Mixed Race Studies

Nitasha Tamar Sharma: Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

New Books Network
2022-03-30

Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021) maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma’s analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

Listen to the interview (01:48:48) here.

Aline Motta and the personal diving into collective memory

ARTE!Brasileiros
2020-03-18

Marcos Grinspum Ferraz

The multimedia artist, one of the winners of the 7th Marcantonio Vilaça Award, departs from a thorough research on his family history to address major topics such as slavery, African heritage and a patriarchal structure that remains in Brazil today

The journey of artist Aline Motta looking for her roots and the vestiges of her ancestors is undoubtedly a personal endeavour. The result, however, concerns the collective memory of thousands of Brazilian families built (or destroyed) in the violent process of the country’s formation, based on slavery and patriarchal structure.

“It took a while for me to acquire some maturity and psychic centering to deal with issues so deep and difficult that concern my own history and family,” she says in an interview with ARTE!Brasileiros. This maturation time included not only some early artwork that dealt with other topics, carried out especially from the beginning of this decade, but also a vast trajectory as a continuist in movies, which commenced in 2001.

It was from 2016, when she had the project Pontes sobre Abismos (Bridges over Abysses) selected by Itaú Cultural’s Rumos program, that Motta, now 45, began to devote herself full-time to authorial work, with a multimedia production that did not leave aside cinema, but also unfolded in installations, photographs, texts, publications and performances…

Read the entire interview here.

A brush with… Ellen Gallagher

The Week in Art
2021-06-30

An in-depth conversation on the artist’s big influences, from Keith Haring to Moby Dick

In this episode of A brush with…, Ben Luke talks to the American artist Ellen Gallagher about her life and work by exploring her greatest cultural influences. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965, Gallagher studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She now lives in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Much of Gallagher’s parents’ ancestry—in particular her Black father who is from the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa—defines the territory of her practice, which relates to the culture and language of the Black diaspora.

Though primarily working in painting and drawing, Gallagher has also worked in sculpture, film and animation. Her early style appears Minimalist and spare from a distance but, up close, one observes intricate drawings of eyes, lips and wigs, which Gallagher has described as “the disembodied ephemera of minstrelsy”—the racist blackface entertainment common in the US from the C19th onwards. In the early 2000s, she used cut-out advertisements from Black culture magazines and transformed them with plasticine, making sculptural reliefs that were often imprinted with witty or incisive symbols and imagery. Many of her paintings refer to the sea and allude to the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya: a Black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, supposedly populated with the children of the mothers of enslaved African women who were thrown—or threw themselves—overboard during their forced journey across the Middle Passage…

Read and/or listen to the interview here.

So What Exactly Is ‘Blood Quantum’?

Code Switch: Race. In Your Face.
National Public Radio
2018-02-09

Kat Chow

If you’re Native American, there’s a good chance that you’ve thought a lot about blood quantum — a highly controversial measurement of the amount of “Indian blood” you have. It can affect your identity, your relationships and whether or not you — or your children — may become a citizen of your tribe.

Blood quantum was initially a system that the federal government placed onto tribes in an effort to limit their citizenship. Many Native nations, including the Navajo Nation and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, still use it as part of their citizenship requirements.

And how tribes use blood quantum varies from tribe to tribe. The Navajo Nation requires a minimum of 25 percent “Navajo blood,” and Turtle Mountain requires a minimum of 25 percent of any Indian blood, as long as its in combination with some Turtle Mountain.

Blood quantum minimums really restrict who can be a citizen of a tribe. If you’ve got 25 percent of Navajo blood — according to that tribe’s blood quantum standards — and you have children with someone who has a lower blood quantum, those kids won’t be able to enroll.

So why keep a system that’s decreasing your tribe’s rolls and could lead to its demise?

“I use the term ‘Colonial Catch 22’ to say that there is no clear answer, and that one way or another, people are hurt,” says Elizabeth Rule. She’s a doctoral candidate at Brown University who specializes in Native American studies, and also a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

“The systems are so complicated,” she explains, “but it’s all part of tribes deciding on their own terms, in their own ways, utilizing their own sovereignty [to decide] what approach is best for them.”

As we explored blood quantum in this week’s episode, we thought a primer of what, exactly, this system is and how it works — or doesn’t — might be useful. Here’s my interview with Elizabeth Rule, edited and condensed for clarity…

Read the entire story here.

FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’

The Guardian
2022-03-26

Kadish Morris, Editor, Critic & Poet

After a hellish couple of years, the pop visionary is back. She talks about beating illness, escaping abuse, and the joy of connecting with her Caribbean roots

FKA twigs isn’t special, she says, she just rehearses a lot. “I don’t think I was born with anything more than the rest of the world,” says the 34-year-old singer-songwriter. It might be hard to believe that anybody could do the splits down a pole or wield a sword, Wushu-style, the way twigs has done without possessing some divine powers, but it’s all in the training. She can afford private lessons now, but when she started out as a fresh-faced back-up dancer, YouTube tutorials and group dance classes helped her to perfect her craft. “I practise and I practise and I practise. That’s who I am.”

Twigs has had a spellbinding career, exploding on to the pop scene a decade ago with operatic vocal arrangements, conceptual videos and futuristic instrumentals. In 2014 the New Yorker magazine said that she “dresses like a high-fashion model from antiquity, but her songs promise the very contemporary pleasures of texture and emotional immediacy”. Since then, she’s released several acclaimed albums and is considered a trailblazer in pop, R&B and Afrofuturism…

Read the entire interview here.

