Mixed Race Studies

That Time I Clapped Back at Langston Hughes

Mixed Auntie Confidential
2023-03-05

TaRessa Stovall

Me at age 3

Even as a child, I balked at the stereotype of the Tragic Mulatto.

It didn’t make sense to me.

And I straight-up resented its implication: that my existence was tragic and my whole life worthless because I was “this close to” but not completely white.

Neither I nor any of the Mixed folks I grew up with seemed the least bit miserable about our ancestry or identities.

I was a young “bookworm”—today I’d be called an avid reader—regularly devouring the works of many fine poets and authors including Langston Hughes, who was one of my favorites…

Read the entire article here.

‘Moral electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the trans-Atlantic struggle for abolition and equal rights

Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Volume 40, 2019 – Issue 3
pages 543-562
DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2018.1539459

Bryan LaPointe, Ph.D. Candidate in History
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Little known to historians, the Guadeloupean-born antislavery and equal rights activist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt exemplified the complex trans-Atlantic networks forged for the abolitionist cause across the nineteenth century. As a contributing journalist for a Parisian political and literary publication, Melvil-Bloncourt produced numerous pieces on the history and politics of slavery and emancipation around the Atlantic world. The American Civil War especially galvanized Melvil-Bloncourt into more fervent antislavery action, prompting him not only to connect with activists based in New Orleans and the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but also to raise money in France for former American slaves. This project explores the depth of Melvil-Bloncourt’s emancipationist sensibilities and activism, guided by what he deemed ‘moral electricity,’ highlighting the influence of the otherwise overlooked Francophone world in the age of emancipation.

Read or purchase the article here.

Colin Kaepernick calls out adoptive parents’ racism as he promotes new graphic novel

CNN
2023-03-10

Matt Foster

Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick accused his White adoptive parents of perpetuating racism in their household in an interview with CBS’ Adriana Diaz on Thursday.

“I know my parents loved me, but there were still very problematic things that I went through,” the 35-year-old said.

“I think it was important to show that, no, this can happen in your home, and how you move forward collectively while addressing the racism that is being perpetuated.”…

Read the entire article here.

Colin Kaepernick: Change the Game, A Graphic Novel

Scholastic Graphix
2023-03-07
Paperback ISBN: 978-1338789652
6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

Written by Colin Kaepernick and Eve L. Ewing
Illustrated by Orlando Caicedo

Colin Kaepernick: Change the Game is an inspiring high school graphic novel memoir for readers 12 and up from celebrated athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick. A high school senior at a crossroads in life and heavily scouted by colleges and Major League Baseball (MLB), Colin has a bright future ahead of him as a highly touted prospect. Everyone, from his parents to his teachers and coaches, is in agreement on his future. Everyone but him.

Colin isn’t excited about baseball. In the words of five-time all-star MLB player Adam Jones, “Baseball is a white man’s sport.” He looks up to athletes like Allen Iverson: talented, hyper-competitive, unapologetically Black, and dominating their sports while staying true to themselves. College football looks a lot more fun than sleeping on hotel room floors in the minor leagues of baseball. But Colin doesn’t have a single offer to play football. Yet. This touching YA graphic novel memoir explores the story of how a young change-maker learned to find himself, make his own way, and never compromise.

‘She had to hide’: the secret history of the first Asian woman nominated for a best actress Oscar

The Guardian
2023-03-07

Andrew Lawrence
Beaufort, South Carolina

Merle Oberon, a pick for best actress in 1936, was born in Bombay and spent her career passing for white

Magazine writers didn’t know what to make of Merle Oberon when she took Hollywood by storm in the 1930s. One writer described her as “bizarre, bewildering, and different”, while others marveled at her “delicate” oval face, “eloquent” emerald eyes, “bright red lips” and “alabaster” skin.

Though her 1936 best actress Oscar nomination for the coming-of-age drama The Dark Angel affirmed her place in a league with Katharine Hepburn and the eventual winner, Bette Davis, the glamor paragons of the day, it was only later that the world discovered Oberon was a south Asian woman passing for white…

Read the entire article here.

BUILDING A MIXED RACE COMMUNITY: The People, Building and Sites of the Winton Triangle

Chowan Discovery Group
2023-03-06

Marvin Tupper Jones

The history covered in this exhibit spans from 1851 to 1973 and takes the viewer from the antebellum time through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the modern Civil Rights eras. It tells stories about over 30 people along with photographs and text. Four women are featured, as well as business people, farmers, carpenters, educators, church leaders, soldiers (Civil War and WWII), Civil Rights activists and organizations. One building included among the thirty 20”x30” panels is the exhibit’s first venue, the C.S. Brown Auditorium in Winton, NC…

For more information, click here.​

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Rutgers University Press
2023-06-16
194 pages,
8 bw, 3 color
6.12 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 9781978835535
Cloth ISBN: 9781978835542
EPUB ISBN: 9781978835559
Kindle ISBN: 9781978835566
PDF ISBN: 9781978835573

Rena M. Heinrich, Assistant Professor of Theatre Practice
University of Southern California

Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people.

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Stages of Denial
• Chapter 2: Tragic Eurasians: Mixed-Asian Dramas in the Late-Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 3: Shape Shifting Performances in the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 4: Cosmopolitan Identity in Mixed Dramatic Forms
• Chapter 5: Multiraciality in the Post-racial Era
• Chapter 6: Beyond Monoracial Hierarchies: Recovering Lost Selves
• Acknowledgments
• Index

A Real Negro Girl: Fredi Washington and the New Negro Renaissance

Oxford University Press
2023-10-02
320 Pages
25 black and white illustrations
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780197626214

Laurie A. Woodard, Assistant Professor of History
City College of New York, New York, New York

• First biography of dancer, actor, and activist Fredi Washington
• Highlights the role of the performing arts in the history of the New Negro Renaissance, which has tended to be focused on literary arts
• Focuses on an African American who could have but chose not to “pass“

The first biography of performing artist, writer, and civil and human rights activist Fredi Washington.

