Mixed Race Studies

Jazz, Race Collide With War In 1930s Europe

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-03-26

Jacki Lyden, Host

The novel Half Blood Blues explores an often overlooked slice of history: black jazz musicians in Germany on the eve of World War II. The book moves from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin to Paris. It’s told by an elderly black jazz musician and his friend who survived the war. Guest host Jacki Lyden speaks with author Esi Edugyan.

Transcript:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I’m Jacki Lyden. Michel Martin is away this week. Now we’re going to take a trip back in time with the help of a prize-winning novelist.

The novel, “Half Blood Blues,” considers a slice of history that often gets overlooked: black jazz musicians and their fate in Germany just before World War II. The novel moves back and forth from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin, Berlin to Paris and it’s told through the eyes of an elderly Baltimore black jazz musician, Sid Griffiths, and his lifelong friend, Chippewa Jones, all in invented period slang.

The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize this year and won the Giller Prize in Canada and its author, Esi Edugyan, joins us now from member station KUOW in Seattle. Welcome.

ESI EDUGYAN: Thank you.

LYDEN: Esi, just to establish, you are a Canadian author.

EDUGYAN: I am.

LYDEN: And you live in…

EDUGYAN: I was born and raised in Calgary.

LYDEN: Born and raised in Calgary, of Ghanaian parents and you live in Victoria?

EDUGYAN: Yes.

LYDEN: Well, please tell us about this novel, which has had so much success. Tell us about the men at the center of your story. They’re jazz musicians from a group called the Hot Time Swingers. We meet them in Paris. They already have escaped from Berlin. They’ve met Duke Ellington and at the center of the group is this really intriguing character you’ve invented called Hieronymus Falk. And he is eventually picked up by the Gestapo in June of 1940. Tell us about these fellows and Hieronymus.

EDUGYAN: Well, essentially, the novel is told in two parts and the first part centers around the Hot Time Swingers who, you know, are a jazz band who’s had quite a bit of success playing in Berlin. And, you know, now the Third Reich has been ushered in and they’re trying to decide exactly how to proceed now that they’ve been prohibited from playing in public.

And so the band consists of two African-American players, Sid and Chip from Baltimore, as well as the German players, Paul, who’s a pianist who has a Jewish background, and Ernst. And then Hieronymus Falk, who is an Afro-German, the child of a French colonial soldier and a German mother, and he’s the trumpet prodigy.

LYDEN: Hieronymus Falk really intrigued me, Esi Edugyan. He is, you say in the novel, the German word was mischling. He is of mixed race and there really were such Afro-Germans prior to the Nazis taking power…

Read the entire transcript here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story

NewSouth Books (American Edition coming soon from Rutgers University Press)
July 2012
352 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781742233314

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

This is a beautifully written, deeply moving and well-researched account of the lives of mixed-race children of occupied Japan. The author artfully blends oral histories with an historical and political analysis of international race relations and immigration policy in North America and Australia, to highlight the little-known story of the thousands of children that resulted from the unions of Japanese women and Allied servicemen posted to Japan following WWII. It is a powerful narrative of loss, longing and reconnection, written by the ABC’s long-time Tokyo correspondent, Walter Hamilton.

Visit the website here.

Miscegenation in the Marvelous: Race and Hybridity in the Fantasy Novels of Neil Gaiman and China Miéville

University of Western Ontario
2012
120 pages

Nikolai Rodrigues

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English

Fantasy literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries uses the construction of new races as a mirror through which to see the human race more clearly. Categorizations of fantasy have tended to avoid discussions of race, in part because it is an uncomfortable gray area since fantasy literature does not yet have a clear taxonomy. Nevertheless, race is often an unavoidable component of fantasy literature. This thesis considers J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a taproot text for fantasy literature before moving on to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, both newer fantasy novels which include interesting constructions of race and raise issues of miscegenation and hybridity. This thesis moves towards an understanding of what purpose creating and utilizing races serves, and how fantasy literature allows for the identification and potential resolution of a number of human anxieties regarding race.

