Mixed Race Studies

Almost Brown, A Memoir

Crown (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-06-06
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593443019
Ebook ISBN: 9780593443026
Audiobook ISBN: 9780593740880

Charlotte Gill

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada to the United States in an elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.

Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Their intercultural experiment features turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke. Over time, Gill’s parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as she too finds herself distancing from her father—Why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?—she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. Is this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? Almost Brown looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What am I? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? Eventually, after years of silence, Gill and her father reclaim a space for forgiveness and love.

In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, “diversity,” and the idea of “race,” a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Oachkatzlschwoaf: The word that’s ‘impossible’ to say

BBC Reel
2022-11-24

Words are loaded with meaning. Certain ones conjure joyful memories and others remind us of less happy times.

For Nenda Neururer, the word ‘oachkatzlschwoaf‘ invokes a range of emotions. The German word is very hard to pronounce and is synonymous with the Austrian state of Tyrol where locals tease outsiders by asking them to pronounce it.

Despite growing up in Tyrol, Nenda Neururer often felt like an outsider when confronted with this word. But when she moved to London she grew nostalgic for it and it became her little secret.

Found in Translation is a series made as part of the In The Mix project, in partnership with BBC Studios TalentWorks, Black Creators Matter and the Barbican.

Video by Nenda Neururer
Executive Producer: Paul I. Harris

By The Cut of Their Cloth

The Mixed Museum
London, United Kingdom
2022-03-21

BTCOTC’s creative director, Warren Reilly, and the Director of The Mixed Museum, Dr Chamion Caballero, discuss the inspiration behind their exploration into Brent’s mixed race and multicultural history as well as the project’s activities.

BTCOTC is part of the Being Brent Heritage 2021 Well Being fund. To learn more about the project, visit: https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/btcotcproject.

Film directed and edited by Justine Nassef Magdy.

The archival photographs featured in the video are from the Petersen Collection at Glamorgan Archives, and Butetown History and Arts Centre (material now hosted at The Heritage & Cultural Exchange Archive).

For more information, click here.

Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel

HarperVia (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2022-04-12
240 pages
5.5 x 0.85 x 8.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063140882
E-book ISBN: 9780063140905
Digital Audio, MP3 ISBN: 9780063140912

Claire Kohda

A young, mixed-race vampire must find a way to balance her deep-seated desire to live amongst humans with her incessant hunger in this stunning debut novel from a writer-to-watch.

Lydia is hungry. She’s always wanted to try Japanese food. Sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside – the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and iced-coffee, ice cream and cake, and foraged herbs and plants, and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But, Lydia can’t eat any of these things. Her body doesn’t work like those of other people. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs’ blood in London – where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time – is much more difficult than she’d anticipated.

Then there are the humans – the other artists at the studio space, the people at the gallery she interns at, the strange men that follow her after dark, and Ben, a boyish, goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can’t bring herself to feed on them. In her windowless studio, where she paints and studies the work of other artists, binge-watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer and videos of people eating food on YouTube and Instagram, Lydia considers her place in the world. She has many of the things humans wish for – perpetual youth, near-invulnerability, immortality – but she is miserable; she is lonely; and she is hungry – always hungry.

As Lydia develops as a woman and an artist, she will learn that she must reconcile the conflicts within her – between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans – if she is to find a way to exist in the world. Before any of this, however, she must eat.

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up

Grove Atlantic
2022-01-18
240 pages
5.5″ x 8.25″
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5890-1
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5891-8

Bernardine Evaristo

From the bestselling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism

Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win was an historic and revolutionary occasion. The first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize, Evaristo’s breathtaking Girl, Woman, Other was dubbed “godlike in its scope and insight” by the Washington Post, named a favorite book by President Obama, Roxane Gay, and countless other readers, and translated into thirty-five languages.

Evaristo’s nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is an intimate and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream to fight to bring her creative work into the world. She recalls her childhood and teenaged years as a young actor and playwright in London, details her early political awakenings and activism, and recounts her determination to tell stories that were absent in the literary world around her. In her over three decades of centering the stories and histories of Black Britons, Evaristo refused to let any barriers stand in her way. In Manifesto, she charts her theory of unstoppability, and explains how she broke with convention to achieve fulfillment both artistic and personal. Drawing deeply on her own varied experiences and the people who have inspired her, Evaristo offers a vital contribution to conversations around race, class, feminism, sexuality, and aging.

Manifesto is a unique inspiration to us all to persist in doing work that we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted, following in Evaristo’s footsteps, from first vision, to continued perseverance, to eventual triumph.

Book Talk-Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family

American Jewish Historical Society
2021-08-04

Author Laura Arnold Leibman discusses her new book with Gender and Jewish Studies Professor, Samira K. Mehta. Hear how family heirlooms were used to unlock the mystery of the Moses’s Family ancestors in, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family.

Tracing an extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac Moses were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and—at times—white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived.

Watch the video (00:56:47) here.

