Mixed Race Studies

The Films of Branwen Okpako: CfP for a GSA Panel Series

DEFA Film Library

January 2022

We invite contributions for a series of panels on Branwen Okpako’s films, for the 2022 GSA conference, September 15-18, 2022. Co-sponsored by the Black German Heritage & Research Association (BGHRA) and the DEFA Film Library, these panels seek to explore the range of stories and rich imagery in the films of this groundbreaking director.

The deadline for submission is 2022-02-28.

Relevant topics might include:

• Afro-Germanness and Afro-German creativity and artistic production;
• Form, filmmaking, and aesthetics;
• Postcolonial and feminist consciousness at the intersections of multiple cultural and familial
• traditions, norms, values;
• Regimes of the body; femininity and gender;
• Engagement with disciplinary regimes, e.g. the police, political regimes, or language;
• German reunification and its repercussion on discourses of racialization, positionality and representation in Europe and Germany;
• Family his- and herstories;
• Affiliation and belonging;
• Political activism and self-empowerment; and
• The reception of Branwen Okpako’s films.

For more information, click here.

How Bernardine Evaristo Conquered British Literature

The New Yorker
2022-02-03

Anna Russell
London, United Kingdom

In a new memoir, the writer describes how she was long excluded from the halls of literary power, and how she finally broke in.

hen the British author Bernardine Evaristo was in her early twenties, she and her drama-school friends would go to London’s theatres and heckle the performances. “It wouldn’t have been anything like ‘Rubbish!’ because it was a political heckling,” Evaristo, now sixty-two, told me recently. They would have been more likely to yell “Sexist!” or “Racist!” and then disappear, giddily, into the night. Recounting the habit this past December, Evaristo put on a mock posh accent and called it “appalling, appalling behavior.” The week prior, she had been named president of the U.K.’s Royal Society of Literature, becoming the first person of color to hold the position in the organization’s two-hundred-year history. (She is also the first who did not attend at least one of the following: Oxford, Cambridge, Eton.) Evaristo has some sympathy for her younger, angrier self. If social media had been around in her youth, she thinks she might have been one of what she calls the “Rabid Wolves of the Twittersphere.” “But we do need these renegades out there, don’t we?” she said. “We do need these people who will just lob a verbal hand grenade.”

Since 2011, Evaristo and her husband, David Shannon, have lived on the outskirts of West London, where she has dubbed herself “Mz Evaristo of Suburbia.” When I met her at her home recently, the doors to each room were painted a different bright color: blue, yellow, pink. Evaristo is tall, with a booming laugh. It’s been a long time since she has heckled anyone. These days, she sees herself as a diplomatic, modernizing force at the top of the British literary establishment from which she was long excluded. “The person I am today no longer throws stones at the fortress,” she writes in her new memoir, “Manifesto: On Never Giving Up,” which was published in the U.S. by Grove Atlantic last month. She used to laugh when people told her to think before she spoke. Now: “I’m so careful about everything I say.”…

Read the entire article here.

“A Free America for All Peoples …”: Fredi Washington, the Negro Actors Guild, and the Voice of the People

The Journal of African American History
Volume 105, Number 3 (Summer 2020)
DOI: 10.1086/709201

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

Focusing on the work of New Negro performing artist Fredi Washington as a writer and activist during the 1930s and 1940s, this article places an African American female performing artist at the center of the narrative of the New Negro Renaissance, illuminates the vital influence of Black female performing artists on the movement, and demonstrates the ways in which Washington and the New Negro Renaissance are central components of the social transformation of twentieth-century America. Washington’s fusion of artistry and activism, her determination to fight oppression on myriad fronts and in myriad forms, casts her as an influential actor in the unremitting African American quest for civil and human rights. Her life and her work make visible the significance of the performing arts within the movement and enhance our understanding of the scope and texture of the activism of Black performing artists and of Black women. Her experience brings the Renaissance into the progressive movements of the early twentieth century and illuminates its role as a keystone in the foundation of the Black Freedom Movement.

Read or purchase the article here.