An Interview with Paisley Rekdal

Kenyan Review
2021-07-07

Ruben Quesada

Paisley Rekdal is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of West: A Translation, as well as the community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. In May 2017, she was named Utah’s Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets’ Poets Laureate Fellowship. Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, was published from W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021.

Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.

RUBEN QUESADA: What is the earliest memory you have about your relationship to literature?

PAISLEY REKDAL: I recall when I felt I understood something about literature that other people didn’t. It was in fifth grade, when we were discussing Lord of the Flies, and the teacher asked who the self-sacrificial character Piggy might also remind us of. Piggy was meant to stand in for Jesus and I remember muttering that in class while the rest of the students looked a little baffled. I understood then that works of literature were often telling multiple stories at once; this multiplicity of meaning seemed to irritate other people, though it didn’t irritate me…

Read the entire interview here.

Adwoa Aboah on acting, recovery and her racial awakening: ‘I am a Black woman. I have a lot to say’

The Guardian
2022-03-19

Hannah J. Davies, Deputy Editor, Newsletters, and a Culture Writer

She is one of the world’s most in-demand models, but it wasn’t always this way. As she gets her big acting break in Top Boy, she explains how she got through a tumultuous decade

A few weeks ago, Adwoa Aboah experienced what she describes as “a sombre moment”. “I was at my mum and dad’s, clearing out my childhood room,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “I was going through all these old Vogues I had kept, and I was like … ‘Why did I do that? What was I looking at … who was I looking at?’ Because no one in these magazines looks like me.” Despite signing with the giant modelling agency Storm at 16, Aboah’s self-esteem as a teenager and into her 20s was, she says, “so low. I was on this trajectory of really wanting to be someone else. I couldn’t count on my hands any models who looked like me who were killing it. Obviously there was Jourdan Dunn, and Naomi Campbell, but … ” she pauses, sighs. “I didn’t have the emotional intelligence, nor the language, to articulate why I wasn’t doing well, why I wasn’t in the places that I thought should have been an option for me. Why wasn’t I being supported by British publications? I was like: ‘Is it me? What’s wrong with me?’ Not in a kind of self-pitying way but … I just didn’t understand.”.

Now 29, Aboah is one of Britain’s most recognisable and successful models, as likely to be seen endorsing Dior or Burberry as H&M or Gap. She was named model of the year by the British Fashion Council in 2017 and, in the same year, memorably featured on the cover of Edward Enninful’s first issue of British Vogue, a vision of retro cool in a patterned headscarf and masses of blue eyeshadow. She’s also an activist, having founded the organisation Gurls Talk – which educates young women on topics including feminism, race, sex and body image – in 2015, and now she has her first regular acting role in the new series of Netflix’s Top Boy, one of the coolest shows on TV. It’s hard to believe that Aboah ever felt like a misfit and, worse still, thought that it was somehow her fault…

Read the entire interview here.

MIXED MESSAGES episode five – Steve

Mixed Messages
2022-03-20

Sarah Doneghy, Host

Steve [Majors] discusses his book, “High Yella.” He tells what it was like growing up in a Black family and being told he was Black, to being white assumed as an adult while raising two Black daughters. In his search for identity, Steve discovers being Black is not only skin deep.

René Jones, one of 4 Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, on his ‘secret’ for success: ‘You have to tell your story’

CNBC
2022-02-27

Jade Scipioni, Senior Reporter, Make It

This story is part of the Behind the Desk series, where CNBC Make It gets personal with successful business executives to find out everything from how they got to where they are to what makes them get out of bed in the morning to their daily routines.

René Jones says banking executives have a “bad rap.” His reason might surprise you.

“I think it’s because we’re not really good storytellers,” Jones, 56, tells CNBC Make It.

Jones, who has served as the chairman and CEO of Buffalo, New York-based regional bank M&T since 2017, is currently one of only four Black CEOs in the Fortune 500. He started there as an executive associate in 1992, and today oversees its 17,000-plus employees and market valuation of $23 billion.

Over time, he says, he’s learned to lean into his own personal story as his “secret weapon” — sharing it with employees has helped him form deeper and more meaningful workplace relationships. Growing up with five siblings in a biracial family, for example — especially as the lightest-skinned of his siblings — taught him early on not to form stereotypes about people…

Read the entire article here.

Genevieve Gaignard’s new exhibit ‘This is America’ on view at Atlanta Contemporary

WABE (WABE 90.1 FM, WABE TV)
Atlanta, Georgia
2022-02-10

Adron McCann

In 2018, Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, released the viral hit song “This is America,” a razor-sharp commentary on contemporary society. In a nod to his incisive work, artist Genevieve Gaignard presents a new exhibition, “This is America: The Unsettling Contradictions in American Identity,” at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center from Feb. 12 – May 15. It’s the first solo exhibition of the multidisciplinary artist’s photography and installation work, through which she unravels the ongoing issues complicating the identities and representations of Americans. Gaignard joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom and curator Karen Comer Lowe to talk about the artist’s new contributions to Atlanta Contemporary.

How race informs the artwork of Gaignard, who is biracial:

“Once you look at it, I think it’s everything. I’m really interested in owning both sides of my story, and so I don’t really tiptoe around those things,” said Gaignard…

Read the entire article here.