Mixed Race Studies

Liminal blankness: Mixing Race and Space in Monochrome’s Psychic Surface

University of Plymouth, Devon, England
2002
320 pages

Angeline Dawn Morrison

A thesis submitted to the University of Plymouth In partial fulfilment for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Research Department Falmouth College of Arts

Blank space in western Art History and visual culture is something that has tended to be either explained away, or ignored. Pictures that do not depict challenge the visual basis of the ego and its others, confronting what I call the ‘Phallic reader’ (who sees according to the logic and rules of the Phallogocentric system he inhabits) and potentially disturbing his sense of the visible. The Phallic reader, the visible and the seeing ego’s sense of how to see, meet in what I call the ‘psychic surface’. Deploying this notion of a ‘psychic surface’ allows for readings which move on from the potentially confining logic of the Phallus. Paradoxically, the psychic structure of monochrome’s liminal blankness is homologous to the indeterminate Mixed Race subject, whose body transgresses not only the foundational historical binarism of `Black/White’, but also Lacanian psychoanalysis. This thesis aims to concentrate on exploring blank spaces, with particular reference to the monochrome within western Art History. Building on the considerable work since at least the 1960s that critiques the binary logocentrism of Eurocentric, Hegelian-originated Art History, this thesis aims to explore the specific ways monochrome evades, undermines and tricks commonly accepted ‘groundrules’ of Art History. The Phallic reader is severely restricted in understanding that which falls outside of the signifying logic of a particular system of Art History that follows a binary, teleological and Phallogocentric course. Both monochrome and the Mixed Race subject fall outside of this logic, as both contain the structure of the trick. In each case, the trick is activated in the tension between the psychic and the opticalsurfaces. I suggest that monochrome’s psychic space is pre-Phallic, a space of eternal deferral of meaning, a space that playfully makes a nonsense of binary structures. Psychoanalysis is largely used here as an analytic tool, but also appears as an object of critique. Art History provides an anchor for the optical surfaces under discussion. Theories of `radical superficiality’ both contradict and complement these ways of theorising the psychic surface. The trick/ster is a significant/signifiant means of deploying interdisciplinary methodologies to negotiate this difficult terrain between Black, White and monochrome. An interdisciplinary approach also enacts the psychic structure of indeterminacy of my objects of study. I hope that by proposing a potential transgressive power for those indeterminate things that continue to confound the binary systems that aim to contextualise and confine them, I will contribute to the areas of Visual Culture and ‘Race’ Theory.

LIST OF CONTENTS:

• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter One: NEITHER GENRE NOR COUNTER-GENRE: MONOCHROME & THE WILD CARD’S ETERNAL RETURNS
  • 1:0 Introduction
  • 1:1 The Square, The Rectangle and the Nemesis of Mimesis
  • 1:2 French Connections: Blank Satire vs. Blank Virtuosity
  • 1:3 Monochrome: Art or Object?
  • 1:4 The Monochrome World of Yves Klein
  • 1:5 The Monochrome Sublime: Barnett Newman
  • 1:6 Conclusion
• Chapter Two: STAGED AND MEDIATED MONOCHROMES: A NEW PROBLEMATIC OF THE PSYCHIC SURFACE
  • 2:0 Introduction: The White Eye of Photography
  • 2:1 The Deathlike in Photography
  • 2:2 Hiroshi Sugimoto & the Returns of Blankness
  • 2:3 John Hilliard & the Specular Monochrome
  • 2:4 The Interstitial Auditory
  • 2:5 Derek Jarman’s Blue: Fantasy of the Maternal Voice?
  • 2:6 Conclusion: Mixed Mediation
• Chapter Three: (IN)VISIBLE WHITENESSES: THE PSYCHIC SPACE OF THE MIXED RACE SUBJECT
  • 3:0 Introduction
  • 3:1 One: Two: Many
  • 3:2 When is a Signifier Not a Signifier? (When It’s a Monkey)
  • 3:3 Diluted Nigger or Dirty Nigger? The ‘Choice’ is Never Yours
  • 3:4 Neither Fish Not Fowl: Indeterminacy & (Ill)legibility
  • 3:5 ‘The New Colored People’
  • 3:6 Conclusion
• Chapter Four: ART & ABJECTHOOD: THE PSYCHIC SPACE OF MONOCHROME
  • 4:0 Introduction
  • 4:1 Silence, Castrated & Castrating
  • 4:2 Other Kinds of Silence
  • 4:3 Generative Blankness & Deathly Silence
  • 4:4 Kristeva’s Black Sun: Monochrome as Narcissistic Mirror
  • 4:5 Returns of the Repressed
  • 4:6 Conclusion: Mourning the Lost Object of An History?
• Chapter Five: CONCLUSION?
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• PICTURES FROM ‘CARLTON JOHNSON: MY “LIFE”‘

Read the entire dissertation here.

