Mixed Race Studies

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

University of Washington Press
December 2021
304 pages
4 b&w illustrations
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780295749488
Paperback ISBN: 9780295749495

Edited by:

Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Assistant professor of English and International Indigenous Studies
University of Calgary

Darryl Barthé, Visiting professor of History
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, San Diego

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.

With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.

Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community

University of Washington Press
June 2016
176 pages
1 bandw illus, 2 tables
6 x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 9780295998503
Hardcover ISBN: 9780295998077

Andrew J. Jolivette, Professor and chair of American Indian studies
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California

The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ “two-spirit” identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity.

Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact – and religious conversion – attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV.

Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco’s two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.

Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, Hybridity in American Texts

University of Washington Press
2007-06-15
352 pages
notes, bibliog., index
6 x 9 in.
Paperback ISBN: 9780295988351
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0295986816; ISBN-13: 978-0295986814
eBook ISBN: 9780295800745

Edited by

David S. Goldstein, Senior Lecturer, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington, Bothell

Audrey B. Thacker, Lecturer in English
California State University, Northridge

This volume of collected essays offers truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors—from Toni Morrison to Bret Harte—these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between “ethnic” and “nonethnic” literatures.

Other contributors include Jesse Alemán, Ariel Balter, Olivia Castellano, AnnaMarie Christiansen, Georgina Dodge, Tracy Floreani, Joe Lockard, Edwin J. McAllister, Sheree Meyer, William Over, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Chauncey Ridley, Derek Parker Royal, Alexander W. Schultheis, Andrea Tinnenmeyer, and Jose L. Torres-Padilla.

Contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Re-Constructing Race and Ethnicity: Identity Imposed or Adopted
  • 1. Citizenship Rights and Colonial Whites: The Cultural Work of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Novels
  • 2. Testifying Bodies: Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy
  • 3. The Color of Money in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
  • 4. Passing as the “Tragic” Mulatto: Constructions of Hybridity in Toni Morrison’s Novels
  • 5. Re-Viewing the Literary Chinatown: Multicultural Hybridity in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land
  • 6. Reading The Turner Diaries: Jewish Blackness, Judaized Blacks, and Head-Body Race Paradigms
• II. Re-Contextualizing Race and Ethnicity: Texts in Historical and Political Perspective
  • 7. Smallpox, Opium, and Invasion: Chines Invasion, White Guilt, and Native American Displacement in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction
  • 8. Visualizing Race in American Immigrant Autobiography
  • 9. Maud Martha vs. I Love Lucy: Taking on the Postwar Consumer Fantasy
• III. Re-Considering Race and Ethnicity: Meta-Issues in Theory and Criticism
  • 10. Some Do, Some Don’t: Whiteness Theory and the Treatment of Race in African American Drama
  • 11. Traumatic Legacy in Darryl Pinckney’s High Cotton
  • 12. Portnoy’s Neglected Siblings: A Case for Postmodern Jewish American Literary Studies
  • 13. Tension, Conversation, and Collectivity: Examining the Space of Double-Consciousness in the Search for Shared Knowledge
  • 14. When Hybridity Doesn’t Resist: Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing!
• Contributors
• Index

Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography

University of Washington Press
2001
282 pages
6” x 9”
Paperback ISBN: 9780295980799

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Award-winning videomaker, performance artist, and pop-culture provocateur Kip Fulbeck has captivated audiences worldwide with his mixture of high comedy and personal narrative. In Paper Bullets, his first novel, Fulbeck taps into his Cantonese, English, Irish, and Welsh heritage, weaving a fictional autobiography from 27 closely linked stories, essays, and confessions. By turns sensitive and forceful, passionate and callous, Fulbeck confronts the politics of race, sex, and Asian American masculinity head-on without apology, constantly questioning where Hapas fit in a country that ignores multiracial identity.

Raised in southern California by a Chinese-born mother and a Caucasian father, Fulbeck pushes the conventions of literary form as he simultaneously draws from, recreates, and fabricates his own life history. His range of experiences – from college professor to youth outreach volunteer, blues player to surfer and lifeguard—informs his witty and humane writing. Like himself, his protagonist is a young man shaped by the conflicting mores, stigmas, desires, and codes of male conduct in America. He searches for and mismanages love and independence, continually experimenting with sex along the way. Sometimes hilarious, always heartfelt, surfing the trivia of pop culture and sound bits, his inner voice shifts continually among the real, the perceived, and the imagined.

Kip Fulbeck is an ocean lifeguard, guitar junkie, dubbed kung fu grandmaster, Lakers fanatic, and associate professor of art studio and Asian American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Dust of Life: America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam

University of Washington Press
1999
160 pages
notes, glossary, bibliog., index
Paperback ISBN: 9780295978369

Robert S. McKelvey, M.D., Professor
Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Oregon Health & Science University

The Dust of Life is a collection of vivid and devastating oral histories of Vietnamese Amerasians. Abandoned during the war by their American fathers, discriminated against by the victorious Communists, and ignored for many years by the American government, they endured life in impoverished Vietnam. Their stories are sad, sometimes tragic, but they are also testimonials to the strength of human resiliency.

Robert S. McKelvey is a former marine who served in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now a child psychiatrist, he returned to Vietnam in 1990 to begin the long series of interviews that resulted in this book. While allowing his subjects to speak for themselves, McKelvey has organized their narratives around themes common to their lives: early maternal loss, the experience of prejudice and discrimination, coping with adversity, dealing with shattered hopes for the future, and, for some, adapting to the alien environment of the United States.

