Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Miscegenation produced Eurasian children that were not European or Asian; they were a people without an identity that had the ability to change the European established racial hierarchy. Christina Firpo mentions that in Vietnam, Eurasians were clearly recognizable as being of French descent. But the French viewed this as a threat to their racial purity and superiority. A British travelogue writer noticed that Eurasians were divided amongst themselves based on how closely they resembled Europeans. The Eurasians with the skin tones and facial features that more closely resembled those of Europeans had higher social statuses than those that had features that more closely resembled Southeast Asians. ‘This made it seem like there were several racial categories within the Eurasian community. This confusion over racial hierarchies within the Eurasian community created confusion among the British. The British were confused as to how to categorize Eurasians racially. The British had established a strict racial hierarchy. They were also convinced that they would be able to maintain a racial purity amongst the Europeans. So they were not prepared when British men began to participate in miscegenation and producing another race. As Ann Stoler put it, Eurasians “straddled the divide” between colonizers and colonized. This “divide” blurred some of the racial lines between Europeans and Southeast Asians, which terrified the British.
Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in American Ballet Theater who epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chicago. She was 89.
Her death was confirmed by her goddaughter, Ellen Coghlan.
Because of her lyrical style in ballets like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s “Undertow,” which depicts a young murderer’s development.
Contemporary ballet makers favored her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreographer and future film director, cast her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s etchings. She portrayed a dead woman who is tossed around by her partner in choreographed movements that suggested she was inert…
…Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15, 1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a Chinese physician in Chicago’s Chinatown, and the former Mary Mondulick, who was of Russian descent…
Samira K. Mehta, Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies University of Colorado, Boulder
An unflinching look at the challenges and misunderstandings mixed-race people face in family spaces and intimate relationships across their varying cultural backgrounds
In this emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta reflects on many facets of being multiracial.
Born to a white American and a South Asian immigrant, Mehta grew up feeling more comfortable with her mother’s family than her father’s—they never carried on conversations in languages she couldn’t understand or blamed her for finding the food was too spicy. In adulthood, she realized that some of her Indian family’s assumptions about the world had become an indelible part of her—and that her well-intentioned parents had not known how to prepare her for a world that would see her as a person of color.
Popular belief assumes that mixedness gives you the ability to feel at home in more than one culture, but the flipside shows you can feel just as alienated in those spaces. In 7 essays that dissect her own experiences with a frankness tempered by generosity, Mehta confronts questions about:
authenticity and belonging;
conscious and unconscious cultural inheritance;
appropriate mentorship;
the racism of people who love you.
The Racism of People Who Love You invites people of mixed race into the conversation on race in America and the melding of found and inherited cultures of hybrid identity.
At first, Misty Copeland thought the pain she was experiencing was shin splits. It was 2012, and, after 12 years with the American Ballet Theatre, Copeland, one of the few Black dancers in the company, had finally landed her first leading role in a classical work.
“I knew how critical this moment was for my career,” she says. “If I had gone to the artistic staff or the physical therapists and said, ‘I’m in a lot of pain,’ they would have removed me from the rehearsals. And I would not have been able to perform. And I knew that had that happened, I wouldn’t be given the opportunity again.”
So she pushed on, dancing the principal role in The Firebird, despite the fact that the pain was becoming increasingly severe. Finally, toward the end of the company’s season, Copeland was diagnosed with six stress fractures in her tibia — three of which were classified as “dreaded black line” fractures, meaning that there were almost full breaks through the bone.
When the first surgeon warned her that she might never dance again, Copeland was devastated. “It was just like my whole world came crashing down,” she says. “I felt mostly like I was letting down the Black community.”…
Read the entire story here. Download the story (00:42:00) here.
Polity
2022-12-27
232 pages
152 x 229 mm / 6 x 9 in
Hardback ISBN: 9781509534654
Paperback ISBN: 9781509534661
ebook ISBN: 9781509534678
Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl, Associate Professor of Sociology Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York
The year 2000 was the first time the US Census permitted respondents to choose more than one race. Although the US has long recognized that a “mixed-race” population exists, the contemporary “multiracial population” presents different questions and implications for today’s diverse society.
This book is the first overview to bring a systematic critical race lens to the scholarship on mixedness. Avoiding the common pitfall of conflating “mixed” with “multiracial,” the book reveals how identity forms and fluctuates such that people with mixed heritage may identify as mixed, monoracial, and/or multiracial throughout their lives. It analyzes the dynamic and various manifestations of mixedness, including at the global level, to reveal its complex impact on both the structural and individual levels. Multiracial critically examines topics such as family dynamics and racial socialization, multiraciality in media and popular culture, and intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation.
