Mixed Race Studies

Stranger In The Village – A Visual Essay

Phoebe Boswell, Visual Artist
2015-12-15

Artist’s Talk at Bla Stallet Konsthallen,
Angered, Gothenburg, Sweden
September 2015

The term ‘residency’ is an interesting one to me – it offers a sense of belonging, of being present, resident, which is artificial of course since you are more often than not placed somewhere you have no connection with, no ties to, no friends in, and no reason for being there, except of course to make work. Belonging is something I think a lot about in my work. A tutor at the Slade once said to me that you make work to ‘fill a hole’, and the difficulty lies in determining within us what that hole is. Mine, I realise, is ‘home’, or a lack of it, and I’m fascinated by how, as human beings, we each individually negotiate our personal sense of belonging.

To give a little history, I’m from Kenya. My father’s family settled there from Britain three generations before him, bought land and farmed it, and he grew up bearing the guilt of a colonial system within his home, much to his dismay.

My mother’s family are Kikuyu, and of course it was the Kikuyu who set up the Mau Mau who fought for Kenya’s independence from the British, and won it in 1963…

Read the entire article here.

Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

Broadview Press
2016-05-04 (Originally Published in 1894)
304 pages
5½” x 8½”
Paperback ISBN: 9781554812660

Mark Twain

Edited by:

Hsuan L. Hsu, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Davis

The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us conjoined twins, babies exchanged in the cradle, acts of cross-dressing and racial masquerade, duels, a lynching, and a murder mystery. Pudd’head Wilson tells the story of babies, one of mixed race and the other white, exchanged in their cradles, while Those Extraordinary Twins is a farcical tale of conjoined twins. Although the stories were long viewed as flawed narratives, their very incongruities offer a fascinating portrait of key issues—race, disability, and immigration—facing the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Hsuan Hsu’s introduction traces the history of literary critics’ response to these works, from the confusion of Twain’s contemporaries to the keen interest of current scholars. Extensive historical appendices provide contemporary materials on race discourse, legal contexts, and the composition and initial reception of the texts.

How psychologists used these doctored Obama photos to get white people to support conservative politics

The Washington Post
2016-05-13

Max Ehrenfreund

American politics always has surprises, but things have been especially unpredictable since President Obama took office. First, few observers were prepared for the tea party movement, which ousted several veteran GOP lawmakers, replaced them with more radically conservative newcomers, and helped the Republican Party win control of the House of Representatives in 2010.

“That left a lot of analysts slack-jawed, wondering: What was this latent force that drove the emergence of this movement?” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University.

Then, of course, there was Donald Trump.

Willer speculates that one thing connecting these two political earthquakes might be white voters’ unconscious racial biases. In a series of psychological experiments between 2011 and 2015, he showed how hostility toward people with darker skin and perceived racial threats can influence white support for the tea party. He and his colleagues published a draft of a paper on their findings online last week — some of the most direct evidence of the importance of race to the conservative resurgence during Obama’s presidency.

First, the researchers randomly sorted subjects into two groups and showed them a series of pictures of celebrities, including digitally altered images of the commander in chief. One group saw a version in which Obama’s skin had been lightened, while in the other version, his skin had been darkened…

Read the entire article here.

Artist Turns Racist Flirtations on Tinder Into Compelling Look at Race and Sex

The Root
2016-05-13

Demetria Lucas D’Oyley

Phoebe Boswell Source: phoebeboswell.com

She Matters: Inspired by James Baldwin’s “Stranger in a Village,” Phoebe Boswell was interested in exploring the perceptions of black women in predominantly white spaces.

Over the weekend I swung by the 156 Art Fair, an annual exhibition of African art at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, N.Y. Among the many strong presentations on display, Phoebe Boswell’s Stranger in the Village stood out.

In April 2015 Boswell, a biracial Kenyan woman currently living in London, was temporarily situated in Gothenburg, Sweden, in a predominantly white area. Boswell set out to explore perceptions of race and sex during her stay by turning to dating app Tinder.

