Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Not Another Remix: How Obama Became the First Hip-Hop President

    Not Another Remix: How Obama Became the First Hip-Hop President

    Journal of Popular Music Studies
    Volume 22, Issue 4, December 2010
    pages 389–415
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2010.01252.x

    Travis L. Gosa, Assistant Professor of Social Science at Cornell University
    Cornell University

    January 20, 2009 marked the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the first African-American president of the United States. Political commentators are busy making sense of Obama’s candidacy and election, but not enough attention has been given to how youth have made sense of Obama. As I show in this article, young people—so-called “hip-hoppers” and “millennials”—used their unique sensibilities, technologies, and music to help define and elect the first black, hip-hop president.

    This article examines “Obama-Hop,” rap music about Barack Obama, and the 2008 presidential election. Rap songs about election year politics were a highly visible aspect of the election (Hamby; NPR). This study provides the first systematic analysis of the political, racial, and gendered discourse of the Obama-Hop movement. While Obama’s campaign was discussed in the framework of “post-racialism” (Crowley), this study shows how Obama’s black masculinity became a major source of identification for rappers. The paper explores how Obama was depicted, embraced, and defended from scrutiny in hip-hop. Based on the review of ninety-seven Obama-themed mixtapes, I show how music was used in an attempt to energize youth toward voting and embracing Obama’s political messages.

    The exploration necessarily informs the larger debate over hip-hop politics. The “hip-hop wars”—as Rose (2008) labels the persistent controversy over rap—are currently being waged over the political relevance of the music. Representing a generational divide over the meaning of political activism (Boyd), there has been resistance to the claim that hip-hop is indeed “political” (Bynoe; McWhorter 2008). Hip-hop academics are increasingly concerned that corporate control and media consolidation are destroying rap’s political significance (Asante; Rose; Powell). This article addresses the debate by considering the political content of digital mixtapes, which are non-commercial compilations of music, news clips, and photos. The proliferation of Obama rap mixes provides evidence that hip-hop continues to be used toward political ends. This paper shows how Obama’s campaign and subsequent victory put in motion a new wave of explicitly political rap, but one that still includes many of the same problematic tropes around race and masculinity…

    Read the entire article here.

  • ‘Visible & Invisible’ Exhibition to Explore History of Hapa JA Experience

    ‘Visible & Invisible’ Exhibition to Explore History of Hapa JA Experience

    The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
    2013-03-31

    The Japanese American National Museum, in collaboration with the USC Hapa Japan Database Project, will present its next exhibition, “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History,” from Sunday, April 7, through Sunday, Aug. 25.

    Through photos, historical artifacts, multimedia images, and interactive components, “Visible & Invisible” explores the diverse and complex history of the mixed-roots and mixed-race Japanese American experience.

    At a free opening night party planned for Saturday, April 6, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., visitors can preview this unique perspective on mixed race within the Japanese American community.

    “Visible & Invisible” is preceded by the five-day Hapa Japan Festival, a free event featuring Hapa musicians and artists, a comedy night, readings by award-winning authors, film screenings of leading documentaries, and a two-day academic conference at USC. The festival runs from April 2 to 6. For more information on the schedule and featured programs, visit http://www.hapajapan.com/…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Poverty at a Racial Crossroads: Poverty Among Multiracial Children of Single Mothers

    Poverty at a Racial Crossroads: Poverty Among Multiracial Children of Single Mothers

    Journal of Marriage and Family
    Volume 75, Issue 2, April 2013
    pages 486-502
    DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12012

    Jenifer L. Bratter, Associate Professor of Sociology
    Rice University

    Sarah Damaske, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies & Employment Relations
    Pennsylvania State University

