Mixed Race Studies

Zawe Ashton interview: The actress is moving on from Fresh Meat with a starring role in Channel 4’s comedy drama Not Safe for Work

The Independent
2015-06-19

Gillian Orr

Multi-talented: Ashton likes to do her own thing Immo Klink

Acting, directing, writing: Zawe Ashton is a woman on the move. Gillian Orr tries to keep up

I’ve only just been introduced to Zawe Ashton and she turns to me and whispers, “Let’s make a run for it!” The actress has been holed up in her publicist’s office for the past few hours. Her minders are just out of earshot. “I need some natural light,” she says as we scarper out the front door and head down a Soho street to a cafe. “I’m going to get into so much trouble,” she laughs.

Ashton is very much a woman on the move. And she likes to do her own thing. We might know her best for her portrayal of the wannabe punk Vod in Channel 4’s student-life sitcom Fresh Meat but there is far more to her than acting. She also directs, produces, and writes. Over the past decade she’s been energetic in theatre and film, and soon she’s going to be published. There’s just no holding her back, and here she is again, coffee ordered, keeping one step ahead.

She is down from Manchester, where she’s been filming the fourth – and final – series of Fresh Meat. Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s brilliant creation has helped turn Ashton into one of television’s most striking new actresses, but now she is moving on. A new Channel 4 comedy drama – Not Safe for Work, which begins at the end of the month – is going to show Ashton in a very different light.

Following the chaotic personal and professional lives of a group of dysfunctional government employees who have been forced to relocate from London to Northampton, Not Safe for Work sees Ashton playing Katherine, a recently divorced woman coming to terms with her displacement from the capital and having to live in a flatshare at an age when she thought she’d be having babies…

…Later that year she also won the award for Best Breakthrough On-Screen Talent at the Creative Diversity Network for her work in Fresh Meat. With Vod, just as it is with Katherine, the fact that Ashton is mixed race is never made out to be an issue that needs to be addressed in storylines. It simply isn’t mentioned. Anyone of any ethnicity could have played these characters. Was that a sense that she had strived to achieve? “I’m glad it seems effortless,” she says. “It’s something that I’ve worked really hard at. I think I’ve always felt that I want to do a very specific type of work and I’ve made informed decisions. You know, hopefully be part of a quiet movement or revolution.” She pauses to giggle. “Without sounding too Che Guevara about it.”

She says that as a child she would hand back scripts to her mother and tell her that she didn’t like how certain characters were represented. At the same time, she doesn’t want her background to be ignored. “I don’t want to be ‘de-ethnicised’. I hate it when people say, ‘Oh I don’t even think of you as a woman’, or, ‘I don’t even think of you as a black woman.’ Well what do you think of me as then? A loaf of bread? But any actor of any race can tell if a part is well written or not. It’s really just about reading stuff that feels well-observed and truthful.”…

Read the entire article here.

Skin Deep Meets Stella Corradi

Skin Deep: Race + Culture
London, England, United Kingdom
2016-07-08

Anuradha Henriques, Editor

East London writer and director Stella Corradi talks fantasy, addiction and her short film “Little Soldier”

Stella Corradi, East London born and bred, is the writer and director behind the short film Little Soldier. Loosely influenced by Corradi’s own personal childhood and memories, Little Soldier tells of the power of a child’s imagination to overcome her reality. It addresses that tempestuous and deeply instinctive love between a mother and child and how that love transcends any obstacle or circumstance.

The film was selected through Film London’s London Calling scheme in 2015 out of hundreds of submissions, and has recently been awarded a Special Jury Mention Award by Film London. The film has also been nominated for the Best UK Short at the East End Film Festival 2016. Corradi is a force to be reckoned with.

I was lucky enough to work with Stella on a film shoot in London over the last few weeks. Most days after work she would give me a lift home and we would talk about food, politics and UK grime and garage. I recorded this interview in the car on one of those journeys, whilst she navigated the lane drifters on the A40…

…AH: What is the film about?

SC: The film is about a ten year old girl, Anya, who lives with her mother who suffers from addiction. Anya is working for her mother’s boyfriend, Derek, who comes between them. To protect her mother and her home, she has to get rid of Derek. She uses her imagination to deal with this reality, to give her power and agency…

…AH: In inner city London you can’t separate class from race. The majority of working class people in London are people of colour. So your casting, whether conscious or not, is a reflection of this intersection of class and race.

SC: Yes, I agree. But at first I subconsciously intended to cast a little girl who has a similar background to me. Because it was a personal story I subconsciously pictured myself in the role of Anya but when I met the right actress to play Anya, it did occur to me that the film would take on other connotations to do with class, race, interdependency and that’s how films grow really. The way you cast brings on other layers and I love what the actors brought to my film. The mixed race experience in London is transmitted visually through Amaris [Miller] and Zawe [Ashton] and in my opinion adds to the narrative, it does not complicate it. Derek, Anya and Amanda are a bi-racial family unit…

Read the entire interview here.

