Mixed Race Studies

Introducing… Monique Roffey

FMcM Associates
London, United Kingdom
2020-10-15

Robert Greer

‘Introducing…’ is our online interview series to introduce you to some of the amazing authors we’re working with and their brilliant books!

Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature. With the Kisses of His Mouth and The Tryst are works which examine female sexuality and desire. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri, and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Welcome! To start with, could you tell us a little bit about yourself…

I’m a bi-national writer based in East London. My identity is mixed and fluid in that I was born in Port of Spain, (a city I frequently return to), but I’m also half English. Via my mother, I have Italian, Maltese and Middle Eastern blood. My consciousness, though, has been shaped by my knowledge and understanding of the Caribbean region. Four of my seven books have been set in the Caribbean region. Two of my books have dealt directly with female sexuality and desire. I’d call myself a magical realist as a writer and a practicing Buddhist in my everyday life; everything else is for others to decide. I teach creative writing on the MA/MFA at Manchester Metropolitan University and for the National Writers Centre. I’ve always enjoyed teaching and know, for sure, that the craft of writing can be taught to anyone with a feel for language and an active imagination…

Read the entire interview here.

Belle de Costa Greene: Library Director, Advocate, and Rare Books Expert.

Headlines & Heroes: Newspapers, Comics, & More Fine Print
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
2022-02-08

Joanna Colclough, Reference Librarian
Serial and Government Publications Division

In 1999, biographer Jean Strouse published her work on J. P. Morgan, railroad magnate, financier, and New York millionaire of the late 1800s. Of course, Belle de Costa Greene is featured in the book – she worked closely with Morgan for the last 8 years of his life as his personal librarian, managing his private art and rare book collection. Greene’s name was not unknown to history. The first half of the 20th century saw Greene rise as a top expert in the rare book world as librarian and first director of the Morgan Library and Museum. But Strouse discovered something new about Greene that presented Greene in whole new light. In an article for The New Yorker (March 29, 1999, p. 66-79), Strouse tells how she located Greene’s birth certificate in Washington, D.C. which was marked with a C for “colored.”

Greene passed as white for her entire professional life. This is a fact both surprising and not – surprising that such a secret could be so well-kept and not surprising considering the prejudice of society…

Read the entire article here.

Preparing for Higher Education’s Mixed Race Future: Why Multiraciality Matters

Palgrave Macmillan
2022-02-09
237 pages
5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9783030888206
eBook ISBN: ISBN: 978-3-030-88821-3

Edited by:

Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero, Associate Chair of the Department of Educational Studies; Associate Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs
Ohio State University

Lisa Delacruz Combs, Ph.D. Candidate
The Ohio State University

Victoria K. Malaney-Brown, Director of Academic Integrity
Columbia University

• Traces a multiracial trajectory to and through higher education – from pre-college adolescents to post-tenure faculty
• Complicates common constructs within higher education by examining them through a mixed race lens
• Critically advances multiraciality in alignment with larger anti-racist and social justice efforts

Increasing attention and representation of multiraciality in both the scholarly literature and popular culture warrants further nuancing of what is understood about multiracial people, particularly in the changing contexts of higher education. This book offers a way of Preparing Higher Education for its Mixed Race Future by examining Why Multiraciality Matters. In preparation, the book highlights recent contributions in scholarship – both empirical studies and scholarly syntheses – on multiracial students, staff, and faculty/scholars across three separate yet interrelated parts, which will help spur the continued evolution of multiraciality into the future.

Table of Contents

• Section I: Foundations of Multiracial Difference
  • Chapter 1. Coming of Age: Why Multiracial Adolescence Matters for Higher Education
  • Chapter 2. College Enrollment and Multiracial Backgrounds: An Exploration of Access and Choice
  • Chapter 3. Operationalizing Multiracial Consciousness: Disrupting Monoracism at a Historically White Institution
• Section II: Complex Identities Nuancing Multiraciality
  • Chapter 4. The “Hot Ho” and the Unwanted, Colored Male: Gendered Multiracial Subjectivities Hailed through Contemporary Racial Discourse
  • Chapter 5. In Pursuit of a Leadership Identity: Exploring the Role of Involvement in Cultivating a Multiracial Identity at a Hispanic Serving Institution
  • Chapter 6. The Complexity of Black Biracial Identity within the Contexts of Peer and Student Service Interactions at a Predominately White Institution
  • Chapter 7. I am Black and …: Complexities of Being a Marginalized Multiracial Higher Education Professional in Times of Heightened Racial Tensions
  • Chapter 8. Are We Enough? Exploring Multiracial Staff Identities through the Narratives of Mixed Filipinx Americans
• Section III: Nuancing Multiracial Engagement and Outcomes
  • Chapter 9. Sense of Belonging for Multiracial and Multiethnic College Students
  • Chapter 10. “Campus Feels Different to Me”: Comparing Climate Experiences of White vs. Non-White Multiracial College Students
  • Chapter 11. Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: The Trials and Tribulations of Multiracial Student Activism
  • Chapter 12. Pedestaled or Pigeonholed? Multiracial Scholars Traversing Monoracial Academia
  • Chapter 13. Conclusion: What Difference Does Multiraciality Make? Reflections and Future Directions