    Although multiracial youth represent a growing segment of children in all American families, we have little information on their well-being within single-mother households. This article examines multiracial children’s level of poverty within single-mother families to identify the degree to which they may stand out from their monoracial peers. Using data from the 2006–2008 American Community Survey (3-year estimates), we explore the level of racial disparities in child poverty between monoracial White children and monoracial and multiracial children of color. Fully adjusted multivariate logistic regression analyses (n = 359,588) reveal that nearly all children of color are more likely to be poor than White children. Yet many multiracial children appear to hold an in-between status in which they experience lower rates of poverty than monoracial children of color. The high level of variation across groups suggests that the relationship between race and childhood poverty is more complicated than generally presumed.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America [Patricia Cleary Review]

    Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America [Patricia Cleary Review]

    William and Mary Quarterly
    Third Series, Volume 69, Number 3, July 2012
    pages 665-667
    DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0665

    Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America. By Gwenn A. Miller. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. 242 pages.

    Patricia Cleary, Professor of History
    California State University, Long Beach

    In a period of imperial expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russia founded only one overseas colony, in several sites off the Alaskan coast. On Kodiak Island, the focus of Gwenn A. Miller’s study, the Russian American Company pursued the fur trade and sought the support of church and state for its efforts. In the process, the company’s agents disrupted the lives of the indigenous Alutiiq people, not least through forming relationships with local women and creating an ethnically mixed Kreol population. In her exploration of this North Pacific outpost, Miller focuses on how these initially tenuous and later increasingly formalized relationships laid the basis for a distinctive category and community of people within the Russian empire.

    Drawing on slim and occasionally challenging sources, Miller traces Russian colonial expansion, examining how conquest and the exaction of tribute from subjugated peoples in Siberia facilitated the Kodiak venture. Teasing out how Russians differentiated themselves from locals, Miller focuses narrowly on the inhabitants of one island outpost, whose interactions, both peaceful and violent, led to the creation of a “new world” that was “never wholly Russian or Alutiiq” (xi). Although less well known than other Russian ventures, such as that at Sitka, Kodiak was, Miller argues, important in no small part because it lay at the “crossroads of early Alaskan colonial contact” (xi)…

    …At the heart of Miller’s analysis is how mixed-race children came to be important both culturally and economically. Russian American children drew the interest of company leaders and government officials, who “singled out these children to be groomed for middling and at times high-level work within the colonial apparatus” (138). Demographic changes prompted such attention. With the overwhelming majority of native men forced to engage in the increasingly dangerous and difficult otter hunt, overhunting led to ever longer voyages, and growing numbers of men perished at sea. European diseases further contributed to the decline of the indigenous population. Company officials began to recognize two related needs: for young indigenous boys to remain in their communities “to train in the art of the sea otter hunt” (114) as their elders died at accelerated rates and for a population of future company workers to be educated appropriately. The hardships of life in the colonial outpost, the “difficulty of transporting substantial numbers of settlers from mainland Russia” (127), the skewed sex ratio among those who did emigrate, the declining Alutiiq population, and an expanding Kreol one turned the Kreol into “an important constituent of the subject population on Kodiak” (127), a few of whom were sent to study at the company’s expense in Saint Petersburg. State encouragement of mixed-race unions elsewhere, Miller states, typically took place in the earlier rather than later phases of colonial enterprises, with families rather than the state or firms responsible for making decisions about children’s educations. In stark contrast, Russian imperial officials “took increasing interest in this Kreol group of colonial residents as a loyal local population, and their expectations for the behavior of these people as European Russians was expressed in more concrete terms over time” (138), with the 1820s a high point. The church, state, and company all became more interested in these children; the company paid for their education in exchange for years of service, an arrangement that would turn “the local Kreol population into a literate managerial force that would be loyal to the Russian crown” (112)…

    Read the entire review here.

