Mixed Race Studies

White Yet Non-White: Miscegenation in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2007)

American Studies Today Online
Volume 19, (2012)
2012-05-30
ISSN: 2044-804X

Sofia Politidou
Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

This article examines the changes in the concept of miscegenation, from the slavery years to the 1960s and the 2000s, as recorded in Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize poetry collection Native Guard (2007). Through a close reading of the poems “Pastoral,” “Miscegenation,” “Blond,” “Southern Gothic” and “South” from the third mainly autobiographical section of the collection, it shall be argued that, while in the past, miscegenation was strictly a matter of race for African-Americans, nowadays, it is also a matter of identity and self identification. Trethewey narrates how she experienced discrimination for being a mixed-race person in the early years of her life. She also describes how being a mixed-race person led her to a quest for selfhood. Trethewey believes that American anti-miscegenation laws enhanced her feeling of being different and caused her to doubt her identity as black, white or a person of mixed race.

Read the entire article here.

Natasha Trethewey talk

Theater Coffman Memorial Union
University of Minnesota
300 Washington Avenue SE
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
2011-04-27, 19:30-21:00 CDT (Local Time)

Cost: Free

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey talks about her family’s experience on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and how it led to her 2010 book Beyond Katrina (The University of Georgia Press). Trethewey is the author of Native Guard: Poems (2006, Houghton Mifflin), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She has won Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, among others, and her poems have appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry. She is Professor of English, holding the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry, at Emory University. Reception and booksigning to follow

For more information, click here.

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out

Inanna Publications
November 2010
250 pages
ISBN-10: 1926708148
ISBN-13: 978-1-926708-14-0

Edited by

Adebe De Rango-Adem (Adebe D. A.)

Andrea Thompson

This anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis. The anthology also serves as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, and what racial identity has come to mean today.

Adebe De Rango-Adem recently completed a research writing fellowship at the Applied Research Center in New York, where she wrote for ColorLines, America’s primary magazine on race politics. She has served as Assistant Editor for the literary journal Existere, and is a founding member of s.t.e.p.u.p.—a poetry collective dedicated to helping young writers develop their spoken word skills. Her poetry has been featured in journals such as Canadian Woman Studies, The Claremont Review, Canadian Literature, and cv2. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate, and is the author of a chapbook entitled Sea Change (2007). Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, will be published in early 2010.

Andrea Thompson is a performance poet who has been featured on film, radio, and television, with her work published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Her debut collection, Eating the Seed (2000), has been featured on reading lists at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design, and her spoken word CD, One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award in 2005. A pioneer of slam poetry in Canada, Thompson has also hosted Heart of a Poet on Bravo tv, CiTr Radio’s spoken word show, Hearsay. In 2008, she toured her Spoken Word/Play Mating Rituals of the Urban Cougar across the country, and in 2009 was the Poet of Honour at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.

Table of Contents (Thanks to Nicole Asong Nfonoyim)

