Mixed Race Studies

I first met Audre in 1984, when I was 22. She told me her grandfather had been Scottish, and that I didn’t need to choose between being Scottish and being black. “You can be both. You can call yourself an Afro Scot,” she said in her New York drawl. Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes…

Jackie Kay, “My hero: Audre Lorde by Jackie Kay,” The Guardian, November 11, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/18/my-hero-audre-lorde-jackie-kay

Darling: New & Selected Poems

Bloodaxe Books
2007
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 1 85224 777 0

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

Humour, gender, sexuality, sensuality, identity, racism, cultural difference: when do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay’s part of the equation. Darling brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, The Adoption Papers, Other Lovers, Off Colour and Life Mask, as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers.

Kay’s poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. The title of her acclaimed short story collection, Why Don’t You Stop Talking, could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice – the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.

Jackie Kay reads from Darling

Jackie Kay reads three poems, ‘In My Country’, ‘Somebody Else’ and ‘Darling’, from Darling: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes eight poems from Darling read by Jackie Kay.  Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by Scottish parents. With humour and emotional directness, her poetry explores gender, sexuality, identity, racism and cultural difference as well as love and music. Her poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. We filmed her at her home in Manchester in 2007.

A short biography of Jackie Kay written by Elizabeth Shostak can be read here.  An excerpt is below.

Unconventional Upbringing
Kay’s fascination with themes of identity can be traced to an upbringing that set her apart, in many ways, from the majority culture in her native Scotland. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, she was adopted by a white family and raised in Glasgow, where she often accompanied her communist parents to antiapartheid demonstrations and peace rallies. Life wasn’t easy for a biracial child in mostly–white Glasgow. “I still have Scottish people asking me where I’m from,” she told Guardian writer Libby Brooks. “They won’t actually hear my voice, because they’re too busy seeing my face.”…

Early Works Explored Identity
When Kay was twelve, she wrote One Person, Two Names, an eighty–page story about an African–American girl who pretended to be white. The question of how we define ourselves, and why, has intrigued Kay in all her subsequent work…

¹Shostak, Elizabeth. “Kay, Jackie 1961–.” Contemporary Black Biography. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. (May 2, 2010). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2873900038.html

Interview: Jackie Kay

The Journal
Newcastle upon Tyne
2013-03-30

Jackie Kay is about to be read in places most writers never reach. David Whetstone spoke to her.

YOU can imagine there are lots of things a writer dreams of – literary prizes, lucrative deals, maybe a film adaptation.

But a different accolade has come the way of Jackie Kay, professor of creative writing at Newcastle University.

Her acclaimed memoir, Red Dust Road, has been chosen as one of 20 books on the list for World Book Night (April 23).

On that night 20,000 volunteers will each distribute 20 copies of the chosen books in communities where reading is not commonplace.

“Obviously the books can be by writers living or dead so there were a lot to choose from,” says Jackie…

…Jackie was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a Scottish couple and grew up in Glasgow.

The book, sparked by Jackie’s decision to track down her birth parents, begins as she waits in a hotel in Nigeria to meet the father she has never seen.

“It’s a strange thing, looking at one black man after another wondering if he is your father,” she writes…

Read the entire interview here.

Jackie Kay @ 5×15

5×15
2012-10-16

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Five speakers, fifteen minutes each. True stories of passion, obsession and adventure recounted live with just two rules: no scripts and only fifteen minutes each.

The Red Dust Road

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University. Her experiences of growing up inspired her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers (1991), which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Her other collections include Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998), Darling: New and Selected Poems (2007) and The Lamplighter (2008). Her collection of poetry for children, Red, Cherry Red (2007) won the 2008 CLPE Poetry Award. Her first novel, Trumpet, published in 1998, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Award. She has also published three collections of short stories: Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002), Wish I Was Here (2006) and her latest book, Reality, Reality (2012). Her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), a memoir about meeting her Nigerian birth father, which was short-listed for the 2011 PEN/Ackerley Prize. Jackie Kay was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.

Jackie Kay: a poetic imagining of post-racial (be)longing

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN: 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.2] (2012-11-29)

Katy Massey

Jackie Kay is a prolific and well-loved writer who, though she has written in many forms, is best-known for her poetry. A mixed-race Scot who lives in the north of England, her work frequently utilises the facts of her own life as a means to ponder wider issues of identity, loss and sexual desire. Her approach challenges some of the key categories of social identification such as race, culture and belonging. Her work also spotlights some of the most cherished concepts of post-colonialism, most notably hybridity, plurality and the condition of the ‘in-between’.

In this article I suggest that, as Kay’s work explores the process of racial mixing, a ‘mixed’ reading is required in order to fully expose the subtleties within it. Such a reading is innovative in that it exposes two previously unarticulated ideas. First, the idea that mixedness can form a site of creative production as it is a condition which demands new identifications are continually brought into being. Second, that this process serves as a site of political resistance because it has a destabilising influence on fixed notions of ‘race’ and the operation of racialised thinking. It is exactly such a reading of Kay’s first autobiographical collection, The Adoption Papers, that this article attempts.

In suggesting the existence of a politically-resistant ‘mixed’ perspective, this article utilises ideas around racial mixing which have been developed in the field of in social science and cultural studies but have rarely been applied in literary criticism. For example, in the title of her book Mixed-race, Post-race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices Suki Ali boldly positions the state of mixedness as ‘post-race’. By positioning ‘mixed’ status as sitting outside fixed racial identifiers, and in this sense ‘post’ or beyond established discourses around race, she opens a space for thinking about ‘race’ which leaves room for uncertainty, for a ‘betweeness’ which remains undefined because perpetually in a state of re-creation…

Read the entire article here.

