Mixed Race Studies

Legacies of Postwar Japan’s “War Bride” Era

Japanese American National Museum
100 North Central Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90012
Telephone: (213) 625-0414
2018-06-30, 09:00-17:30 PDT (Local Time)

Presented in partnership with the Hapa Japan Project at USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

During and shortly after the US-Allied Occupation of Japan, the Japanese women who fraternized with soldiers often met opposition from their families and were shunned by other Japanese. Many mixed-raced children faced severe prejudice for being “impure” and born from the former enemy.

This symposium brings together various stakeholders to tell the stories of the war brides and their children. By focusing on the memories, realities, and legacies of this community, this groundbreaking gathering will create opportunities for listening, discussing, healing, and empowering attendees.

Symposium Schedule

9:00am – 9:30am Welcome and Opening Remarks

• Duncan Williams (USC Shinso Ito Center and Hapa Japan Project)
• Fredrick Cloyd (author of Dream of the Water Children)

9:30am – 10:40am Session 1 – Occupation/Migration: Women, Children and the U.S. Military Presence

• Etsuko Crissey (author of Okinawa’s GI Brides: Their Lives in America)
• Mire Koikari (University of Hawai‘i; author of Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East Asia)
• Elena Tajima Creef (Wellesley College; author of Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body and Following Her Own Road: The Life and Art of Mine Okubo)

10:40am – 11:50am Session 2 – Difference and Other: War-Bride and Mixed-race Children’s Representations

• Margo Okazawa-Rey (Fielding Graduate University; Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University)
• Sonia Gomez (University of Chicago; Visiting Scholar, MIT; author of From Picture Brides to War Brides: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the Making of Japanese America)

11:50am – 1:15pm LUNCH BREAK

1:15pm – 2:45pm Session 3 — Book Launch of “Dream of the Water Children: Memory & Mourning in the Black Pacific”

• Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd (author of Dream of the Water Children)
• Curtiss Takada Rooks (Loyola Marymount University)
• Angela Tudico (Archives Specialist, National Archives at New York City)

2 :45pm – 3 :00pm COFFEE/TEA BREAK

3 :00pm – 5 :30pm Session 4 – Film and Discussion of “Giving Voice, The Japanese War Brides”

• Miki Crawford (Producer/author of Giving Voice, The Japanese War Brides)
• Kathryn Tolbert (Washington Post; Producer/Director of Seven Times Down, Eight Times Up: The Japanese War Brides)

5:30pm Closing Remarks: Fredrick Cloyd

For more information and to RSVP, click here.

The Family Resemblance

Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
305 Great Neck Road
Waterford, Connecticut 06385
2018-06-23 through 2018-06-29

Book, music & lyrics by Masi Asare

Akosua and her family are expecting an ordinary Christmas back home in central Pennsylvania, but heavy winds, a corporate crisis, and a visitation from an ancestor mean things do not go as planned. This semiautobiographical musical centers on three generations of one cross-cultural family—a white mother, black father, two mixed race daughters, and the spirit of an African grandmother. Even when your heritage is all over the map, you have to go back to your roots to find your way forward. The score includes American folk and popular song, west African highlife, and Akan classical music.

For more information, click here.

Melissa Harris-Perry in Conversation with Allyson Hobbs

Stanford University
Cubberley Auditorium
Stanford, California
Wednesday, 2018-05-23, 17:00-18:30 PDT (Local Time)

Contact: rmeisels@stanford.edu

Join us for an evening of conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry, Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University, founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center, Editor-at-Large, Elle.com and Author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, in conversation with Allyson Hobbs, Associate Professor of History and Director of African and African American Studies [and author of A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life].

Sponsored by: Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Humanities Center, African & African American Studies, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, History Department, and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

For more information, click here.

All Mixed Up: Our Changing Racial Identities Film Screening
Sie FilmCenter
2510 East Colfax Avenue
Denver, Colorado 80206
Wednesday, 2018-05-09, 19:00-21:30 MDT (Local Time)
Rebekah E. Henderson, Creator

World Premiere of the film project All Mixed Up: Our Changing Racial Identities. AMU is a short film that examines the experience of multiracial Americans and their families through a series of interviews. This project is intended to be the start of many more conversations about how we think about race. Following the film there will be a Q&A session with the project creators and some of the participants. This screening will be in honor of the late Dr. Gregory Diggs who provided the creative spark that launched this project last spring.

