Mixed Race Studies

One Drop of Love: A Multimedia Solo Performance on Racial Identity by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni at James R. Fitzgerald Theater

James R. Fitzgerald Theater
Cambridge Rindge & Latin School
459 Broadway
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Friday, 2013-08-30, 19:30 EDT (Local Time)

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Jillian Pagan, Director

Produced by: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chay Carter

How does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships?

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval is a multimedia solo show that journeys from the U.S. to East & West Africa and from 1790 to the present as a culturally Mixed woman explores the influence of the “one -drop rule” on her family and society.

For more information, click here.

Don’t miss Hapa-Palooza 2013: Celebrate mixed ethnicity and third culture in Vancouver

Vancouver Observer
Vancouver, British Columbia
2013-09-13

Jordan Yerman

Celebrate the whole you with literature, film, art, and dance. This is Hapa-Palooza.

The third annual Hapa-Palooza Festival kicks off on September 18, once again bringing three days of art and culture to Vancouver. Focusing on mixed-race identity, this is a celebration of what makes us… us.

Anna Ling Kaye, Hapa-Palooza’s Artistic Director, says, “The big thing that’s different this year is that we’re incorporated as our own society. We’re making a big push for a bigger festival.”…

Read the entire article here.

Hapa-Palooza: A Celebration of Mixed Roots, Arts and Ideas

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2013-09-18, 2013-09-19, and 2013-09-21

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.

New Book by Dr. Yaba Blay Explores Racial Identity and Skin Color Politics

Drexel Now
Drexel University
2013-07-31

News Media Contact: Alex McKechnie, News Officer, University Communications
Phone: 215-895-2705; Mobile: 401-651-7550

What does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? What determines who is Black and who is not? A new book by Dr. Yaba Blay, an assistant professor and co-director of the Africana Studies program in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of what Blackness is and what it looks like. 

The book, entitled (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, combines candid narratives and photos of 60 contributors from 25 different countries, providing a living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. It is intended to spark dialogue about the intricacies and nuances of racial identity and the influence of skin color politics.

The book is part of Blay’s larger, multi-platform project called (1)ne Drop – a reference to the “one-drop rule” from the early 1900s that held that anyone with 1/32 of “African Black blood” was Black.

The project, which includes an online and traveling exhibition, ultimately seeks to raise social awareness and inspire community conversation about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality.

The project was the inspiration behind “Who is Black in America?”, the fifth installation of CNN’s Black in America television documentary series with Soledad O’Brien in 2012, on which Blay served as a consulting producer…

Read the entire press release here.

Haji, an Actress Featured in Cult Films by Russ Meyer, Dies at 67

The New York Times
2013-08-17

Daniel E. Slotnik

Haji [Barbarella Catton], a voluptuous actress who played one of three homicidal go-go dancers in Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult film “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” died on Aug. 9 in Southern California. She was 67.

Her death was confirmed by the dancer and actress Kitten Natividad, a friend, who said she did not know the cause. She said Haji had high blood pressure and heart problems in recent years and was taken to a hospital after falling ill at a restaurant in Newport Beach.

Haji, a brunette of Filipino and British descent, met Meyer, the celebrated B-movie director, in the mid-1960s while she worked in a strip club in California. He cast her as the lead in his biker movie “Motorpsycho” (1965) even though she had no acting experience…

Read the entire obituary here.

Wilder than her pet cheetah, the sex-mad Black Venus who outwitted the Nazis: Remarkable story of Josephine Baker as Rihanna is set to play legendary seductress in biopic

The Daily Mail
2013-08-22

Annabel Venning

Under scorching stage-lights, Josephine Baker stepped out in front of the audience entirely naked, but for a few strategically-placed flamingo-feathers.

Her male dance partner carried her upside down, her long, slender legs stretched out in the splits.

He set her down, and she began to dance. As the light played on her coffee-brown skin, her body seemed to become almost molten as she wound herself around her partner.

She was, she later recalled, lost in the eroticism of the moment, ‘intoxicated . . . driven by dark forces I didn’t recognise,’ as she writhed seductively before shuddering to a climactic halt.

For a few moments the Paris audience remained silent, as if stunned. Then they rose to their feet as one and erupted in ecstatic applause.

She was hailed as the ‘Black Venus’. Picasso dubbed her the ‘Nefertiti of now’. Author Ernest Hemingway called her ‘the most sensational woman anyone ever saw’.

It was the start of an extraordinary career.  Josephine Baker, the girl from the St Louis ghetto, rose to become one of the greatest divas ever, an icon of the Jazz Age, talented and glamorous, but also decadent and amoral.

Today, all that many people remember of her is that she danced naked except for her famous tutu made of (fake) bananas…

Read the entire article here.

Art at Wing Luke Museum explores mixed-race heritage

The Seattle Times
2013-08-19

Robert Ayers, Special to The Seattle Times

The thought-provoking “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian-American Art” exhibition is showing at the Wing Luke in Seattle through Jan. 19, 2014.

“War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian-American Art,” currently at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, is a jewel of an exhibition that has been organized and curated by Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis.

