Mixed Race Studies

David Domke & Christopher Parker: Obama, the Tea Party, and Racism

Town Hall Seattle
Great Hall; enter on Eight Avenue
2012-09-24, 19:30-21:00 PDT (Local Time)

David Domke, Chair of the University of Washington Department of Communications and a winner of the school’s Distinguished Teaching Award, believes President Barack Obama has been subjected to historically unprecedented disrespect by legislators and many citizens. Is this evidence of racism toward our first African-American president? What role has the Tea Party played in this animosity? What does public-opinion data tell us; what do we learn from public rhetoric; and what does news coverage suggest? Speaking to the data, UW Professor of Social Justice and Political Science and author of the forthcoming book Change They Can’t Believe In, Christopher Parker joins Dr. Domke in a candid, evidence-based conversation around this explosive topic. Presented as part of the Town Hall Civic series, with Elliott Bay Book Company. 

For more information, click here.

The Eurasian Face

Blacksmith Books
November 2010
140 pages
70+ b/w images
Bilingual: English/Chinese
20.5 x 31 cm
Hardcover ISBN: 978-988-99799-9-7

Kirsteen Zimmern

No one represents diversity better than Eurasians—those individuals with a mix of Caucasian and Asian heritage. Once a source of shame, the Eurasian face has become the face that sells. It is the face with which everyone can identify. In an ever-shrinking world, the search is on for a one-size-fits-all global image. Eurasians have become the world’s poster boys and girls, much sought after as actors and models.

Taking advantage of increasingly tolerant times and the growing commercial and cultural exchanges between East and West, Eurasians have gained prominence as entrepreneurs, professionals and athletes. This book of interviews and black-and-white portraits reveals how seventy Eurasians of diverse backgrounds see their place in the world today.

Kirsteen Zimmern is a photographer of Chinese and Scottish ancestry. She has always been fascinated by the tell-tale signs of East and West in the faces of fellow Eurasians, and has found this fascination to be widespread: few days go by without strangers examining her appearance to discern her ethnicity. She lives in Hong Kong.

View pages 48-59 here.

The Fifth Figure

Bloodaxe Books
2006-09-28
80 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1852247320; ISBN-13: 978-1852247324

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze is a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances are so powerful she has been called a ‘one-woman festival’. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.

Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life.

The Fifth Figure is her fifth book, and sees Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture.

In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s Third World Blues: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition.

Travel Light Travel Dark

Bloodaxe Books
2013-06-30
96 pages
216 x 138 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781852249915

John Agard

John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new symphonic collection, Travel Light Travel Dark, Agard casts his unique spin on the intermingling strands of British history, and leads us into metaphysical and political waters. Cross-cultural connections are played out in a variety of voices and cadences. Prospero and Caliban have a cricket match encounter, recounted in calypso-inspired rhythms, and in the long poem, “Water Music of a Different Kind,” the incantatory orchestration of the Atlantic’s middle passage becomes a moving counterpoint to Handel’s Water Music.

Travel Light Travel Dark brings a mythic dimension to the contemporary and opens with a meditation on the enigma of colour. Water often appears as a metaphoric riff within the fabric of the collection, as sugar cane tells its own story in “Sugar Cane’s Saga” and water speaks for itself in a witty debate with wine, inspired by the satirical tradition of the goliards, wandering clerics of the Middle Ages.

Poetry: Three Treasures by Hannah Lowe

Freeword: a global meeting place for literature, argument and free thinking
2012-06-12

Hannah Lowe

A panelist at ‘2 Nations’, our recent event exploring national identity, Hannah Lowe is a poet of Chinese, Jamaican and English heritage. In this poem she performed for the audience that night, she explores how her background has influenced her sense of her own identity.

Three Treasures

Jamaica in the attic in a dark blue trunk,
sea-salt in the hinges. What must it look like
all that wide blue sea?

England downstairs in a rocking chair.
Nanna rocking with her playing cards,
cigs and toffee, tepid tea.

Jamaica frying chicken in the kitchen,
pig-snout in the stew-pot,
breakfast pan of saltfish, akee

China in the won-ton skin,
gold songbird on the brittle porcelain,
pink pagoda silk settee…

Read the entire poem here.

The writer of “Miscegenation” considers it a most providential event, and as one significant of the type-man or miscegens of the future, that the statue on the dome of the Capitol at Washington is of a “bronze tint.” But it is possible that he mistakes its significance. As has been shown in these pages, the mixed or mongrel people perish, and are blotted from the face of the earth. The Egyptians, the Carthagenians, and now the Mexicans, are historical examples of God’s punishment upon those who dare to mar the works of His creation. The dome of the Capitol, therefore, with its mulatto statue, has the symbol of decay upon it, and it would seem to constantly point to the triumph of the Confederate or White Constitution in the place of the mongrelized one which the folly of the hour has deified.

