Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical by Todd Decker (review)

    Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical by Todd Decker (review)

    Theatre Journal
    Volume 65, Number 3, October 2013
    pages 447-448
    DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0077

    Bethany Wood

    Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. By Todd Decker. Broadway Legacy series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 238.

    Todd Decker’s Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical examines representations of race in the creation and evolution of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s iconic musical by tracing the impact of particular performers on numerous stage, sound, and film productions. Using the “dynamic of the color line” as his “vantage point” (4), Decker places the original musical in conversation with subsequent interpretations in order to analyze the enduring influence of Show Boat on representations of race in American musical theatre. Through his systematic examination, Decker addresses the broader issue of “the performed distinction between black and white [that serves] as an essential and constructive element of the American musical in its totality” and argues for interracial histories of musical theatre, a field “largely written along divided racial lines” (5).

    He presents his analysis in two parts: “Making,” which focuses on Show Boat’s 1927 debut; and “Remaking,” which examines the versions created from 1928 to 1998. Each section employs extensive archival research in its account of how race has been staged in key productions. Chapter 1 centers on the major themes established by the musical’s source material, Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. This chapter, along with chapter 2, situates Show Boat’s central focus on race and music within 1920s popular culture. The analysis in this chapter follows the pattern in Show Boat theatre scholarship of faulting Ferber for failing to approach the narrative’s themes in the same manner that Hammerstein would later employ for the musical. Decker criticizes Ferber’s cursory attention to the issues of music and race, and, in the following chapters, demonstrates Hammerstein’s efforts to foreground these themes by making Show Boat “an object lesson in the power of black music and a celebration of a moment in popular culture history when black music and musicians were breaking into mainstream white culture with undeniable force” (52).

    Chapters 2 and 3 address the influence of Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan on Hammerstein’s interpretive vision and provide detailed context concerning their careers. Chapter 2 details Kern and Hammerstein’s initial plan to cast Robeson as Joe in order to highlight the themes of race and music in the initial script, as well as the complications that resulted when Robeson decided not to join the original Broadway cast. Chapter 3 considers Morgan’s influence on the creation of Show Boat , as Hammer-stein adapted act 2 to showcase her talents as a torch singer and exploit her reputation for dissipation. Hammerstein’s efforts and Morgan’s performance worked to establish Julie as a tragic figure, expressing herself through Morgan’s “thoroughly white” (65) singing style.

    In chapter 4, Decker argues that the musical choices for the characters of Ravenal and Magnolia “whitened” Show Boat’s central couple by making Ravenal an operatic tenor, a style associated with white singers, and aligning Magnolia’s voice with white culture through her performance of “After the Ball,” a Victorian parlor waltz. Show Boat was one of the first Broadway musicals to use both black and white performers in large numbers, and chapter 5 explores the musical’s use of both a black and a white chorus. Along with chapter 2, this section adds a much-needed look at contemporary responses to Show Boat in the black press.

    Part 2 investigates the reworking of racial representations in productions of Show Boat that followed its premiere. Chapter 6 looks at several “remakings” between 1928 and 1940 that featured Robeson, who eventually accepted and became associated with the role of Joe in several landmark productions. Decker discusses how Robeson’s powerful performances and offstage persona enhanced Joe’s role, which Hammerstein expanded for the 1936 film in order to capitalize on Robeson’s talents and appeal. As in his examination of the 1927 production, Decker analyzes several deleted scenes in order to illustrate Hammerstein’s continued, yet unrealized plan to use Show Boat as a history lesson of black influence on popular music. Chapter 7 centers on several productions during and shortly after World War II, including the 1946 Broadway revival and the 1951 film starring Ava Gardner as Julie. Decker’s analysis of the impact that…

  • Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “From the Conservation of Races to the Cosmic Race”

    Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “From the Conservation of Races to the Cosmic Race”

    Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
    University of California, Merced
    California Room
    5200 North Lake Rd.
    Merced, California 95343
    2013-10-23, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

