Mixed Race Studies

Jackie Kay – Red Dust Road Launch Night

Glasgow Women’s Library
81 Parnie Street, Glasgow, Scotland
Wednesday 2010-06-23, 19:00 BST

Red Dust Road Exclusive Launch

Jackie Kay is known and loved for her fiction – a novel, and short stories -, for her poetry and her plays. In this revelatory and redemptive book, with characteristic generosity and humour, she tells the most inspirational of stories: her own…

For more information, click here.

Borders Book Festival: Where Words Come Alive—Jackie Kay

Harmony Marquee
Melrose, Scotland
2010-06-20, 20:30 BST (Local Time)

Published only days before the festival, Red Dust Road is Jackie Kay’s autobiographical journey.  Adopted by warm-spirited Scottish communists, Jackie has never thought of anyone else as her ‘real’ parents, but meeting her birth father and mother was nevertheless revelatory. This is a wonderfully written, emotional book about biology and destiny, strangers and family, belonging and belief.

For more information, click here.

Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey

Picador an Imprint of PanMacmillan
2010-06-04
304 pages
214mm x 135mm, 0.43 kg
ISBN: 9780330451055

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

‘What makes us who we are? My adoption is a story that has happened to me. I couldn’t make it up.’

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, the journey that Jackie Kay undertakes in Red Dust Road is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions.

In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move.

Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love.

Jackie Kay’s Representation of ‘The Broons’: Scotland’s Happy Family

eSharp
Special Issue: Spinning Scotland: Exploring Literary and Cultural Perspectives (2009)
pages 109-143
ISSN: 1742-4542

Mª del Coral Calvo Maturana
Universidad de Granada

This paper focuses on the contemporary Scottish poet Jackie Kay and the comic strip ‘The Broons’ by studying Jackie Kay’s representation of this family in contrast to its characterisation in the comic strip. This study presents a brief introduction to Jackie Kay and ‘The Broons’ and pays attention to Kay’s referential portrayal of this Scottish family in five of her poems: ‘Maw Broon Visits a Therapist’ (2006a, p.46-47), ‘Paw Broon on the Starr Report’ (2006a, p.57), ‘The Broon’s Bairn’s Black’ (2006a, p.61), ‘There’s Trouble for Maw Broon’ (2005, p.13-14) and ‘Maw Broon goes for colonic irrigation’ (unpublished). Each of the poems will be approached stylistically by using the advantages offered by corpus linguistics methodology; in particular, the program Wordsmith Tools 3.0. (Scott 1999) will help to show the collocation of certain words through concordances…

Read the entire article here.

The Poet as Cultural Dentist: Ethnicity in the Poetry of Jackie Kay

Theory and Practice in English Studies 4 (2005)
Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies.
Brno: Masarykova Univerzita
pages 63-67

Pavlína Hácová, Philosophical Faculty
Palacky University, Olomouc

The acclaimed British poet Jackie Kay (born 1961) belongs to the colourful mainstream of recent British poetry. The paper aims to survey the ethnic imagery and consciousness Kay explores in her poems, predominantly with the images of dentistry. Special attention will be paid to the images of cultural significance. A few sample poems will be discussed to demostrate the constant search for identity (inclusion vs. exclusion, assimilation vs. marginalization) and cultural heritage.

…Kay keeps clear-cut the distinction between white and black. In the poem “Pride”, the exploration of identity that is based on the imagery of teeth, leads to concern with nationality. Kay is proud of her mixed Scottish and Nigerian background. She links her African descent to her Scottish nationality as she compares Scottish clans to African tribes – both sharing the pride of their respective cultures:

His [the stranger’s] face had a look
I’ve seen on a MacLachlan, a MacDonnell, a MacLeod,
the most startling thing, pride. (Kay 1998: “Pride”, lines 51-53)

However, Kay does not see the identity of the characters as either black or white. She has stated in an interview: “I consider myself a Scottish writer, in the sense that I am, and I consider myself a black writer, in the sense that I am, and a woman writer, in the sense that I am” (Severin 2002)…

Read the entire paper here.