Meet the first Black skeleton athlete to compete for the U.S. at the Olympics

National Public Radio
2022-02-10

Jaclyn Diaz, Reporter

BEIJING — Skeleton is a heart-racing, adrenaline-fueled event where a single racer flies face-first down a frozen track, sometimes going more than 80 mph, belly-down on a sled.

Kelly Curtis is quick to acknowledge this sport is “crazy.” That doesn’t make her love it any less.

The event has been a mainstay at the Winter Games since 2002. At the Beijing Winter Olympics, just three Americans will compete for a medal — and Curtis is one of them.

As soon as Curtis shot herself down a topsy-turvy track in Beijing on Friday, she made history.

Curtis is the first Black athlete, man or woman, to represent the U.S. at the Olympics in skeleton. The 33-year-old is also the only member of the U.S. Air Force at this year’s Winter Games.

Curtis joins a small group of Black athletes competing for the U.S. at the Beijing Olympics…

Read the entire article here.

Introducing… Monique Roffey

FMcM Associates
London, United Kingdom
2020-10-15

Robert Greer

‘Introducing…’ is our online interview series to introduce you to some of the amazing authors we’re working with and their brilliant books!

Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature. With the Kisses of His Mouth and The Tryst are works which examine female sexuality and desire. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri, and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Welcome! To start with, could you tell us a little bit about yourself…

I’m a bi-national writer based in East London. My identity is mixed and fluid in that I was born in Port of Spain, (a city I frequently return to), but I’m also half English. Via my mother, I have Italian, Maltese and Middle Eastern blood. My consciousness, though, has been shaped by my knowledge and understanding of the Caribbean region. Four of my seven books have been set in the Caribbean region. Two of my books have dealt directly with female sexuality and desire. I’d call myself a magical realist as a writer and a practicing Buddhist in my everyday life; everything else is for others to decide. I teach creative writing on the MA/MFA at Manchester Metropolitan University and for the National Writers Centre. I’ve always enjoyed teaching and know, for sure, that the craft of writing can be taught to anyone with a feel for language and an active imagination…

Read the entire interview here.

Belle de Costa Greene: Library Director, Advocate, and Rare Books Expert.

Headlines & Heroes: Newspapers, Comics, & More Fine Print
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
2022-02-08

Joanna Colclough, Reference Librarian
Serial and Government Publications Division

In 1999, biographer Jean Strouse published her work on J. P. Morgan, railroad magnate, financier, and New York millionaire of the late 1800s. Of course, Belle de Costa Greene is featured in the book – she worked closely with Morgan for the last 8 years of his life as his personal librarian, managing his private art and rare book collection. Greene’s name was not unknown to history. The first half of the 20th century saw Greene rise as a top expert in the rare book world as librarian and first director of the Morgan Library and Museum. But Strouse discovered something new about Greene that presented Greene in whole new light. In an article for The New Yorker (March 29, 1999, p. 66-79), Strouse tells how she located Greene’s birth certificate in Washington, D.C. which was marked with a C for “colored.”

Greene passed as white for her entire professional life. This is a fact both surprising and not – surprising that such a secret could be so well-kept and not surprising considering the prejudice of society…

Read the entire article here.

Mirror Girls

Little, Brown Young Readers
2022-02-08
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780759553859
eBook ISBN-13: 9780759553859
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549165962

Kelly McWilliams

A thrilling gothic horror novel about biracial twin sisters separated at birth, perfect for fans of Lovecraft Country and The Vanishing Half

As infants, twin sisters Charlie Yates and Magnolia Heathwood were secretly separated after the brutal lynching of their parents, who died for loving across the color line. Now, at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, Charlie is a young Black organizer in Harlem, while white-passing Magnolia is the heiress to a cotton plantation in rural Georgia.

Magnolia knows nothing of her racial heritage, but secrets are hard to keep in a town haunted by the ghosts of its slave-holding past. When Magnolia finally learns the truth, her reflection mysteriously disappears from mirrors—the sign of a terrible curse. Meanwhile, in Harlem, Charlie’s beloved grandmother falls ill. Her final wish is to be buried back home in Georgia—and, unbeknownst to Charlie, to see her long-lost granddaughter, Magnolia Heathwood, one last time. So Charlie travels into the Deep South, confronting the land of her worst nightmares—and Jim Crow segregation.

