Mixed Race Studies

Passing Me By: African American Women and ‘Passing’ As a Film Genre

PopMatters
2011-04-08

Matt Mazur, PopMatters Contributing Editor

Caught between two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in the African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, the protagonist of the passing film is confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage.

“Life is but a walking shadow,” wrote William Shakespeare in Macbeth. In film studies, we frequently consider the extreme contrast of light and dark, of noirish chiaroscuro designs that were born from the severe German expressionist lines. These are the “shadows” that highlight the pronounced differences between black and white, between coruscation and silhouette, between good and evil. The complex interplay between these two diametrically-opposing forces is one of the most essential technical elements of a film’s design, illuminating, reflecting and projecting the subconscious and highlighting implicit narrative themes in a visual language that aids the spectator’s understanding of the art as they read it. Nowhere is this essential cinematic contrast more apparent than upon the skins of characters in films about passing—a trope in which (usually female, usually biracial African American/Caucasian) pass for white, abandoning their black heritage and otherness to reap the benefits of whiteness. The light is the positive signifier, while the dark is the negative.

Until recently, this particular leitmotif was refracted bluntly in the way race dynamics were depicted in film in general. There were “black” films and “white” films, but rarely did any movie dare to highlight what life was like for any realistic scope of biracial characters who existed in true Jungian shadow-self, caught between these two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color, be marginalized and treated like dirt, or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage. This concept was, from post-Reconstruction through the ‘60s, a much-discussed, weighty social issue, evidenced in the presence of the passing narrative in black and white art of the time, and it was brought most to social awareness in cinematic depictions, many of which proved to be financial and critical successes.

While racial passing seems outdated by today’s standards, and the very thought of a black person needing to pass for white actually smacks of racism, this essay repositions the importance of passing as a genre by looking at four key Hollywood films from the early-‘30s through the late-‘50s: two versions of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl in 1934 and Douglas Sirk in 1959), Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), and Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957). We examine how race passing has become supplanted by other more socially acceptable sub-modes of the passing narrative (for example: the quintessential passing model now largely excludes race but focuses instead on gender and sexuality), but also how the distant ancestors of race passing can still somewhat insidiously found lurking unnamed in the world of contemporary film, from the extreme popularity of a biracial actress like Halle Berry (who has been nicknamed a “black Barbie” because of the way she conforms to standards of white female beauty) to the teasing, exoticized, and even sexually-festishized presence of the racially-ambiguous Mariah Carey in films such as Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001) and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)…

Read the entire article here.

INDIGO – Laura Kina & Shelly Jyoti

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
2043 North Miami Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127
2011-05-14 through 2011-06-30

Opening Reception
2011-05-14, 14:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Shelly Jyoti, Visual Artist, Fashion Designer, Poet, Researcher and Independent Curator

In the 19th century, Bengal was the world’s biggest producer of indigo but today, the deep blue color of indigo is synthetically created in a lab and is associated in the West with blue jeans more than its torrid colonial past. But indigo holds a sustained presence in the post-colonial identity of India. Employing fair trade embroidery artisans from women’s collectives in India and executing their works in indigo blue, Jyoti and Kina’s works draw upon India’s history, narratives of immigration and transnational economic interchanges. The artists decided to collaborate in 2008-2009, considering their mutual interest in textile history, pattern & decoration. They began by thinking about the intersections of their own ethnic and national positions in relation to fabrics. For this exhibition in particular, Jyoti’s Indigo Narratives utilize traditional embroidery and embellishments along with heritage symbols belonging to traveling ethnic communities who settled in coastal Gujarat while Kina’s Devon Avenue Sampler series focuses on a contemporary Desi/Jewish community in Chicago.  This exhibition includes new works in mediums such as hand-embroidery on khadi, acrylic on fabric, hand-stenciled Sanskrit calligraphy and textile embroidery on canvas.

For more information, click here.

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012: Call for Papers

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012
“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”
2012-11-01 throuth 2012-11-04
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Click here for this announcement in PDF format.

Conference Description: What is Critical Mixed Race Studies? will be hosted at DePaul University in Chicago, November 1-4, 2012. The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”

Proposals:We invite panels, roundtables, and papers that address the conference theme, although participants are also welcome to submit proposals that speak to their own specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its connection to the conference theme. Proposals might consider the ways different disciplines approach or provide methodologies for critical analyses of mixed race issues. Proposals might also consider the following areas as related to Critical Mixed Race Studies:

To submit a proposal or for more information, please visit: http://las.depaul.edu/cmrs

Deadline for all proposals: December 15th, 2011.
Selections will be finalized by March 1, 2012.

All queries should be directed to cmrs@depaul.edu.

Group provides space for ‘racial Hybrids’

The University News
A Student Voice of Saint Louis University Since 1921
2011-04-14

Sean Worley

Black Student Alliance, Filipino Student Association, Indian Student Association and the list of groups oriented around race goes on. Although these student groups have a noticeable presence on campus, for some students, they just are not enough.
 
“I constantly feel different,” freshman Rebecca Glasgow said. “I relate to things but I always feel different.”
 
Glasgow identifies as an Arab-American with her father being from the United States and her mother from Syria, she often wonders where her chartered student organization is on campus.
 
Hybrid Identities is such a student organization for students who identify with no one particular race. In other words they are mixed race, or hybrid.
 
This CSO is currently in its probationary status but is already starting to gain interest and support…

Read the entire article here.

Stories of Biracial America

The New York Times
2011-05-06

Polly Rosenwaike

Barack Obama makes two appearances in Danzy Senna’s first story collection, “You Are Free”: in a photograph on an administrator’s desk at an exclusive preschool, and on the bumper sticker of a BMW. Seeing that BMW, the narrator of the story “Replacement Theory” observes, “The election had come and gone, the blackish man was in charge, and the slogan on the bumper—Yes We Can—already had the feeling of some dusty, long-gone revolution.”

If Obama is “blackish,” Senna’s central characters are usually whitish, the genes of a light-skinned parent predominating over those of the dark-skinned one. Langston Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too” begins: “I, too, sing America. / I am the darker brother.” In Senna’s stories, as in her novels (“Caucasia” and “Symptomatic”) and her memoir (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”), she explores what it’s like to be the lighter sister…

Read the entire review here.

You Are Free: Stories

Riverhead (and Imprint of Penguin Press)
2011-05-03
240 pages
ISBN 9781594485077

Danzy Senna

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they’d applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities-and envies- the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.