For more information, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

Transnational Perspectives on Black Germany

University of Toronto
Innis Town Hall
2 Sussex Avenue
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1J5 Canada
2018-05-23 through 2018-05-25

Sponsors: Germanic Languages & Literatures, Cinema Studies Institute, Gender & Women’s Studies Institute, Centre for Transnational & Diaspora Studies, Comparative Literature, SSHRC, Centre for the United States, TIFF, DAAD, and Heinrich Böll Stiftung

The Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) is collaborating with the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto in hosting the 3-day SSHRC-funded conference, “Transnational Perspectives on Black Germany” in Toronto, Ontario, on May 23-25, 2018. The event will feature keynote addresses by Fatima El-Tayeb and Noah Sow, a screening of “On Second Glance” (dir. Sheri Hagen, 2012) at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox with filmmaker in attendance, and a dance-music-word tribute to Afro-German poet and activist May Ayim by guest artists Layla Zami and Oxana Chi.

REGISTRATION OPEN UNTIL 4/21/2018

For more information, click here.

Interracial Intimacies Symposium

University of Chicago
5733 South University Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637
2018-04-18 through 2018-04-19

Please join us for a two-day symposium examining the history of interracial intimacies in comparative and transnational perspective. This symposium offers emerging and established scholars an opportunity to come together to discuss issues of interracial intimacies broadly construed.

Doris L. Garraway, Associate Professor of French at Northwestern University, and Sarah Kovner, Senior Research Scholar in the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, will be the keynote speakers.

For more information, click here.

Mixie and the Halfbreeds

fu-GEN Theater
157 Carlton Street, Suite 207
Toronto, Ontario M5A 2K3
Telephone: 416.920.2828
2018-04-03 through 2018-04-15

written by: adrienne wong & julie tamiko manning
directed by: jenna rodgers
featuring: zoe doyle & nessa trenton
choreography by: ming-bo lam
set & lighting design by: alison yanota
costume design by: jackie chau
sound design by: deanna h. choi
stage manager: bradley dunn
producer: jenna harris
production manager: suzie balogh

In Mixie and the Halfbreeds, two estranged neighbors are not as different as they think. Haunted by peroxide teeth and blondissima hair, Mixie and Trixie tackle a question that has plagued mankind through the ages: do blondes really have more fun? Mixie & the Halfbreeds invites the audience to explore complex and relevant issues of culture, identity, and race, and tackles questions of mixing in contemporary Canadian society and popular culture.

Book Talk: The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean
University of South Florida
IBL Conference Room (FAO 296)
4202 E. Fowler Avenue
Tampa, Florida
Thursday, 2018-03-01, 14:00 EDT

Presenter

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy
Department of Africology (African Diaspora Studies)
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Profess Mitchell-Walthour is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil.

For more information, click here.

Miriam Allott Series 2017-18: Sarah Howe, TIDE Writer in Residence with Colm Toibin Fellow, Anthony Joseph

Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, c. 1550-1700 (TIDE)
2017-10-30

Sarah Howe, TIDE Writer in Residence, and TS Eliot Prize-winning author of Loop of Jade will read with University of Liverpool’s Colm Toibin Fellow in Creative Writing, the novelist Anthony Joseph.

Tuesday 14 November 5.30 pm, School of the Arts Library, 19 Abercromby Square.

Funded by the European Research Council and in association with the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool.

For more information, click here.

Virginia Officials, Hidden Figures Author Join NASA in Honoring Legacy of Famed Mathematician; Live on NASA Television

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA Langley
Media Advisory M17-105

Karen Northon
Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
202-358-1540

Mike Finneran
Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia
757-864-6110

2017-09-07

The Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Credits: NASA

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, and author Margot Lee Shetterly are among the dignitaries honoring Katherine Johnson, former NASA employee and central character of the book and movie Hidden Figures, at 1 p.m. [EDT] Sept. 22 at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

They will join Hampton Mayor Donnie Tuck and Langley Center Director David Bowles in cutting the ribbon to officially open the center’s new Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, a state-of-the-art lab for innovative research and development supporting NASA’s exploration missions.

The event will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website. Media wishing to attend must contact Michael Finneran of the Langley communications office at 757-864-6110 or michael.p.finneran@nasa.gov.

Johnson, 99, will attend and participate in photo opportunities, but will not be available for interviews. A prerecorded message from her will be aired during the ceremony and a statement will be read.

Johnson was a “human computer” at Langley who calculated trajectories for America’s first spaceflights in the 1960s. The retired mathematician was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2015. Her contributions and those of other NASA African-American human computers are chronicled in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, based on Lee-Shetterly’s book of the same name. She worked at Langley from 1953 until she retired in 1986.

For more about Johnson, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

The Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility (CRF) is a $23-million, 37,000-square-foot, energy efficient structure that consolidates five Langley data centers and more than 30 server rooms. The facility will enhance NASA’s efforts in modeling and simulation, big data, and analysis. Much of the work now done by wind tunnels eventually will be performed by computers like those at the CRF.

For more information about Langley Research Center, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/langley