Mixed Race Studies

NBCBLK Summer Book Club: ‘New People’ by Danzy Senna

NBCBLK
NBC News
2017-07-14

Donna Owens

Danzy Senna (Mara Casey)

NEW PEOPLE
By Danzy Senna
229 pp. Riverhead Books, $26

The literati have always loved Danzy Senna.

In 1998, the biracial Boston native dazzled literary circles with her debut novel, `Caucasia.’ The coming of age tale—which tackled race, class and gender before terms like `intersectionality’ entered the mainstream lexicon—nabbed awards, and was hailed an instant classic.

Senna’s follow-up novel, `Symptomatic,’ (2001) further explored mixed-race characters. Her memoir, `Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History,’ (2009) and story collection, `You Are Free,’ (2011) continued probing identity politics.

Now the scribe is back with her anticipated third novel,`New People.’ As with Senna’s previous work, it mines the complex themes of race, sex, and class. The tale unfolds through the adventures of Maria, a hip Brooklynite whose enviable lifestyle unravels behind her obsession with a man she barely knows…

…You’re biracial—White mom and African American father — and your writing delves frequently into race. Is it a painful topic for you?

So for me, I’m not so much writing about race as I am writing about America. And to me, the American story is one of race, money and class. We do live in a racialized world, and I’ve spent my whole life in this space. I find it strange when writers don’t address it. I’m almost always assumed to be white. I’ve been privy to a lot of racism and conversations in rooms where I unintentionally disappeared into whiteness. I think there were periods when it was a struggle. But I’m at a place in my life when I’m very clear on who I am, my own story and who I come from…

Read the entire interview and book excerpt here.

Dr. Zebulon Miletsky talks about the mixed race / mixed culture experience to BWTM

Bayloric Worldwide Television & Media
2017-07-18

Ingram Jones, Host

Dr Zebulon Miletsky assistant professor of Africana Studies at Stony University, New York talks to BWTM  about his experiences and shares a wealth of knowledge on the topic of race.

Dr. Zebulon Vance Miletsky teaches African-American History at Stony Brook University where he is an Assistant Professor in both the Departments of Africana Studies and History. He is the author of numerous articles, essays and most recently a book chapter that appeared in the anthology “Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority” which traces the contested meanings throughout history of terminology for multiracial people and the role that this historical legacy of “naming” plays into how President Obama is read as African American, but still asserts a strategic biracial identity through the use of language, symbols, and interactions with the media. Miletsky who is half-Jewish (white) and African-American/Afro-Caribbean, received his Ph.D. in African-American Studies with a concentration in History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2008 . There, he was trained as a historian by some of the best thinkers in the field of Black Studies, many of whom are veterans from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. His research interests include: Racial passing; interracial marriage; African-Americans in Boston; Northern freedom movements; and Mixed race history. Miletsky has given a Ted Talk and at Stony Brook University entitled “Tracing Your ‘Routes’” and has have been interviewed on Huffington Post Live, various radio shows including the WBAI NYC 99.5 FM Pacifica radio show “Behind the News-Long Island” and the “Multiracial Family Man” Podcast.

Watch the interview (01:26:47) here. Read the transcript here.

Got something to say about race and kids?

Medium
2017-07-15

Andrew Grant-Thomas, Co-Founder
EmbraceRace

Let’s have it.

What do these pieces have in common?

“But Daddy, I’m a scientist, too!”

Why are all the white dolls sitting together on the Target shelf?

Muslim in Trump’s America…

Read the entire article here.

‘Krazy Kat,’ and all that jazz

The Boston Globe
2017-06-23

Matthew Guerrieri, Globe Correspondent

This Sunday is the anniversary of the end of one of the greatest comic strips of all time. On June 25, 1944, the final installment of “Krazy Kat” was published, two months after the death of its creator, George Herriman. In various forms since 1910, the strip’s essential paradox — Ignatz, a mouse, forever beans Krazy with bricks, who nevertheless loves him back — yielded seemingly inexhaustible variations.

In its day, “Krazy Kat” was more a critical than a popular favorite, though publisher William Randolph Hearst, a fan, continued to give Herriman carte blanche despite the strip’s sometimes meager readership. But its dreamlike artwork, linguistic fantasy, and self-referential tinkering with comic-strip form influenced numerous other art forms — music included.