As their provocative title suggests, the curators — both scholars in the field of mixed-race studies — see their role not only to present a group of stimulating high-quality works (which they have done anyway,) but also to encourage a new understanding of what “mixed race” means. The last thing they intend is a celebration of multiculturalism, and instead, they stress that there is nothing new or exceptional about mixed-race heritage. These are issues that are more than political for them, and for the artists they have included in the show, because they are part of the fabric of their own experience…

Read the entire article here.

Alien Citizen, The Play

World Premier at the Asylum Lab
1078 Lillian Way
Hollywood, California 90038
Fridays & Saturdays @ 20:00 PDT (Local Time)
Preview May 3, 2013, Opens May 4 – June 1

Written and performed by Elizabeth Liang
Directed by Sofie Calderon
Associate Produced by Richard Lee, Karen Smith, and Wendy Belcher
Co-produced by Leila Ciszewski
Stage Managed by Michelle Hilyard
House Managed by Charls Sedgwick Hall and Kate Huffman
Lighting & Projection Design by Matt Richter
Sound Design by Dennis Yen
Graphic and Program Design by Gene Michael Barrera

Presented by HapaLis Productions in association with Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

Who are you when you’re from everywhere and nowhere? Alien Citizen is a funny and poignant one-woman show about growing up as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and New England.

Elizabeth Liang, like President Obama, is a Third Culture Kid or a TCK. Third Culture Kids are the children of international business people, global educators, diplomats, missionaries, and the military — anyone whose family has relocated overseas because of a job placement. Liang weaves humorous stories about growing up as an Alien Citizen abroad with American commercial jingles providing her soundtrack through language confusion, first love, culture shock, Clark Gable, and sandstorms…

Our protagonist deals with the decisions every global nomad has to make repeatedly: to adapt or to simply cope; to build a bridge or to just tolerate. From being a Guatemalan-American teen in North Africa to attending a women’s college in the USA, Alien Citizen reflects her experience that neither one was necessarily easier than the other. She realizes that girls across the world are growing into womanhood in environments that can be hostile to females (including the USA). How does a young girl cope as a border/culture/language/religion straddler in country after country that feels “other” to her when she is the “other?” Where is the line between respecting others and betraying yourself?

Humor is a great survival mechanism! And friends make all the difference.

For more information, click here.

Japanese-Canadian hapa woman makes opera fun

Global Asian Women: Stories for and about Asian women around the world
2013-07-31

Elizabeth Noh

Her name means a solo piece in an opera, and it just so happens that Aria Umezawa is a trained opera singer.

The mixed Japanese-Canadian is also the co-founder and artistic director of Opera 5, a small production company in Toronto, Canada.

Fate or coincidence? Her parents had no idea when they named her 25 years ago.

“My parents joke that if they knew I would follow my namesake, they would have named me lawyer or doctor,” says Aria.

Her calling came at the age of 6, when she saw her first opera, Turandot by Puccini. “The music touched me.”

The experience lead her to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and later at McGill University in Montreal. She trained as an opera singer, but she found that she wasn’t cut out to be a performer and was more suited to be a director…

…Aria is bi-racial. Her mother is Caucasian from the province of Alberta in western Canada. Her father is Japanese who came to Canada as a teenager. Aria was born and raised in Toronto. She has two younger brothers.

Some people say Eurasian, but “hapa” is commonly used in North America. The term originates from Hawaii and means a person of mixed blood. We talk about her mixed background.

“Growing up, it never occurred to me that my family was different on any sort of substantial level. We ate foods that my friends didn’t eat, and I was enrolled in karate instead of ballet, but I figured every family had its quirks,” she says…

Read the entire article here.

Actor Guilt

2nd Story
Chicago, Illinois
2012-06-07

Khanisha Foster

Coming up on two years ago I moved to L.A., and since that time I have been writing. Writing creative non-fiction for 2nd Story, an organization that has stolen my heart, and writing my memoir—I’m the kid of a former Black Panther career criminal and heroin-addicted parents, one black and one white (so there’s lots to write about there), and with the help of UCLA’s professional program I’m in screenplay Heaven. All of this is work, commitment, and time well spent FO SHO, but here I am feeling like I’m cheating on acting.

Acting was the first and only thing I ever wanted to do. It taught me about my brain, my heart, my sexuality. I felt alive on stage before I ever felt it in real life. I was ready for the business you hear about when you grow up wanting to be an actor. I was going to be rejected. No problem. I was going to be poor. Since I had never been anything else, that was fine by me. I was going to have to work my butt off. This, to me, seemed to be the easiest part. My childhood was more than challenging, and my father always taught me I’d have to work twice as hard to get half as far, so hard work seemed habitual. What I wasn’t ready for was the complete challenge of identity I was about to undergo.

I’m mixed; the list, which changes in specifics based on my audience and how they wish to receive it (everybody thinks they know more about being mixed than you do), goes like this: black and white, which then breaks down into Creole, which then breaks down into African, French, Spanish (Spain), plus Native American (I prefer this to American Indian), Scottish, Irish, and German. Are you trying to picture what I look like? If you don’t know me or haven’t seen a picture, my skin is honey-colored (or so every base makeup I ever bought tells me), while my hair is almost black like both of my parents’; its waves fall into curls and it is shiny soft, and even though it looks full, quite thin. Everyone thinks I’m Latina…

Read the entire article here.