Mixed Race Studies

Theaster Gates illuminates the dark history of Maine’s interracial exiles

Document Journal
2019-03-18

Ann Binlot

For his first solo museum exhibition in France at Palais de Tokyo, Theaster Gates explores America’s dark forgotten past through the interracial exile of Malaga Island.

“Nothing is pure in the end… A sea of wood, An island of debate. Can an exhibition start to shift the negative truths of the history of a place?”

Theaster Gates has exemplified the meaning of social practice in his work, creating new models for building community while bringing awareness to both the historical and present-day struggles of black America. In Amalgam, his first solo museum exhibition in France at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Chicago-based artist shed light on Malaga Island, a 41-acre island located at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine. The island was a fishing hamlet, home to an interracial community born out of the Civil War until 1912, when the Maine governor Frederick Plaisted forced its poorest population, a group of about 45 mixed-race individuals, off the island. Some relocated in Maine, while others were involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions. Ashamed to be associated with the island and the stigma that came with being from there, many of its descendants feared speaking about the incident, which stemmed from racism and classism…

Read the entire article here.

Dancer, singer … spy: France’s Panthéon to honour Josephine Baker

The Guardian
2021-11-28

Jon Henley

The performer will be the first Black woman to enter the mausoleum, in recognition of her wartime work

In November 1940, two passengers boarded a train in Toulouse headed for Madrid, then onward to Lisbon. One was a striking Black woman in expensive furs; the other purportedly her secretary, a blonde Frenchman with moustache and thick glasses.

Josephine Baker, toast of Paris, the world’s first Black female superstar, one of its most photographed women and Europe’s highest-paid entertainer, was travelling, openly and in her habitual style, as herself – but she was playing a brand new role.

Her supposed assistant was Jacques Abtey, a French intelligence officer developing an underground counter-intelligence network to gather strategic information and funnel it to Charles de Gaulle’s London HQ, where the pair hoped to travel after Portugal.

Ostensibly, they were on their way to scout venues for Baker’s planned tour of the Iberian peninsula. In reality, they carried secret details of German troops in western France, including photos of landing craft the Nazis were lining up to invade Britain.

The information was mostly written on the singer’s musical scores in invisible ink, to be revealed with lemon juice. The photographs she had hidden in her underwear. The whole package was handed to British agents at the Lisbon embassy – who informed Abtey and Baker they would be far more valuable assets in France than in London.

So back to occupied France Baker duly went. “She was immensely brave, and utterly committed,” Hanna Diamond, a Cardiff university professor, said of Baker, who on Tuesday will become the first Black woman to enter the Panthéon in Paris, the mausoleum for France’s “great men”….

Read the entire article here.

Acculturation of mixed-race people and/or adoptees

MAIF Social Club
37 Rue de Turenne
75003 Paris, France
2021-11-09, 18:30 CET (Local Time)

For its 4th edition in France, the National Adoption Awareness Month, organized by the director Amandine Gay, offers a comparative view between the experience of transracial adoptees and mixed-race people.

“Acculturation of mixed-race people and/or adoptees” conference will welcome:

• Nina Daboussi (podcaster of Le cul entre deux chaises)
• Jacqueline Ogier (spokeperson for the Fédération des Enfants Déracinés des départements et régions d’outre-mer)
• Solène Brun (sociologist)
• Nora el Massioui and Sophie Rakotondrasoa for the 1 Cul 2 Chaises collective

The event is free, with subscription and in French.

The conference will be recorded and available later on, at the MAIF online channel.

For more information, click here.

Josephine Baker is 1st Black woman given Paris burial honor

The Associated Press
2021-08-21

FILE – In this file photo dated March 6, 1961, singer Josephine Baker poses in her dressing room at the Strand Theater in New York City, USA. The remains of American-born singer and dancer Josephine Baker will be reinterred at the Pantheon monument in Paris, Le Parisien newspaper reported Sunday Aug. 22, 2021, that French President Emmanuel Macron has decided to bestow the honor. Josephine Baker is a World War II hero in France and will be the first Black woman to get the country’s highest honor. (AP Photo)”

PARIS (AP) — The remains of American-born singer and dancer Josephine Baker will be reinterred at the Pantheon monument in Paris, making the entertainer who is a World War II hero in France the first Black woman to get the country’s highest honor.