Read the entire thesis here.

Jemmy Jock Bird: Marginal Man on the Blackfoot Frontier

University of Calgary Press
2004
205 pages
16 b/w illustrations, 1 b/w photo, index
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55238-111-3

John C. Jackson

Jemmy Jock Bird, the son of a Cree woman and a mixed-blood trader employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, has become part of the mythology of the mountain man era. In this creative non-fiction account, Jackson meticulously reconstructs the life of this intriguing individual who was caught between opposing sides of a dual Métis heritage. Closely identified with the Cree and the Peigan, Bird’s trading activities and undercover work as a “confidential servant” of the Hudson’s Bay Company during the competitive period of the fur trade are explored using materials from the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, the Montana Historical Society, and Bird’s descendants living on the American Blackfeet Reserve in Browning. As an interpreter, Bird was later instrumental in negotiating the 1855 Blackfoot peace treaty and the 1877 Canadian Treaty 7. Jackson steeps himself in the sparse documentation of the fur trade era to shed some much-needed light on Jemmy Jock Bird’s adventurous career – one that straddled the international borders of the northern plains and mountain west and touched upon many aspects of western development.

“No more kiyams”: Métis women break the silence of child sexual abuse

University of Victoria,  British Columbia, Canada
2004
146 pages

Lauralyn Houle

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SOCIAL WORK In the Faculty of Human and Social Development

“No more kiyams” Métis women break the silence of child sexual abuse, is a glimpse into the lives of four M&is women who were raised in an Aboriginal community and who speak to the effects and the obstacles of trying to heal from an abuse that affects not only them, but also their families and communities.

As Métis people, the women in this thesis bring to light, the generational abuses that affect the healing process. They give a picture of how healing is a very personal journey but at the same time a collective process. Rose, Betsy, Angela and Rena provide us with insight into why healing from child sexual abuse needs to address a cultural perspective. Rose became a victim of a respected elderly uncle. Betsy and Angela’s fathers were their abusers. For Rena it was her stepfather, grandfather, and cousins; how does one send all those significant people to jail? In addition, remain a ‘part’ of family and community. The Métis are raised to be very proud and loyal to family and community. We do not heal alone.

This work is about honouring individual strength and gifts in order to heal. It speaks to healing that is not in isolation from identity as a Métis or in isolation from one’s community. This thesis is about acknowledging the strengths of Métis women by giving voice to their stories, their dreams, and their lives.

Read the entire thesis 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.

Questioning Being Black and White in Canada

Canadian Dimension: for people who want to change the world
2012-08-24

Denise Hansen

“Canadians have a favourite pastime, and they don’t even realize it. They like to ask—they absolutely love to ask—where you are from if you don’t look convincingly white. They want to know it, they need to know it, simply must have that information. They just can’t relax until they have pin-pointed, to their satisfaction, your geographic and racial coordinates. They can go almost out of their minds with curiosity, as when driven by the need for food, water, or sex, but once they’ve finally managed to find out precisely where you were born, who your parents were, and what your racial makeup is, then, man, do they feel better. They can breathe easy and get back to the business of living.” —An except from Lawrence Hill’s Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada

Lawrence Hill dubs it The Question and, indeed, for most black/white mixed Canadians The Question has become a reoccurring topic of conversation fielded in classrooms, workplaces, out with new friends, in busy line-ups and crowded bars…most any public place. Most commonly asked in the form of “where are you from?”, “what’s your background?”, or put ignorantly simply as “what are you?”, The Question has become a defining aspect of the black/white mixed race experience for people of black and white descent living in Canada.