    Juliet Hooker, Associate Professor of Government
    University of Texas, Austin

    The Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos [1882-1959] and the African American political thinker W.E.B. DuBois [1868-1963] are viewed as having developed conceptions of race and racial identity that are quintessentially Latin American and U.S. American respectively.  Vasconcelos is one of Latin America’s foremost advocates of mestizaje; his notion of the Cosmic Race is generally viewed as articulating a more complex approach to race that sought to dismantle specific racial group identities and reformulate hybrid subjectivities. This approach is often contrasted to the binary, static conceptions of race developed in the U.S., including by African-American thinkers. This paper analyzes this characterization of Latin American and African American political thought by comparing Vasconcelos and DuBois’ arguments about race, especially racial identity. In particular, I will analyze DuBois’ discussion of racial mixing in the U.S. and the motivations behind Vasconcelos’ account of mestizaje in order to complicate the comparison between supposedly static, biologically grounded accounts of race and flexible notions of race that are able to acknowledge processes of racial mixing.  The aim of this juxtaposition is to stage a hemispheric dialogue about race between these two towering American pensadores, in order to show the surprising points of convergence and divergence between U.S. and Latin American ideas about race.

    The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

    For more information, click here.

  • Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Race-ing Toward the Real South Korea: The Cases of Black-Korean Nationals”

    Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Race-ing Toward the Real South Korea: The Cases of Black-Korean Nationals”

    Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
    University of California, Merced
    California Room
    5200 North Lake Rd.
    Merced, California 95343
    2013-11-07, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

    Nadia Y. Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
    Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California

    Students of South Korean multiculturalism have laudably given voice to the many non-Koreans who live in a proudly single-blood nation and have extensively criticized the state for its self-interested multicultural project.  Without critiquing these claims, Kim argues that the multicultural scholarship has omitted one of the important groups who diversify South Korea and find themselves on the bottom of most racialized orders: the part-Black children of USA-ROK military couplings. This dearth of works on Korean-Black children in particular is unexpected in light of Superbowl XL MVP Hines Ward’s 2006 visit being widely seen as the opening salvo on a multicultural South Korea.  Yet, because scholars are guided by the lens of the state on who the “multicultural citizens” are and because we typically opt for the conceptual language of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism over that of race and (ethno)racism, Black-descent populations tend to be overlooked.  By doing so, Kim argues, we as scholars inadvertently reify the country’s belief that Blacks are the most biologically and culturally different from them and perpetuate the relative “closeness” and state “privileging” of diasporic Koreans, Asians from the Pacific region, and lighter-skinned people who themselves, to be sure, endure inequality.  We also enable the state and like-minded adherents to promote policies of cultural assimilation of minorities that, in reality, deny pluralistic equality on the related basis of biological (racial) criteria.  Kim will conclude with the consequences of inadvertently reifying state hegemonic projects.

    Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University, Kim researches ‘race’/ethnicity/nation, gender/relationality, citizenship, immigration/transnationalism, community politics, Asian American Studies, and Korean Studies. She authored the award-winning book Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to L.A. and is penning another on marginalized immigrant women of color, citizenship, and Environmental Justice.

    The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

    For more information, click here.

  • Rearticulating Black Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization: Hines Ward and the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary South Korean media

    Rearticulating Black Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization: Hines Ward and the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary South Korean media

    Cultural Studies
    Volume 28, Issue 3, 2014
    pages 391-417
    DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.840665

    Ji-Hyun Ahn
    University of Texas, Austin

    Since the mid-2000s, the term multiculturalism has entered the Korean lexicon as migration has become more and more prevalent due to globalization. The cornerstone of this multicultural explosion was a 2006 visit by American football star Hines Ward, born to an African-American father and a Korean mother. As a black mixed-race sports celebrity, he suddenly became an emblematic media figure in the Korean televisual landscape, signifying a broader racial reconfiguration in Korean society. This media event – what I shall call ‘the Hines Ward moment’ – created and opened the discursive space for racial politics and multicultural issues in Korean society. Hence, this article aims to look at what this discursive explosion of multiculturalism and mixed-race means in the context of globalization. Reading the Hines Ward moment as a symbolic media text, the paper examines how the media discourse on Hines Ward articulates the issues of national identity and racial politics in contemporary Korean society. For analysis, newspaper articles, television programmes and television commercials that deal with the Hines Ward case are examined. By analyzing the modes of articulation of the Hines Ward moment, this study deconstructs the image of a ‘global, multicultural Korea’ shaped by the Korean media and examines the struggle for Koreanness in the televisual area of contemporary Korean media.

    Introduction: imagining a multicultural, global Korea?

