Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, A Memoir of a Kidnapping

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Texas, United States on 2023-08-13 02:15Z by Steven

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, A Memoir of a Kidnapping

Simon & Schuster
2023-08-01
272 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 9781668021743
eBook ISBN13: 9781668021767

Shane McCrae

An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage—all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.

For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

A revelatory account of a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. And it is also a powerful reflection on what is broken in America—but also what might heal and make it whole again.

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Birding While Indian, A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2023-06-09 17:24Z by Steven

Birding While Indian, A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Mad Creek Books (an imprint Ohio State University Press)
June 2023
246 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
6 Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8142-5872-9
eBook (PDF): ISBN: 978-0-8142-8289-2

Thomas C. Gannon, Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s tears when coworkers called her “squaw,” and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the Indigenous humans, animals, and land of the United States.

Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, of the aftershocks of history, and of human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.

Table of Contents

  • PREFACE: The Lifelook
  • March 1965, Piss Hill: Great Horned Owl
  • July 1967, Piss Hill: Lewis’s Woodpecker
  • January 1968, Rapid Creek: Common Goldeneye
  • June 1969, I-90: Western Meadowlark
  • April 1970, Fort Pierre/Missouri River: Sandhill Crane
  • June 1970, a Fort Pierre slough: Wood Duck
  • August 1971, Saskatchewan: Western Grebe
  • May 1977, a Rapid City marsh: Red-winged Blackbird
  • June 1978, Spearfish Canyon: American Dipper
  • June 1979, a Pennington County dirt road: Common Nighthawk
  • August 1981, Old Faithful: Common Raven
  • June 1983, a Pennington County dirt road: Long-billed Curlew
  • June 1985, Skyline Drive: Field Sparrow
  • June 1985, Fort Morgan, CO: House Finch
  • September 1987, northern Black Hills: Mourning Dove
  • December 1987, Belle Fourche, SD: [Species Unknown]
  • January 1989, Rapid City, SD: European Starling
  • January 1991, Gavins Point Dam: Long-tailed Duck
  • April 2001, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Common Grackle
  • February 2003, Kirk Funeral Home: Prairie Falcon
  • April 2003, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Northern Cardinal
  • May 2003, Clay County Park: Bald Eagle
  • June 2004, Ardmore, OK: Northern Mockingbird
  • June 2005, Folsom Children’s Zoo: White Stork
  • June 2006, Crazy Horse Memorial: Turkey Vulture
  • July 2008, Kountze Lake: Snowy Egret
  • August 2008, Fontenelle Forest: House Wren
  • May 2009, the lake beside Lakeside, NE: Black-necked Stilt
  • May 2009, Devils Tower: American Goldfinch
  • May 2009, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Eurasian Collared-Dove
  • May 2009, Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge: Marbled Godwit
  • July 2009, Pioneers Park: Brown-headed Cowbird
  • June 2010, Idyllwild, CA: Steller’s Jay
  • June 2010, Spirit Mound: Dickcissel
  • May 2011, Wilderness Park: Veery
  • December 2011, Highway 385: Ferruginous Hawk
  • May 2012, Indian Cave State Park: Chuck-Will’s-Widow
  • June 2012, Custer State Park: Canyon Wren
  • June 2012, Millwood State Park: Black-bellied Whistling-Duck
  • July 2012, Newton Hills State Park: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
  • July 2012, Morrison Park: Lesser Goldfinch
  • May 2013, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: Bonaparte’s Gull
  • May 2014, El Segundo Beach: Brown Pelican
  • March 2015, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: American Robin
  • July 2016, Medicine Bow National Forest—Vedauwoo: Dusky Flycatcher
  • November 2017, Lewis and Clark Lake: Snowy Owl
  • March 2018, West Platte River Drive: Whooping Crane
  • May 2018, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Red-tailed Hawk
  • CODA: Birding While Indian
  • Works Cited and Sources Consulted
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Almost Brown, A Memoir

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Books, Canada, Monographs, United Kingdom, United States on 2023-06-09 02:16Z by Steven

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.

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Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Books, Forthcoming Media, Latino Studies, Monographs on 2023-05-24 14:20Z by Steven

Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

HarperCollins
2023-03-14
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063220430

Michelle Miller

The award-winning journalist and co-host of CBS Saturday Morning tells the candid, and deeply personal story of her mother’s abandonment and how the search for answers forced her to reckon with her own identity and the secrets that shaped her family for five decades.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”

Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. Michelle traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in white-dominated world. From the wealthy white schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with white, largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped Michelle’s understanding of herself and her own Blackness.

