Chick

Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Books, Media Archive, Poetry, United Kingdom on 2013-02-09 01:26Z by Steven

Chick

Bloodaxe Books
2013-01-24
64 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1852249609; ISBN-13: 978-1852249601

Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe’s first book of poems takes you on a journey round her father, a Chinese-black Jamaican migrant who disappeared at night to play cards or dice in London’s old East End to support his family, an unstable and dangerous existence that took its toll on his physical and mental health. ‘Chick’ was his gambling nickname. A shadowy figure in her childhood, Chick was only half known to her until she entered the night world of the old man as a young woman. The name is the key to poems concerned with Chick’s death, the secret history of his life in London, and her perceptions of him as a father. With London as their backdrop, Hannah Lowe’s deeply personal narrative poems are often filmic in effect and brimming with sensory detail in their evocations of childhood and coming-of-age, love and loss of love, grief and regret.

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Passing: A Strategy to Dissolve Identities and Revamp Differences

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, Philosophy on 2013-02-08 02:16Z by Steven

Passing: A Strategy to Dissolve Identities and Revamp Differences

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
January 2008
142 pages
ISBN: 9780838641255

Anna Camaiti Hostert, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Studies Program and Philosophy
Florida Atlantic University

This book takes its title from the homonymous novel by Nella Larsen who, during the Harlem Renaissance, posed the question of what it means to be black in a racist country. The practice of passing was in fact used by African Americans to escape discrimination during the time of segregation. Nella Larsen condemns this practice, but also shows its potential, defining it as “not entirely strange perhaps… but certainly not entirely friendly.”

Starting from this consideration, Camaiti Hostert’s book turns the meaning of the social practice of passing upside down and makes it become a universal tool to redefine any social, ethnic, gender, and religious identity. Based on the Foucauldian consideration that total visibility is a “trap,” the author focuses her attention on the interstices, on the spaces off and on the narratives between the lines. The emphasis is on the transitional moment, in a Gramscian sense: the fluid state flowing between the starting and ending points becomes the place of a counter-hegemony, which helps not only to rewrite history but also to change the political status quo. More interesting than the departure or arrival point is the phase any individual has to go through in order to redefine his/her own self and his/her position in society. It is a deterritorialization of the self and of social practices. It is a way to oppose any form of binary thinking and particularly cultural barriers. Post-colonial literatures, cinema, and new communication technologies that shape the many forms of popular culture are the common ground on which passing relies. From there, from the different conditions of in betweeness, stems the possibility of change.

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Beyond Loving: Intimate Racework in Lesbian, Gay, and Straight Interracial Relationships

Posted in Books, Gay & Lesbian, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science on 2013-02-08 01:39Z by Steven

Beyond Loving: Intimate Racework in Lesbian, Gay, and Straight Interracial Relationships

Oxford University Press
2012-08-07
240 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 9780199743568; ISBN10: 0199743568

Amy C. Steinbugler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Beyond Loving provides a critical examination of interracial intimacy in the beginning decades of the twenty-first century—an era rife with racial contradictions, where interracial relationships are increasingly seen as symbols of racial progress even as old stereotypes about illicit eroticism persist. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, Amy Steinbugler examines the racial dynamics of everyday life for lesbian, gay, and heterosexual Black/White couples. She disputes the notion that interracial partners are enlightened subjects who have somehow managed to “get beyond” race. Instead, for many partners, interracial intimacy represents not the end, but the beginning of a sustained process of negotiating racial differences. Her research reveals the ordinary challenges that partners frequently face and the myriad ways that race shapes their interactions with each other as well as with neighbors, family members, co-workers and strangers. Steinbugler analyzes the everyday actions and strategies through which individuals maintain close relationships in a society with deeply-rooted racial inequalities-what she calls “racework.” Beyond Loving reveals interracial intimacy as an ongoing process rather than a singular accomplishment. This analytic shift helps us reach a new understanding of how race “works” – not just in intimate spheres, but across all facets of contemporary social life.

Features

  • Interviews with same-sex interracial couples–a topic on which there is very little research—allow Steinbugler to examine for the first time how everyday racial practices are shaped by sexuality and gender.
  • Amy Steinbugler challenges the widespread assumption that interracial intimacy represents the ultimate erasure of racial differences.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: The Historical Roots of Lesbian, Gay, and Heterosexual Black/White Intimacy
  • Chapter 2: Public Interraciality: Navigating Racially Homogeneous Social Spaces
  • Chapter 3: Public Interraciality: Managing Visibility
  • Chapter 4: Intimate Interactions: Racework as Emotional Labor
  • Chapter 5: Interracial Identities: Racework as Boundary Work
  • Chapter 6: White Racial Identities Through the Lens of Interracial Intimacy
  • Conclusion: The Intimate Politics of Interraciality
  • Appendix A. Research Methods
  • Appendix B. Respondent Characteristics
  • Table 1. Design of Interview Sample
  • Table 2. Sample Details by Group
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A comprehensive and complex look at multiethnic Asian American identities

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Book/Video Reviews, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2013-02-07 23:10Z by Steven