Dido Belle: Britain’s first black aristocrat

The Telegraph
2016-07-06

Nisha Lilia Diu

Amma Asante’s award-winning film Belle arrives on Netflix today. In this feature, first published in June 2014, Nisha Lilia Diu reveals the true story that inspired it

The amazing thing about Dido Elizabeth Belle is not that she was mixed-race. Who knows how many white men’s children were born to black slave women in the 18th century? It’s not even that her father was a wealthy English aristocrat – there were plenty of titled captains tearing around the Caribbean at that time, capturing French and Dutch schooners during the Seven Years’ War and making off with their sugar, coffee and other (often human) cargo. The extraordinary thing about Dido Belle is that her father, a 24-year-old Navy officer called John Lindsay, took her home to England and asked his extended family to raise her. And they did. They did it in some style, too.

Belle grew up in Kenwood House in north London. It was the palatial weekend retreat of Lindsay’s uncle, the first Earl of Mansfield, set in landscaped gardens with a view of St Paul’s Cathedral six miles away. Mansfield was Lord Chief Justice, and he made a number of landmark rulings on slavery that were among Britain’s first steps towards abolition. Did Belle’s presence in his home have anything to do with it? Plenty of his contemporaries thought so, and they didn’t admire him for it.

“Dido was very, very privileged,” says William Murray, a descendant of the earl and the son of the heir apparent. “She was in the top 5 per cent, perhaps the top 1 per cent, in terms of how she lived, her allowance, her dress, her education.” But Belle’s position was far from clear-cut…

Read the entire article here.

Akala: Dynamite by any other name…

The Guardian
2013-06-01

Kate Mossman, Editor and Pop critic
New Statesman

Akala in Notting Hill last month: ‘In Brixton and Tottenham my sister was worshipped because she was representing a side of intellectual black culture that is never usually acknowledged.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

Rapper, adapter of Shakespeare and brother of Ms Dynamite, Akala is on a mission to correct a few misconceptions

A few weeks ago in these pages, Birmingham rapper Lady Leshurr asked why there had been no high-profile female rappers in the UK since Ms Dynamite. Akala seems a good person to consult – one, because he’s her brother, and two, because you can ask Akala just about anything and you’ll get a pretty comprehensive answer. In the course of 68 minutes in a London community centre under the Westway, he talks about 16th-century explorers, Biggie Smalls, the universities of 13th-century Timbuktu, tai chi, the Black Wall Street of Oklahoma, the African city portraits of Olfert Dapper, Eminem, peanuts, Napoleon’s generals, traffic lights and golf. But back to Ms Dynamite.

“I remember the Daily Mail wrote an article about my sister at the time,” he says, “and essentially their argument was, ‘Well, she’s not really black, is she – she’s quite clever and she’s got a white mum!’ It was so funny the way they tried to co-opt us. Remember that big story about Bob Marley and his ‘white dad’ last year? He was unequivocally black power, but he’s rewritten as this fun-loving Rasta. Mark Duggan [the Tottenham man shot by police in August 2011] was also mixed race, but no one’s ever going to co-opt Mark Duggan!”…

Read the entire article here.

Leslie Barlow’s mixed-race identity inspires her to paint underrepresented people

City Pages
Minneapolis, Minnesota
2016-07-18

Erica Rivera

There are plenty of portrait painters in Minnesota, but few have captured such a wide range of diverse faces in the tender and beautiful way Leslie Barlow does. The recent MCAD MFA grad focuses on the underrepresented faces of the Twin Cities, a mission driven by the lack of visibility of stories like hers: people of mixed-race backgrounds.

Barlow first became fascinated by the question of how we define who we are in the fifth grade, when she was asked to label her race on a standardized test. This was before the “other” box existed or multiple choices were allowed. She checked “African-American” (her father is primarily black), but when she went home and relayed the day’s events, her mother (who is primarily white) asked why she hadn’t checked the “white” box.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m being pulled in two different communities or I feel like I’m not part of any community because of my background,” says Barlow…

Read the entire article here.

PHOTOS: What It Means to Celebrate Afro-Latinidad in the Time of Black Lives Matter

Remezcla
2016-07-12

Isabelia Herrera, Music Editor

Photography by: Itzel Alejandra Martinez, Photo Editor

Itzel Alejandra Martinez

When Remezcla headed to the fourth edition of New York City’s Afro-Latino Festival this weekend, surrounded by colorful dashikis and bold #BlackLivesMatter t-shirts, we were reminded that the political utility of the Afro-Latino label is more urgent than ever. Speaking with festival attendees, families, and musicians, it became clear that celebrating Afro-Latinidad in times of black trauma isn’t about diverting the focus of anti-racist movements, but about highlighting the diversity of black experiences. As the nation reels from the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, and as police violence continues to rattle black and brown communities, Afro-Latinos are uniquely positioned to combat anti-blackness in Latino communities. To that end, we spoke to a group of festival attendees about their Afro-Latinidad in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Here’s what they had to say…

Red the entire photo-essay here.