History and the (Un)making of Identifications in Literary Representations of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics

University of British Columbia
September 2000
465 pages

Marian Josephine Gracias

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English)

This dissertation examines selected literature by and about Anglo-Indians (Eurasians) and Goan Catholics from India and the Indian diaspora, focusing on its preoccupation with the history of these communities as a site of contested identifications. Especially polemical are perceptions (due to communalist stereotypes or internalisation) of Anglo Indians and Goan Catholics as mimic or intermediary communities who ended up capitulating to British and/or Portuguese colonialist structures respectively. Larger issues for both communities in India and in the diaspora also involve questions of racial or cultural hybridity, and the slippage between religion and culture, particularly the linking of conversion to Christianity with colonisation, Westernisation, denationalisation, and non-Indianness.

I argue for a more layered understanding of the concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and resistance in relation to identifications from these communities. By choosing literature set in times of national crisis and historical change (in India, and in East Africa for the Goan diaspora), I have been attentive to the varying ways in which literary characters and narrators confront, project, or elide contradictions of proximity and difference in the production of racial, cultural, and national identity. The main literary texts in the discussion of Anglo- Indian identifications include John Masters’ “Bhowani Junction”, Manorama Mathai’s “Mulligatawny Soup”, Stephen Alter’s “Neglected Lives” and Allan Sealy’s “The Trotter-Nama”. In these texts, I have examined how the narrative opens up or circumscribes the agency and racial identifications of Anglo-Indian characters. As well, I make some references to Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” and selected work by Ruskin Bond. The central literary texts in the discussion of Goan Catholic and diasporic identifications include Lambert Mascarenhas’ “Sorrowing Lies My Land”, Kiran Nagarkar’s “Ravan and Eddie”, João da Veiga Coutinho’s “A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History”, selected writing by damian lopes, and Peter Nazareth’s “In a Brown Mantle” and “The General is Up”. I also dwell in some detail on selected short stories by Lino Leitão, and Violet Dias Lannoy’s “Pears from the Willow Tree”. I examine the role of Anglo-Indian and Goan Catholic women literary characters, making the case that, for the most part, it is male characters who are given political and narrative complexity in terms of negotiating colonialism and nationalism, and that women characters, when central, are imaged as mediating grounds to advance or block access to male characters who are competing over nationalist and colonialist discourses about race and sexuality. An exception is the poetry of Eunice de Souza where there is critical reflection on the position of Goan Catholic women.

