{"id":26452,"date":"2012-11-12T22:29:46","date_gmt":"2012-11-12T22:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26452"},"modified":"2016-02-28T18:56:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-28T18:56:45","slug":"other-tongues-mixed-race-women-speak-out-review-mckibbin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26452","title":{"rendered":"Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (review) [McKibbin]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (review) [McKibbin]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Toronto Quarterly<\/a>
\nVolume 81, Number 3<\/a>, Summer 2012
\npages 704-705
\nDOI: 10.1353\/utq.2012.0140<\/a><\/p>\n

Molly Littlewood McKibbin<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out<\/a> by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, eds.(Inanna Publications, 2010)<\/em><\/p>\n

DeRango-Adem<\/a> and Thompson\u2019s<\/a> new collection of the artistic, autobiographical, and scholarly work of almost seventy women performs the important task of bridging the gap between late twentieth-century mixed-race writing and more contemporary work. Their text demonstrates the changes multiracial discourse has undergone and is undergoing. Other Tongues<\/em> addresses the important concerns that dominated multiracial discourse in North America in the final decades of the twentieth century, which, as the contributions illustrate, are still quite relevant to the experiences of both older and younger multiracial women. Prominent recurring themes include belonging; racial inclusion and exclusion; identity formation; racism; physical appearance; the continuing prevalence of the \u2018what are you\/where are you from?\u2019 question; the relationships between race, culture, and ethnicity; and the relationship of \u2018colour\u2019 to whiteness. Although some writers do not further these issues beyond what earlier collections have already done, others take them up in ways that renew older ideas with fresh perspectives. Many contributions touch on issues that are central to ongoing multiracial discourses, including gender, sexuality, class, migration, transracial adoption, single parenting, families consisting of multiracial parents, the rhetoric of \u2018post-racialism,\u2019 and the impact of Barack Obama<\/a> as a public figure.<\/p>\n

As Amber Jamilla Musser<\/a> argues, race is \u2018all about context,\u2019 and this collection makes a concerted effort to include work arising out of many different contexts. Through contributors from a large variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds working in a range of genres \u2013 including autobiographical essays, narrative sketches, poetry, drama, scholarly essays, and visual art (unfortunately not printed in colour) \u2013 Other Tongues offers diverse voices that explore multiracial experience in North America (a necessarily limited geographical region, as the editors acknowledge). The exclusive engagement with women\u2019s voices is, the editors explain, the result of a commitment to the goals of women\u2019s studies. But while Carol Camper\u2019s preface (itself rather troubling in its uncritical adoption of conventional notions of authenticity) signals DeRango-Adem and Thompson\u2019s debt to her 1994 collection of women\u2019s writing, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women<\/a><\/em>, and while the desire to offer a forum in which women\u2019s voices can be heard is clear, the absence of men\u2019s experiences is at times a notable lack. Since multiracial discourse is in many ways a product of critical race theory and, consequently, is dependent on the \u2018storytelling\u2019 of racialized individuals as a way of approaching matters of race, the absence of male contributors seems limiting. While the editors\u2019 choice is made explicit, the collection is presented in a way that suggests it is quite straightforwardly a text grappling with multiracialism that happens to include only women. Since contemporary North American multiracial theory, scholarship, and cultural production have never been dominated by men, there is no immediately apparent reason to focus on women to the exclusion of men.<\/strong><\/p>\n

However, the most significant feature of the volume is that it exhibits clearly the complicated set of variables that affect the experiences and identities of racialized figures, and several of the contributions are especially insightful. The blend of contributors of different ages and from different class, educational, regional, and cultural backgrounds aids the project of multiracial discourse, which is perhaps best defined by its heterogeneity. This collection is helpful since the importance of hearing a variety of voices is essential for resisting the homogenizing process of racialization in North American society. As Jackie Wang explains, \u2018I write because I believe that it means something, because I have a story, although it is not the story,\u2019 and, indeed, the multitude of \u2018stories\u2019 in Other Tongues<\/em> demonstrates the differences within \u2018mixed race\u2019 even as it identifies similarities.<\/p>\n

Although the content of the book does not really break new ground, the editors foster an unusual dialogue between their contributors that emphasizes the important links among \u2018real life,\u2019 art, politics, and the academy. A strength of the collection is that because it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (review) [McKibbin] University of Toronto Quarterly Volume 81, Number 3, Summer 2012 pages 704-705 DOI: 10.1353\/utq.2012.0140 Molly Littlewood McKibbin Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, eds.(Inanna Publications, 2010) DeRango-Adem and Thompson\u2019s new collection of the artistic, autobiographical, and scholarly work of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,19,8,20,25],"tags":[4628,2422,6502,6500,6501,12708],"class_list":["post-26452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-canada","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-adebe-de-rango-adem","tag-andrea-thompson","tag-molly-l-mckibbin","tag-molly-littlewood-mckibbin","tag-molly-mckibbin","tag-university-of-toronto-quarterly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26452"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45816,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26452\/revisions\/45816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}