Mixed Race Studies

The Lesser-Known Side of Harris’s Identity: Asian American

The New York Times
2024-07-28

Amy Qin

Some Asian American leaders are rooting for Kamala Harris to become the first Asian American president. But she is not widely known as Asian American, reflecting the complexity of the identity.

Daniel Chiang can remember one Asian American who ran for president in 2020: Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur. But he was surprised to learn last week that there was another person running for president then, and in 2024, who counted herself an Asian American: Kamala Harris.

“I never got that impression,” said Mr. Chiang, 38, a Taiwanese American from Connecticut.

Ms. Harris, the vice president and likely Democratic nominee for president, is known widely as the first Black woman to be elected vice president.

But Ms. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is less known as an Indian American and Asian American. Asked to name a famous Asian American, only 2 percent of Americans said Kamala Harris, according to a recent survey by The Asian American Foundation…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Desis: Stories of Multiracial South Asians

HumSub Global
2024-02-12
176 pages
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 979-8989630202

Rahul Arjun John Yates
Punita Khanna

Embark on an inspiring journey through the captivating narratives of “Mixed Desis,” a book creating community for and gathering the voices of mixed-race individuals, interracial families, and multiracial family researchers. Within these pages, you’ll find the heartfelt stories of trailblazers who dared to defy convention in their pursuit of love and life.

Listen to this community of brave, vulnerable, and perceptive multiracial South Asians as they share their journeys toward happiness, balance, and self-actualization.

Join us in celebrating the resilience, love, and strength of these remarkable individuals. Purchase “Mixed Desis” today and empower yourself with knowledge, empathy, and a deeper connection to the vibrant tapestry of human experience. Your journey to understanding and unity begins here.

2024 Critical Mixed Race Studies Association Conference

OSU Union
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
2024-06-13 through 2024-06-15

Welcome to the 7th biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, taking place both virtually and in person at The Ohio State University (OSU) in the OSU Union. We are hosting the conference during the week of Loving Day, the anniversary of the June 12, 1967 Loving v. Virginia U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down remaining laws banning interracial marriage. The conference will also concurrently take place during Columbus, Ohio’s Pride weekend. In this spirit, we can mobilize love as an act of radical resistance against white supremacy and forms of intersectional oppression. Within the structure of white supremacy, people identified or identifying as multiracial or mixed have often been placed in “liminal spaces,” or forced to navigate between two or more worlds, identities, and places that are at times conflicting. It is for this reason that we center the idea of liminality or “betwixt and between,” as a productive space from which to form solidarities and foster a “beloved community.”

Within Critical Mixed Race Studies, “betwixt and between” holds meaning as the title of the longest running college course on multiracial identity, taught by the late G. Reginald Daniel (aka “Reg”), Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. The idea of multiracial people living “betwixt and between” was also debated in his groundbreaking text, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. While we wish to elevate and honor Reg’s life and scholarship by centering liminality, the framing can also be limiting. Therefore, we invite expansive thinking around questions of “betwixt and between” toward liberating our emerging field of study. We suggest this liberation could happen through solidarity and in or through beloved community. Borrowing from the late bell hooks in Killing Rage: Ending Racism, the “transformative power of love” can be wielded to cultivate cross-racial solidarities amongst ourselves as “beloved community [which] is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world. To form beloved community we do not surrender ties to precious origins. We deepen those bondings by connecting them with an anti-racist struggle.”

For more information and to register, click here.

Virtual Book Chat: Levan Book Chats—Rena Heinrich, Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Levan Institute of the Humanities
University of Southern California
Wednesday, 2024-02-14, 20:00Z, (12:00 PST, 15:00 EST)

A discussion of Rena Heinrich’s new book, Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama (Rutgers University Press, 2023). The author will be joined in conversation by SanSan Kwan (UC Berkeley) and Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain (Maynooth University), moderated by Duncan Williams (USC). Coorganized by the USC School of Dramatic Arts and the USC East Asian Studies Center.

To register, click here.

About the Author: Rena Heinrich is an associate professor of theatre practice in critical studies at the USC School of Dramatic Arts and an affiliated professor of East Asian studies in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. She is a contributor to Shape Shifters: Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century (2Leaf Press, 2017). Her next book (co-authored with Francisco Beltrán) examines American immigration mythology and its pervasive circulation through cultural artifacts within the United States.

Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required.