• Acknowledgements
• Preface – Carol Camper
• Introduction – Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson1
• RULES/ROLES
  • Enigma – Andrea Thompson
  • Blond- Natasha Trethewey
  • Mixed- Sandra Kasturi
  • pick one – Chistine Sy and Aja
  • My Sista, Mi Hermana – Phoenix Rising
  • little half-black-breed – Tasha Beeds
  • “White Mask” – Jordan Clarke
  • “Nothing is just black or white” – Jordan Clarke
  • Roll Call – Kirya Traber
  • What Am I? – Marijane Castillo
  • Casting Call: Looking for White Girls and Latinas – D.Cole Ossandon
  • Conversations of Confrontation – Natasha Morris
  • “why i don’t say i’m white”- Alexis Kienlen
  • “Confession #8” – Mica Lee Anders
  • “Other Female” – Mica Lee Anders
  • “MMA and MLA” – Mica Lee Anders
  • The Pieces/Peace(is) in Me – monica rosas
  • Generation Gap (Hawaiian Style) – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • The Incident that Never Happened – Ann Phillips
  • In the Dark – Anajli Enjeti-Sydow
  • ananse vs. anasi (2007) – Rea McNamara
  • Contamination-  Amber Jamilla Musser
  • A Mixed Journey From the Outside In – Liberty Hultberg
  • What Are You? – Kali Fajardo-Anstine
  • One Being Brown – Tru Leverette
  • One for Everyday of the Week – Michelle Lopez Mulllins
  • Savage Stasis – Gena Chang-Campbell
  • The Half-Breed’s Guide to Answering the Question – M. C. Shumaker
  • My Definition – Kay’la Fraser
  • Pop Quiz – Erin Kobayashi
• ROOTS/ROUTES
  • Melanomial – Sonnet L’Abbe
  • half-breed – Jonina Kirton
  • “Inca/Jew” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • Open Letter – Adebe DeRango Adem
  • Prism Woman – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Southern Gothic – Natasha Trethewey
  • The Drinking Gourd- Miranda Martini
  • Reflection – Jonina Kirton
  • “Untitled” White Sequence – Cassie Mulheron
  • “Untitled” Black Sequence – Cassie Mulheron
  • Mapping Identities – Gail Prasad
  • Whose Child Are You? – Amy Pimentel
  • From the Tree – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • My sister’s hair – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • I, too, hear the dreams – Peta Gaye-Nash
  • Learning to Love Me – Michelle Jean-Paul
  • A Conversation among Friends – Nicole Salter
  • The Combination of the Two – Rachel Afi Quinn
  • “Loving Series: Elena Rubin” – Laura Kina
  • On the Train – Naomi Angel
  • Coloured – Sheila Addiscott
  • Of Two Worlds – Christina Brobby
  • What is my Culture? – Karen Hill
  • mo’oku’auhau (Genealogy) – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • Siouxjewgermanscotblack [cultural software instructions] – Robin M. Chandler
  • “Loving Series: Shoshanna Weinberger” – Laura Kina
  • A Hairy Situation – Saedhlinn B. Stweart-Laing
  • “Pot Vida” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • Songs Feet Can Get – Rage Hezekiah
  • Opposite of Fence – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • Applique – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • Blanqueamiento – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • The Land – Farideh de Bossett
  • Native Speaker: Daring to Name Ourselves – Nicole Asong Nfonoyim
• REVELATIONS
  • Colour Lesson I – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Concealed Things – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Serendipity – Priscila Uppal
  • “Ultramarine” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • before i was this – Katherena Vermette
  • Firebelly – Andrea Thompson
  • From Chopsticks to Meatloaf and Back Again – Jasmine Moy
  • My Power – Sonnet L’Abbe
  • Whitewashed – Kathryn McMillan
  • Actually, I’m Black – Marcelite Failla
  • “Self” – Lisa Walker
  • Grey (A Bi-racial Poem) – Sonya Littlejohn
  • Nubia’s Dream – Mica Valdez
  • both sides – Jonina Kirton
  • Mulatto Nation – Marika Schwandt
  • Colour Lesson II – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • racially queer femme – Kimberly Dree Hudson
  • mypeople – Ruha Benjamin
  • My Life in Pieces – Jennifer Adese
  • Burden of Proof: From Colon-Eyes to Kaleidoscope – Angela Dosalmas
  • Recipe for mixing – Tomie Hahn
  • Metamorphosis – Gena Chang-Campbell
  • The Land Knows – Shandra Spears Bombay
  • Land in Place: Mapping the Grandmother – Joanne Arnott
  • “I am the leaf, you are the leaf” – Lisa Walker
  • Language and the Ethics of Mixed Race – Debra Thompson
  • Hybrid Identity and Writing of Presence – Jackie Wang
• Contributors Notes

Natasha Trethewey: 2010

Littoral: The Journal of Key West Literary Seminar
2010-03-17

Arlo Haskell

Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry, including Native Guard, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Domestic Work, which won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A native of Mississippi, a member of the Dark Room Collective, and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University, Trethewey’s work often shifts from the personal to the historical, confronting subjects that include the legacies of racism in America and her own experiences as a person of mixed race growing up in the deep South.

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Trethewey reads a selection of poems including “Limen,” “Genus Narcissus,” “Myth,” “Miscegenation,” “Taxonomy,” and “Knowledge: After a Chalk Drawing by J.H. Hasselhorst, 1864.”

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World (17:57) / 10.3 MB

Hollins University Commencement

2010-05-22 through 2010-05-23
Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia

Natasha Trethewey, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and a graduate of Hollins University’s master of arts program in English and creative writing, will be the guest speaker at Hollins’ 168th Commencement Exercises, which will be held on Sunday, May 23, 2010, at 10 a.m. on the university’s historic Front Quadrangle.

Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, studied at Hollins in 1990 and 1991 and is now professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University at Atlanta. She received the Pulitzer for her most recent collection of poetry, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006), which blends her reflections on growing up as the daughter of a biracial couple in the Deep South with largely forgotten Southern history dating back to the Civil War…

For more information, click here.

Natasha Trethewey Reads at ECU

The Common Reader
Newsletter of the ECU Department of English
Eastern Carolina University
Volume 26, Number 6: May 2008

Lisa DeVries

On April 2, Natasha Trethewey visited East Carolina University for a public reading and book signing organized by fellow poet and friend John Hoppenthaler.  She won the Pulitizer Prize for her 2006 book of poetry, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), the third African American woman to win the award, following in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove.  Trethewey is also a professor of poetry at Emory University and holds the Phyllis Wheatley Distinguished Chair.  She Has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Her previous works include Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) and Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002).  Her most recent work deals with telling the untold stories of history, identity politics, racism, and miscegenation. She claims that she writes only what she is given, “a violent history and the terrible beauty of my South, my Mississippi.”  [Interview and photos by Lisa DeVries.]

Read the entire interview here.