While unique in many respects, the Vietnamese Amerasian story also illustrates themes that are tragically universal: neglect of the human by-products of war, the destructiveness of prejudice and racism, the pain of abandonment, and the horrors of life amidst extreme poverty, hostility, and neglect.

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

University of Washington Press
January 2013
304 pages
63 illustrations, 44 in color, maps
7 x 10 in.
ISBN: 978-0-295-99225-9

Edited by

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

Cover art by Mequitta Ahuja

War Baby/Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai’i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.

Visit the website here.

The Heart of Hyacinth

University of Washington Press
2000 (Originally published in 1903)
288 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Paperback ISBN: paperback (9780295979168

Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton) (1875-1954)

Introduction by:

Samina Najmi, Professor of English
California State University, Fresno

The Heart of Hyacinth, originally published in 1903, tells the coming-of-age story of Hyacinth Lorrimer, a child of white parents who was raised from infancy in Japan by a Japanese foster mother and assumed to be Eurasian. A crisis occurs when, 18 years after her birth, her American father returns to Japan to reclaim her just as Hyacinth has become engaged to a Japanese aristocrat, and she forcefully asserts her Japanese ties only to find that her prospective father-in-law will not tolerate a white wife for his son. Onoto Watanna creates in her protagonist a young white woman who not only claims a Japanese identity but shifts between her Japaneseness and her whiteness as expediency dictates. In this novel Watanna is on the cutting edge of what we now call race theory, using that theory-of racial constructions and fluidity-in the service of an avant-garde feminism.

Onoto Watanna (pen name for Winnifred Eaton) was a popular writer of American romance novels. Daughter of a Chinese mother and English father, she used her own mixed heritage to explore diverse social issues and exploited the Orientalist fantasies of her readership to become a best-selling author. Samina Najmi is visiting assistant professor in English at Wheaton College and has written extensively on women and race in Asian American literature.

Being Eurasian: Memories Across Racial Divides

University of Washington Press
2004
296 pages
6″ x 9″
Paperback (9789622096714)
Hardcover (9789622096707)

Vicky Lee
Hong Kong Baptist University

What was it like being a Eurasian in colonial Hong Kong? How is the notion of Eurasianness remembered in some Hong Kong memoirs? Being Eurasian is a description and analysis of the lives of three famous Hong Kong Eurasian memoirists, Joyce Symons, Irene Cheng and Jean Gittins, and explores their very different ways of constructing and looking at their own ethnic identity.

‘Eurasian’ is a term that could have many different connotations, during different periods in colonial Hong Kong, and in different spaces within the European and Chinese communities. Eurasianness could mean privilege, but also marginality, adulteration and even betrayal. Eurasians from different socio-economic sectors had very different perceptions of their own ethnicity, which did not always agree with their externally prescribed identity. Being Eurasian explores the ethnic choices faced by Hong Kong Eurasians of the pre-war generation, as they dealt with the very fluidity of their ethnic identity.

Rubén Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y más allá

University of Washington Press
Published with Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture
April 2010
160 pages
110 color illus., notes, bibliog., 9 x 10 in
Paperback ISBN: 9780295990040

Edited and Introduced by:

Ben Mitchell, Senior Curator of Art
Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, Washington

Essays By:

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Former Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Stanford University
Former Associate Director for Creativity and Culture
Rockefeller Foundation

John Keeble, Professor Emeritus
Eastern Washington University

“Multiple backgrounds can form such two- and three-dimensional ideas that they take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Russian history, Shakespeare, English literature, or Freud . . . had to do with cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota, picking potatoes in Hoople, North Dakota, or visiting relatives in Michoacán. This diversity of ideas can produce a three-headed monster or an artist, and I chose the latter.” –Rubén Trejo

Rubén Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y más allá is the first comprehensive survey of Trejo’s art and career. It focuses on more than fifty works from 1964 through the present, including pieces from his delightful life-size, puppet-like Clothes for Day of the Dead series; works from the Calzones series – cast bronze underwear and jalapenos – that challenge the Spanish machismo culture; seminal examples of his lifelong exploration of the cruciform image; and much more. The volume includes biographical and interpretive essays, as well as a chronology, list of exhibitions, and bibliography.

Rubén Trejo (1937-2009) was born in a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad yard in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his father, a mixed Tarascan Indian and Hispanic from Michoacán, Mexico, and his mother, from Ixtlan in the same Mexican province, had found a home for the family in a boxcar while his father worked for the railroad. Trejo became the first in his family to graduate from college, and in 1973 he moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he began a thirty-year association with Eastern Washington University as teacher and artist.

His isolation from major centers of Chicano culture led him to search for self-identity through his art. Influenced and inspired by such writers and artists as Octavio Paz and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, he explored a dynamic, multidimensional worldview through his sculpture and mixed-media pieces and created a body of work that deftly limns his identity as an artist and a Chicano. Throughout his long teaching career, he worked tirelessly to create opportunities for young Chicanos through tutoring and mentoring.

Table of Contents

• Preface by Ben Mitchell
• In a Garden of Ideas / Ben Mitchell
• Beyond Boundaries, Aztlán y más allá / Tomás Ybarra-Fraust
• Plates
• Trejo’s Perfect Havoc / John Keeble
• Chronology for Rubén Miguel Trejo
• Selected Exhibitions
• Selected Bibliography
• Patrons
• About the Authors