Mixed Race Studies

As scientists have repeatedly pointed out, the concept of race is fundamentally cultural, not biological. Nevertheless, because some realities of population genetics are unfortunately caught up in the false rhetoric of race, we might have to rely on the construct and acknowledge the biological differences in HLAs in order to save lives.

Black people already have a highly mixed genetic heritage because of the history of involuntary migrations across the world imposed by slavery and colonialism. “As those mixes take place it creates a more complicated HLA type,” much rarer than that of somebody who comes from a single ethnic heritage, says Galen Switzer, a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine professor. Such diversity in HLA types makes it more difficult even for any two black people to match.

Cici Zhang, “When Your Medical Treatment Depends On Your Race,” The Establishment, April 11, 2018. https://theestablishment.co/when-your-medical-treatment-depends-on-your-race-ef2c24691b78.

Transnational Perspectives on Black Germany

University of Toronto
Innis Town Hall
2 Sussex Avenue
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1J5 Canada
2018-05-23 through 2018-05-25

Sponsors: Germanic Languages & Literatures, Cinema Studies Institute, Gender & Women’s Studies Institute, Centre for Transnational & Diaspora Studies, Comparative Literature, SSHRC, Centre for the United States, TIFF, DAAD, and Heinrich Böll Stiftung

The Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) is collaborating with the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto in hosting the 3-day SSHRC-funded conference, “Transnational Perspectives on Black Germany” in Toronto, Ontario, on May 23-25, 2018. The event will feature keynote addresses by Fatima El-Tayeb and Noah Sow, a screening of “On Second Glance” (dir. Sheri Hagen, 2012) at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox with filmmaker in attendance, and a dance-music-word tribute to Afro-German poet and activist May Ayim by guest artists Layla Zami and Oxana Chi.

REGISTRATION OPEN UNTIL 4/21/2018

For more information, click here.

When Your Medical Treatment Depends On Your Race

The Establishment
2018-04-11

Cici Zhang

Human red bone marrow Jill Doughtie

Why do minority patients have a much harder time finding a match for bone marrow transplants?

It’s not easy to look for a specific boy among hundreds of first graders, especially when they swarm into lines for cupcakes and cotton candy. On this fall bake-sale day, the cafeteria of Public School 106 in the Parkchester section of the Bronx is buzzing with energy and children’s happy shrieks. A few teachers shout across the hall to keep things from spinning out of control. And when I finally spot 6-year-old Asaya Bullock, he seems to be well in hand.

“Ready for your green soup?” Charline, his mother, takes out a thermos with a Spider-Man design on the side.

The green soup is one of the only three things Asaya has ever been able to eat. He drinks it for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner; he drank it for the whole trip that his family took to the Caribbean to visit his mom’s relatives. Luckily, with broccoli, kale, green beans, and some minced meat, Asaya’s soup is at least healthy — and better than the small bowl of potato chips used as comfort food after his bi-weekly belly infusion. The recurring medical procedure helps keep him alive…

Read the entire article here.

Mizuko

Hapa Japan
2018-04-13

Fredrick Cloyd

Featured Image by Edward M. Haugh

During the years of gathering research and thoughts, memory and conversations into some sort of cohesive unit for a book–which would eventually become the forthcoming (Spring 2018 by 2Leaf Press) entitled: Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, I had not thought of a title, or a way to fit all the pieces together for the vast amount of links and connections I wanted to make in relation to world historical archive and a definite anti-colonial stance. Yet another story of a unique person in the world was not my goal, although it would also be taken that way. I wanted to reach those who were concerned with looking at the historical present.

In focusing on my mother and myself, it came one day in a dream. Just as the opening scene in my book presents, I am suddenly woken up in the middle of the night to write:　みずこ　水子　ミズコ (mizuko) on a notepad I pull out from the bedside drawer. It puzzled me because, at least consciously, I did not know what this word meant or what it was. Then, the next day, I looked it up on the internet. The term mizuko, was the postwar euphemism for aborted fetus, or dead fetus. An entire religious ceremonial ritual grew out of this when the U.S. Occupation lifted its ban on religious ceremonies in Japan. Many women flooded to the countless shrines and statues to pray for those babies gone. Some were so ashamed, they did it in secret. But most women, even after given “permission,” could now do prayers in the forest and write their babies names or burn their incense in the name of that baby they let go from their bodies…

Read the entire article here.

Review: Atlantic Families, Race, and Empire

The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History
2018-04-19

Casey Schmitt, Ph.D. Candidate in early American history
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018).

A central thread running through Daniel Livesay’s Children of Uncertain Fortune is deceptively simple: Atlantic families structured the development of ideologies surrounding race in the British empire during the long eighteenth century.¹ Woven through the book, however, is a richly nuanced exploration of what terms like Atlantic, family, race, and empire meant and how understandings of those terms changed over a pivotal hundred-year period starting in the 1730s. Through institutional records and family papers produced on both sides of the Atlantic, Livesay identifies 360 mixed-race people from Jamaica and traces the lived experiences of a handful of them as they navigated their social and economic position within transatlantic kin networks. Those individual narratives reveal how Britons experienced empire through family ties in ways that shaped their perceptions of race, colonialism, and belonging…

Read the entire review here.