Where relevant, I draw from particular areas of cultural studies, postcolonial and feminist theories (including those dealing with psychoanalysis), and writings about Indian history and nationalism. Writings from these areas offer pertinent insights on ambivalence in the production of subjectivity, and on the construction of Indianness in relation to arguments on colonialism, gender, caste, class, secularism, and the religious right (especially the discourses of Hindutva). While the identifications and identity of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics appear in the genre of history, these communities are largely absent or peripheral in the area of literary analysis, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory pertaining to India. Therefore, I hope that a study of these communities will contribute to the discussion of religious and multiracial identifications that is increasingly relevant to the field of postcolonial and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Copy Cat Copy Cat?
• Chapter 1: “A Certain Way of Being There”
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 Proximity and Distance: Colonialism and the Construction of Mimic Subjectivity
  • 1.3 Forms of Mimic Subjectivity and the Question of Subversion
  • 1.4 Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Construction of Indianness
• Chapter 2: Negotiating Classifications: Writing an Anglo-Indian History
  • 2.1 Introducing Mixed Race Classifications
  • 2.2 Anglo-Indians and the Discourse of Mixed Races under British Colonialism
  • 2.3 Scientific Racialism and Other Discourses of Mixed Races
  • 2.4 Conclusion: (Dis)placing Anglo-Indian Classifications and Affiliation
• Chapter 3: (By) Passing Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications in Literature
  • 3.1 Literary Antecedents: Representations of Mixed Race People
  • 3.2 “Species Loyally”: Anglo-Indian Identifications in John Masters’ Bhowani Junction
  • 3.3 Between Homes: Manorama Mathai’s Mulligatawny Soup
  • 3.4 Escaping from History: Stephen Alter’s Neglected Lives
  • 3.5 Interracial Relationships in Bhowani Junction, Mulligatawny Soup and Neglected Lives: Possibilities and Closures
• Chapter 4: Beyond Doom and Gloom: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
  • 4.1 Introduction: Alternatives to Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications
  • 4.2 Contending with “The Grey Man’s Burden”: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
• Chapter 5: Writing Identity in Goan History
  • 5.1 Claims in the Writing of Goan History.
  • 5.2 Early History of the Portuguese in India and Goa
  • 5.3 Mixing Trade, Religion, and Race
  • 5.4 Conversion to Christianity and the Practice of Religion Under British and Portuguese Colonialism
  • 5.5 Caste, Conversion, and National Identity in Portuguese Goa and British India
  • 5.6 Placing the Politics of Resistance to Portuguese Rule
  • 5.7 Claiming Goa: Liberation or Invasion?.
  • 5.8 The Impact of Language and Migration in the Construction of Goan Identity Today
  • 5.9 Colonial and Caste Effects in Locating Conversion to Christianity Within Communal and Secular Debates in Contemporary India
• Chapter 6: Identifications in Crisis: Goan Catholics in Literature
  • 6.1 The Question of Goan Identity
  • 6.2 Writing Against Colonialism: Lambert Mascarenhas’ Sorrowing Lies My Land, Lino Leitão’s “The Miracle” and “Armando Rodrigues”
  • 6.3 The Crisis of Leadership: Violet Dias Lannoy’s Pears from the Willow Tree and Lambert Mascarenhas’ A Greater Tragedy
  • 6.4 Interrogating Gender: The Poetry of Eunice de Souza
  • 6.5 Hindus and Catholics: Where Parallel Worlds of Difference Meet in the Horizon of Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie
• Chapter 7: “The Intimate Outsider”: History and Location in Literature from the Goan Catholic Diaspora
  • 7.1 Introductory Issues in Writing Diaspora
  • 7.2 The Search for a Theory of Goan History: João da Veiga Coutinho’s A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History.
  • 7.3 East African Goan Catholics: Narrating the Third That Walks Between Black and White in Peter Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle and The General Is Up
  • 7.4 Intermediary Positions and Peter Nazareth’s Narrators
  • 7.5 Navigating Historical Legacies in damian lopes’ Writing
• Chapter 8: Epilogue: The Politics of Engagement
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

Passed Over: The Tragic Mulatta and (Dis)Integration of Identity in Adrienne Kennedy’s Plays

African American Review
Volume 35, Number 2 (Summer, 2001)
pages 281-295
DOI: 10.2307/2903258

E. Barnsley Brown

Much recent interest in the drama of Adrienne Kennedy has been spawned by the publication of her innovative autobiography People Who Led to My Plays (1987), the 1992 Great Lakes festival devoted to her work, and the recent productions of her plays by the Signature Theatre Company, which devoted an entire season to her work. Yet Kennedy has yet to receive the widespread critical attention she deserves as one of the most unique and innovative twentieth-century American playwrights. [1] Compared to August Wilson, who has garnered many accolades and is fast replacing Lorraine Hansberry as the African American playwright whose work is anthologized, taught, and critiqued, Kennedy’s work is still relatively unknown by the average theatergoer, and even by some academics. And while critics praise August Wilson’s use of African beliefs in the supernatural and the presence of the ancestors, these very elements are present in Kennedy’s earliest plays from the 1960s. Wilson’s characteristic themes—the inexorable legacy of history, the tenuous line between dream and reality, memory as a (re)constructive process, and the conflicting forces in identity formation—were addressed by Kennedy over a decade earlier. It bears asking, then, why Kennedy’s work has been largely ignored until recently, and her message, a message grounded in the politics of oppression, often overlooked.