Jackie Kay (Review of Darling)

Aesthetica Magazine
Issue 19 (2007-10-01)
page 10

Rachel Hazelwood

Jackie Kay is one of the most prolific and insightful poets currently writing in the UK today. At a time when too many people frequently describe the form as being “in decline” and thought of as an “exclusive club”, Kay writes poems that are accessible, yet deeply involved and involving. Her poetry embraces the reader, and at the same time it challenges them to really think about what she is saying. Her work covers weighty themes such as gender, ethnicity, racism and cultural difference, and presents them in ways that leave you marvelling at her command of language, and at the same time feeling as though you have gained valuable insight into subjects fraught with social and emotional complexities. As far as Kay is concerned: “All you need is a way of reading poetry so while you’re listening, you are also reading; and that you listen to poetry like you might listen to a piece of music. You actually don’t need to understand it in the first instance; you’re listening to enjoy and experience language, not to worry about it.  Once you’re past worrying you can actually return again and again to the same poem, and that’s what I think is wonderful about poetry.”

Kay’s latest work, Darling, published in October 2007, brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, The
Adoption Papers, Other Lovers, Off Colour and Life Mask, as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers…

Read the entire review here.

Hollins University Commencement

2010-05-22 through 2010-05-23
Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia

Natasha Trethewey, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and a graduate of Hollins University’s master of arts program in English and creative writing, will be the guest speaker at Hollins’ 168th Commencement Exercises, which will be held on Sunday, May 23, 2010, at 10 a.m. on the university’s historic Front Quadrangle.

Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, studied at Hollins in 1990 and 1991 and is now professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University at Atlanta. She received the Pulitzer for her most recent collection of poetry, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006), which blends her reflections on growing up as the daughter of a biracial couple in the Deep South with largely forgotten Southern history dating back to the Civil War…

For more information, click here.

Biracial Asian Americans and Mental Health

University of California, Davis
News and Information
2008-08-10

A new study of Chinese-Caucasian, Filipino-Caucasian, Japanese-Caucasian and Vietnamese-Caucasian individuals concludes that biracial Asian Americans are twice as likely as monoracial Asian Americans to be diagnosed with a psychological disorder.

The study by researchers at the Asian American Center on Disparities Research at the University of California, Davis, was reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston.

“Up to 2.4 percent of the U.S. population self-identifies as mixed race, and most of these individuals describe themselves as biracial,” said Nolan Zane, a professor of psychology and Asian American studies at UC Davis. “We cannot underestimate the importance of understanding the social, psychological and experiential differences that may increase the likelihood of psychological disorders among this fast-growing segment of the population.”…

Read the entire article here.

ENGL S-88 Study Abroad in Venice, Italy: Interracial Literature (32137)

Harvard Summer Program in Venice, Italy: Liberal arts studies in Italy’s city of canals
2010-06-03 through 2010-07-30
Mondays, Wednesdays, 10:00-12:30 CEST (Local Time)
(4 credits: UN, GR) Limited enrollment

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and African-American Studies
Harvard University

This course examines a wide variety of literary texts on black-white couples, interracial families, and biracial identity, from classical antiquity to the present. Works studied include romances, novellas, plays, novels, short stories, poems, and nonfiction, as well as some films and examples from the visual arts. Topics for discussion range from interracial genealogies to racial “passing,” from representations of racial difference to alternative plot resolutions, and from religious and political to legal and scientific contexts for the changing understanding of race. Focus is on the European tradition and the Harlem Renaissance.

Prerequisites: none.

For more information, click here.

The President, the Professor, and the Wide Receiver

When the biracial U.S. President Barack Obama visits South Korea tomorrow, he will be visiting a country grappling with its prejudices about race.

Foreign Policy
2009-11-17

James Card

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, is making his landmark visit to Asia, including a Wednesday stop in Seoul, where South Korea is in the midst of a racial reckoning. His visit could have positive repercussions for years to come. Race is a thorny issue in the country, and biracial persons especially so. Both North and South Koreans embrace pure bloodlines, untainted by non-Korean DNA. Biracial children are broadly considered unadoptable, and children and adults of mixed race endure ostracism and bullying. But in the past few years, a number of events and people have made South Koreans reconsider racism and persons of mixed race…

Read the entire article here.