How Reggie Yates went from kids’ TV to confronting neo-Nazis

The Guardian
2016-06-28

Hannah J. Davies

Louis Theroux 2.0: Reggie Yates in a cell at Bexar County Detention Center.

He braves Russian far-right rallies and Texas prison cells for his job. Meet the man helping to reinvent the documentary for Generation Y

While filming in South Africa in 2013, Reggie Yates experienced the two scariest moments of his TV career to date. “The director, sound man and I got caught up in a fight between two gangs,” he explains. “One of the guys pulled out a gun and I thought: ‘All bets are off.’ We got out of there, but we met up with one of the gangs again later on in this little hut and they all had their machetes out. I thought: ‘This could go wrong at any minute,’ but it didn’t. I think a lot of that came down to the respect we showed them; I don’t wear a bulletproof [vest] in these places, because [that would be] saying that I don’t trust someone or I think I’m better.” He laughs before adding: “It could’ve been worse!”…

…Starting out as a child actor in 90s barbershop sitcom Desmond’s, he went on to work as a kids’ TV presenter alongside pal Fearne Cotton on shows including CBBC’s Smile. Then came a move into radio DJing on 1Xtra, before a gig as the anchor of Radio 1’s Official Chart Show. Somehow he’s also found time to voice cartoon rodent Rastamouse and appear in Doctor Who, as well as writing and directing his own short films (his latest, Shelter, stars W1A’s Jessica Hynes). It even transpires during our conversation that he’s a “massive interiors nerd”, who teases that he might one day open a furniture store…

Read the entire article here.

NYC AfroLatino Fest Comes at an Important Time

Sounds and Colours
2016-07-05

Gina Vergel

It seems the fourth edition of AfroLatinoFest in New York City comes at a crucial time.

A survey by the Pew Research Center, released in March, points to a disconnect in how some Afro-Latinos living in the United States report their race. It found that while 24 percent of U.S.-based Latinos identify as Afro-Latino, just 18 percent of that group reports its race as “Black.”

According to an article in Colorlines, “when asked directly about their race, only 18% of Afro-Latinos identified their race or one of their races as black. In fact, higher shares of Afro-Latinos identified as white alone or white in combination with another race (39%) or volunteered that their race or one of their races was Hispanic (24%). Only 9% identified as mixed race.”

And so Afro-Latino Fest, taking place from the 8th to the 10th of July, is offering a series of intellectually engaging panels, documentary screenings, and keynote speakers about AfroLatinidad, along with music and food, of course…

Read the entire article here.

Prize-winning Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe makes verse of city’s Basic Law

South China Morning Post
2016-07-07

Clare Tyrrell-Morin

Having played down her Chinese side while growing up and studying in the UK, Howe, now at Harvard, has turned to it again as she makes an ‘erasure poem’ out of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution

We meet in a small office on the second floor of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, overlooking a tranquil garden unseen from Harvard University’s main thoroughfares. It’s freezing outside, but the view is spectacular: the bare branches of an ancient tree, contemplated by scholars for generations, silhouetted against a wintry sky. It’s a good view for a poet.

The office belongs to a Radcliffe Fellow, Sarah Howe, who is spending the year here with 50 other artists and scholars. You may not know her name yet, but Howe could become one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated writers.

In December, the 32-year-old won the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award for authors under the age of 35. The previous month, scientist Stephen Hawking read out a poem, titled “Relativity”, that she had written for him for Britain’s National Poetry Day. And, in January, Howe was presented with the £20,000 (HK$204,000) T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry at a lavish ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.

Her winning collection was “Loop of Jade”, which weaves around her identity as a British-Chinese poet born in Hong Kong. The dualistic, hybrid work dances between the search for her mother’s Chinese roots and subjects as varied as censorship, 14th-century Flemish paintings, evenings in Arizona and the rain in London. The book captures a quest for identity, dislocation and the crossing of waters – themes familiar to many a Hongkonger – yet, equally, it is an exploration of the Western literary canon and the impact Chinese poetry has had on it…

Read the entire article here.

Essence Fest: How Prince helped Misty Copeland discover artistic freedom

The New Orleans Times-Picayune
2016-07-02

Chelsea Brasted, Lifestyle and Culture Reporter

Misty Copeland recounted her own Prince tribute Saturday (July 2) during an Essence Fest weekend full of them. But for the first African American woman to be named principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, the music star was a friend before she’d ever even seen him in concert.

“I’d never seen him perform live,” Copeland said during an interview with Soledad O’Brien on the festival’s Empowerment Experience stage. Copeland was emotional as she continued her story, adding, “I approached this relationship as this really hilarious quiet guy that became my friend, then I stepped onstage with him for the first time and I was like, OK, I get it now. Like, wow.”…

Read the entire article here.