A comprehensive and complex look at multiethnic Asian American identities

Nichi Bei: A mixed plate of Japanese American News & Culture
2013-01-01

Ben Hamamoto, Nichi Bei Weekly Contributor

When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities, by Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012, 248 pp., $21.95, paperback)

The whole spectrum of the mixed race, multiethnic Asian American experience could never be contained in a single book. That said, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu’s new book, “When Half is Whole,” comes pretty close (without ever setting out to do so). The book is a series of profiles of mixed race and multiethnic Asian and Asian American people, tied together by the author’s personal reflections and explanations of how these people both shape and are shaped by their larger cultural contexts. The people featured in the book have ancestries that include Chinese, Japanese, Okinawan, Filipino, Mexican, black and white. They come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, grew up in different countries, and have different sexual orientations. Some have Asian mothers, others Asian fathers. Yet each person’s experience is portrayed with nuance and sensitivity…

Read the entire article here.

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Racial Socialization of Biracial Youth: Maternal Messages and Approaches to Address Discrimination

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2013-02-07 18:28Z by Steven

Racial Socialization of Biracial Youth: Maternal Messages and Approaches to Address Discrimination

Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies
Volume 62, Issue 1 (February 2013)
pages 140–153
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00748.x

Alethea Rollins, Instructor, Child and Family Development
University of Central Missouri

Andrea G. Hunter, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

We explored how mothers of biracial youth prepare their children to navigate diverse racial ecologies and experiences of racism and discrimination. A qualitative thematic analysis was used to identify racial socialization messages mothers used and emergent racial socialization approaches. Mothers of biracial youth engaged in the full range of racial socialization discussed in the literature, including cultural, minority, self-development, egalitarian, and silent racial socialization. These messages varied by the biracial heritage of the youth, such that mothers of biracial youth with Black heritage were more likely to provide self-development racial socialization messages, whereas mothers of biracial youth without Black heritage were more likely to provide silent racial socialization. On the basis of the array of racial socialization messages mothers delivered, we identified three emergent approaches: promotive, protective, and passive racial socialization.

Read the entire article here.

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Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture

Posted in Barack Obama, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs on 2013-02-07 00:30Z by Steven

Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture

University of Tennessee Press
2013-01-11
150 pages
Cloth ISBN-10: 1572339322; ISBN-13: 978-1572339323

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University

The past two decades have seen a growing influx of biracial discourse in fiction, memoir, and theory, and since the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency, debates over whether America has entered a “post-racial” phase have set the media abuzz. In this penetrating and provocative study, Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins adds a new dimension to this dialogue as she investigates the ways in which various mixed-race writers and public figures have redefined both “blackness” and “whiteness” by invoking multiple racial identities.

Focusing on several key novels—Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses (1998), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998)—as well as memoirs by Obama, James McBride, and Rebecca Walker and the personae of singer Mariah Carey and actress Halle Berry, Dagbovie-Mullins challenges conventional claims about biracial identification with a concept she calls “black-sentient mixed-race identity.” Whereas some multiracial organizations can diminish blackness by, for example, championing the inclusion of multiple-race options on census forms and similar documents, a black-sentient consciousness stresses a perception rooted in blackness—“a connection to a black consciousness,” writes the author, “that does not overdetermine but still plays a large role in one’s racial identification.” By examining the nuances of this concept through close readings of fiction, memoir, and the public images of mixed-race celebrities, Dagbovie-Mullins demonstrates how a “black-sentient mixed-race identity reconciles the widening separation between black/white mixed race and blackness that has been encouraged by contemporary mixed-race politics and popular culture.”

A book that promises to spark new debate and thoughtful reconsiderations of an especially timely topic, Crossing B(l)ack recognizes and investigates assertions of a black-centered mixed-race identity that does not divorce a premodern racial identity from a postmodern racial fluidity.

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Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy on 2013-02-06 19:00Z by Steven

Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense

Harvard University Press
February 2013
384 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
2 graphs, 4 tables
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674064461

Edited by

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning in the School of Arts; Sciences and Adjunct Professor of Public Health & Community Medicine in the School of Medicine
Tufts University

Jeremy Gruber, President and Executive Director
Council for Responsible Genetics

Can genes determine which fifty-year-old will succumb to Alzheimer’s, which citizen will turn out on voting day, and which child will be marked for a life of crime? Yes, according to the Internet, a few scientific studies, and some in the biotechnology industry who should know better. Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber gather a team of genetic experts to argue that treating genes as the holy grail of our physical being is a patently unscientific endeavor. Genetic Explanations urges us to replace our faith in genetic determinism with scientific knowledge about how DNA actually contributes to human development.

The concept of the gene has been steadily revised since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. No longer viewed by scientists as the cell’s fixed set of master molecules, genes and DNA are seen as a dynamic script that is ad-libbed at each stage of development. Rather than an autonomous predictor of disease, the DNA we inherit interacts continuously with the environment and functions differently as we age. What our parents hand down to us is just the beginning. Emphasizing relatively new understandings of genetic plasticity and epigenetic inheritance, the authors put into a broad developmental context the role genes are known to play in disease, behavior, evolution, and cognition.

