Mixed Race Studies

Who Needs Hybridity? The Political Limits of Mixed Race Identity

University of Toronto
November 2016
153 pages

Emily Alanna Moorhouse

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

This thesis examines how non-white, mixed race women with Asian heritage understand, participate in, and resist colonialism, anti-blackness and anti-Indigeneity. The study finds that mixed race identification is contextual and shifts according to the racial make-up of spaces. Participants performed their identities in white spaces differently than in communities of colour. Although all participants could name whiteness, their awareness of the racial and colonial basis of citizenship was situated on a spectrum. The thesis explores how race is understood through multiple axes of identity such as disability, gender, and sexuality. Although the family is often a good space to learn about race, multiracial families sometimes reproduced ableism, queer-phobia, anti-blackness and shadism. Lastly, I focus on how hybridity is a sexualized discourse that contributes to the fetishization of multiraciality. I highlight the sexualized forms of violence that multiracial women encounter.

Read the entire thesis here.

Longwood announces 2017 Dos Passos Award Winner

Longwood University
Farmville, Virginia
2017-02-22

Danzy Senna, a novelist and short story author who burst onto the American literary scene in 1998 with her critically acclaimed first novel Caucasia, will be awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature this spring at Longwood University.

“Danzy is a writer whose work stands out for its constant focus on identity, both as an American and as a person of biracial heritage,” said Dr. David Magill, associate professor of English at Longwood and chair of the Dos Passos Prize Committee. “She challenges readers on the values of their personal identity, and explores the idea of Americanism in a similar vein as John Dos Passos.”

Senna is the 35th recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which is awarded annually by the Longwood Department of English and Modern Languages.

Caucasia is a coming-of-age story about a biracial girl in the mid-1970s who struggles with racial identity in a tumultuous world. It won the Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year.

Since her second novel, Symptomatic, a psychological thriller published in 2004, Senna has written an autobiographical work on her own biracial parentage—her mother is the celebrated poet Fanny Howe and her father is an African-American scholar. She further explores the topic in her 2011 short-story collection, You Are Free…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Identity in Children’s Literature

Routledge
2017-02-10
154 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781138860179
eBook (VitalSource) ISBN: 9781315716725

Amina Chaudhri, Associate Professor of Teacher Education
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago

Racially mixed children make up the fastest growing youth demographic in the U.S., and teachers of diverse populations need to be mindful in selecting literature that their students can identify with. This volume explores how books for elementary school students depict and reflect multiracial experiences through text and images. Chaudhri examines contemporary children’s literature to demonstrate the role these books play in perpetuating and resisting stereotypes and the ways in which they might influence their readers. Through critical analysis of contemporary children’s fiction, Chaudhri highlights the connections between context, literature, and personal experience to deepen our understanding of how children’s books treat multiracial identity.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Multiracial Identity in the United States: Historical and Current Discourse
• 3. Multiracial Picturebooks
• 4. In/Visibility: The Legacy of Pathology in Contemporary Fiction
• 5. Multiracial Blending: The Post-Racial Myth in Contemporary Fiction
• 6. Multiracial Awareness: Power and Visibility In Contemporary Fiction
• 7. Voices of the Past: Multiracial Identity in Historical Fiction
• 8. Hidden Identities: Whiteness and Passing
• 9. Teaching and Learning with Multiracial Fiction
• Appendices

Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century

Liverpool University Press
2017-03-01
216 Pages
210 x 147 mm
29 B&W illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9781781383117

Theodor Michael

Translated by:

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent.

Theodor Michael’s life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora. The text has been translated by Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool and an internationally acknowledged expert in black German studies. It is accompanied by a translator’s preface, explanatory notes, a chronology of historical events and a guide to further reading, so that the book will be accessible and useful both for general readers and for undergraduate students.

Caramel queen or white man’s whore: #HashtagLightie, the play exploring the realities of modern mixed-race lives

Media Diversified
2017-02-10

Zahra Dalilah

Women and men of mixed heritage, especially black/white, are often called upon in media to provide an inoffensive face of diversity, a fetishized vision of exotic beauty or simplistically characterised as inherently confused halves of one thing or the other. The play #HashtagLightie – which recently sold out the Arcola Theatre, London before rehearsals had even begun – effortlessly defies these restrictions with a story that is relatable in its specificity and genuine in its relationships.

The show, written by Lynette Linton and directed by Rikki Beadle-Blair, centres on an Irish/Bajan family who become the targets of racial abuse on social media. Although issues of colourism and the impact of social media on young lives are not exactly new, #HashtagLightie interweaves these with a fresh look at the identities and perceptions of mixed-race women and men in British society…

Read the entire review here.

Why Rachel Dolezal Can Never Be Black

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2017-03-03

Denene Millner

Rachel Dolezal stepped down from her post as the leader of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP in 2015 amid criticism that she was passing herself off as black. Nicholas K. Geranios/AP

Rachel Dolezal just won’t let it go.