Multi-award nominated playwright Natasha Marshall talks about the return of her hit show, Half Breed!

Theater Full Stop
2018-03-29

Lucy Basaba, Founder & Editor

Debuting at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, Natasha Marshall’s Half Breed has sparked conversation about what it means to be of mixed heritage in Britain today and how this is viewed within society. A part autobiographical work, Marshall’s vital one woman show has received critical acclaim, picking up multiple award nominations in the process. Marshall credits the show’s success to the influential Talawa Theatre Company and Soho Writer’s Lab for allowing the show to reach its full potential.

Both companies are renowned for their support and championing of new writing, contributing to our contemporary canon of new voices. Read on to find out more about Marshall’s response towards the show’s success, what she’d like for audiences to take away from the show and what it was like performing the show to audiences in India!

You’ll be performing your critically acclaimed show Half Breed at Soho Theatre in April before embarking on a UK tour. How are you feeling ahead of the tour?

I’m nervous but mainly so excited to take this story to the places that need it the most. Schools/ rural areas… it’s going to be a journey. Feels very surreal to be doing this because I never imagined it would go this far, but very grateful it has.

Half Breed places focus on identity; growing up as the only mixed raced resident within a rural part of the UK. What drew you to write a piece on this particular subject?

It’s my experience on what it means to be black and I never saw that portrayed anywhere, so I decided to do it myself. Just wanted to see more variety onstage for people of colour, I was tired of seeing/performing the same old stereotypes…

Read the entire interview here.

A Standing Ovation for One Drop of Love

The Pilot Light: Official Blog of Naropa University
Boulder, Colorado
2018-04-19

Heather Hendrie, MA Transpersonal Wilderness Therapy student

Fanshen Cox Digiovanni Photo by David DeVine

It is my belief that the real magic in art arises in the space where the personal masterfully meets the universal. And mastery is what Fanshen Cox Digiovanni brought to us yesterday over the lunch hour at Naropa University with her one-woman show, “One Drop of Love”.

Fanshen Cox Digiovanni, an award-winning actor, producer, playwright, educator, and activist, was on campus performing as part of this year’s annual Bayard & John Cobb Peace Lecture. She wrote her show as her MFA thesis. In answer to the question, “How long did it take you to create this beautiful piece?” she laughs and says, “Oh, about 48 years!”

Using pieces from her father’s memoir and real images and recordings of conversations with family members, Fanshen created a masterpiece. She has performed the show across the country over the past five years. “One Drop of Love” is an interactive multimedia show that explores the intersections of race, class, and gender in pursuit of truth, justice, and love…

Read the entire article here.

In Black and White: A Hermeneutic Argument against “Transracialism”

Res Philosophica
Volume 95, Issue 2, April 2018
Pages 303-329

Tina Fernandes Botts, Professor of Philosophy
California State University, Fresno

Transracialism, defined as both experiencing oneself as, and being, a race other than the race assigned to one by society, does not exist. Translated into hermeneutics, transracialism is an unintelligible phenomenon in the specific sociocultural context of the United States in the early twenty-first century. Within this context, race is a function of ancestry, and is therefore defined in terms of something that is external to the self and unchangeable. Since transracialism does not exist, the question of whether transracialism would be ethically advisable if it did exist is inapposite. Nonetheless, at a minimum we can say that racial transition (defined as attempting to change one’s race through artificial and/or associative changes, and living life as a race other than the race assigned to one by society, etc.) is possible, but is very likely unethical, since it is the same as racial passing.

Read or purchase the article here.

Thinking through Rejections and Defenses of Transracialism

Philosophy Today: An International Journal of Contemporary Philosophy
Volume 62, Issue 1, Winter 2018
Pages 11-19
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday201829196

Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy; Africana Studies
University of Connecticut, Storrs

This article explores several philosophical questions raised by Rebecca Tuvel’s controversial article, “In Defense of Transracialism.” Drawing upon work on the concept of bad faith, including its form as “disciplinary decadence,” this discussion raises concerns of constructivity and its implications and differences in intersections of race and gender.

Read the entire article here.

Building new selves: identity, “Passing,” and intertextuality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies
Published online: 2018-04-03
DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2018.1453977

David Hoegberg, Associate Professor of English; Africana Studies
Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis

This article examines Zoë Wicomb’s wide-ranging use of intertextuality in the novel Playing in the Light to explore the links between identity construction and postcolonial authorship. Focusing on the characters as intertextual agents, I argue that the three coloured women on whom the novel focuses – Helen, Marion, and Brenda – use texts in distinctive ways that illuminate their struggles to position themselves in South Africa’s complex and changing racial landscape. Racial “passing” is one form of a larger pattern in the novel of the use of citation and imitation to achieve specific ends. By embedding the citations of Helen and Marion within the citation-rich narrative of Brenda, Wicomb lays bare the mechanisms of identity construction within a work that stages and highlights its own intertextual practices.

Read or purchase the article here.