Jackie Kay and Sebastian Barry: Identity and struggle

The Guardian
2011-08-15

Sarah Crown

In our inaugural podcast from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Sebastian Barry and Jackie Kay talk to us about the themes that power their work

In our first podcast from the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festival, we explore questions of identity and struggle as played out in the 20th-century…

…The poet and novelist Jackie Kay turned memoirist last year with her book Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her birth parents: a white Scottish woman, and a Nigerian man. Her writing reflects her grappling with the thorny issue of her own identity, and she reveals how this podcast has reconnected her with her family…

[Jackie Kay reads “Burying My African Father.”]

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the audio here. Download the audio here.

Literature and Racial Ambiguity

Rodopi
2002
320 pages
8.7 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-90-420-1428-2 / 90-420-1428-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-90-420-1418-3 / 90-420-1418-0

Edited by:

Teresa Hubel, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College in London, Ontario

Neil Brooks, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College at Western University, London, Ontario

Contents

• Neil Brooks and Teresa Hubel: Introduction
• 1. Peter Clandfield: “What Is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the work of Jackie Kay
• 2. Neluka Silva: “Everyone was Vaguely Related”: Hybridity and the Politics of Race in Sri Lankan Literary Discourses in English
• 3. Teresa Zackodnik: Passing Transgressions and Authentic Identity in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• 4. Myriam Perregaux: Whiteness as Unstable Construction: Kate Pullinger’s The Last Time I Saw Jane
• 5. Bella Adams: Becoming Chinese: Racial Ambiguity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
• 6. Jennifer Sparrow: Strategic Créolité. Caliban and Miranda after Empire
• 7. Jennifer Gibbs: White Identity and the New Ethic in Faulkner’s Light In August
• 8. Elizabeth DeLoughrey: White Fathers, Brown Daughters: the Frisbie Family Romance and the American Pacific
• 9. Rita Keresztesi Treat: Writing Culture and Performing Race in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood ‘(1927)
• 10. Kathryn Nicol: Visible Differences: Viewing Racial Identity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and “Recitatif”
• 11. Yvette Tan: Looking Different/Rethinking Difference: Global Constants and/or Contradictory Characteristics in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies and Adib Kalim’s Seasonal Adjustments
• 12. Margaret D. Stetz: Jessie Fauset’s Fiction: Reconsidering Race and Revising Aestheticism
• 13. Paul Allatson: “I May Create A Monster”: Cherríe Moraga’s Transcultural Conundrum
• 14. Michele Hunter: Revisiting the Third Space: Reading Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• Notes on the Authors

Jackie Kay wins Scottish Book of the Year

The Edinburgh Reporter
2011-08-26

Creative Scotland is delighted to announce that award winning poet and author, Jackie Kay, has been awarded the 2011 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year, in partnership with Creative Scotland, for her autobiography Red Dust Road.

Jackie Kay received her £30,000 prize at a ceremony hosted by Dame Jenni Murray this afternoon at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
 
Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Kay was adopted at birth by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow.  Red Dust Road, published by Picador, is an autobiographical account of Jackie’s search to find her birth parents, a journey that is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions.  In an amazing new chapter, a recent Guardian Podcast by Jackie Kay led to her making contact with her birth sisters for the first time…

Read the entire article and listen to the interview here.

My hero: Audre Lorde by Jackie Kay

The Guardian
Series: My Hero
2011-11-18

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

Refusal to be defined by single categories: Lorde in 1983. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

‘Lorde was openly lesbian before the gay movement existed. Her wise words often seem eerily prescient’

Audre Lorde dropped the y from Audrey when she was still a child so she could be Audre Lorde. She liked the symmetry of the es at the end. She was born in New York City in 1934 to immigrants from Grenada. She didn’t talk till she was four and was so short-sighted she was legally blind. She wrote her first poem in eighth grade. The Black Unicorn, her most unified collection of poems, partly describes a tricky relationship with her mother. “My mother had two faces and a frying pot / where she cooked up her daughters / into girls … My mother had two faces / and a broken pot /where she hid out a perfect daughter /who was not me.”…

…I first met Audre in 1984, when I was 22. She told me her grandfather had been Scottish, and that I didn’t need to choose between being Scottish and being black. “You can be both. You can call yourself an Afro Scot,” she said in her New York drawl. Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes…

Read the entire article here.

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance

Palgrave an (imprint of Macmillan)
May 2007
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-1-4039-8640-5, ISBN10: 1-4039-8640-1

Lynette Goddard, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre
Royal Holloway, University of London

Staging Black Feminisms explores the development and principles of black British women’s plays and performance since the late Twentieth century. Using contemporary performance theory to explore key themes (such as migration, motherhood, sexuality, and mixed race identity), it offers close textual readings and production analysis of a range of plays, performance poetry and live art works by practitioners, including Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, Valerie Mason John, Winsome Pinnock, Jacqueline Rudet, Debbie Tucker Green, Dorothea Smartt, Su Andi, and Susan Lewis.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: HISTORY AND AESTHETICS
  • Black British Women and Theatre: An Overview
  • Black Feminist Performance Aesthetics
• PART II: PLAYS
  • Winsome Pinnock’s Migration Narratives
  • Jacqueline Rudet (Re)Writing Sexual Deviancy
  • Jackie Kay and Valerie Mason-John’s Zamis, Lesbians and Queers
• PART III: PERFORMANCES
  • Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troops
  • Solo Voices: Performance Art, Dance and Poetry
• PART IV: CONCLUSIONS
  • Black Feminist Futures?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index