‘In trying to enthuse the students, I definitely enthused myself’

Islington Tribune
London, United Kingdom
2022-02-10

Anna Lamche, Reporter

Hannah Lowe

The recipient of the Costa book of the year for The Kids, Hannah Lowe may have just about achieved her goal, learns Anna Lamche

TRACKING down a physical copy of Hannah Lowe’s The Kids has been difficult since the poet won the Costa Book Award last week, a fact she attributes more to a “national shortage of paper” than to her publisher’s surprise at her unexpected win.

Hannah won the prestigious prize last Tuesday for her book of sonnets, a beautiful and haunting ode to teaching and childhood. Her collection reflects on the junctures between education and the superstructures of history, class and race – the result is a tightly rendered meditation on human experience, spanning birth to death and grief to laughter, often within a matter of lines…

…Born to a “half Jamaican, half Chinese” father, Hannah’s own experience – she recalls being called “white wog” at school in one poem – allows her to relate to the alienation of her own black and diasporan students in the wake of the 7/7 bombings and beyond. The Kids continually demands we consider “the stakes when teachers rarely look like those/they teach”….

Read the entire article here.

Abraham Galloway is the Black figure from the Civil War you should know about

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2022-02-08

Elizabeth Blair, Senior Producer/Reporter, Arts Desk

He has been compared to James Bond and Malcolm X, though his name has largely been left out of the history books.

Abraham Galloway was an African American who escaped enslavement in North Carolina, became a Union spy during the Civil War and recruited Black soldiers to fight with the North. That’s the short version. The fuller picture would include his work as a revolutionary and being one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina Senate.

David Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War, calls him a “swashbuckling figure who wouldn’t take sass from Northern or Southern or Black or white, Union or Confederate.”

When Cecelski was doing research for another book about maritime slavery, he kept coming across Galloway’s name. “And the stories were sort of so different than what I had been taught about slavery or the Civil War, or the role of African Americans in the Civil War,” he says…

Read or listen to the story (00:05:07) here.

The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War

University of North Carolina Press
September 2012
352 pages
17 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-2190-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-3812-9

David S. Cecelski

AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS

• 2012 North Caroliniana Book Award, The North Caroliniana Society
• Ragan Old North State Award, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association

Abraham H. Galloway (1837-1870) was a fiery young slave rebel, radical abolitionist, and Union spy who rose out of bondage to become one of the most significant and stirring black leaders in the South during the Civil War. Throughout his brief, mercurial life, Galloway fought against slavery and injustice. He risked his life behind enemy lines, recruited black soldiers for the North, and fought racism in the Union army’s ranks. He also stood at the forefront of an African American political movement that flourished in the Union-occupied parts of North Carolina, even leading a historic delegation of black southerners to the White House to meet with President Lincoln and to demand the full rights of citizenship. He later became one of the first black men elected to the North Carolina legislature.

Long hidden from history, Galloway’s story reveals a war unfamiliar to most of us. As David Cecelski writes, “Galloway’s Civil War was a slave insurgency, a war of liberation that was the culmination of generations of perseverance and faith.” This riveting portrait illuminates Galloway’s life and deepens our insight into the Civil War and Reconstruction as experienced by African Americans in the South.

He risked his life to become a founding father of civil rights. Why was he forgotten?

The Los Angeles Times
2022-02-09

Stuart Miller

Mention Walter White and it will likely conjure an image of Bryan Cranston from “Breaking Bad,” playing the man who snarled, “I am the danger.”

But there’s a real-life Walter White who deserves to be a household name — a Black man who faced unfathomable danger in pursuit of truth and justice as he did battle with the American way. White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today.

That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime’s engrossing new biography, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”…

Read the entire article here.