But is The Question just harmless curiosity? Or does The Question unconsciously reveal deeply held racial assumptions, sometimes even racist values? Either way, The Question puts race centre stage in a society where, ironically, the topic is often avoided, evaded at best. Is it time to take The Question as an opportunity to educate Canadians about issues of mixed race and blackness?…

…“People are socialized to uncritically accept racial categories. They want to know who mixed race people are affiliated with, perhaps as a guide to how they can engage with them,” explains Professor Leanne Taylor who studies multiracial and multiethnic identities at Brock University. Taylor adds that in Canada the idea of mixed race has even been commodified and exported internationally as the lived reality of what multiculturalism is—the message (falsely) being: ‘look at all these beautiful, mixed people as a symbol of how well people are getting along in Canada’….

Read the entire essay here.

Whispering Grounds whispers thoughts of origins and nature

Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph
2011-10-19

Amanda Halm

Whispering Grounds, an exhibit of 13 charcoal drawings by artist Annie Lalande, is currently on display at the Bank National Financial Group Gallery, a space dedicated to visual arts in the Palais Montcalm.

Incongruous lines and organic shapes sweep across paper to symbolize the bi-racial identity that swirls inside the artist…

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Disentangling “Race” and Indigenous Status: The Role of Ethnicity

Queen’s Law Journal
Volume 33, Issue 2 (Spring 2008)
pages 487

Sébastien Grammond, Dean and Associate Professor of Law
University of Ottawa

The notion of “race” is a social construction, discredited today by scientists as factually unsound. Individuals cannot be organized into discrete groups of people based solely on physical characteristics. An individual’s identity is now understood to consist of more than the contents of one’s blood. This more robust understanding takes account of other important elements of identity, such as the individual’s cultural and historical makeup. Despite this progress, the author argues, notions of race (sometimes in the form of blood quantum requirements) still define indigenous status in many countries, including Canada. The author posits that group identity would be best understood by reference to the concept of ethnicity, which leads to a broader understanding of identity that goes beyond the biological classifications associated with race.

The author analyzes the American Supreme Court case of Rice v. Cayetano, where the majority found that an ameliorative provision of the Hawaiian Constitution violated the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution due to its racial distinctions. The author contends that what separated the majority and dissenting judgements was the fact that the former took a racial view of indigenous identity and the latter an ethnic view. The majority focused on the word “race” in the impugned provision, thereby automatically labeling it as racist. According to the dissent, the intent of the provision was to recognize status on the basis of ancestry, and not on the basis of rigid blood purity requirements, as a racial distinction would. The author supports the dissenting view. He argues that while the concept of race is incoherent, ancestry might be a legitimate definition of identity, as it can reflect non-biological elements transmitted by descent. Rice v. Cayetano demonstrates how an inaccurate definition of indigenous status can undermine public policy initiatives meant to redress harm done to indigenous peoples. The author concludes by proposing that while ancestry may be a satisfactory determinant of ethnicity, group identity would be better understood with reference to other relevant sociological factors, such as language, residence, culture, participation in community events and self-identification.

Read the entire article here.

John A. Macdonald wanted an ‘Aryan’ Canada

The Ottawa Citizen
2012-08

Tim Stanley, Professor of History
University of Ottawa

In 1885, John A. Macdonald told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed …” This was the precise moment in the histories of Canada and the British Dominions when Macdonald personally introduced race as a defining legal principle of the state.

He did this not just in any piece of legislation, but in the Electoral Franchise Act, an act that defined the federal polity of adult male property holders and that he called “my greatest achievement.”

Macdonald’s comments came as he justified an amendment taking the vote away from anyone “of Mongolian or Chinese race.” He warned that, if the Chinese (who had been in British Columbia as long as Europeans) were allowed to vote, “they might control the vote of that whole Province” and their “Chinese representatives” would foist “Asiatic principles,” “immoralities,” and “eccentricities” on the House “which are abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles.” He further claimed that “the Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics” and that “the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful; it cannot be, and never will be.” For Macdonald, Canada was to be the country that restored a pure Aryan race to its past glory, and the Chinese threatened this purity…

Read the entire article here.