Immigration, Passing, and the Racial Other in Neo-Victorian Imperialist Fiction: The Case of Carnival Row (2019–)

Adaptation
Published 2021-10-07
DOI: 10.1093/adaptation/apab018

Dina Pedro, Ph.D. candidate
Department of English and German, School of Philology, Translation and Communication
Universitat de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

In this article, I provide a close reading of Season 1 of the neo-Victorian TV series Carnival Row as both an ambivalent postcolonial and neo-passing narrative. I first draw on previous criticism on postcolonial neo-Victorianism and turn-of-the-century American passing novels in order to analyze Carnival Row’s contradictory revision of imperial London through its re-imagining in a fictional city named The Burgue. I then explore the conflicting ways in which the series tackles (neo-)imperialism and colonialization, as it simultaneously criticizes and reproduces imperial ideologies and stereotypes of the racial Other. Finally, I argue that Carnival Row seems to offer a new take on American passing novels by allowing Philo, the mixed-race male protagonist, to embrace his biracial nature without meeting a tragic fate at the end of Season 1. Nonetheless, by choosing a White actor (Orlando Bloom) to play the role of the passer, the series culturally appropriates a form of Black oppression for the entertainment of a White audience. Thus, despite the series’ well-intentioned attempts to criticize (neo-)imperial, racist, and xenophobic practices, it ultimately perpetuates—rather than subverts—those very same ideologies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family

Oxford University Press
2021-08-30
320 Pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780197530474

Laura Arnold Leibman, Professor of English and Humanities
Reed College, Portland, Oregon

Highlights

• Provides a rare historical portrait of life as a Jewish American of color
• Examines the history of racial “passing” in an international context
• Uses an intersectional lens to untangle a family history

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother’s maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses’s ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress’s assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings’ extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and–at times–white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race–as well as on the role of religion in racial shift–in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Origins (Bridgetown, 1793-1798)
• Chapter 2: From Slave to Free (Bridgetown, 1801)
• Chapter 3: From Christian to Jew (Suriname, 1811-12)
• Chapter 4: The Tumultuous Island (Bridgetown, 1812-1817)
• Chapter 5: Synagogue Seats (New York & Philadelphia, 1793-1818)
• Chapter 6: The Material of Race (London, 1815-17)
• Chapter 7: Voices of Rebellion (Bridgetown, 1818-24)
• Chapter 8: A Woman Valor (New York, 1817-19)
• Chapter 9: This Liberal City (Philadelphia, 1818-33)
• Chapter 10: Feverish Love (New York, 1819-1830)
• Chapter 11: When I am Gone (New York, Barbados, London, 1830-1847)
• Chapter 12: Legacies (New York and Beyond, 1841-1860)
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Family Trees
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Notes

Bernardine Evaristo on a childhood shaped by racism: ‘I was never going to give up’

The Guardian
2021-09-25

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo: ‘I liked the same music as my little white pals, ate the same food, had the same feelings – human ones.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

My creativity can be traced back to my heritage, to the skin colour that defined how I was perceived. But, like my ancestors, I wouldn’t accept defeat

When I won the Booker prize in 2019 for my novel Girl, Woman, Other, I became an “overnight success”, after 40 years working professionally in the arts. My career hadn’t been without its achievements and recognition, but I wasn’t widely known. The novel received the kind of attention I had long desired for my work. In countless interviews, I found myself discussing my route to reaching this high point after so long. I reflected that my creativity could be traced back to my early years, cultural background and the influences that have shaped my life. Not least, my heritage and childhood

Through my father, a Nigerian immigrant who had sailed into the Motherland on the “Good Ship Empire” in 1949, I inherited a skin colour that defined how I was perceived in the country into which I was born, that is, as a foreigner, outsider, alien. I was born in 1959 in Eltham and raised in Woolwich, both in south London. Back then, it was still legal to discriminate against people based on the colour of their skin, and it would be many years before the Race Relations Acts (1965 and 1968) enshrined the full scope of anti-racist doctrine into British law.

My English mother met my father at a Commonwealth dance in central London in 1954. She was studying to be a teacher at a Catholic teacher-training college run by nuns in Kensington; he was training to be a welder. They married and had eight children in 10 years. Growing up, I was labelled “half-caste”, the term for biracial people at that time…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Other Windrush’: the hidden history of Afro-Chinese families in 1950s London

gal-dem
2021-06-30

Tao Leigh Goffe, Assistant Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural History
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

image credit: Tao Leigh Goffe/Canva

In this extract from ‘The Other Windrush‘, writer Tao Leigh Goffe explores the history of relative Hyacinth Lee, who migrated to the UK from Jamaica.

Family history is colonial history. How, then, to understand the vernacular photographic record and what is missing about the Windrush era, itself already an omission from British history? Since the inception of the technology of photography in the 1840s, the family photo album as an heirloom to be passed down, vertically, has formed the flesh of blood relation. The family album is also a literary surface inscribed with multiple meanings about race, gender, sexuality, class and who does not belong in the family tree. The visuality of collected images forms the fleshy proof of a seemingly biological argument for bourgeois belonging and familial intimacy. Blood is proof of kinship; the family portrait is flesh, and often colonial belonging.

Because family history is inevitably colonial history, I am invested in what and who is left out of the family album and outside of colonial history. Of particular (and selfish) interest to me is the impossibility of subjects of African and Chinese heritage. Photographs of Afro-Chinese families pose a challenge to the British colonial Trinidad experiment that wished to introduce Chinese labour to the Caribbean plantation to replace Africans in the early nineteenth century.

The ‘experiment’ documented in a secret Parliamentary Papers memorandum predicted the races would not mix. African and Asian people did, of course, ‘mix’; and many subsequent channels of migration were formed from Africa meeting Asia (both China and India) in the Caribbean. Where do we see these descendants present in the routes of the Windrush generation?…

Read the entire article here.