As she charts her personal journey, Michelle looks back on her decades on the ground reporting painful events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd, revealing how her struggle to understand her racial identity coincides with the nation’s own ongoing and imperfect racial reckoning. What emerges is an intimate family story about secrets—secrets we keep, secrets we share, and the secrets that make us who we are.

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More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew

Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, United States, Women on 2023-05-24 14:15Z by Steven

More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew

Convergent Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-05-02
240 Pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593443040

John Blake, Award-Winning CNN Journalist

An award-winning journalist tells the story of his quest to reconcile with his white mother and the family he’d never met—and how faith brought them all together.

John Blake grew up in a notorious Black neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore that became the setting for the HBO series The Wire. There he became a self-described “closeted biracial person,” hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother’s race. The son of a Black man and a white woman who met when interracial marriage was still illegal, Blake knew this much about his mother: She vanished from his life not long after his birth, and her family rejected him because of his race.

But at the age of seventeen, Blake had a surprise encounter that uncovered a disturbing family secret. This launched him on a quest to reconcile with his white family. His search centered on two questions: “Where is my mother?” and “Where do I belong?” More Than I Imagined is Blake’s propulsive true story about how he answered those questions with the help of an interracial church, a loving caregiver’s sacrifice, and an inexplicable childhood encounter that taught him the importance of forgiveness.

Blake covered some of the biggest stories about race in America for twenty-five years before realizing that “facts don’t change people, relationships do.” He owes this discovery to “radical integration,” which was the only way forward for him and his family—and is the only way forward for America as a multiracial democracy. More Than I Imagined is a hopeful story for our difficult times.

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

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, Forthcoming Media, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Monographs, United States on 2023-03-08 15:21Z by Steven

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
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A Real Negro Girl: Fredi Washington and the New Negro Renaissance

Posted in Arts, Biography, Books, Forthcoming Media, Monographs, Passing, United States, Women on 2023-03-08 15:20Z by Steven

A Real Negro Girl: Fredi Washington and the New Negro Renaissance

Oxford University Press
2023-10-02
320 Pages
25 black and white illustrations
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780197626214

Laurie A. Woodard, Assistant Professor of History
City College of New York, New York, New York

  • First biography of dancer, actor, and activist Fredi Washington
  • Highlights the role of the performing arts in the history of the New Negro Renaissance, which has tended to be focused on literary arts
  • Focuses on an African American who could have but chose not to “pass

The first biography of performing artist, writer, and civil and human rights activist Fredi Washington.

Following Fredi Washington’s debut in her first dramatic role in 1926, Alfred Spengler of the New York North Side News reported that she was “astonishingly pretty for a real Negro girl.” Throughout her career, Washington was vulnerable to discrimination because her near-white skin and hazel eyes, coupled with her self-identification as Negro, cast her as too physically white to play black and too culturally black to play white. The multifaceted Washington was of course a great deal more than her looks; she was a performing artist, a writer, and a civil and human rights activist. Embracing the genres of dance, theater, and film, she used her talent, creativity, and determination to sustain a thirty-year career in the arts and in labor and political activism during the New Negro Renaissance and beyond.

Although Fredi Washington has been largely forgotten, A Real Negro Girl shows that, at the zenith of her career, she was a household name in the black community, well known in mainstream America, and a darling of the European press. Most famous for her role in the film “Imitation of Life,” she was a part of a cohort that included Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Delving into her professional and personal experiences in Harlem, nationally, and internationally, this book illuminates Washington’s significance to the New Negro Renaissance and reveals the vital influence of black performing artists and of black women on the movement. Over the years, Washington expanded her social and political consciousness and anti-racism activism, encompassing journalism, labor organizing, protests, and support of progressive politics. As a founder and executive director of the Negro Actors Guild of America, she sought to protect black artists from professional exploitation and physical abuse.

