Mixed Race Studies

Bilal Kawazoe’s film ‘Whole’ tackles the experience of being mixed race in Japan

The Japan Times
2021-09-30

Mark Schilling, Film Critic

In Bilal Kawazoe’s ‘Whole,’ Usman Kawazoe (left) and Kai Sandy (right) play two biracial men who bond over coming to terms with their identity while living in Japan.

In Japanese, the word “hāfu” — a colloquial term for people who are half-Japanese — is a label that some accept, but others reject, preferring such terms as “daburu” (double) or “mikkusu” (mix).

So seeing the title of Bilal Kawazoe’s new film “Whole,” which tells the story of two biracial men of radically different backgrounds in Kobe who become friends, my first thought was that Kawazoe, who is of Japanese and Pakistani parentage, had come up with yet another alternative to the hāfu label.

Not so, as he explains in a video call. The title instead refers to the characters’ quests to become “whole” in terms of their identity. Kawazoe says his brother, Usman, came to him with the idea of “making a film based on the identity crises and the experiences of mixed people in Japan.”

“We did a lot of research and realized there wasn’t really a narrative film (on that theme),” he continues. Instead, they found films that were “quite stereotypical or just one-sided.”

“So we kind of felt this sense of responsibility to make an honest film on this whole mixed-race experience,” he says…

Read the entire review here.

Hawai′i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

Duke University Press
September 2021
360 pages
17 illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1437-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1346-4

Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma’s analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hawaiʻi Is My Haven
• 1. Over Two Centuries: The History of Black People in Hawaiʻi
• 2. “Saltwater Negroes”: Black Locals, Multiracism, and Expansive Blackness
• 3. “Less Pressure”: Black Transplants, Settler Colonialism, and a Radical Lens
• 4. Racism in Paradise: AntiBlack Racism and Resistance in Hawaiʻi
• 5. Embodying Kuleana: Negotiating Black and Native Positionality in Hawaiʻi
• Conclusion: Identity↔Politics↔Knowledge
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Ralston, Elreta Melton Alexander

NCPedia
State Library of North Carolina
Raleigh, North Carolina
2013

Virginia L. Summey, Historian, Author, and Faculty Fellow
Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Elreta Melton Alexander was a pioneering African-American attorney from Greensboro, North Carolina. Born in Smithfield, North Carolina, she was the daughter of a Baptist minister and a teacher, and grew up comfortably as a part of the black middle class. Coming of age during the Jim Crow period of the South, she was raised by her educated, middle-class parents to be a leader in the community. The descendant of two white grandparents, her bi-racialism formed her early awareness of colorism within the African-American community…

Read the entire article here.

[Louis Rodolphe] Agassiz applied this penchant for classification to his views on race. Part of the expedition involved sketching and describing mixed-race Brazilians. Agassiz saw the rampant miscegenation in Brazil as a “mongrelization” of pure racial types that would ultimately result in sterility. Agassiz categorized humans into different “species.” In his book on the Brazil trip, Agassiz notes, “the fact that [the races] differ by constant permanent features is in itself sufficient to justify a comparison between the human races and animal species.”

Michelle Y. Raji, “Retrospection: Agassiz’s Expeditions in Brazil,” The Harvard Crimson, April 21, 2016. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/4/21/agassiz-in-brazil/.

De Waal’s ‘extraordinary’ memoir goes to Tinder Press

The Bookseller: At the Heart of Publishing since 1858
2021-09-28

Heloise Wood, Deputy News Editor

Tinder Press has landed Kit de Waal’s memoir about growing up in Birmingham in the Sixties and Seventies, Without Warning and Only Sometimes, which she described as “the story I always wanted to tell”.

Publisher Mary-Anne Harrington acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Jo Unwin at JULA. Without Warning and Only Sometimes will be published on 18th August 2022.

The memoir charts de Waal’s unpredictable childhood, growing up mixed race in Moseley, Birmingham.

Harrington said: “I have been desperate to work with Kit for years and knew she had the most wonderful story to tell, so it’s both an enormous thrill and an honour to be working with her on Without Warning and Only Sometimes. Kit takes us into the mind and heart of a girl raised to believe the world was going to end in 1975, who was never allowed to celebrate Christmas, and whose father squirreled away every penny he had to build a house in St Kitts that his wife and children were never to see.”…

Read the entire article here.

1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem

National Public Radio
2021-09-30

Hansi Lo Wang

Growing numbers of Latinos identifying as “Some other race” for the U.S. census have boosted the category to become the country’s second-largest racial group after “White.” Researchers are concerned the catchall grouping obscures many Latinx people’s identities and does not produce the data needed to address racial inequities.
Ada daSilva/Getty Images

For Leani García Torres, none of the boxes really fit.

In 2010, she answered U.S. census questions for the first time on her own as an adult. Is she of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? That was easy. She marked, “Yes, Puerto Rican.”

But then came the stumper: What is her race?

“Whenever that question is posed, it does raise a little bit of anxiety,” García Torres explains. “I actually remember calling my dad and saying, ‘What race are you putting? I don’t know what to put.’ ”

The categories the once-a-decade head count uses — “White,” “Black” and “American Indian or Alaska Native,” plus those for Asian and Pacific Islander groups — have never resonated with her.