Integrating diverse theories, qualitative research, and national-level data, this accessible and engaging book is essential for students of race and those looking to understand the new field of multiraciality.
Table of Contents
Detailed Contents
List of Figures and Tables
CHAPTER 1: MULTIRACIAL AMERICA
CHAPTER 2: DEFINING MIXED-RACE & MULTIRACIAL
CHAPTER 3: RACE AND FAMILY
CHAPTER 4: INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES & GLOBAL MIXEDNESS
CHAPTER 5: MULTIRACIALISM IN THE MEDIA
CHAPTER 6: NEW, SHIFTING, OR REBOUNDING BOUNDARIES
Synopsis: This topical short documentary features interviews with multiethnic and multiracial youth living in Catalonia, Spain, who talk about their mixed heritage and its meaning for them, their identity and sense of belonging, and their experiences of discrimination and agency. Through these narratives, MIXED VOICES reveals that the positive, empowering experiences of mixedness—a growing reality in Spain as well as across the globe—can coexist with negative stereotypes and prejudices and the continued stigmatization and discrimination of racialized groups, who are more constrained in their identity options. In this way, the documentary highlights the socially transformative aspects of mixedness while alerting us to persistent social divisions that hinder social inclusion and cohesion.
MIXED VOICES was produced as part of the MIXED-YOUTH Research Project (“Social Relations and Identity Processes of Children of Mixed Unions: Mixedness—Between Inclusion and Social Constraints,” CSO2015-63962-R), for which a total of 152 Spanish-born individuals from very diverse ancestries were interviewed. More information about the results of this project can be found in the following publications:
Rodríguez-García, Dan. (2022) “The Persistence of Racial Constructs in Spain: Bringing Race and Colorblindness into the Debate on Interculturalism.” Social Sciences 11: 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11010013.
Rodríguez-García, Dan, Miguel Solana, Anna Ortiz, and Beatriz Ballestín. (2021) “Blurring of Colour Lines? Ethnoracially Mixed Youth in Spain Navigating Identity.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(4): 838–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654157.
Rodríguez-García, Dan, and Cristina Rodríguez-Reche. (2022) “Daughters of Maghrebian Muslim and Native Non-Muslim Couples in Spain: Identity Choices and Constraints.” Social Compass 69(3): 423–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/00377686221091045.
Rodríguez-García, Dan, Miguel Solana-Solana, Anna Ortiz-Guitart, and Joanna L. Freedman. (2018) “Linguistic Cultural Capital among Descendants of Mixed Couples in Catalonia, Spain.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 39(4): 429–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2018.1487388.
The material for this documentary was recorded in 2020 in Catalonia, Spain, in the midst of a full lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each participant self-recorded their video, which may have affected the sound and image quality in some cases. All participants have given their consent to use their recordings for the purposes of this documentary.
PRODUCTION TEAM:
INMIX-UAB Research Group on Immigration, Mixedness, and Social Cohesion: Dan Rodríguez-García, Anna Ortiz-Guitart, Cristina Rodríguez-Reche, Teresa Habimana-Jordana, Miguel Solana-Solana, Beatriz Ballestín-González, Víctor Navarro-Izquierdo, Joanna Freedman
The first scholarly volume dedicated to French Creole music and its contribution to the development of jazz in New Orleans
During the formative years of jazz (1890–1917), the Creoles of Color—as they were then called—played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Indeed, music penetrated all aspects of the life of this tight-knit community, proud of its French heritage and language. They played and/or sang classical, military, and dance music as well as popular songs and cantiques that incorporated African, European, and Caribbean elements decades before early jazz appeared. In Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz, the author describes the music played by the Afro-Creole community since the arrival of enslaved Africans in La Louisiane, then a French colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, emphasizing the many cultural exchanges that led to the development of jazz.
Caroline Vézina has compiled and analyzed a broad scope of primary sources found in diverse locations from New Orleans to Quebec City, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Two previously unpublished interviews add valuable insider knowledge about the music on French plantations and the danses Créoles held in Congo Square after the Civil War. Musical and textual analyses of cantiques provide new information about the process of their appropriation by the Creole Catholics as the French counterpart of the Negro spirituals. Finally, a closer look at their musical practices indicates that the Creoles sang and improvised music and/or lyrics of Creole songs, and that some were part of their professional repertoire. As such, they belong to the Black American and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich cultural heritage of Louisiana.
Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
October 2022
342 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7936-5263-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7936-5264-5
Mark Christian, Professor of Africana Studies City University of New York, New York, New York
In Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic, Mark Christian presents a Black British study within the context of the transatlantic and Liverpool, England. Taking a semi-autoethnographic approach based on the author’s Black Liverpool heritage, Christian interacts with Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic. Yet, provides a fresh perspective that takes into account a famous British slave port’s history that has been overlooked or under-utilized. The longevity of Black presence in the city involves a history of discrimination, stigma, and a population group known colloquially as Liverpool Born Blacks (LBBs). Crucially, this book provides the reader with a deeper insight of the transatlantic in regard to the movement of Black souls and their struggle for acceptance in a hostile environment. This book is an evocative, passionate, and revealing read.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Theorizing Transatlantic Liverpool and the Black Atlantic Paradigm
Life and Times in a Liverpool Black Family – The Christians
Schooling, L8 Community Football, Grassroots Education, and Mainstream Miseducation
Anti-Black Riots, Resistance & Black Organization Demise: 1919-2000s
A Tale of Two Freedoms: Contemporary Self-Reflexivity and the Memory of Frederick Douglass
Appendices
Liverpool City Council Slave Apology Minutes – from December 9, 1999
The Age of Slave Apologies: The Case of Liverpool, England – transcript of public lecture presented by Dr. Mark Christian, November 14, 2007
Front cover: CWCN Reports on Historic Slave Apology (Issue 26: December 1999)
Consortium of Black Organisations – Liverpool- Response to LCC Slave Apology
Front cover: CWCN Celebration of College Status (Issue 12: December 1992)
CWCN Editorial denounces drastic cuts to funding by LCC (Issue 21: June 1997)
Liverpool Echo (August 27, 1997) – Report praised CWC teaching
Front cover: CWCN (Issue 1: June 1987) – Evidence of LCC fight to close CWC in 1987
Front cover: CWCN (Issue 25: June 1999) – Reports on Lawrence Inquiry and Racism
CWCN (Issue 12: December 1992, p.13) – Proof of Jacqueline N. Brown visiting CWC.
Front cover: CWCN (Issue 8: December 1990) – Dr. William E. Nelson Jr at CWC
Dr Mark Christian Community Education Award from The Voice 1999
Liveright (an imprint of W. W. Norton)
2022-11-08
432 pages
6.3 x 9.4 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-324-09084-7
Kerri K. Greenidge, Mellon Assistant Professor
Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke—the Grimke sisters—are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.
That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance.
In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics.
A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.
Ruby used to be a fiery, sexy, musical genius. But when she got pregnant as a teenager in the 90s, her life took a turn into banality. Now a middle-aged Indo-Canadian woman, she feels unseen and unheard by her white husband and struggles to communicate with her mixed-race daughter. When she discovers her husband cheating, she embarks on a quest to unearth exciting secrets from her past. To find what she needs, she drives straight into B.C.’s raging wildfires, accompanied only by the fantastical stories her mother used to tell about their ancient Moghul ancestry — a dancer named Rubina who lived in the concubine quarters of the great Red Fort. This book is at once historical fiction and political romance, deftly navigating themes of mixed-race relationships, climate change, motherhood, body shame, death and the passage of time.
Hurst Publishers
October 2022
304 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781787388079
Sofia Samatar, Assistant Professor of English James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
A rich history of wanderers, exiles and intruders. A haunting personal journey through Central Asia. An intimate reflection on mixed identity shaped by cultural crossings.
Over a century later, Sofia Samatar traces their gruelling journey across desert and mountains, and its improbable fruit: a small Christian settlement inside the Khanate of Khiva. Named ‘The White Mosque’ after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village—a community of peace, prophecy, music and martyrs—lasted fifty years.
Within this curious tale, Sofia discovers a tapestry of characters connected by the ancient Silk Road: a fifteenth-century astronomer-king; an intrepid Swiss woman traveller; the first Uzbek photographer; a free spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way, in a voice both warm and wise, she explores her own complex upbringing as an American Mennonite of colour, the daughter of a Swiss-American Christian and a Somali Muslim.
On this pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, Samatar traces the porous borders of identity and narrative. When you leave your tribe, what remains? How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of life’s buried archives and startling connections, does a person construct a self?