  • AALR Mixed Race Initiative

    AALR Mixed Race Initiative

    Akemi Johnson
    2013-03-24

    Akemi Johnson

    Historian Lily Anne Yumi Welty and I just finished writing our collaborative piece for The Asian American Literary Review’s special issue on mixed race, coming out this fall. Lily and I shared a summer of research (and karaoke, kaiten sushi, officers’ clubs, and sweltering traffic jams) in Okinawa, although she comes at the topic from a historical, academic angle. Working on this joint piece, we realized how differently we’re used to writing–she’s all about the outline and thesis and being explicit, while I tend to make sense of things as I go, planting dots for readers to connect. We’ll see how our mashup turns out…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Barry McGee

    Barry McGee

    art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century
    Public Broadcasting Service
    Season 1 (2001), Place

    About Barry McGee

    A lauded and much-respected cult figure in a bi-coastal subculture that comprises skaters, graffiti artists, and West Coast surfers, Barry McGee was born in 1966 in California, where he continues to live and work. In 1991, he received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. His drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name “Twist.” He views graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum. His trademark icon, a male caricature with sagging eyes and a bemused expression, recalls the homeless people and transients who call the streets their home. McGee says, “Compelling art, to me, is a name carved into a tree.” His work has been shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and on streets and trains all over the United States. He and his daughter, Asha, live in San Francisco.

  • Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America

    Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America

    Cornell University Press
    2010-08-05
    248 pages
    7 Illustrations
    6.1 x 9.3 in
    ISBN-10: 0801446422; ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4642-9

    Gwenn A. Miller, Assistant Professor of History
    College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts

    From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia’s only overseas colony, was inhabited by indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed “kreol” community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia’s modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people.

    In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia’s North Pacific venture. Although Russia’s Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers—Spain, England, Holland, and France—started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the “discovery” and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia’s Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller’s attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.

    Contents

    • Preface
    • Acknowledgments
    • Comparative Timeline
    • Maps
    • Introduction
    • 1. An Economy of Confiscation
    • 2. Beach Crossings on Kodiak Island
    • 3. Colonial Formations
    • 4. Between Two Worlds
    • 5. Students of Empire
    • 6. A Kreol Generation
    • Conclusion
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions.

    Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned.

    Diana Adesola Mafe, “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Volume 29, Number 1, 2009): 38-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fro.0.0004

  • The Body Beautiful: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

    The Body Beautiful: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

    Women Make Movies
    England, 1991
    23 minutes
    Color, VHS/16mm/DVD
    Order No. W99229

    Melbourne Film Festival, Best Documentary

    This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.

  • The Graffitist Who Moved Indoors

    The Graffitist Who Moved Indoors

    The New York Times
    2013-03-28

    Carol Kino

    SAN FRANCISCO — “This is one of my favorite things to do,” Barry McGee said as he drove along the Bayshore Freeway on a glowering winter day, pointing out random patches of new graffiti. He was supposed to be talking about his traveling midcareer retrospective, which opens Saturday at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Instead, he was revisiting some of the places where he’d spent time in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as he rose to prominence as the graffiti artist known as Twist.

    “That was the key, to have every rooftop in San Francisco,” Mr. McGee reminisced as he took an off-ramp down toward the industrial reaches of the Mission District, one of many places where he and his crew once tagged the road, safety barriers and every visible roof below. “It seems completely ridiculous now,” he said, laughing, “but then it was the most important thing.”

    Since those days, the whole South of Market area, once known for its seediness, has been redeveloped, gentrified. Mr. McGee had to drive past several blocks of trendy loft buildings before finding a slice of ruined waterfront that resembled the streets he once roamed. He finally stopped at a crumbling warehouse by the bay…

    …But perhaps the person with the biggest expectations is Mr. McGee himself.

    He grew up in South San Francisco, the child of a Chinese-American secretary and an Irish-American father who worked in auto body shops and collected junked hot rods. As a teenager, he was fascinated by the anarchic tactics of the Bay Area’s activist groups, some of which were spray-painting anti-government slogans on banks and underpasses. (Unsurprisingly, one of his favorite words is “radical.”)

    A friend introduced him to graffiti and Mr. McGee, who had “always drawn,” said his creative life took off. “It was really empowering,” he said. “I really thought I was doing art on the street.”…

    Read the entire article here. View the slide show here.