Incorporating close readings of images and films, interviews, and fan mail, as well as writings by and about Washington, A Real Negro Girl highlights Fredi Washington as an influential actor in the African American quest for civil and human rights.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: The Roots of the New Negro Renaissance
  • Chapter 2: Dancing All Day: Reading Blackface and Black Bodies
  • Chapter 3: Boxers, Blacks, and a Real Negro Girl: White Expectations and Imagined Conceptions of Authentic Blackness
  • Chapter 4: Race, Place, and Miscegenation: Fredi Washington in Imitation of Life
  • Chapter 5: Beyond the Footlights: New Negro Performing Artists and More Tangible Forms of Activism
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Select Bibliography
  • Index
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Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

Posted in Books, Communications/Media Studies, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Philosophy, Politics/Public Policy, United Kingdom, United States on 2023-03-08 15:17Z by Steven

Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

Rutgers University Press
2022-12-09
218 pages
7 b-w illustrations
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9781978830875
Cloth ISBN: 9781978830882
EPUB ISBN: 9781978830899
PDF ISBN: 9781978830905

Daniel McNeil, Department of Gender Studies
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario

Thinking While Black brings together the work and ideas of the most notorious film critic in America, one of the most influential intellectuals in the United Kingdom, and a political and cultural generation that consumed images of rebellion and revolution around the world as young Black teenagers in the late 1960s. Drawing on hidden and little known archives of resistance and resilience, it sheds new light on the politics and poetics of young people who came together, often outside of conventional politics, to rock against racism in the 1970s and early ‘80s. It re-examines debates in the 1980s and ‘90s about artists who “spread out” to mount aggressive challenges to a straight, white, middle-class world, and entertainers who “sold out” to build their global brands with performances that attacked the Black poor, rejected public displays of introspection, and expressed unambiguous misogyny and homophobia. Finally, it thinks with and through the work of writers who have been celebrated and condemned as eminent intellectuals and curmudgeonly contrarians in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it delivers the smartest and most nuanced investigation into thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Armond White as they have evolved from “young soul rebels” to “middle-aged mavericks” and “grumpy old men,” lamented the debasement and deskilling of Black film and music in a digital age, railed against the discourteous discourse and groupthink of screenies and Internet Hordes, and sought to stimulate some deeper and fresher thinking about racism, nationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness and social media.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Chapter 1: Theories in Motion
  • Chapter 2: Black and British
  • Chapter 3: A Movie-Struck Kid from Detroit
  • Chapter 4: Slave-Descendants, Diaspora Subjects, and World Citizens
  • Chapter 5: Enlarging the American Cinema
  • Chapter 6: Middle-Aged, Gifted, and Black
  • Coda
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
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Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Posted in Biography, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, Slavery, United States on 2023-01-30 03:18Z by Steven

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Simon & Schuster
2023-01-17
416 pages
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9781501191053

Ilyon Woo

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.

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The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Books, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2023-01-22 18:12Z by Steven

The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging

Beacon Press
2023-01-10
200 pages
Size: 5.5 x 8.5 Inches
Cloth ISBN: 978-080702636-6
Audio ISBN: 978-080700776-1

Samira K. Mehta, Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies
University of Colorado, Boulder

An unflinching look at the challenges and misunderstandings mixed-race people face in family spaces and intimate relationships across their varying cultural backgrounds

In this emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta reflects on many facets of being multiracial.

Born to a white American and a South Asian immigrant, Mehta grew up feeling more comfortable with her mother’s family than her father’s—they never carried on conversations in languages she couldn’t understand or blamed her for finding the food was too spicy. In adulthood, she realized that some of her Indian family’s assumptions about the world had become an indelible part of her—and that her well-intentioned parents had not known how to prepare her for a world that would see her as a person of color.

Popular belief assumes that mixedness gives you the ability to feel at home in more than one culture, but the flipside shows you can feel just as alienated in those spaces. In 7 essays that dissect her own experiences with a frankness tempered by generosity, Mehta confronts questions about:

  • authenticity and belonging;
  • conscious and unconscious cultural inheritance;
  • appropriate mentorship;
  • the racism of people who love you.

The Racism of People Who Love You invites people of mixed race into the conversation on race in America and the melding of found and inherited cultures of hybrid identity.

Table of Contents

  • Author’s Note
  • Introduction
  • ONE: Where Are You Really From? A Triptych
  • TWO: Meat Is Murder
  • THREE: Failing the Authenticity Test
  • FOUR: American Racism
  • FIVE: Appropriation
  • SIX: Mentoring
  • SEVEN: The Racism of People Who Love You
  • Acknowledgments
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