Kennedy ascribes her limited critical success to the fact that her plays are “abstract poems” (Diamond, “Interview” 157) and thus do not easily fit into an American theatrical tradition dominated by realistic plays such as those of Alice Childress and Hansberry. I contend, however, that Kennedy’s lack of widespread popularity can be more accurately attributed to her uncanny ability to make audiences feel ill at ease through her dramatization of the politics of identity and, in particular, of miscegenation. As she admits at the end of her interview with Elin Diamond, “My plays make people uncomfortable so I’ve never had a play done in Cleveland [her hometown], never” (157). The volatile content of Kennedy’s plays-her (not so) standard theme of a history of racial and sexual abuse leading to fragmentation and even death-does not make her plays either light viewing or reading. In effect, Kennedy’s painful exploration of miscegenation through a fragmented, postmodern form challenges and even assaults her audienc e, revealing both her riveting power as a writer as well as the grounds upon which her work has been passed over by her contemporaries, critics, and scholars alike.

By tackling the taboo topic of miscegenation and representing it in both the form and content of her plays, Kennedy represents the African American struggle against both external and internal oppression. In her plays, which she has described as “states of mind” (qtd. in Cohn 108), Kennedy shows the self in dialogue not only with society but also with the fragmentary vestiges of otherness within the self, those internalized markers of oppression. Kennedy thus creates psychic landscapes in which the ongoing battle between conflicting discourses and mythologies is made manifest through symbols, composite characters, and a plurality of voices, all of which reveal the violent struggle between whiteness and blackness within as well as outside the self…

…If the reading or viewing audience cannot locate Sarah, then who can? Kennedy brings home the impossibility of fixing Sarah’s identity and forces the viewer to confront his or her own displacement within the phantasmagoric world of the play.

As the tragic mulatta, caught between races, caught between “room” that do not offer a home or a place to belong, Sarah represents (t)races of an unattainable, stable, and unified subjectivity and identity. In actuality, Sarah and herselves are at once black and white, male and female, English and African (American), contemporary and historical. These traces of identity pass by the spectator in ephemeral moments, reflected, refracted, and distorted, as in a funnyhouse mirror. Kennedy seems to be suggesting that not only is the lack of a unified self a human condition, but it is also a subaltern condition, aggravated by racial animosity. By conveying Sarah’s internal struggle through traces of multiple selves, Kennedy thus underscores the racial hatred that has long characterized American society and effectively revises the family drama to reveal the tragic effects of racial hatred on an individual as well as collective level.

Kennedy embodies the racial polarization that has long characterized American society in Sarah’s fragmented consciousness by emphasizing colors–white, black, and yellow, the “color” of the mulatto. The colors themselves take on a life of their own as Sarah talks about how her statue of Queen Victoria is “a thing of astonishing whiteness” and “black is evil and has been from the beginning” (5). Sarah’s struggle to integrate her warring heritages is embodied throughout by a relentless repetition of “white” and “black” on every page of the play’s dialogue. Even the stage directions emphasize the colors of costumes, lights, and props—for example, “a white nightgown” (2,4), “white light” (2), “an ebony mask” (7), “a black shirt and black trousers” (9). “a black and white marble floor” (16), “a dark brightness” (20)—all of which point to Sarah’s internal struggle. Yet the images of whiteness in the stage directions far outnumber those of blackness, demonstrating Sarah’s obsession with white culture and her desire to pass for white.

In actuality, Sarah desires to repudiate her black heritage, symbolized by her black father, whose persistent knocking is heard throughout the play, thus suggesting that Sarah’s black heritage cannot be ignored. Kennedy makes Sarah’s desire to pass most evident in the following monologue, in which Sarah speaks of her desire for much more than integration into white society:

As for myself I long to become even a more pallid Negro than I am now; pallid like Negroes on the covers of American Negro magazines; soulless, educated and irreligious. I want to possess no moral value, particularly value as to my being. I want not to be. I ask nothing except anonymity…. It is my dream to live in rooms with European antiques and my Queen Victoria, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books, a piano, oriental carpets and to eat my meals on a white glass table. I will visit my friends’ apartments which will contain books, photographs of Roman ruins, pianos and oriental carpets. My friends will be white.

I need them as an embankment to keep me from reflecting too much upon the fact that I am a Negro. For like all educated Negroes… I find it necessary to maintain a stark fortress against recognition of myself. (6)

Educated in a Eurocentric tradition and “soulless,” stripped of pride in her blackness or “soul,” Sarah desires complete assimilation, as shown in her reverence for the symbols and trappings of Eurocentric civilization–European antiques, books, oriental carpets, photographs of Roman ruins, and so forth.

