Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Postwar responses to black occupation children represent a formative moment in the racial reconstruction of postfascist Germany. Military occupation between 1945 and 1949 produced some 94,000 occupation children. However, official and public attention fixed on a small subset, the so-called “farbige Mischlinge” or “colored mixed-bloods,” distinguished from the others by their black paternity. Although they constituted a small minority of postwar German births—numbering only about 3,000 in 1950 and nearly double that by 1955—West German federal and state officials, youth welfare workers, and the press invested the children with considerable symbolic significance.

The years after 1945 were constituent for contemporary German racial understanding, and postwar debates regarding “miscegenation” and “Mischlingskinder” were central to the ideological transition from National Socialist to democratic approaches to race. The term “Mischling,” in fact, survived the Third Reich and persisted well into the 1960s in official, scholarly, media, and public usage in West Germany. But its content had changed. Rather than refer to the progeny of so-called mixed unions between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans as it had during the Third Reich, immediately after the war it came to connote the offspring of white German women and foreign men of color. Thus “Mischling” remained a racialized category of social analysis and social policy after 1945, as before. But the definition of which races had mixed, as well as the social significance of such mixing, had fundamentally altered.

Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eleym and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 31-32.

Performance and Identity in Adrian Piper’s Work

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2022-04-01 03:02Z by Steven

Performance and Identity in Adrian Piper’s Work

InMedia: The French Journal of Media Studies
Volume 8, Number 2 (2020)
DOI: 10.4000/inmedia.2754
17 pages

Antonia Rigaud, Associate Professor of American Studies
Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris France

Lorna Simpson
*Head On Ice #3*
2016
Ink and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass
Unique
67 x 50 x 1 3/8 in (170.2 x 127 x 3.5 cm)
^©Lorna Simpson
*Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth*
*Photo: James Wang*

Adrian Piper’s career which spans close to 60 years illustrates the passage in American art from conceptualism to performance art at the turn of the 1970s. She uses the language of conceptualism to interrogate, through performance, the notion of identity in American culture. Confronting her viewers with racial stereotypes, or presenting strategies of retreat, her performances suggest that identity is a fluctuating notion, one which can only exist in dialogue between artist and audience. Her critique of essentialism is at the heart of artworks which are to be construed as social contracts binding artist and audiences together in the definition of the self.

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Tags: Adrian Margaret Smith Piper, Adrian Piper, Antonia Rigaud, InMedia, InMedia: The French Journal of Media Studies

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Mixed Race Studies

Performance and Identity in Adrian Piper’s Work

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