The white civil rights activist and former NAACP leader outed by her parents in 2015 for passing herself off as black is making the rounds with news that she is living on food stamps, a month away from homelessness, can’t find a job and, perhaps most shockingly, has legally changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo.

News of Dolezal’s precarious living conditions and new name — Nkechi is the Igbo word for “gift of God,” with roots in Nigeria, and Diallo means “bold” in Fulani, a word that can be traced to both Guinea and Senegal — comes, not surprisingly, just weeks before her new memoir, In Full Color, heads to bookstores…

Read the entire article here.

Creator and lead actress Brittani Noel partners with Director Shilpi Roy (Brown Girls, Freeform) to launch multiracial dramedy film THE OTHER, a Sundance Institute Artists Kickstarter selection.

2017-03-01

Brittani Noel

For Immediate Release:

“A woman’s struggle with her multiracial identity gets seriously twisted in this dramedy short film.”

LOS ANGELES, CA, March 1, 2017: Up-and-comer Brittani Noel joins forces with Director Shilpi Roy (Brown Girls, Freeform), Sundance Alum Stacie Theon (Abbie Cancelled, Birds of America), and Leah McKendrick (M.F.A., SXSW) to make The Other, a short film exploring the distinct struggles of being in-between races. When multiracial Mischa discovers that society has a need to put people into ethnic boxes, and that not all boxes are created equal, things get really twisted, really fast…

“Diversity is a hot button issue right now,” says Roy. “We need to be exploring it and talking about it as a society, and there’s no better way to continue to spark conversation and understanding than with this film.” This story shines a light on the unique plight of the mixed race person in a way that’s relatable to anyone who has ever felt like “the other.” Roy is no stranger to the delicate topic of race in modern American society, having just completed her comedy pilot Brown Girls, which centers on an Indian-American woman and a recently emigrated Indian woman. Signing on to direct The Other was a natural and serendipitous fit, and focuses on a topic Roy feels passionate about.

The film will star Brittani Noel alongside Brent Bailey (Criminal Minds, Rizzoli & Isles, Californication), known for his starring role in the popular Emmy Award-winning web series Emma Approved. The Other’s Kickstarter campaign is now live and seeking to complete funding over the next few weeks.

Written by Brittani Noel, Directed by Shilpi Roy, and starring Brittani Noel and Brent Bailey.

The Kickstarter campaign is available for viewing here.
Teaser Video Link is here.

Join the journey!

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theothershort
Twitter: @theothershort
Instagram: @theothershort
Email: othershortfilm@gmail.com

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For media inquiries: othershortfilm@gmail.com

Erased Onscreen: Where Are All the Interracial Couples?

The New York Times
2017-03-03

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” Credit Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures

The recent drama “Loving” is about an interracial marriage and takes place in midcentury rural Virginia, but there are no burning crosses, white hoods or Woolworth counters. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, a white man and a black Native American woman kiss in public at a drag race, and no one voices disapproval. A few white spectators stare and scowl. But the couple embrace and laugh, unsullied.

“Segregation wasn’t a clean divide in these communities,” the drama’s writer-director, Jeff Nichols, told me, and for “Loving” it’s true: The film, about the 1967 Supreme Court case striking down laws banning interracial marriage, addresses the long ignored and deliberately suppressed topic of mixed race in America. It confounds our impressions of the past, the legacies of slavery, and the reality of Jim Crow.

Fifty years have passed since “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” and this is still an issue. Mixed-race couples existed here long before 1967, but the Lovings (played by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) were among the first to demand official recognition through marriage. According to the codes of popular culture and the law of domestic relations, families like theirs did not exist. Sustaining the legitimacy of racial boundaries requires suppression of these narratives. Without policing and erasing by law and popular culture, taboos lose their authority…

Read the entire article here.

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

Princeton University Press
March 2017
224 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
7 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780691172422
eBook ISBN: 9781400884636

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law
Yale Law School

Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.

As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.

Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler’s American Model upends understandings of America’s influence on racist practices in the wider world.

Racial Passing: Masking Culture and Identity in America (HUM-596)

San Diego State University
San Diego, California
Spring 2017

Michael Caldwell, Lecturer

New Course This Spring in Humanities!

It is a curious fact that in contemporary culture African Americans are often imitated by non-African Americans. Yet there was a time in American history when African Americans who could, chose to pass as white. What historical and social circumstances made such a choice possible? What does that choice suggest about the nature of identity: is it inherited or can we literally make of ourselves what we wish? What are the limits to self-construction? Though this course begins by looking at instances of African American passing, it moves forward to consider other assimilationist stances in American history, as well as more recent, strident efforts to resist assimilation. Throughout the course our goal will be to think hard about the factors that go into making and refining one’s identity.

For more information, click here.