Following Fredi Washington’s debut in her first dramatic role in 1926, Alfred Spengler of the New York North Side News reported that she was “astonishingly pretty for a real Negro girl.” Throughout her career, Washington was vulnerable to discrimination because her near-white skin and hazel eyes, coupled with her self-identification as Negro, cast her as too physically white to play black and too culturally black to play white. The multifaceted Washington was of course a great deal more than her looks; she was a performing artist, a writer, and a civil and human rights activist. Embracing the genres of dance, theater, and film, she used her talent, creativity, and determination to sustain a thirty-year career in the arts and in labor and political activism during the New Negro Renaissance and beyond.

Although Fredi Washington has been largely forgotten, A Real Negro Girl shows that, at the zenith of her career, she was a household name in the black community, well known in mainstream America, and a darling of the European press. Most famous for her role in the film “Imitation of Life,” she was a part of a cohort that included Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Delving into her professional and personal experiences in Harlem, nationally, and internationally, this book illuminates Washington’s significance to the New Negro Renaissance and reveals the vital influence of black performing artists and of black women on the movement. Over the years, Washington expanded her social and political consciousness and anti-racism activism, encompassing journalism, labor organizing, protests, and support of progressive politics. As a founder and executive director of the Negro Actors Guild of America, she sought to protect black artists from professional exploitation and physical abuse.

Incorporating close readings of images and films, interviews, and fan mail, as well as writings by and about Washington, A Real Negro Girl highlights Fredi Washington as an influential actor in the African American quest for civil and human rights.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: The Roots of the New Negro Renaissance
• Chapter 2: Dancing All Day: Reading Blackface and Black Bodies
• Chapter 3: Boxers, Blacks, and a Real Negro Girl: White Expectations and Imagined Conceptions of Authentic Blackness
• Chapter 4: Race, Place, and Miscegenation: Fredi Washington in Imitation of Life
• Chapter 5: Beyond the Footlights: New Negro Performing Artists and More Tangible Forms of Activism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

Rutgers University Press
2022-12-09
218 pages
7 b-w illustrations
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9781978830875
Cloth ISBN: 9781978830882
EPUB ISBN: 9781978830899
PDF ISBN: 9781978830905

Daniel McNeil, Department of Gender Studies
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario

Thinking While Black brings together the work and ideas of the most notorious film critic in America, one of the most influential intellectuals in the United Kingdom, and a political and cultural generation that consumed images of rebellion and revolution around the world as young Black teenagers in the late 1960s. Drawing on hidden and little known archives of resistance and resilience, it sheds new light on the politics and poetics of young people who came together, often outside of conventional politics, to rock against racism in the 1970s and early ‘80s. It re-examines debates in the 1980s and ‘90s about artists who “spread out” to mount aggressive challenges to a straight, white, middle-class world, and entertainers who “sold out” to build their global brands with performances that attacked the Black poor, rejected public displays of introspection, and expressed unambiguous misogyny and homophobia. Finally, it thinks with and through the work of writers who have been celebrated and condemned as eminent intellectuals and curmudgeonly contrarians in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it delivers the smartest and most nuanced investigation into thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Armond White as they have evolved from “young soul rebels” to “middle-aged mavericks” and “grumpy old men,” lamented the debasement and deskilling of Black film and music in a digital age, railed against the discourteous discourse and groupthink of screenies and Internet Hordes, and sought to stimulate some deeper and fresher thinking about racism, nationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness and social media.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Theories in Motion
• Chapter 2: Black and British
• Chapter 3: A Movie-Struck Kid from Detroit
• Chapter 4: Slave-Descendants, Diaspora Subjects, and World Citizens
• Chapter 5: Enlarging the American Cinema
• Chapter 6: Middle-Aged, Gifted, and Black
• Coda
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Announcing The First Be Your Mixed-Ass Self^® Anthology

2023-02-20
Militantly Mixed

Mixed-race writers invited to share contribute to groundbreaking celebration of Mixed identity.

Militantly Mixed and Mixed Auntie Confidential announce an exciting new anthology celebrating a fresh dimension of Mixed-race identity journeys for writers at all experience levels.

The premiere issue of the Be Your Mixed Ass Self^® Anthology Volume 1 welcomes original, unpublished essays and poetry by Mixed-race adults of all genders, and mixes.

“Be Your Mixed Ass Self^®” is the motto of the Militantly Mixed podcast, created and hosted by Sharmane “Sir Auntie Mane” Fury. “This anthology takes that affirmation to the next level to uplift public unapologetic mixedness in ways that empower us all.”

This groundbreaking anthology will be a fundraiser for the award-winning Militantly Mixed podcast which is celebrating its fifth anniversary in 2023. The anthology submission deadline is March 15, 2023.

“We’re looking for writing that shares the experience of becoming your Mixed ass self,” says TaRessa Stovall, author and blogger at Mixed Auntie Confidential, who is co-editing the anthology with Sharmane. “Contributors don’t have to be professional or published writers. We welcome new and experienced writers to add their voices to the mix.”

“It’s the authenticity of the writing for us,” said Sharmane…

For more information, click here.