All Tangled Up: Intersecting Stigmas of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair

Black Camera: An International Film Journal
Volume 9, Number 1, Fall 2017
pages 47-61

Reighan Gillam, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Southern California

The film Pelo Malo / Bad Hair (dir. Mariana Rondón, 2013) depicts the story of Junior, a mixed-race young boy in Venezuela who wishes to straighten his curly hair. This essay shows that the stigmatization of black hair is part of Venezuela’s racial aesthetic regime and thus contextualizes the actions and desires of the main character. Moreover, while much of the literature on race and beauty in Latin America focuses on women’s experiences, this essay examines men’s and boys’ experiences of aesthetic regimes that value whiteness. Junior’s continual fussing with his hair, as well as his other actions, informs his mother’s fears that he is gay. I argue that the main character, Junior, is subject to shifting forms of stigma that inform his attempts to straighten his curly hair and in turn inform Junior’s mother’s perception that he is gay.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black soldier who crossed Delaware with Washington will be honored in New Jersey

Courier Post
Cherry Hill, New Jersey
2022-02-09

Matthew Korfhage, USA Today Network

New Jersey’s Oliver Cromwell, who crossed the Delaware with George Washington and lived to nearly 100, will at long last receive a historical marker.

Since they were children, cousins Arianna Murray and Jane Fox Long had known the story of Oliver Cromwell.

His story wasn’t taught in schoolbooks. But in Burlington, New Jersey, and across the country, nine generations of his family helped keep it alive.

“We knew that our great-great-great grandfather — I forget how many greats — had crossed the Delaware with Washington,” Fox Long said. “It was the story that my mom had told, and it was also passed down to her.”

“Every Fourth of July, it was always a conversation piece,” said Murray, from her home in Philadelphia. “How could it not be?”

Cromwell was a decorated hero of New Jersey, they knew, a representative of an American history that had gone unheralded for much of this nation’s lifetime: an African American patriot of the Revolutionary War…

…Against this backdrop, Cromwell was born on the farm of tavernkeeper John Hutchin on May 24, 1753, in present-day Burlington County, an area whose taverns “Burlington Biographies” author Richard L. Thompson described as a hotbed for American revolutionary sentiment.

Cromwell’s parentage is not known with certainty, but multiple records refer to him as being of mixed race, likely African and white heritage. Late in life, he referred to himself as being “in the family of John Hutchin.”

Cromwell joined the New Jersey militia in 1775, where he was listed as “Indian,” leading to speculation he may have had Native American heritage. This is far from definitive, said Burlington County historian Jeff Macechak, who noted that other soldiers he believed to be of African descent were also listed the same way…

Read the entire article here.

Slavery took hold in Florida under the Spanish in the ‘forgotten century’ of 1492-1619.

Tampa Bay Times
2019-08-29

J. Michael Francis, Hough Family Endowed Chair
University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Gary Mormino, Professor emeritus of History
University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Rachel Sanderson, Associate Director, La Florida: The Interactive Digital Archive of the Americas
University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Every 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida included Africans, both free and enslaved.

On Jan. 5, 1595, an infant boy named Esteban was baptized in the small Spanish garrison town of St. Augustine. In the priest’s three-line baptism entry, Esteban’s mother is identified only by her first name, Gratia. Described as a slave owned by a Spanish woman named Catalina, Gratia was one of perhaps 50 slaves who lived in St. Augustine at the end of the 16th century. And like Gratia, most of the town’s other slaves appear only briefly in the historical record, with few personal details besides a Christian name: Simón, María, Agustín, Francisca, Ana, Baltasar, Felipe or Ambrosio.

Collectively, their long-forgotten stories document and complement a remarkable history that dates back more than a century before the first slaves reached Virginia in 1619. They portray a society that was fluid and eclectic. By 1619, La Florida’s population included Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, French, Flemish, Germans, two Irishmen, West Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans and a diverse group of Native Americans. In other words, early Florida reflected a population that resembled modern America.

Floridanos of African descent were present from the earliest Spanish expeditions to the peninsula. Most readers are familiar with the founding myth of Florida and Juan Ponce de León’s alleged search for the Fountain of Youth. However, his 1513 voyage takes on a different complexion when we understand the crew’s composition, which included several free blacks. One of them, Juan Garrido, a native of West Africa, later participated in Hernando Cortés’s 1519 conquest of Mexico, where he lived over the next two decades, participating in numerous conquest expeditions. In a lengthy petition submitted to the Spanish Crown in 1538, Garrido highlighted his three-decade career as a “conquistador,” adding that he commissioned the construction of Mexico City’s first Christian chapel and that he was the one who introduced wheat into Mexico…

Read the entire article here.