Le Parisien newspaper reported Sunday that French President Emmanuel Macron decided to organize a ceremony on Nov. 30 at the Paris monument, which houses the remains of scientist Marie Curie, French philosopher Voltaire, writer Victor Hugo and other French luminaries.

The presidential palace confirmed the newspaper’s report.

After her death in 1975, Baker was buried in Monaco, dressed in a French military uniform with the medals she received for her role as part of the French Resistance during the war.

Baker will be the fifth woman to be honored with a Pantheon burial and will also be the first entertainer honored…

Read the entire article here.

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Bloomsbury
2019-02-21
232 pages
9 colour and 37 bw illus
229 x 152 mm
Hardback 9781501332357

Lyneise E. Williams, Associate Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. The term ‘Latinize’ is introduced to connect France’s early 19th-century endeavors to create “Latin America,” an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population.

Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched onto images of Latin Americans of European descent mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage. Whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans.

After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
  • The Term “Latin American”
  • Why Paris?
  • Much More Than Primitivism
  • Reduced to Latin Americans
  • Parisian Figurations of Blackness from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
  • Overview of the Study
• Chapter 1: Playing Up Blackness and Indianness; Downplaying Europeanness
  • Editing Francisco Laso: Racializing Spanish and Portuguese Americans
  • Performing Rastaquerismo
  • Justified by Anthropology: Quatrefages, Hamy, and the Casta Paintings
  • Latin American Self-Representation
  • The Shifting Rastaquouère
  • Maintaining Anthropological Interpretations in the Early Twentieth Century
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Chocolat the Clown: Not Just Black
  • Chocolat and Footit: Partners in Contrast
  • The Auguste Chocolat
  • The Give and Take of Chocolat and Footit
  • Chocolat and Footit at the Nouveau Cirque
  • Chocolat as Brand Image
  • Beneath the Surface
  • Chocolat as Mixed Animal
  • Chocolat the Contaminant
  • Impure Chocolat(e)
  • Chocolat, That Special Ingredient: The Racially Mixed Object of Desire
  • Complicating Notions of Minstrelsy
  • Lip Interventions
  • Representations Through Clothing
  • Sexualizing Black Dandies
  • Assimilating the Latin
  • Beyond the Circus
  • Chocolat, Object of Gay Desire
  • Chocolat and the Elite and the Virile
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Alfonso Teofilo Brown: Agency and Impositions of Blackness and Europeanness
  • Sport and the Imagined Ideal Male Body
  • Black Boxers in Turn-of-the-Century France
  • Gangly Brown
  • The Purity and Hybridity of Gangly Brown
  • Brown the Gentleman
  • Images of Black Difference
  • Brown the Philanthropist
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Figari’s Blacks: Negotiating French and Southern Cone Blackness
  • Figari and Paris
  • Contested Whiteness and the Black Body
  • Conceptualizing Regional Identity
  • Through the Anthropological Gaze
  • Candombe as Framing Device
  • Gender and Race in Candombe
  • Objects as Markers
  • Figari as “Naïf” Painter
  • Increasing Latin American Presence in Paris
  • Perceptions of Black Uruguayans
  • Figari’s Evolution in Paris
  • Contradictions and Contrasts between Figari’s Paintings and Written Work
  • Conclusion
• Coda
• Select Bibliography

In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre–Civil War New Orleans

Historic New Orleans Collection
2010
128 pages
70 color images, 7 b/w images
8″ × 9½”
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-917860-57-7

Edited and with an introduction by Erin M. Greenwald, with essays by William Keyse Rudolph and Patricia Brady

Julien Hudson, born in 1811 in New Orleans, was the son of a property-owning free woman of color and a white English merchant, ironmonger, and ship chandler. Hudson began painting in the mid-1820s, training first in New Orleans and later in Paris. Little is known about his personal life, outside of scattered details found in a handful of public documents and a pair of early-twentieth-century reminiscences by former student George Coulon and prominent Creole of color Rodolphe Desdunes. This carefully researched volume is the most thorough examination to date of Julien Hudson and his world.

