Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

However, the scientific founding behind the distinction of race based on geographic ancestry is highly questionable, and theorists in favor of social construction philosophy seeking to uphold race as a social construct refute the ancestry-race connection, calling it an antiquated and generalized treatment of the multifarious and intricate notion that is racial identity and heritage. By locating race within one’s ancestral historic place of origin, biological determinism fails to acknowledge the constant “migration and gene flow [which] have spread human genes around the world in a myriad of ways. Successive migrations, conquests, absorptions, intermarriages, alliances, and extinctions of populations have produced a constant, never-ending shuffling of human genetic material” (Alland 2002: 47). How can biological determinism account for the massive population of mixed race?

At the core of biological determinism theories is the deprecating confusion of geographic ancestry and race. For example, Senegalese, Jamaican, and African American are all considered part of the same conglomerate race: black. All Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are Asian. Polish, German, French, and Canadian; white. Race, “as used by the average educated speaker of English, connotes geographic ancestry” (Levin 2002: 25) that has then been messily combined into general genetic racial groups. However these peoples, of vastly differing geographic location but the same socially constructed racial group are almost guaranteed to have very drastically different genetic profiles because of the connection between geographic ancestry and genetics. Two people considered the same race but from separate poles of the world will not be genetically similar, yet two people from the same location but of considered different races are very likely to share very similar genomes due to ancestral intermarriage and proximity.

Danielle Antonia Craig, “From Medical Innovation to Sociopolitical Crisis: How Racialized Medicine Has Shifted the Scope of Racial Discourse and its Social Consequences,” (Senior Essay, Wesleyan University, 2013), 11-12.

Creative Media lecturer publishes new book

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Europe, Media Archive on 2013-09-14 17:26Z by Steven

Creative Media lecturer publishes new book

Dundalk Institute of Technology
Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland
2013-09-02

Sarah Mc Cann

Zélie Asava, a lecturer on the BA & BA (Hons) in Video & Film Production has recently had her book—The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television—published by the Peter Lang Publishing Group.

The book is also the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

The book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland, Sarah Mc Cann, Zélie Asava

Comments Off on Creative Media lecturer publishes new book

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30

Mixed Race Studies

Creative Media lecturer publishes new book

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta