Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Otis Houston: You agree that it’s important for people to see a black family in the White House, if only to demonstrate that it’s possible. Is it also important for black children to be able to see people who look like them on television, or in movies, or even in television commercials? Is there an importance in people, whatever their background, seeing folks who superficially resemble them included in mainstream media?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Yeah, there probably is. I’m sure that there is. But one thing that often gets lost in a lot of these debates is that black people have only ever been around 12 percent of the population. So it doesn’t really bother me or my sense of myself if I don’t always see myself. Also — getting back to my own obtuseness or naïveté — I saw myself in Crime and Punishment in a way that I did with very few novels in which the protagonist resembled me and my American contemporary social identity. I saw myself in The Brothers Karamazov. I saw myself in the novels of Roberto Bolaño, and in Borges’s Ficciones set in Buenos Aires. The self is really something that I don’t think can be boiled down to physical appearance, necessarily, or to gender, to epoch, to time or era, to language. The notion that to see myself is to see a mixed race, heterosexual, endomorphic contemporary, I think really reduces what the self is.

I never saw myself more clearly than in the novels of Dostoyevsky when I was in college. No one has ever spoken more to my sense of myself. And I can see myself in Batman. I relate to Bruce Wayne more than I do to the Black Panther, if we have to go into comic books. I don’t want to be glib about it — I understand why a young boy or young girl needing some self-esteem, a young girl seeing Wonder Woman … I get it. But I think we really should not go too far with it, or we risk restricting the self too severely. The self is a multitudinous thing, right?

Otis Houston, “The Singular Power of Writing: A Conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 12, 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-singular-power-of-writing-a-conversation-with-thomas-chatterton-williams.

The Missing Bi-racial Child in Hollywood

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2011-07-13 20:51Z by Steven

The Missing Bi-racial Child in Hollywood

Canadian Review of American Studies
Volume 37, Number 2 (2007)
pages 239-263
E-ISSN: 1710-114X; Print ISSN: 0007-7720

Naomi Angel

The growing interest in issues pertaining to “mixed-race” identities and communities, as well as a surge in films with “mixed-race” characters has prompted this examination of representations of “mixedrace” characters in film. The research consists of an analysis of selected films, including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Jungle Fever, and situates this analysis within a historical framework based on the particular context in which each film was set and/or made. The value in studying “mixed-race” representations in film lies in the reflection it provides of significant moments in “mixed-race” histories and in the portrayal of cultural imaginings of people of “mixed race.”

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: Canadian Review of American Studies, Hollywood, Naomi Angel, Spike Lee, Stanley Kramer

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The Missing Bi-racial Child in Hollywood

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