Mixed Race Studies

Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial

Weekday with Steve Scher
KUOW.org 94.9 FM
Seattle News & Information
2013-04-15

Steve Scher, Host

Also this hour: Everett Herald reporter and columnist Jerry Cornfield catches us up on what’s happening this week in Olympia. Then, University of Washington Communication professor Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial.

The interview with Dr. Joseph begins at 00:13:30 and ends at 00:40:39.

When asked about what transcending blackness means, she replied, “I chose this phrase because I think it’s a really disturbing one; the notion that blackness is something that needs to be transcended, that needs to be gotten over. It is inevitably a lack, a slight, a mark as opposed to a positive, wonderful entity.”

Download/Listen to the interview here.

Miscegenation in America started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa. English, French, Dutch and American slavetraders took black concubines on the Guinea coast and mated with females on the slave ships. It should be noted that many Africans and Europeans were themselves the products of thousands of years of mixing between various African, Asian and Caucasian peoples.

Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Negro History, Part X: Miscegenation in America,” Ebony Magazine, (October 1962) 94.

Opening 4/25: “War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”

DePaul Art Museum
Chicago, Illinois
2013-04-16

CHICAGO — The DePaul Art Museum explores the construction of mixed-heritage Asian American identity in the United States with “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” which opens April 25.

“It gives visibility to the increasingly mixed generation coming of age by highlighting artworks that map personal biography and the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity against U.S. and transnational histories,” said Laura Kina, exhibit curator. Kina is a Vincent de Paul Professor and founding member of Global Asian Studies at DePaul University, where she also is an associate professor of art, media and design in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. April 25 at the museum, located at 935 W. Fullerton Ave., just east of the CTA’s Fullerton ‘L’ stop. The museum is free and open to the public every day. The exhibition runs through June 30.

“Through traditional media as well as video, installation and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including U.S. wars in Asia, multiculturalism and identity politics, racialization, gender and sexual identity, citizenship and nationality, and transracial adoption,” said Kina. She co-edited a book of the same title with Wei Ming Dariotis, an associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Mequitta Ahuja, Albert Chong, Serene Ford, Kip Fulbeck, Stuart Gaffney, Louie Gong, Jane Jin Kaisen, Lori Kay, Li-Lan, Richard Lou, Samia Mirza, Chris Naka, Laurel Nakadate, Gina Osterloh, Adrienne Pao, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jenifer Wofford and Debra Yepa-Pappan…

Read the entire press release here.

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

Random House
2012-09-18
432 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7

Tom Reiss

Here is the remarkable true story of the real Count of Monte Cristo—a stunning feat of historical sleuthing that brings to life the forgotten hero who inspired such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.

Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave—who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.

Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution, in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East—until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.

The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son. 

Table of Contents

• prologue, part 1 • February 26, 1806
• prologue, part 2 • January 25, 2007
• book one
  • chapter 1 • The Sugar Factory
  • chapter 2 • The Black Code
  • chapter 3 • Norman Conquest
  • chapter 4 • “No One Is a Slave in France”
  • chapter 5 • Americans in Paris
  • chapter 6 • Black Count in the City of Light
  • chapter 7 • A Queen’s Dragoon
• book two
  • chapter 8 • Summers of Revolution
  • chapter 9 • “Regeneration by Blood”
  • chapter 10 • “The Black Heart Also Beats for Liberty”
  • chapter 11 • “Mr. Humanity”
  • chapter 12 • The Battle for the Top of the World
  • chapter 13 • The Bottom of the Revolution
  • chapter 14 • The Siege
  • chapter 15 • The Black Devil
• book three
  • chapter 16 • Leader of the Expedition
  • chapter 17 • “The Delirium of His Republicanism”
  • chapter 18 • Dreams on Fire
  • chapter 19 • Prisoner of the Holy Faith Army
  • chapter 20 • “Citizeness Dumas… Is Worried About the Fate of Her Husband”
  • chapter 21 • The Dungeon
  • chapter 22 • Wait and Hope
• epilogue • The Forgotten Statue
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note on Names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners (Biography): “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo,” by Tom Reiss

The Pulitzer Prizes
Columbia University
New York, New York
2013-04-15

For a distinguished and appropriately documented biography or autobiography by an American author, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo,” by Tom Reiss (Crown), a compelling story of a forgotten swashbuckling hero of mixed race whose bold exploits were captured by his son, Alexander Dumas, in famous 19th century novels.

For more information, click here.