    There has been a common belief that South Korea (hereafter, Korea) has always been a racially homogeneous country because of the strong myth of ‘one people one nation’ (hankyoreh hanminjok) (Shin 2006, G.-S. Han 2007). However, this common myth no longer seems as effective as it was in the past…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Visualizing Race: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Television

    Visualizing Race: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Television

    University of Texas at Austin
    August 2013
    240 pages

    Ji-Hyun Ahn

    Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

    “Visualizing Race: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Television” investigates visual representations of multicultural subjects in both celebrity culture and the reality television genre to examine the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary Korean television. My aim is to explain the transformation from a modern monoracial Korea to a multicultural, global Korea as a national project of what I call “neoliberal multiculturalism” and to problematize the implicit tie between the two words, “neoliberal” and “multiculturalism.” Using the category of mixed-race as an analytical window onto this cultural shift, I attempt to link the recent explosion of multiculturalism discourse in Korea to the much larger cultural, institutional, and ideological implications of racial globalization. To illustrate this shift, the dissertation analyzes both black and white mixed-race celebrities as well as ordinary multicultural subjects appearing on Korean reality programs. I examine historical archives, popular press sources, policy documents, and television programs in order to analyze them as an inter-textual network that is actively negotiating national identity.

    Utilizing the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism as an overarching framework, the dissertation explicates how concepts such as nationality, race, gender, class, and the television genre are intricately articulated; it also critically deconstructs the hegemonic notion of a multicultural, global Korea presented by the Korean media. I argue that Korean television deploys racial representations as a way to suture national anxiety over an increasing number of racial others and projects a multicultural fantasy towards Koreans. This interdisciplinary project contributes to several fields of study by explicating the changed cultural meaning of mixed-race in the age of globalization, defining the organic relation between the medium of television and racial representation, broadening our understanding of Asian multiculturalism and the racial politics in the region, and examining the particulars of ethnic nationalism appearing in the Korean media and popular culture.

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Holding Onto The Other Half Of ‘Mixed-Race’

    Holding Onto The Other Half Of ‘Mixed-Race’

    the race card project: six word essays
    Morning Edition
    National Public Radio
    2013-10-14

    Steve Inskeep, Host

    NPR continues a series of conversations about The Race Card Project, where thousands of people have submitted their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into those six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition.

    Again and again, The Race Card Project receives submissions dealing with mixed-race identity; from a child of a mixed-race union, from a parent of mixed-race children or from someone who is trying to figure out how to identify a mixed-race student or colleague, for example.

    Those kinds of stories are the largest single category of six-word submissions the Race Card Project receives, says Michele Norris, who curates the project. Many of these entries have a lot to do with labels and identity.

    Wilma Stordahl, a Seattle resident who’s an account manager for a national landscape company, offered one such submission: “Norwegian with Nappy Hair Doesn’t Fit.“…

    Read the article here. Listen to the story here. Read the transcript here.

  • Identity Production in Figured Worlds: How Some Multiracial Students Become Racial Atravesados/as

    Identity Production in Figured Worlds: How Some Multiracial Students Become Racial Atravesados/as

    The Urban Review
    June 2013

    Aurora Chang

    Using Holland et al.’s (Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) theory of identity and their concept of figured worlds, this article provides an overview of how twenty-five undergraduates of color came to produce a Multiracial identity. Using Critical Race Theory methodology with ethnographic interviewing as the primary method, I specifically focus on the ways in which Multiracial figured worlds operate within a racial borderland (Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera—The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987), an alternate, marginal world where improvisational play (Holland et al. in Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) and facultad became critical elements of survival. Participants exercised their agency by perforating monoracial storylines and developed a complex process of identity production that informed their behaviors by a multifaceted negotiation of positionalities. I end by focusing on implications for urban education that can be drawn from this study.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Mixed Remixed: a media festival celebrating connection

    Mixed Remixed: a media festival celebrating connection

    October 2013

    Mixed Remixed is an exciting new media festival celebrating racial and cultural connectedness which will be held June 14, 2014 at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles. Mixed Remixed brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial families and individuals for workshops, readings, film screenings and live performance including music, comedy and spoken word.

    Mixed Remixed is brought to you by the co-founder of the original [The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival] multiracial/multicultural film and book festival  and an incredible group of volunteers.  The original festival showcased many talented filmmakers, writers, and performers including Key & Peele, Rebecca Walker, Kip Fulbeck, Danzy Senna, Carleen Brice, Kim Wayans & Kevin Knotts, Angela Nissel, Neil Aitken, Mat Johnson, Faith Adiele, Sundee Frasier, Karyn Parsons, Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng and many many more.  Mixed Remixed promises to be even bigger and better and will also highlight playwrights, visual artists, and multidiscliplinary artists!

