Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States since 1898―and a colony of Spain for 400 years before ―was very much subjected, by the empires and local criollo elites, to eugenicist ideas. “Race” science, in the first-half of the twentieth century, allowed criollo elites to create new racializing parameters while inserting “progressive” measures of social hygiene, public health, and eugenics to promote ideas of modernization, progress, and civilization. These seemingly progressive ideas were cemented on the figure of “el jibaro” (a white Puerto Rican farmworker) as the mythical symbol of the Puerto Rican nation which is constructed as a product of the mixture of Black, indigenous, and Spanish. Discursively constructing Puerto Ricanness as the mixture of three “races” allows for an erasure of racialization processes and the systematic racist structure of Puerto Rican nationalism as an all-inclusive ideology of exclusion. The conflation of these three “races” to create a white/light-skinned farmworker signify an erasure of the “factors”/bodies that were assumed to compose the idea behind Puerto Rican nationalism. Additionally, by seeing these three “races” as a mere factor for the creation of the “jibaro” it invisibilized those bodies which—in the criollo elite’s views—did not belong unless they were to “better the ‘race”(an intrinsic eugenic idea rooted in popular belief around certain kinds of racial mixture “pa’ mejorar la raza”). Hence, Blackness and Indigeneity in Puerto Rico are discursively mounted to create a seemingly mixed—dare I say, post-racial—society as long as Black and indigenous bodies mix and assimilate to the “jibaro nation.” This is to say, everything that falls outside of the national symbol of the “jibaro”—which strives for a lighter skin—becomes systematically pathologized. Hence, even if mixed-race identity is assumed to be the organizing principle, it is anti-Blackness and the systemic striving to achieve whiteness that operates as the driving force of Puerto Rican society.

R. Sánchez-Rivera, “Shilling for U.S. Empire: The Legacies of Scientific Racism in Puerto Rico,” The Abusable Past, June 22, 2020. https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/shilling-for-u-s-empire-the-legacies-of-scientific-racism-in-puerto-rico/.

Afrofuturism’s Others

Posted in Literary/Artistic Criticism, Live Events, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2013-05-28 02:37Z by Steven

Afrofuturism’s Others

Tate Modern
Starr Auditorium
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
Saturday, 2013-06-15, 14:00-16:00 BST (Local Time)

Ellen Gallagher, Deluxe 2004–5 (detail) Mixed media, 60 frames, 38.9 x 32 cm each
Tate Photography © Tate

Ellen Gallagher’s work deconstructs received truths and weaves together propositional narratives, inhabiting spaces where the future collapses into the past, obsolescence into technology and image into text. These are spaces carved out by the cultural aesthetic of Afrofuturism.

In the context of Gallagher’s work, speakers will explore and complicate readings of Afrofuturism and its influence on contemporary artists’ practices, creating an intricate understanding of the genre and its evolutions. Speakers include Zoe Whitley (Independent Curator and panel co-organiser), Hazel V. Carby (Professor of African American Studies and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalisation at Yale University), Amna Malik (Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL), and Lili Reynaud-Dewar…

This event is related to the exhibition Ellen Gallagher: AxME

For more information, click here.

Tags: Amna Malik, Ellen Gallagher, Hazel Carby, Hazel V. Carby, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Tate Modern, Zoe Whitley

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Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Posted in Arts, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2013-05-20 00:30Z by Steven

Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Tate Modern: Exhibition
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
2013-05-01 through 2013-09-01

Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the mid-1990s. Her gorgeously intricate and highly imaginative works are realised with a wealth of virtuoso detail and wit. This is her first major solo exhibition in the UK, providing the first ever opportunity to explore an overview of her twenty-year career.

Gallagher brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film and animation. The exhibition explores the themes which have emerged and recurred in her practice, from her seminal early canvases through to recent film installations and new bodies of work.

In her series of wig-map grid collages, Double Natural, POMP-BANG, and eXelento, Gallagher has appropriated and incorporated found advertisements for hair and beauty products from the 1930s to the late 1970s from publications such as Ebony, Our World, and Black Stars. These advertisements fostered ideals in black beauty through wigs and hair adornments, which Gallagher has then recontextualised, collaging the Afro wig elements and embellishing them with plasticine. As she comments: ‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’…

For more information, click here.

Tags: Ellen Gallagher, Tate Modern

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Mixed Race Studies

Afrofuturism’s Others

Ellen Gallagher: AxME

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