Kennedy shows that Sarah has absorbed white racist ideology so fully that she and herselves repeatedly refer to her father as “a wild black beast” (5). Sarah also believes he raped her mother, thus adhering to the mythical idea of the black rapist. [5] As Rosemary Curb argues, “Sarah experiences the racial warfare within herself by consciously identifying with the White oppressor self against the Black oppressed sell” (“Fragmented” 181). In fact, Sarah and herselves identify so completely with the white oppressor that her final disintegration of selfhood, her tragic hanging at the end of the play by either murder or suicide, is best read as the death of her Negro self (yes)….

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Britannia: Part 3 of 3 (1965-2011)

BBC Two
2011-10-20

George Alagiah, Host

Below is the last episode as four 15-minute videos.

Obama’s Racial Identity Is His Call

Poynter.
2008-12-16

Tom Huang, Sunday & Enterprise Editor
The Dallas Morning News
Also Ethics and Diversity Fellow at The Poynter Institute

Not long ago, I sat on a journalism panel in which the question of “What are you?” came up…

…I thought about the “What are you?” question when I read Jesse Washington’s recent Associated Press story about the hubbub surrounding Barack Obama’s racial identity.

Obama self-identifies as African American, because, as he’s explained in the past, “that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”

 It turns out that some people are less than comfortable with that. Some argue that it’s too simplistic to call him “black.” After all, he was raised by his white mother and white grandparents. Others argue that it’s more accurate to identify Obama as “biracial” or “multiracial.”…

…Well, let’s give the individual the power of self-identification. If Obama wants to be identified as “black,” let’s give him that choice. If Tiger Woods wants to be identified as “multiracial” (or “Cablinasian,” for that matter), more power to him.

The reality is we still live in a society in which racial constructs, however antiquated they might be, still matter. They help us be mindful about how our cultural traditions have shaped our identities. They help us remember how centuries of oppression and discrimination shaped our politics, economic divide and social strata…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President

ABC-CLIO Praeger
September 2011
276 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38533-9
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-313-38534-6

Dinesh Sharma, Senior Fellow
Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research
St. Francis College, New York

Distinguishing itself from the mass of political biographies of Barack Obama, this first interdisciplinary study of Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years examines their effect on his adult character, political identity, and global world-view.

Barack Obama is the first American president born and raised in Hawai’i, the most diverse state in the Union, and the first American president to have spent a significant part of his childhood in a Muslim-majority nation, namely, Indonesia. What effect did these—and other early experiences—have on the man who is now, arguably, the world’s most popular political leader?

The first 18 years of President Obama’s life, from his birth in 1961 to his departure for college in 1979, were spent in Hawai’i and Indonesia. These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is noted—his protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted “outpost” patriotism. Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President is the first study to examine, in fascinating detail, how his early years impacted this unique leader.

Existing biographies of President Obama are primarily political treatments. Here, cross-cultural psychologist and marketing consultant Dinesh Sharma explores the connections between Obama’s early upbringing and his adult views of civil society, secular Islam, and globalization. The book draws on the author’s on-the-ground research and extensive first-hand interviews in Jakarta; Honolulu; New York; Washington, DC; and Chicago to evaluate the multicultural inputs to Obama’s character and the ways in which they prepared him to meet the challenges of world leadership in the 21st century.

Features

• Foreword
• Photographs
• Timelines
• Figures
• Appendices

Highlights

• Offers the first systematic study of Barack Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years and their effect on his adult character and political identity
• Shows how Obama’s early experiences fostered a repertoire of social and psychological skills ideally suited to dealing with the complex cultural and geopolitical issues that confront 21st-century America
• Provides new keys to understanding Obama by looking at the varied cultural and religious influences that shaped his attitudes, beliefs, and hybrid cultural identity
• Examines Ann Dunham’s doctoral dissertation, based on her social anthropological fieldwork in Indonesia, for clues to the perceptual prisms she inculcated in her son, Barack Obama

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance

University Press of Mississippi
1999
202 pages
Cloth: 157806130X (9781578061303)
Paper: 1578061318 (9781578061310)

Jon Woodson, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Jean Toomer’s adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie—Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman—and, through them, the mystic’s influence on many of the notables in African American literature.

Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel Cane became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff’s philosophy in the United States.

Woodson’s is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of “objective literature.” He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff’s philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Jean Toomer: Beside You Will Stand a Strange Man
• 2 Wallace Thurman: Beyond Race and Color
• 3 Rudolph Fisher: Minds of Another Order
• 4 Nella Larsen: The Anatomy of “Sleep”
• 5 George Schuyler: New Races and New Worlds
• 6 Zora Neale Hurston: The Self and the Nation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Desdemona’s Fire – Review

African American Review
Volume 35, Number 2 (Summer 2001)
pages 342-343

Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

Ruth Ellen Kocher. Desdemona’s Fire. Detroit: Lotus P, 1999. 62 pp.

This shapely first collection, 1999 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, rises with independent grace from its framework of myth and allusion. The title, Desdemona Fire, certainly signals the book’s chief subject. Desdemona, here a “poor white girl from the edge of town,” bears a child by a traveling African American jazz pianist. The “fire” designates both the mother’s passion and its product, a restless girl who prowls the volume in a red nightgown. In the title poem, the speaker addresses her father, cast as Othello: “I am writing myself into your story/because you murder again/not knowing my birth.” Kocher’s references, in fact, range from Louise Gluck and Wallace Stevens to Greek myth and Buddhism. However, this volume finds a deeper coherence in its autobiographical voice, which appealingly balances vivid poetry with spare forthrightness. While these poems sometimes treat stock situatiions–sessions of braiding and straightening hair, the sounds of violence in the projects—Kocher often u ses allusion to defamiliarize these scenes, and the restraint of her style highlights her scrupulous fairness in writing a complex world. As she remarks in “Odyssea Home,” “Sometimes, words are simply/too accurate for anger and lust.”

The structure of Desdemona’s Fire dramatizes Kocher’s attractive unpredictability. It divides roughiy in half, a binary which suggests the obvious racial and cultural split within the speaker. Part I circles obsessively around the absent black father, but while Part II offers many complementary versions of the speaker’s white mother, the volume doesn’t really work so neatly. Instead, from one half to another this collection changes spirit. While abandonment and murder darken the first half of the book, the second half seeks and finds moments of reconciliation.

Kocher’s best poems explore how agonizing differences and tentative connections can coexist among people, accessibly sketching how race, especially, complicates human feelings. “The Migrant,” a powerful poem several pages in length, provides a memorable example of these concerns. Kocher recounts the “First time I saw another/brown face”: While staying at a farm rented by her white mother’s relatives, she watches black migrant workers pick tomatoes. The little girl strongly feels the paradox of her situation and hides from both groups, the migrants whom she physically resembles and the gathered family to whom she also belongs. While she imagines the workers’ angry children rushing the porch to smash the heaped tomatoes, she also projects forward to real violence, an attack by her white cousin she will experience years in the future. As in the rest of the volume, Kocher expresses estrangement from her white kin in sorrowful or bitter tones; after all, they ought to claim her, while the darker women eyeing her curiously from the fields owe her no such debt, or at least a far frailer one. Elsewhere, Kocher finds generous community with the neighborhood women of color who braid her hair (“Braiding”), in sharp contrast to the alienation she feels from mother and scowling grandmother in “Liturgy of the Light-Skinned.”…

Read the entire review here.

Sun uses it’s Arsenal to divide us

Lester Holloway
2011-08-17

Lester Holloway, Liberal Democrat Councillor, Journalist & Equality Campaigner
London Borough of Sutton

Top footballers are good at what they do but the Government does not turn to Ashley Cole or John Terry for economic advice. By the same token, their views on race shouldn’t set the agenda. That was my first reaction to the full page devoted to Theo Walcott’s experiences in today’s Sun.
 
I have no issue with the Arsenal and sometime England winger–his history and childhood memories are his own–but when a few paragraphs in his new autobiography are plucked out and spun into a full page in Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper you have to ask: ‘what it going on?’…

…Let’s start with the headline:”People call me black but I’m mixed race.” Again, he’s perfectly entitled to that view, but it’s not one shared by all who recognise that being “mixed race” means you are seen as a person of colour just as those who have two black parents. The political term ‘black’ has never excluded the ‘white side’ of the family, but is in part a uniting umbrella term recognising shared African ancestry. That makes it a term of power–power in numbers and from the spiritual and cultural legacy of the continent.
 