John H. Van Evrie, Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation,” (New York: John Bradburn Publishing, 1864): 67.

Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation”

John Bradburn Publishing
1864
72 pages
Classification Number: CAGE E185.62.V24 1864

John H. Van Evrie (1814-1896)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I.—The Diversity of the Races.
• II.—Miscegenation; or, the Mixture of the Races.
• III.—The Future of the Races.
• IV.—The Effect of Subgenation Upon the White Race.
• V.—Subgenation, the Basis of Democracy.
• VI.—Women and Subgenation.
• VII.—Subgenation and the Presidential Election.
• VIII.— The Recognition of the Confederate States.
• IX.—The Millennium Solved.
• X.—An Omen.

Introduction

Scaliger quaintly observes “that nothing will sell better than a scurrile pamphlet,” and the extensive sale of a recent brochure, entitled “Miscegenation,” in which the most indecent doctrines are seductively inculcated under the garb of philosophy, seems to prove the assertion. While there is no excuse for the gross violation of natural instincts which that author recommends, yet there is probably some good reason why there is a want of a popular knowledge as to the true relation of the races. The juxtaposition of the Caucasian, Indian, and Negro races on this continent, in considerable numbers, has no parallel in history. If we except the Egyptians and the Carthagenians, there were no ancient nations which had other than a homogeneous population. A negro was a curiosity in Greece and Rome.   All modern Europe, from which we derive our language, is composed of one race or the varieties of it. The question, as to the proper relation of distinct races, is, therefore, a new one, and has been committed to this country for solution.

The writer to whom allusion has been made offers a solution, and it is no less a proposition than the annihilation of all the existing races and the formation of a new one! He proposes to bring this about by mingling the races, and has invented the word Miscegenation to express his idea (miscere, to mix; genus, a race). The suggestion of the word is a good one. The necessity of new terms to express the proper, as well as the improper, relation of the races on this continent has long been felt by thoughtful minds. The words slavery and slave are derived from Sclavi—Sclavonians, who were conquered by the Germans and reduced to abject bondage. The word, therefore, expresses a relation existing between persons of the same race, and not between those of different races. Hence it is a misnomer as applied to the American form of society. The present writer proposes to profit by the suggestion of the author of of “Miscegenation” and coin another word, long needed.  It is subgenation, from sub, lower, and generatus and genus, a race born or created lower than another; i.e., the natural or normal relation of an inferior to a superior race. The invention of new words has the high authority of Horace:

“Si forte necesse est
Indiciis monstrare recentribus abdita rerum.”

They were never so much needed as now. The simple truths—There is no slavery in this country; there are no slaves in the Southern States. We are fighting about a myth. For three centuries the Christian world was deluged in blood upon the assumption that there was a Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There was no Holy Sepulchre there. The world was fighting on a false premise. This country is now repeating the same insensate folly.  In the following pages the writer proposes to show how and why this is so, to expose the errors and absurdities of the author of “Miscegenation,” and to give such a solution to the question of the proper relation of the races as shall commend itself to the conscience 0f every intelligent friend of Humanity…

Read the entire book here.

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers

Routledge
2012-07-11
234 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-65367-1
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-80189-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-85989-6

Lauren Onkey, Vice President of Education and Public Programs
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
Cleveland, Ohio

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans since the mid-nineteenth century in popular culture and literature. Irish writers and political activists have often claimed—and thereby created—a “black” identity to explain their experience with colonialism in Ireland and revere African-Americans as a source of spiritual and sexual vitality. Irish-Americans often resisted this identification so as to make a place for themselves in the U.S. However, their representation of an Irish-American identity pivots on a distinction between Irish-Americans and African-Americans. Lauren Onkey argues that one of the most consistent tropes in the assertion of Irish and Irish-American identity is constructed through or against African-Americans, and she maps that trope in the work of writers Roddy Doyle, James Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, John Boyle O’Reilly, and Jimmy Breslin; playwright Ned Harrigan; political activists Bernadette Devlin and Tom Hayden; and musicians Van Morrison, U2, and Black 47.

Contents

• 1. Introduction: “Aren’t We a Little White for That Kind of Thing?”
• 2. “A Representative Americanized Irishman”: John Boyle O’Reilly
• 3. Melees
• 4. Bernadette’s Legacy
• 5. Ray Charles on Hyndford Street: Van Morrison’s Caledonian Soul
• 6. Born Under a Bad Sign
• Conclusion: Micks for O’Bamagh