hapa-Palooza Festival: September 12, 13 & 15, 2012

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2012-09-12, 2012-09-13 and 2012-09-15

Hapa-Palooza: A Vancouver Celebration of Mixed-Roots Arts and Ideas is a new cultural festival that celebrates the city’s identity as a place of hybridity, synergy and acceptance. A vibrant fusion of music, dance, literary, artistic and film performances, Hapa-Palooza places prominence on celebrating and stimulating awareness of mixed-roots identity, especially amongst youth.

For more information, click here.

Purdu­e Hapa Stude­nt Assoc­iatio­n Callo­ut Sept. 17, 2012

Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana
Class of 1950, Room 121
2012-09-17, 18:00-20:00 CDT (Local Time)

The term “Hapa” refers to a biracial/multiracial person with Asian and/or Pacific Islander roots. As a club, we promote both diversity and unity, and we strive to raise awareness of identity crisis amongst Hapas, as well as Asian interest on campus. With leadership and volunteering opportunities, memorable events, and fellow club members to create long lasting memories and friendships, Purdue HSA is Purdue’s newest upcoming organization. Come to our callout to learn more about what HSA is all about!

For more information, click here.

Susan Graham Discusses Project RACE

Mixed Race Radio
2012-08-15, 17:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Susan Graham, Executive Director
Project RACE

Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) members are the national advocates for multiracial children, teens, adults, and our families. Project RACE was started in 1990, so we are in our 22nd year! Susan Graham, the mother of two multiracial children and Chris Ashe, the mother of a multiracial child began Project RACE because of their own frustration with their own children being forced to pick only one race on forms in America. That meant, very simply, that a child had to choose to be her mother’s race or her father’s race. Susan and Chris planned to start a grassroots movement to pass State legislation, mandate the US Census Bureau and federal agencies to add the term “multiracial” to forms, or in some way accommodate the needs of multiracial people.

Play in your default player here.

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey 2012 Annual Convention

What is the Black German Experience? History, Performance Popular & Visual Cultures
Barnard College, Columbia University
New York, New York
2012-08-10 through 2012-08-11

Building on the success of the inaugural 2011 conference, the second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey (BGCSNJ) will be held at Barnard College in New York City on August 10-11, 2012.  This year’s convention will focus on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?”

The conference will feature a keynote address, “‘Operation Helping Hands’, African Americans and the Albert-Schweitzer Children’s Home for Mixed-Race Children,” by Yara Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, screenings of the films “Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story” and “Audre Lorde—The Berlin Years 1984-1992,” and readings by Black German poet-performers Olumide Popoola and Philipp Kabo Köpsell.

Features

• Teaching the Black German Experience.
• Historical and Popular Cultures of Blacks in Germany.
• Visualizing German Blackness.
• Witnessing Our Histories—Reclaiming the Black German Experience.
• Telling Our Stories—Black German Life Writing.

For more information, click here.

U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey coming to campus

East Carolina University
Greenville, North Carolina
2012-10-24 through 2012-10-25

United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will be on campus Oct. 24-25 as part of the Contemporary Writers Series. A native of Gulfport, Miss., Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2006. She is professor of English at Emory University; she was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate in June.
 
Trethewey is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.
 
The Contemporary Writers Series aims to expose students and other readers to award-winning fiction and nonfiction writers, translators and poets…

For more information, click here.

Embodying Belonging: Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan

University Of Hawai‘i Press
May 2010
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3344-2

Taku Suzuki, Assistant Professor of International Studies
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Embodying Belonging is the first full-length study of a Okinawan diasporic community in South America and Japan. Under extraordinary conditions throughout the twentieth century (Imperial Japanese rule, the brutal Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II, U.S. military occupation), Okinawans left their homeland and created various diasporic communities around the world. Colonia Okinawa, a farming settlement in the tropical plains of eastern Bolivia, is one such community that was established in the 1950s under the guidance of the U.S. military administration. Although they have flourished as farm owners in Bolivia, thanks to generous support from the Japanese government since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, hundreds of Bolivian-born ethnic Okinawans have left the Colonia in the last two decades and moved to Japanese cities, such as Yokohama, to become manual laborers in construction and manufacturing industries.