    Through film screenings, readings, workshops and performance, Mixed Remixed highlights previously untold stories of our connectedness as a community and a nation across cultural, racial and religious divides; provides a safe, positive forum for honest discussions about race and culture; creates a platform for emerging storytellers’ careers; and promotes the Mixed experience as a valuable prism with which to view issues of social justice and change…

    For more information, click here.

  • Transcending blackness: from the new millennium mulatta to the exceptional multiracial [Aspinall Review]

    Transcending blackness: from the new millennium mulatta to the exceptional multiracial [Aspinall Review]

    Ethnic and Racial Studies
    Volume 37, Issue 5, 2014
    pages 850-851
    DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.831934

    Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
    University of Kent, UK

    Transcending blackness: from the new millennium mulatta to the exceptional multiracial, by Ralina L. Joseph. Durham and London. Duke University Press. 2013.
    xx+ 226 pp., (paperback). ISBN 978-0-8223-5292-1

    This book is concerned with representations of mixed-race African American women, notably, the two categories into which fall the mainstream images of mixed-race blackness: the new millennium mulatta. exceedingly tragic, always divided, alone, and uncomfortable, and the exceptional multiracial, unifying, strikingly successful post-racial ideal. The analysed texts which form the main body of the book belong to the 1998-2008 era (following the debates about capture of the multiracial population in the 2000 US Census), a period during which representations crystallized into this two-sided stereotype. Both are rooted in a condemnation of blackness which is either implicit as where blackness is stigmatized through the presentation of tragic mulatta inevitability or explicit, where discarding the burden of blackness means arriving at a safely post-racial state. Both representations take place in the context of gendered and sexualized as well as racialized performances.

    An in-depth approach is adopted in which four representative works are examined with regard to the textual nuances that construct the two stereotypes. Part 1 explores the new millennium mulatlas: the bad race girl’ in Jennifer Beals’s portrayal of Bette Porter on the cable television drama The L Word (2004-2008), in which Bette is mired in the tragic misfortune and destiny of the mulatta: and the ‘sad race girl’ in Danzy Senna’s novel ‘Caucasia‘ (1998), which investigates how Senna reinterprets the tragic mulatta heroine in her production of a new millennium mulatta representation. Race and gender arc the drivers that torture the protagonists who are unable to achieve the states of post-race and post-feminism. In part II, ‘The Exceptional Multiracial’. Joseph interrogates representations that develop the character of the racial-transforming mixed-race title character in Alison Swan’s independent film ‘Mixing Nia‘ (1998) and the racial-switching mixed-race contestant in an episode of Tyra Banks’s reality television show ‘America’s Next Top Model‘ (2005). These representations portray blackness as an irrelevant entity for the multiracial, something that can and should be transcended through racialized performances. Blackness, the cause of sadness and pain for the multiracial African American, must be erased or surpassed in order to reach a state of health or success.

    These particular works were chosen by Joseph as they were ‘representations of this particular time period and particular subgenre of multiracial African American representations’ and are not isolated representations of mixed-race African Americans but representative texts. Indeed, she contends that contemporary black-white representations do not go beyond this binary, the idea that blackness is a deficit that black and multiracial people must overcome…

    Read or purchase the review here.

  • New faculty: Amy Non links health disparities to genetics and environment

    New faculty: Amy Non links health disparities to genetics and environment

    Research News @ Vanderbilt
    Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
    2012-11-30

    Liz Entman, (615) 322-NEWS

    For decades, researchers have struggled to identify the root causes behind racial disparities in health. Amy Non, assistant professor of anthropology, takes a multidisciplinary approach.

    A molecular anthropologist specializing in epigenetics, the study of how environment and behavior affect the expression of genes, her work integrates genetics, anthropology and public health.

    For example, why are African Americans at greater risk for many chronic diseases? “We don’t really know what’s causing it—whether it’s their genetic ancestry or whether it’s something about their social or cultural environment,” Non said. She has found no evidence that African genetic ancestry plays a role and is now trying to identify psychosocial mechanisms—such as stress—that may contribute to these disparities.

    Stress triggers a release of hormones that can lead to inflammation or dysregulation of other biological processes, she said. Prolonged exposure to stress can permanently interfere with the genes that regulate these hormones, which can have long-term consequences on a person’s health.

    Read the entire article here.