The sisters reunite as teenagers in the deeply haunted town of Eureka, Georgia, where ghosts linger centuries after their time and dangers lurk behind every mirror. They couldn’t be more different, but they will need each other to put the hauntings of the past to rest, to break the mirrors’ deadly curse—and to discover the meaning of sisterhood in a racially divided land.

Rebecca Hall says directing ‘Passing’ helped ‘unlock’ Black family history

theGrio
2021-11-10

Mariel Turner, Senior Editor

“It really gave me an access point into the history of my family that otherwise would have remained hidden,” the first-time director says

Writing and directing Passing has given Rebecca Hall a host of things: critical acclaim, first-time directing experience and award season buzz. One thing she didn’t expect, however, is the deep dive into her family’s own history that the film spurred.

The 39-year-old actress-director told theGrio exclusively that reading the 1929 novel on which Passing is based, and directing the film itself, helped her to uncover her own family’s history of passing and white assimilation. Hall, the daughter of Detroit opera singer Maria Ewing and Royal Shakespeare Company founder Peter Hall, confirmed that her grandfather was Black and white-passing…

Read the entire article here.

S2E10 Black Feminist Physics: A Conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Cite Black Women
November 2020

Christen Smith, Host

In this episode Cite Black Women podcast host Christen Smith sits down with theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to discuss Black feminist physics, the intersections between the matrix of violence against Black women and science, her radical Black feminist upbringing and her forthcoming book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred (March 2021, Bold Type Books).

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also a columnist for New Scientist and Physics World. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter. Using ideas from both physics and astronomy, she responds to deep questions about how everything in the universe got to the be the way it is. She also does research in Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. Essence magazine recognized her as one of “15 Black Women Who Are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers.” She has been profiled in several venues, including TechCrunch, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Nylon, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives. A cofounder of the Particles for Justice movement, she has received the 2017 LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics, as well as the 2021 American Physical Society Edward A. Bouchet Award for her contributions to particle cosmology. She divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Listen to the interview (01:11:29) here.

An Education for All: Teacher Educated Her Hampton Students `for Eternity’

The Daily Press
Norfolk, Virginia
1995-02-07

Felice Belman

Mary S. Peake

HAMPTON — Mary S. Peake was so devoted to her students that she taught them even when it was illegal to do so.

She was so dedicated to education that, even after the city of Hampton was burned by Confederate rebels, she started a school for ex-slaves at Fort Monroe.

And she was so concerned about her work that in February 1862 – so weak from tuberculosis that she couldn’t stand – Peake gathered her students round her bedside and taught lessons between violent spasms of coughing. She died the next day.

”It’s important to remember Mary S. Peake because she taught the prominent people of her time,” said Debbie Lee Bryant, a genealogist and historian in Hampton. ”It’s important to remember her because she was the first black missionary teacher, and because her school was the forerunner to what’s now known as Hampton University.”

Peake’s contemporaries were equally admiring.

”Mrs. Peake was a remarkable person as to disposition, talents and piety,” said an unsigned article in an 1862 edition of the ”American Missionary” magazine, the journal of the American Missionary Association.

”She devoted unreservedly to the elevation of her own race,” the article said.

Mary S. Peake was a free black woman when most Southern blacks were slaves. She taught black children in Hampton and, in 1861, opened a school, marking the beginning of general education for blacks in the South. The founders of Hampton Institute, now called Hampton University, were inspired by Peake’s example.

Peake was the first teacher of blacks in any territory liberated by the Federal Army and the founder of the first school for blacks after the war began.

Born Mary Smith Kelsey, Peake was the daughter of a free black woman and a white Englishman. She was sent away to school in Alexandria but returned home to Norfolk at the age of 16, after Congress shut down schools for blacks in the Washington area. A studious girl, she turned most frequently to the Bible, according to a biography written by her contemporary, the Rev. Lewis C. Lockwood…

Read the entire article here.