Based on the author’s multisited field research on the work, education, and community lives of Okinawans in the Colonia and Yokohama, this ethnography challenges the unidirectional model of assimilation and acculturation commonly found in immigration studies. In its vivid depiction of the transnational experiences of Okinawan-Bolivians, it argues that transnational Okinawan-Bolivians underwent the various racialization processes—in which they were portrayed by non-Okinawan Bolivians living in the Colonia and native-born Japanese mainlanders in Yokohama and self-represented by Okinawan-Bolivians themselves—as the physical embodiment of a generalized and naturalized “culture” of Japan, Okinawa, or Bolivia. Racializing narratives and performances ideologically serve as both a cause and result of Okinawan-Bolivians’ social and economic status as successful large-scale farm owners in rural Bolivia and struggling manual laborers in urban Japan.
 
As the most comprehensive work available on Okinawan immigrants in Latin America and ethnic Okinawan “return” migrants in Japan, Embodying Belongingis at once a critical examination of the contradictory class and cultural identity (trans)formations of transmigrants; a rich qualitative study of colonial and postcolonial subjects in diaspora, and a bold attempt to theorize racialization as a social process of belonging within local and global schemes.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racializing Culture and Class in a Transnational Field
• 1. Modern Okinawan Transnationality: Colonialism, Diaspora, and “Return”
• 2. The Making of Patrones Japonesas and Dekasegi Migrants
• 3. From Patrón to Nikkei-jin Rodosha: Class Transformations
• 4. Educating “Good” Nikkei and Okinawan Subjects
• 5. Gendering Transnationality: Marriage, Family, and Dekasegi
• Conclusion: Embodiment of Local Belonging
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index

The Family Jewell: A Metis History of San Juan Island and Puget Sound, by Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky

San Juan Historical Museum
323 Price St.
Friday Harbor, Washington
Saturday, 2012-06-30, 18:00 PDT (Local Time)

The history of Métis families (Native American and European ancestry) is like the mist that shrouds the San Juan Island chain: a constant, but elusive, characteristic of the Puget Sound past and present. Come and see through the mist at an upcoming presentation about Nora Jewell, born on San Juan Island around 1864, and one of the first mixed-race women to seek justice within Washington’s territorial legal system. Nora Jewell’s remarkable story reveals much about the social and political world of Métis families who were so prevalent during the territorial settlement of the island chain. Professor Jagodinsky’s discussion will follow the course of Nora Jewell’s documented life between 1864 and 1910 to offer a personal glimpse into the efforts of Métis women to maintain their identity and independence during a period of great transition for the indigenous people of San Juan Island and the Puget Sound. Touching on the practice and problems of Métis history, this presentation makes more visible the presence of indigenous and mixed-race families in San Juan’s past and present. Island locals will no doubt recognize family members and old friends in Nora Jewell’s history, while visitors will enjoy learning more about the rich history of cultural diversity on San Juan Island and the nearby mainland.

Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky is assistant professor of history at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is writing a comparative history of Native women’s use of the American legal system in Washington and Arizona between 1854 and 1935.

5th Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival

Japanese American National Museum
Los Angeles, California
2012-06-15 through 2012-06-17

Co-producers: Fanshen Cox, Heidi Durrow, and Jennifer Frappier of the award-winning podcast Mixed Chicks Chat

The Festival is a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit organization, celebrating stories of the Mixed experience. Each year the Festival brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial families and individuals for two days of workshops, readings, film screenings and live performance including music, comedy and spoken word.

Note from Steven F. Riley: Please visit my “vendor” table where I will be giving away books (referenced on this site) to lucky winners!

For more information, click here.  For the press release, click here.