Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
To be sure, there are other dimensions of this adaptation that deserve discussion—for example, the downplaying of Clare’s abusive childhood, which renders her passing a little more mercenary than it is in the novel—but I’ve already gone on too long. As is by now clear, I have my misgivings about [Rebecca] Hall’s recent film, but, above all, I’m very glad that she made it. If nothing else, it is a sign of [Nella] Larsen’s growing stature, a growth evident to any scholar who has been watching the ballooning scholarly interest in her work in the last decade. Having her novel adapted for the big screen constitutes a new stage in this evolution, for it makes her only the second novelist of the Harlem Renaissance to have her work adapted for film in a major way (Zora Neale Hurston was first, with Darnell Martin’s 2005 adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God).
“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski [Miyawaki]. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”
Mitski Miyawaki, who performs with her band under her first name, grew up in a biracial, multicultural household. During her childhood, Mitski lived in Japan, Malaysia, China, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it wasn’t until she returned to the U.S. that she had a racial designation imposed on her.
“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”
In the U.S., Mitski was regularly asked what most biracial people – her being half Japanese and half Caucasian American – are asked at least once in their lives: “What ARE you?” Mitski doesn’t particularly identify with American or Japanese culture, and her parents didn’t encourage her to choose or adopt either.
“I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that’s important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way,” observes Mitski. “Being an outsider at the time nurtured my eye as a writer.”…