“I thought I might want to explore what my body might feel like living in a space that might not be very welcoming,” Boswell says.

Any black woman who has ever ventured online to look for love—a particularly painful place for black women—should be able to predict the worst of what happened to Boswell next. Reactions to Boswell ranged from microaggressions to flat-out racism. But Boswell turned her lemons into artistic lemonade. For her installation, she sketched portraits of her online suitors with a mechanical pencil and included quotes from her exchanges.

“In the space of day, I go back through microaggressions for a month,” Boswell explained. “It’s like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I’m frightened from the things that I see.” Here, she talks about the experiences on Tinder that inspired the project…

Read the entire interview here.

Marlene Daut

New Books Network
2016-04-18

Dan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California

Marlene Daut tackles the complicated intersection of history and literary legacy in her book Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). She not only describes the immediate political reaction to the Haitian Revolution, but traces how writers, novelists, playwrights, and scholars imposed particular racial assumptions onto that event for decades afterward. Specifically, she identifies a number of recurring tropes that sought to assign intense racial divisions to the Haitian people. Individuals of joint African and European heritage, she contends, received the blunt of these attacks, as they were portrayed as monstrous, vengeful, mendacious, and yet also destined for tragedy. Moreover, observers and chroniclers of the Revolution maintained that these supposed characteristics produced ever-lasting discord with black Haitians. Daut analyzes hundreds of fictional and non-fictional accounts to argue that portrayals of the Haitian Revolution, and of the country itself, have long suffered under these false assumptions of exceptional racial problems. She has also produced a compendium of Haitian fiction during this period, in conjunction with the book. You can find it here.

Listen to the interview (00:49:33) here. Download the interview here.

Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority

The New Press
January 2016
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-62097-115-4

Steve Phillips

A New York Times bestseller, Brown Is the New White takes an unvarnished look at the history of whites and people of color in America and reveals how the past has created current conditions that have revolutionary implications for U.S. politics in 2016 and beyond

Despite the abundant evidence from Obama’s victories proving that the U.S. population has fundamentally changed, many progressives and Democrats continue to waste millions of dollars chasing white swing voters. Explosive population growth of people of color in America over the past fifty years has laid the foundation for a New American Majority consisting of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters in America right now, and that majority is growing larger every day. Failing to properly appreciate this reality, progressives are at risk of missing this moment in history—and losing.

A leader in national politics for thirty years, Steve Phillips has had a front-row seat to these extraordinary political changes. A civil rights lawyer and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Phillips draws on his extensive political experience to unveil exactly how people of color and progressive whites add up to a new majority, and what this means for U.S. politics and policy. A book brimming with urgency and hope, Brown Is the New White exposes how far behind the curve Democrats are in investing in communities of color—while illuminating a path forward to seize the opportunity created by the demographic revolution.

Marvin Rees Becomes UK’s First Elected Black Mayor

The Voice
2016-05-14

Marc Wadsworth

‘I’m the descendant of Jamaican slaves. Now I’m mayor of Bristol,’ Rees tells The Voice

BRISTOL’S NEW mayor has not only changed the face of the city after winning a huge victory but is also promising a new and inclusive way of doing politics.

Marvin Rees, 44, told The Voice in an exclusive interview: “I’m really honoured and feel the weight of the challenge I’m taking on. It’s also very exciting. I’m pleased so many good people are coming forward, wanting to work collectively, which I think this job requires. It’s not messianic leadership. It’s about fostering collective leadership around shared priorities such as poverty eradication, building homes for people and tackling inequality.”

Rees, who grew up poor in the St Paul’s area of the city, has pledged to appoint an all-party cabinet that reflects how people voted and the city’s diversity.

In 2012 Rees unsuccessfully ran for mayor when the post was first created. He amassed a whopping 31,259 votes, losing to independent George Ferguson, a wealthy architect, by less than seven per cent.

This time Rees notched up just under 70,000 votes, almost 30,000 more than Ferguson…

Read the entire article here.