“It’s tricky,” the Brooklyn, N.Y., resident by way of Tennessee says. “Both of my parents are from the island of Puerto Rico, and we’re just historically pretty mixed. If you look at anyone in my family, you wouldn’t really be able to guess a race. We just look vaguely tan, I would say.”…

Read the entire article here.

Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times

Wesleyan University Press
2021-06-08
392 pages
31 color photos
Hardback ISBN: 9780819579911
Paperback ISBN: 9780819579928
eBook ISBN: 9780819579935

Edited by:

Christina Baade, Professor, Communication Studies & Media Arts
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Kristin A. McGee, Associate Professor of Popular Music
University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

Essays investigate Beyoncé’s global impact

From Destiny’s Child to Lemonade, Homecoming, and The Gift, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has redefined global stardom, feminism, Black representation, and celebrity activism. This book brings together new work from sixteen international scholars to explore Beyonce’s impact as an artist and public figure from the perspectives of critical race studies, gender and women’s studies, queer and cultural studies, music, and fan studies. The authors explore Beyoncé’s musical persona as one that builds upon the lineages of Black female cool, Black southern culture, and Black feminist cultural production. They explore Beyoncé’s reception within and beyond North America, including how a range of performers—from YouTube gospel singers to Brazilian pop artists have drawn inspiration from her performances and image. The authors show how Beyoncé’s music is a source of healing and kinship for many fans, particularly Black women and queer communities of color. Combining cutting edge research, vivid examples, and accessible writing, this collection provides multiple lenses onto the significance of Beyoncé in the United States and around the world.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Janell Hobson
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Beyoncé Studies / Christina Baade, Marquita Smith, and Kristin McGee
• Part One “Diva” / Black Feminist Genealogies
  • 1. “I Came to Slay”: The Knowles Sisters, Black Feminism, and the Lineage of Black Female Cool / H. Zahra Caldwell
  • 2. From Colorism to Conjurings: Tracing the Dust in Beyoncé’s Lemonade / Cienna Davis
• Part Two “Formation” / A Southern Turn
  • 3. Beyoncé’s South and a “Formation” Nation / Riché Richardson
  • 4. Merging Past and Present in Lemonade’s Black Feminist Utopia / J. Brendan Shaw
• Part Three “XO” / Faith and Fandom
  • 5. At the Digital Cross(roads) with Beyoncé: Gospel Covers That Remix the Risqué into the Religious / Birgitta J. Johnson
  • 6. “She Made Me Understand”: How Lemonade Raised the Intersectional Consciousness of Beyoncé’s International Fans / Rebecca J. Sheehan
• Part Four “Worldwide Woman” / Beyoncé’s Reception Beyond the United States
  • 7. The Performative Negotiations of Beyoncé in Brazilian Bodies and the Construction of the Pop Diva in Ludmilla’s Funk Carioca and Gaby Amarantos’s Tecnobrega / Simone Pereira de Sá and Thiago Soares
  • 8. A Critical Analysis of White Ignorance Within Beyoncé’s Online Reception in the Spanish Context / Elena Herrera Quintana
• Part Five “Hold up” / Performing Femme Affinity and Dissent
  • 9. Six-Inch Heels and Queer Black Femmes: Beyoncé and Black Trans Women / Jared Mackley-Crump and Kirsten Zemke
  • 10. From “Say My Name” to “Texas Bamma”: Transgressive Topoi, Oppositional Optics, and Sonic Subversion in Beyoncé’s “Formation” / Byron B Craig and Stephen E. Rahko
• Part Six “Freedom” / Sounding Protest, Hearing Politics
  • 11. Musical Form in Beyoncé’s Protest Music / Annelot Prins and Taylor Myers
  • 12. Beyoncé’s Black Feminist Critique: Multimodal Intertextuality and Intersectionality in “Sorry” / Rebekah Hutten and Lori Burns
• Part Seven “Pray You Catch Me” / Healing and Community
  • 13. Beyond “Becky with the Good Hair”: Hair and Beauty in Beyoncé’s “Sorry” / Kristin Denise Rowe
  • 14. The Livable, Surviving, and Healing Poetics of Lemonade: A Black Feminist Futurity in Action / Mary Senyonga
• About the Contributors
• Index

Lives Like Mine

Simon & Schuster
2021-06-10
384 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781398502826
Paperback ISBN: 9781398502857
eBook ISBN: 9781398502840

Eva Verde

Mother.
To three small children, their heritage dual like hers.

Daughter.
To a mother who immigrated to make a better life but has been rejected by her chosen country.

Wife.
To a man who loves her but who will not defend her to his intolerant family.

Woman…
Whose roles now define her and trap her in a life she no longer recognises…

Meet Monica, the flawed heroine at the heart of Lives Like Mine.

With her three children in school, Monica finds herself wondering if this is all there is. Despite all the effort and the smiles, in the mirror she sees a woman hollowed out from putting everyone else first, tolerating her in-laws’ intolerance, and wondering if she has a right to complain when she’s living the life that she has created for herself.

Then along comes Joe, a catalyst for change in the guise of a flirtatious parent on the school run. Though the sudden spark of their affair is hedonistic and oh so cathartic, Joe soon offers a friendship that shows Monica how to resurrect and honour the parts of her identity that she has long suppressed. He is able to do for Monica what Dan has never managed to, enabling her both to face up to a past of guilty secrets and family estrangements, and to redefine her future.