Theaster Gates on how his new show was inspired by the eviction of 45 people from an island in Maine

The Art Newspaper
2019-02-01

Anna Swansom

Theaster Gates ©Theaster Gates; Photo: Julian Salinas

The Chicago-based artist’s exhibition in Paris examines the forced removal in 1911 of the inhabitants of Malaga Island

The US artist Theaster Gates has taken the eviction of a mixed-race community from a small island in Maine as the starting point for his first solo exhibition in France, opening this month at the Palais de Tokyo. In 1912, 45 people from Malaga Island were evicted by the state authorities and eight of them were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded following the state’s purchase of the island in 1911. The island, a poor fishing village of black, white and mixed-race people, was ridiculed in a Maine newspaper as a “strange community” of “peculiar people”; its eviction has recently been described by a US documentary as having been motivated by economics, racism, eugenics and political retribution.

Through new works including sculptures, a film and a video, the Chicago-based artist has developed the wide-ranging project and exhibition, Amalgam, which explores the complexity of interraciality and migratory histories. The show has been organised by Katell Jaffrès and has received support from Regen Projects, Richard Gray Gallery and White Cube.

The Art Newspaper: How did you become interested in the history of Malaga Island and how did this lead to Amalgam?

Theaster Gates: I had started a residency in 2017 at Colby College in Maine and was visiting a friend who said there was this important, not well-known history about this island that used to have black and mixed-race people that were evicted. We were in a boat and he suggested having lobsters on the adjacent island before checking it out. So I learned of it quite leisurely and then started to do research.

The idea of interracial mixing led to the creation of a sculptural form, “amalgam”: a by-product of what happens when one artistic form from history meets another one to create a new kind of work. I wanted to create a bridge that would make people more curious about this island and for people who are of mixed race and from backgrounds where their parents are of different religions, I wanted Malaga to be a place where all mixes felt that they had a home. The beauty of mixing is one of the cornerstones of the exhibition…

Read the interview article here.

Provenance: A Novel

Creative Cache
2015-09-16
334 pages
5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0991614325

Donna Drew Sawyer

• Winner of the 2017 Maryland Writers’ Association Annual Book Award for Historical Fiction
• Selected for the 2017 “Go On Girl Book Club” reading list
• Finalist for 2016 “Phillis Wheatley Award for First Fiction.”

Southern civility turns savage when Hank Whitaker’s dying words reveal the unimaginable. No one—not his socialite wife, Maggie, or young son, Lance—ever suspected the successful businessman, husband, and father they knew and loved was a black man passing for white. In 1931, in the segregated South, marriage between whites and blacks is illegal. Maggie is now a criminal facing jail. When Lance receives death threats to atone for his father’s betrayal, the family flees the U.S. for the racial freedom of Paris.

Still grieving Hank’s death and fearful of their uncertain future as Europe marches toward war, Lance and Maggie mourn the lives they loved but lost. As they struggle to create new lives and identities for themselves, they find a surprising community of artists and American expats that are on the same journey and show them a different way to live and to love. Provenance is a sweeping historical saga about love, betrayal, tragedy, triumph, passion, privilege and the universal desire for acceptance—regardless of who you are or where you’re from.

Half-Blood Blues

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
2011-09-03
304 pages
8.5 X 5.5 X 0.9 in
Cloth ISBN:9780887627415
Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 9781250012708

Esi Edugyan

• Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris—where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance—Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.