Mixed Race Studies

A New Orleans Company Shines A Light On Opera’s Diverse History

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2017-05-28

Malika Gumpangkum and Lulu Garcia-Navarro

For many people, New Orleans is practically synonymous with jazz; it’s the birthplace of both the music and many of its leading lights, from Louis Armstrong to Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. But now, one organization is working to draw attention to the city’s history of opera music.

OperaCréole, an opera company founded in New Orleans, is resurrecting music written by local composers of color and others who’ve been left out of the overwhelmingly white, male canon. The company’s latest production, La Flamenca, is by the Creole composer Lucien-Léon Guillaume Lambert, whose father was born in New Orleans.

OperaCréole founder and mezzo-soprano Givonna Joseph joined NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss La Flamenca and her company’s work in general. Hear their full conversation at the audio link…

Listen the entire story here.

The Forgotten Story of Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert

Bacchus Tales & Co.
August 2017

J. C. Phillips, Co-Founder, Publisher, Writer

Charles Lucien Lambert ​Sr.

The story of this brilliant, sometime forgotten, underrated composer can date back to the ugly history of racial discrimination in the United States. His family’s sojourner led this brilliant man to work and strive in his chosen profession. It was that sacrifice of his father that made that opportunity possible…

Read the entire article here.

Eric Stinton: It’s Time To Recognize That Black History Is Part Of Hawaii’s History

Honolulu Civic Beat
Honolulu, Hawaii
2022-02-07

Eric Stinton

Nitasha Tamar Sharma attempts to clarify misconceptions and challenges common assumptions about race in Hawaii in her book “Hawaiʻi Is My Haven.”

On the cover of Nitasha Tamar Sharma’s recent book, “Hawaiʻi Is My Haven,” is a striking image of Kamakakēhau Fernandez wearing a pink bombax flower lei. The Na Hoku Hanohano award-winning falsetto singer and ukulele player was adopted from Arkansas by a Maui family when he was six weeks old, and was enrolled in Hawaiian language classes starting in kindergarten. He grew up in Hawaii and with Hawaii in him.

Fernandez is one of countless examples of Black locals who have contributed to Hawaiian culture and life for over 200 years, yet whose stories have largely gone unrecognized.

“Black people have been evacuated out of the narrative of who is in Hawaii,” Sharma says. “Historically we don’t think Black people were in Hawaii when they actually were.”…

Read the entire article here.

Existing Across Boundaries: A Conversation with Community Journalist and Editor Sharon Ho Chang

The Seventh Wave
2021-10-15

Sharon Ho Chang knows her way around community journalism. She is the managing editor at the South Seattle Emerald, a digital news and culture publication run by and centering the BIPOC people and communities who live, work, create, and are experiencing displacement due to gentrification in the city’s Central District and South End. The Emerald is a beacon of thorough, complex, and vital reporting for the immediate area, as well as an example of how journalism can embrace multifaceted local stories that have regional, national, and even global importance. In addition to editing the Emerald, Chang is also a writer, artist, and documentarian with a lot of storytelling under her belt, including the publication of two nonfiction books — Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World (Routledge, 2015) and the memoir Hapa Tales And Other Lies: A Mixed Race Memoir About the Hawai’i I Never Knew (self published in 2018) — both of which explore in academic and personal ways the experience of being mixed race. She is also a photographer and videographer, and is dedicated to documenting underrepresented and underreported stories of the people and places in her community in Seattle, her family and elders in Taiwan, and her own multiracial transnational experience.

Chang spoke with Interviews Editor Sarah Neilson over Zoom about her many, many journalism projects past and present; her experiences with feedback and creative inspiration over time; voting in her first Taiwan presidential election; and what Economies of Harm means to her…

Read the entire interview here.

Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

The Atlantic
2022-02-03

Adam Serwer, Staff Writer

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”

He was referring, of course, to the Jews.

In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.

Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.

Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks…

Read the entire article here.

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

University of Washington Press
December 2021
304 pages
4 b&w illustrations
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780295749488
Paperback ISBN: 9780295749495

Edited by:

Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Assistant professor of English and International Indigenous Studies
University of Calgary

Darryl Barthé, Visiting professor of History
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, San Diego

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.

With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.

‘The Chevalier’ team is eager to burnish the legacy of Joseph Bologne

Experience CSO
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association
Chicago, Illinois
2022-02-01

Kyle MacMillan

A champion fencer, gifted athlete, high-ranking officer and violin virtuoso, Joseph Bologne was all those things in 18th-century France, but the classical world has only belatedly come to recognize him as well as a prolific and talented composer.

While he achieved considerable musical success during his lifetime, he nonetheless faced discrimination and was ultimately all but forgotten after his death in 1799, in no small part because he was mixed race. Bologne was born in the French Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe, the son of a white plantation owner and his wife’s African slave.

Chicago’s Music of the Baroque, along with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, will present the Midwest premiere Feb. 18-20 of The Chevalier, a concert theater work about the life and music of this fascinating and unfairly overlooked historical figure. (Bologne took the title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges after graduating from France’s Royal Polytechnical Academy of Fencing and Horsemanship in 1766.) One performance will occur at 8 p.m. Feb. 20 at Symphony Center, with additional dates of 7:30 p.m. Feb. 18, Kehrein Center for the Arts, 5628 W. Washington, and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 19, North Shore Center for the Arts in Skokie.

“We’re absolutely ecstatic that the launchpad for the tour is in three different neighborhoods in Chicago during Black History Month. It is the perfect way to start us off, and I’m just so grateful for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra organization to be platforming it,” said Bill Barclay, writer-director of and an actor in The Chevalier. Now the artistic director of Concert Theatre Works, he was director of music in 2012-19 at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

Read the entire article here.

Rebecca Hall says directing ‘Passing’ helped ‘unlock’ Black family history

theGrio
2021-11-10

Mariel Turner, Senior Editor

“It really gave me an access point into the history of my family that otherwise would have remained hidden,” the first-time director says

Writing and directing Passing has given Rebecca Hall a host of things: critical acclaim, first-time directing experience and award season buzz. One thing she didn’t expect, however, is the deep dive into her family’s own history that the film spurred.

The 39-year-old actress-director told theGrio exclusively that reading the 1929 novel on which Passing is based, and directing the film itself, helped her to uncover her own family’s history of passing and white assimilation. Hall, the daughter of Detroit opera singer Maria Ewing and Royal Shakespeare Company founder Peter Hall, confirmed that her grandfather was Black and white-passing…

Read the entire article here.

S2E10 Black Feminist Physics: A Conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Cite Black Women
November 2020

Christen Smith, Host

In this episode Cite Black Women podcast host Christen Smith sits down with theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to discuss Black feminist physics, the intersections between the matrix of violence against Black women and science, her radical Black feminist upbringing and her forthcoming book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred (March 2021, Bold Type Books).

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also a columnist for New Scientist and Physics World. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter. Using ideas from both physics and astronomy, she responds to deep questions about how everything in the universe got to the be the way it is. She also does research in Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. Essence magazine recognized her as one of “15 Black Women Who Are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers.” She has been profiled in several venues, including TechCrunch, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Nylon, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives. A cofounder of the Particles for Justice movement, she has received the 2017 LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics, as well as the 2021 American Physical Society Edward A. Bouchet Award for her contributions to particle cosmology. She divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Listen to the interview (01:11:29) here.

Nadia Owusu Examines Her Ghanaian-Armenian Identity In ‘Aftershocks’

Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2021-01-16

NPR’s Scott Simon speaks to Nadia Owusu about her memoir, Aftershocks.

Listen to the interview (00:07:02) and/or read the transcript here.