Category: Book/Video Reviews

  • Anomaly dir. by Jessica Chen Drammeh (review) African Studies Review Volume 57, Number 3, December 2014 pages 274-275 Manouchka Kelly Labouba, USC Provost’s PhD Fellow Critical Studies School of Cinematic Arts University of Southern California Anomaly is a personal documentary featuring mixed-raced people who discuss the complexities and challenges of defining their identity across the different…

  • Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present by Jeffrey Lesser (review) Journal of Interdisciplinary History Volume 45, Number 3, Winter 2015 pages 449-451 Samuel L. Baily, Professor Emeritus of History Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present (Cambridge,…

  • ‘Who We Be,’ by Jeff Chang Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2014-12-12 Tricia Rose, Director Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America Brown ­University, Providence, Rhode Island Who We Be: The Colorization of America. By Jeff Chang. Illustrated. 403 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $32.99. The dramatic changes spurred by the…

  • ‘Pelo Malo’ Is A Rare Look Into Latin American Race Relations Morning Edition National Public Radio 2014-12-10 Jasmine Garsd, Reporter and Host NPR Music’s Alt.Latino Actor Samuel Lange Zambrano plays Junior, a boy who becomes obsessed with relaxing his hair. Courtesy of the artist “Pelo Malo” means “bad hair” in Spanish. It’s a term that…

  • THE VERY NOTION of racial “passing” implies a test. Those who believed clear racial categorization was possible might test for race by measuring physical traits to indicate “blood purity”: slight physical traits that could be identified, such as the half-moon of a nail bed or the whites of ones eyes.

  • Brute Ideology Dissent Fall 2014 Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History; Professor of African and African American Studies; Director, Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History Harvard University Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields. Verso, 2012, 310 pp. The Problem of Slavery in…

  • New doc on Shadeism doesn’t make the cut Mixed In Canada 2014-12-08 Rema Tavares Debuting November 10th, 2014 on the CBC’s free preview on their documentary channel, Hue: A Matter of Colour opens with the narrator and main subject, Vic Sarin, discussing his relationship to his mixed-race family (or if anything lack thereof). This movie,…

  • Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade by Randy J. Sparks, and: Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It by James Ciment (review) Journal of the Early Republic Volume 34, Number 4, Winter 2014 pages 686-690 DOI: 10.1353/jer.2014.0068 Andrew N. Wegmann…

  • Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories ed. by Andrew Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, Christina Gomez (review) Journal of College Student Development Volume 55, Number 8, November 2014 pages 856-858 DOI: 10.1353/csd.2014.0077 Jessica C. Harris Andrew Garrod, Christina Gómez, and Robert Kilkenny, Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013)…

  • A Profound Documentary, Little White Lie Follows a Woman’s Search for Her Identify The Village Voice New York, New York 2014-11-26 Diana Clarke In Woodstock, New York, at the end of the 20th century, Lacey Schwartz was raised in an affluent Jewish household where something was slightly off. Darker-skinned than her mother and father, Schwartz…