This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities’ “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

I Would Meet You Anywhere, A Memoir

Mad Creek Books (an imprint of Ohio State University Press)
2023-11-04
248 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8142-5883-5

Susan Kiyo Ito

Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Part 1
  • I Would Meet You Anywhere
  • Go for Broke
  • The Place I Came From
  • Not a Japanese Girl
  • Searching
  • One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
  • What Do You Need?
  • A Small Crime
  • What I Did Over Spring Break
  • I Would Meet You at the Holiday Inn
• Part 2
  • Your Mother Is Very Nice
  • The Mouse Room
  • Totaled
  • Lucky
  • I Would Meet You in a Hospital
  • Long-Lost Daughter
  • Just a Bee Sting
  • Dairy Queen
  • I Would Meet You at a Wedding
  • Origami
  • Undertow
  • Guest Room
  • Separation
  • Like a Heartbeat
• Part 3
  • A Small Hole
  • Spit
  • I Would Meet You at the Ferry Building
  • I Had an Aunt
  • Got OBC?
  • Look at the Baby
  • The Most Japanese Person in the Family
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments

Almost Brown, A Memoir

Crown (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-06-06
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593443019
Ebook ISBN: 9780593443026
Audiobook ISBN: 9780593740880

Charlotte Gill

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada to the United States in an elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.

Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Their intercultural experiment features turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke. Over time, Gill’s parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as she too finds herself distancing from her father—Why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?—she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. Is this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? Almost Brown looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What am I? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? Eventually, after years of silence, Gill and her father reclaim a space for forgiveness and love.

In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, “diversity,” and the idea of “race,” a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Blackness, Koreanness, and Han: Unmasking Race in Korean Hip Hop

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 54, Issue 2, March 2023
pages 136–156
DOI: 10.1177/00219347231153169

Hyein Amber Kim, Teaching Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York

Previous studies have analyzed Korean hip hop through the lens of authenticity, language, and cultural hybridity, but not through the lens of race. One of the main characteristics of hip hop culture is that it emerged in the form of resistance against dominant hegemony and as a form of resistance to systemic injustice; however, it is difficult to find K-hip hop artists that defy the racial supremacy of Koreanness and racism through their art. This article utilizes Yoon Mi-rae, who is half-Black and half-Korean, as a significant text to explore how race plays a role in Korean society and how Blackness, Koreanness, and han intersect in the K-hip hop scene. Utilizing the concept of community cultural wealth, interest convergence principle, and Koreanness, the study analyzes how Yoon Mi-rae’s “Black Koreanness” was consumed by Korean media and music industry, and how Yon Mi-rae, as an embodiment of Blackness and Han, uses hip hop and her intersectionality as a tool of resistance to both the mainstream American and mainstream Korean racial ideology and discourse. With the growing influence and popularity of K-hip hop globally, the article problematizes the message K-hip hop is reflecting and sending the world about race.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘She had to hide’: the secret history of the first Asian woman nominated for a best actress Oscar

The Guardian
2023-03-07

Andrew Lawrence
Beaufort, South Carolina

Merle Oberon, a pick for best actress in 1936, was born in Bombay and spent her career passing for white

Magazine writers didn’t know what to make of Merle Oberon when she took Hollywood by storm in the 1930s. One writer described her as “bizarre, bewildering, and different”, while others marveled at her “delicate” oval face, “eloquent” emerald eyes, “bright red lips” and “alabaster” skin.

Though her 1936 best actress Oscar nomination for the coming-of-age drama The Dark Angel affirmed her place in a league with Katharine Hepburn and the eventual winner, Bette Davis, the glamor paragons of the day, it was only later that the world discovered Oberon was a south Asian woman passing for white…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Rutgers University Press
2023-06-16
194 pages,
8 bw, 3 color
6.12 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 9781978835535
Cloth ISBN: 9781978835542
EPUB ISBN: 9781978835559
Kindle ISBN: 9781978835566
PDF ISBN: 9781978835573

Rena M. Heinrich, Assistant Professor of Theatre Practice
University of Southern California

Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people.

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Stages of Denial
• Chapter 2: Tragic Eurasians: Mixed-Asian Dramas in the Late-Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 3: Shape Shifting Performances in the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 4: Cosmopolitan Identity in Mixed Dramatic Forms
• Chapter 5: Multiraciality in the Post-racial Era
• Chapter 6: Beyond Monoracial Hierarchies: Recovering Lost Selves
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Ruth Ann Koesun, Versatile Ballet Theater Dancer, Dies at 89

The New York Times
2018-02-14

Anna Kisselgoff

Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in American Ballet Theater who epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chicago. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her goddaughter, Ellen Coghlan.

Because of her lyrical style in ballets like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s “Undertow,” which depicts a young murderer’s development.

Contemporary ballet makers favored her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreographer and future film director, cast her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s etchings. She portrayed a dead woman who is tossed around by her partner in choreographed movements that suggested she was inert…

…Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15, 1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a Chinese physician in Chicago’s Chinatown, and the former Mary Mondulick, who was of Russian descent…

Read the entire obituary here.