The dense, idiosyncratic argot of Herriman’s dialogue and his precisely-dashed linework and zig-zagging scenery (a stylization of Herriman’s beloved southwestern landscapes) found its musical counterpart in syncopation. As early as 1911 — only a year after Krazy and Ignatz first appeared in the margins of Herriman’s strip “The Dingbat Family” — a New York composer-pianist named Ben Ritchie published “Krazy Kat Rag,” with a Herriman illustration on the cover. In later years, saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer’s Orchestra (which included such jazz luminaries as Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Lang, and Joe Venuti), expatriate bandleader Sam Wooding, and clarinetist Artie Shaw all recorded “Krazy Kat” tributes.

Most ambitious was composer John Alden Carpenter’s “Krazy Kat” ballet, subtitled “A Jazz Pantomime.” First performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1921, and first staged in 1922 — choreographed by Russian-born Adolph Bolm, with scenery designed by Herriman himself (he also illustrated the sheet music) — the ballet was well-received, but Carpenter’s score (possibly the first concert work to include the word “jazz” in the title) was soon overshadowed by more overt rapprochements between jazz and classical music. Carpenter’s version of jazz was tame, owing more to the “sweet” jazz of white dance bands than the “hot” jazz of their African-American counterparts. But the composer effectively mined jazz’s capacity for charm and whimsy…

Read the entire article here.

CFA: Special Issue of The History of the Family – Mixed Marriage, Interracial Relationships, and Binational Couples from Global and Comparative Perspectives

H-Black-Europe
2017-06-30

Call for papers to special issue in The History of the Family: An International Quarterly

Special issue theme: Mixed Marriage, Interracial Relationships and Binational Couples from Global and Comparative Perspectives

Guest-editors:

Julia Moses
University of Sheffield/University of Gottingen

Julia Woesthoff
DePaul University

Call for Article Proposals

In response to the mass globalization of the twenty-first century and associated migration, a recent boom in social-scientific research has analyzed various manifestations of binational and interracial romantic relationships in the present and recent past. This theme issue seeks to historicize this research by drawing on key case studies from across the world and across time and drawing on relevant historiography and theoretical literature. This call for proposals welcomes both quantitative and qualitative studies that shed light on individual experiences of, as well as various practices of regulating, ‘interracial’, ‘binational’ and ‘mixed marriages’. The issue aims to parse the assumptions behind these contested concepts and to trace how these categories have shifted over time and space. In doing so, it also seeks to chart how intermarriages and other forms of interracial, binational and cross-confessional relationships took shape: who participated in these relationships? How common were they, and in which circumstances were they practiced (or banned)? Contributions investigating relationships involving regions in the Americas, Africa and Asia are particularly welcome.

The papers in this issue chart these relationships over various periods of time. Some papers will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This era was a flashpoint for considerations about the relationship between race, culture and family formation. It was during the contested ‘first age of globalization’ at the turn of the twentieth century that new cultural encounters took form, forged through the expansion of European empires, a spike in global economic migration facilitated by new transportation technologies and the rise of mass communication through daily newspapers and the telegraph. At the same time, the growth of anthropology and related social sciences as disciplines contributed to the problematization of race, culture and cultural difference. These encounters came to a head in the First and Second World Wars, which witnessed a new era of nationalism across the world alongside a call to return to the home and family as a safeguard against the uncertainties of a world at war and faced by severe economic fluctuations. How were the perception and practice of intermarriage and other forms of cross-cultural romantic relationships affected by these historical developments? Other papers will focus on earlier periods, including moments of religious reformation and counterreformation as well as various early experiments in trade and imperialism. How did early colonial and commercial encounters shape attitudes towards interracial relationships? How have changing religious conflicts shaped attitudes towards intermarriage across confessional lines?

Ultimately, the theme issue will build on a selection of papers from a panel organized by the co-editors that will take place at the upcoming European Social Science History Conference (Belfast, 2018). Proposals that complement the themes and regions presented in the panel are particularly welcome, and those participating in the theme issue are also very welcome to come along to the ESSHC to join in the discussions there and help shape this joint venture.

Deadline for proposing articles (max 500 word abstracts only): Friday, 29 September 2017 (by e-mail to: j.moses@sheffield.ac.uk and j.woesthoff@depaul.edu).

The acceptance of abstracts will be announced to authors in early December 2017. The proposals selected are to be submitted initially as extended abstracts or working draft papers before Friday, 23 March 2018 so they can be considered together with the papers that will be presented at the ESSHC. Complete drafts (max 10,000 words) should be submitted by Friday, 20 July 2018 to the guest editors. After internal editing and revision by the author, the papers will be sent out for external peer-review via the journal. Please note that inclusion in the theme issue is subject to final external peer review.

We warmly welcome your proposal!

For more information, click here.