Fracturing a united black community by prizing away “mixed race” people is really about breaking up that power, dividing and ruling. Some of the worst apartheid and colonial regimes have been built upon a colour and shading heirachy, while shadism and the caste system still blights the world today. Clearly Walcott wasn’t trying do advance any of these notions! But I strongly suspect The Sun’s aim was to reduce the size, and therefore the influence, of the black community by emphasising “mixed race” as being seperate from black.
 
I’m not entirely clear what “mixed race” is anyway. I am of mixed parentage, and therefore dual heritage, but I am not a member of any distinct “mixed race”; indeed there is no such thing. Pick two mixed people at random, and I will put money on them having less ancestry in common than if you compared them to any randomly picked person with two black parents. If “mixed race” people are grouped together exclusively on grounds of skin shade, that is quite insulting and not a little “racist!”…

…Walcott is not an activist; I have no expectations of him apart from delivering pinpoint crosses from the touchline (and Lord knows, Arsenal will need plenty of them this season!) It matters not that he grew up in a small Berkshire town and is dating a white young woman. What matters is that we have an holistic debate, and that if papers such as The Sun are going to get excited about a footballer declaring himself mixed race as opposed to black, they should give other perspectives an airing too.
 
Failure to do so can only reinforce suspicions that they–or certainly the rich and powerful in Britain–wish to ensure that the rapidly growing numbers of people of mixed parentage do not identify black. After all, creating difference, tension and envy between black people on the basis of skin colour is a tactic that has been tried and tested for many generations…

Read the entire essay here.

Bynum: The Long Shadow of the Civil War (2010)

The Civil War Monitor: A New Look at America’s Greatest Conflict
2011-10-19

Laura Hepp Bradshaw
Carnegie Mellon University

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies by Victoria E. Bynum. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Cloth, ISBN: 0807833819.

“Few histories,” Victoria Bynum laments, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political or social dissenters” (148). By resurrecting the histories of three anti-secessionist communities in the South, Bynum’s latest book about the Civil War home front and post-war aftermath brings previously ignored strains of political and social dissent back to life through an intricate examination of the period rooted in race, gender, and class politics. Ultimately guided by three central questions designed to probe the prevalence of Unionism among southerners during the war, the effects of Union victory on freedpeople and southern Unionists, and the Civil War’s broader legacies, Bynum finds answers in the Piedmont of North Carolina, the Piney Woods of Mississippi, and the Big Thicket of Hardin County, Texas. These regions, though miles apart, are united in Bynum’s analysis by kinship and the political alliances of non-slaveholding, yeoman farming families…

…These home front battles, Bynum tells us, had a lasting effect on the political and social clime of the Reconstruction era, and beyond.  When Republican Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow Reconstruction segregated the South, former southern Unionists like Jasper and Warren Collins of the Big Thicket region rejected the two-party political system in favor of alternative platforms such the Populists or Socialists, in addition to the predominant southern religions.  Newt Knight and his descendants struggled against the rising tide of white supremacy that sought to divide white, black, and Native American demographics by living openly as a multi-racial community.  Furthermore, Bynum highlights the challenges faced by women in the Reconstruction period, as Jim Crow also regulated sexual mores and relations between both the sexes and races.

Thematically, the book harnesses examples of gender, class, and race on the wartime home front and in the post-war period. Yet, even though a vast portion of the book is devoted to discussing the anti-secessionist personalities of Newt Knight, Jasper and Warren Collins, and to a lesser extent, Bill Owens, an explicit examination their gender is curiously overlooked. Bynum mentions that “southern Unionists, Populists, and Socialists” were portrayed as “cowards and traitors,” but she fails to examine the implications of those labels within the broader context of southern masculinity (114). That said, Bynum’s sophisticated, multi-layered analysis of class relations, especially during the Civil War, more than make up for this shortcoming. She thoroughly illustrates a web of complex, inter-community class tensions that linked the conscripted poor, men fortunate to wave Confederate service, and the home guard. Bynum successfully explicates the repercussions of a segregated South on people of mixed race descent who were forced to either claim their black identity, like Anna Knight, a descendant of Newt Knight, or to “pass” as white by relocating away from the communities of their birth and obscuring their ancestry, as many other Knight Company descendants were forced to do…

Read the entire review here.