Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
NPR’s All Things Considered Interview with Heidi W. Durrow
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2010-03-02, 21:00 to 23:00Z
Heidi W. Durrow, author of the new Bellwether Prize winning novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, is scheduled to be interviewed on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered today (Tuesday, March 2, 2010 between 16:00 and 18:00 EST). Please check your local NPR affiliate for actual broadcast times.
CU professor helps author come alive: New [Ralph] Ellison book on sale
CU Independent
University of Colorado
2010-02-07
Kaely Moore
Adam Bradley, a CU associate professor of English, and John Callahan, a professor of humanities at Lewis and Clark College, have come together after author Ralph Ellison’s death to produce unpublished work.
Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” became a literary success after its release in 1952. From the time of its publication, to Ellison’s death in 1994, the author worked on putting out a second novel that he never finished…
…Bradley, who has a black father and a white mother, said that he didn’t have much of a connection with the black side of his family while growing up.
“When I read this book in college, it had a clarifying influence on me,” Bradley said. “I saw parts of myself in it in the search for identity, in the search for a father figure and all these sorts of things that are really quite personal, played out in a public work of fiction. It inspired me to understand what exactly my multiracial identity means.”…
…Bradley said the book centers around the relationship between two characters. One is a black jazzman turned preacher and the other is a child of indeterminate race whom the preacher raises as his own. The two travel around the country as a part of a revival sermon until the child strikes out on his own and disappears for years, emerging decades later as a white, racist senator.
The central plot of the book is about an attempt upon the senator’s life by the hands of his own estranged son, Bradley said, as the preacher races to Washington to try to save the man he knew years before…
Read the entire article here.
The Bluest Eye [Review of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky]
The New York Times
2010-02-25
Louisa Thomas, Contributing Editor
Newsweek Magazine
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. By Heidi W. Durrow. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2010. 264 pages. Cloth ISBN-13: 9781565126800)
There’s a reason many great social justice novels are written as historical fiction or contain elements of fantasy or allegory: This builds a certain crucial distance into their storytelling. Heidi W. Durrow is the daughter of an African-American serviceman and a white Danish mother, and her first novel was, according to her publisher, “inspired by true events.” On the face of it, the story of a biracial girl growing up in 1980s America, grappling with confusion over both her identity and a complicated, mysterious family history, couldn’t be more timely or important. But in the moments when Durrow’s novel seems to tackle its big themes most self-consciously — when it appears written for the Age of Obama — it can be predictable, even dull. It’s when it approaches the questions of identity and community more subtly and indirectly that “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” can actually fly…
Read the entire review here.
The Voices Project Screening and Discussion: Multi-Racial Identities, Part 1
Oregon State University
Wednesday, 2010-03-03 12:00-13:00 PST (Local Time)
Memorial Union
Room: Journey Room
Contact: Diane Davis
OSU students, staff and faculty share their experiences and challenges of being multiracial at OSU and in life. They address issues such as their identity and when they realized it; their cultural attachments; how others perceive them; their family interactions; the pros and cons of being multiracial; whether there is anything they would change about their identity, advice for others and why this issue is important.
For more information, click here.
Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the “South,” and American Bodies
Southern Quarterly
Volume 41, Number 1 (Fall 2003)
pages 39-52
Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor of English
University of Florida
In the paper I investigate a certain kind of imaginative response, especially on the part of mixed-race artists, to the prevalence of racialized discourses of modernity and nationalism in the Americas. Such discourses often dominated public thought in the Americas in general; more specifically for my purposes, I will be looking at the work of two artists, in Harlem and Mexico City, between the 1920s and the 1940s. In negotiating their own sense of a particularly mixed-race and thoroughly modern American nationalism, the United States mulatto writer Jean Toomer (1895-1967) and the Mexican mestiza painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) each would try to imagine an organic fusion-one which saw the fusion presumably inherent in race-mixing as a practice of hybridization and/ or grafting. Such a fusion was, further, imagined as a coming together of a (largely imaginary) time and space of primitive energies with the energies of modernity. As William Carlos Williams conceived it, to hybridize or to marry, as he put it in his 1925 In the American Grain, would be the only “moral” way to “fertilize . . . to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize” (121). For artists and intellectuals in the United States who saw that the 1920s presented a crossroads in how the US would define itself as “American,” people like Williams, the writer Waldo Frank, and even many intellectuals of color such as Toomer felt indeed that cultural, if not also racial, fusion might be the “crosspollenizing” way out of the seeming sterility of an ever-deepening divide along the color line. For Mexican artists and intellectuals at a time of intense nation building, given that race and cultural mixing in Mexico were already an unavoidable fact, the idea of hybridity, that is mestizaje (Indo-Hispanic mixing), of necessity became the watchword for a new and unified Mexican nation. At a time when eugenics science generally characterized race-mixing as productive only of degenerate or sterile offspring, Kahlo and Toomer, and others like them, would effect this imaginative unification, fusion, and cross-pollenization by means of a eugenic counter-discourse which privileged race (and cultural) mixing as productive of hybrid, and therefore stronger, cultures and, ultimately, nations. If we remember the fascination that genetic, eugenic, and evolutionary theories held for both North and South Americans in the earlier part of the twentieth century, it begins to make sense that such an idea of cultural and racial hybridity ultimately would give rise to a very general notion that North must fuse in some way with South, given the tendency to divide the United States and Mexico into “North” and “South,” a division which often imaginatively paralleled the industrial/agricultural divide assigned to these same regions in the United States itself. For Toomer in the United States, this fusion would involve a literally organic connection between the urban North and the agrarian South. For Kahlo and her husband, the artist and muralist Diego Rivera, the fusion would often be envisioned in terms of an agrarian Mexico (South) with an industrial United States (North)…
Read the entire article here.