Rather than dismissing genetic reductionism out of hand, Krimsky and Gruber ask why it persists despite opposing scientific evidence, how it influences attitudes about human behavior, and how it figures in the politics of research funding.

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What does Martin Luther King mean to Latinos today?

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-02-06 05:41Z by Steven

What does Martin Luther King mean to Latinos today?

Bentley IMPACT – The Power of Ideas
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts
2013-01-17

Donna Maria Blancero, Associate Professor of Management

“I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2013, we must ask ourselves the question: has his dream become a reality for Latinos?

We know that Dr. King inspired many Latinos, including Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Latinos, just like other Americans, consider Dr. King a great leader of the civil rights movement. If he were alive today, he likely would be working side by side with Latinos to address issues of inequality.

But what does his legacy mean for us today? Has his dream been achieved?…

…When I ask participants in my research to self-identify their race (they all self-identify as Latino), I am typically met with a range of responses. Some are angry at me and state that they are Mexican American or Puerto Rican and that I shouldn’t be asking about race—their race, they say, is Latino! Others have written in comments, such as “I checked off ‘white’ but don’t tell my family, they would be angry at me.” Many Latinos have mixed backgrounds that don’t easily fit into a box. More importantly, many of us don’t want to be put in a box, even if it is “multi-racial.’”…

Read the entire article here.

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The Fictive Flapper: A Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston and Cather

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2013-02-06 05:26Z by Steven

The Fictive Flapper: A Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston and Cather

University of Maryland, College Park
2004
391 pages

Traci B. Abbott, Lecturer, English and Media Studies
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This study seeks to reevaluate the 1920s icon of assertive female sexuality, the flapper, as represented in the novels of four women writers. Although cultural images often designate, by their very construction, normal and alteritous social categories, I argue that the flapper’s presence and popularity encourage rather than restrict this autonomy for even those female populations she appears to reject, notably lower-class women, nonwhite women, and homosexuals. Specifically, the flapper was predicated upon the cultural practices and beliefs of many of the very groups she was designed to exclude, and therefore her presence attests to the reality of these women’s experiences. Moreover, her emphasis on the liberating potential of sexual autonomy could not be contained within her strictly defined parameters in part because of her success in outlining this potential. Each chapter then focuses upon images of black and white female sexuality in the novels, chosen for their attention to female sexual autonomy within and beyond the flapper’s boundaries as well as the author’s exclusion from the flapper’s parameters.  Nella Larsen’s Passing suggests that the fluidity of female sexual desire cannot be contained within strict dichotomies of race, class, or sexual orientation, and women can manipulate and perhaps even transcend such boundaries. Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life offers a critique of the flapper’s excessive emphasis on sexual desirability as defined by conspicuous consumption, maintaining that lower-class white and black women can and should have access to sexual autonomy, while Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston similarly questions the denigration of working-class and non-white women in this model with her affirming view of Janie Woods, but also complicates the cultural presumption that any woman can find autonomy within a heterosexual relationship if such relationships are still defined by conventional notions of gender power. Finally, Willa Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, contends modern black and white women have the right to control their own sexual needs within an unusual antebellum setting. Thus, all of these novel provide other models of sexual autonomy besides the white, middle-class, heterosexual flapper while harnessing the flapper’s affirming and popular imagery.

Read the entire dissertation here.

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“And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2013-02-06 03:08Z by Steven

“And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

AsianShakespearean ~ Poetic Justifications, Artistic Testimonies…
2012-04-25

Rebecca Hu

Scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing has frequently been approached from the angles of race and queer theories.  H. J. Landry and soon after, Brian Carr, have recently broken ground in their demonstrations of a new synthesized approach to the discourses, taking into account symptomatic readings of homosexual desire as an expression of hooksian feminism and ethnic pride. Nevertheless, by synthesizing, both critical approaches tread dangerously on the delicate lines concerning race and gender: Landry, although meticulously addressing his usage of the term, “mulatto,” in his third footnote, takes the political construction of “race” for granted; his perpetual separation of “black” and “white” as distinct figures even as he rebukes this constructed “blood quantum version of race” undermines the internal, complex “cultural authenticities” which Candice Jenkins just a year before him had striven to demarcate in her analysis of the same novel (46-47). So undermining, Landry problematically critiques that performance of conventional femininity through submission to black men is “embracing inferiority” (25). Carr, in a similar vein, situates paranoid interpretations of passing as “nothing” for “something,” implying consequently that “blackness” and “whiteness” are, in fact, differentiated by absence and existence respectively. Carr’s ironic dichotomy necessitates qualification throughout his assessment of paranoia. He admits repeatedly that concentrated focus on the nothing does, indeed, further paranoia itself. Controversy arises in Carr’s article when he subsequently links paranoia with homosexuality with the “killing desire” which ultimately eliminates Clare Kendry (291) — this time, without sufficient qualification. These racial and gender pitfalls caution us to re-evaluate our current synthesis when speaking of Passing

Read the entire article here.

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