{"id":31174,"date":"2013-05-19T22:36:13","date_gmt":"2013-05-19T22:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31174"},"modified":"2013-05-19T22:36:13","modified_gmt":"2013-05-19T22:36:13","slug":"%e2%80%98one-drop-of-love%e2%80%99-creates-ripple-effect-at-ucsb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31174","title":{"rendered":"\u2018One Drop of Love\u2019 Creates Ripple Effect at UCSB"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018One Drop of Love\u2019 Creates Ripple Effect at UCSB<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Bottom Line<\/a>
\nWeekly Newspaper of Associated Students, UC Santa Barbara: News, Features, Video & Investigative Journalism for UCSB<\/em>
\n2013-05-13<\/p>\n

Yuen Sin<\/strong>, Staff Writer<\/p>\n

The personal is very much the political, as actress-playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni<\/a> illustrated through her solo show \u201cOne Drop of Love: A Daughter\u2019s Search for her Father\u2019s Racial Approval<\/a>.\u201d The show was performed at the University of California, Santa Barbara\u2019s Multicultural Center on May 7.<\/p>\n

First formulated as a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis project, \u201cOne Drop of Love\u201d began as Cox DiGiovanni\u2019s personal attempt to revive her estranged relationship with her Jamaica-born father, who failed to show up at her wedding years before.<\/p>\n

What ensued was a powerful multimedia, one-woman play laced with wit, warmth, and depth that fused her fragmented experiences with racial and cultural dispossession into a coherent narrative. The multidimensional show traversed back into the years of Cox DiGiovanni\u2019s family history to untangle the weight of the socio-political events that have inevitably contributed to a crucial part of her identity and self-perceptions today…<\/p>\n

…Cox DiGiovanni slipped in and out of multiple roles with dexterity, first imperiously bearing down at the audience as an anonymous U.S. Census Bureau officer, and then staggering affectionately across the stage with a lilting accent as her grandmother, revealing through her impressions the fluid and ultimately arbitrary nature of identity labels.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Her personal trajectory of \u201cplacelessness\u201d\u2014not seeing herself as \u201cblack\u201d enough to join the Black Students Union, and yet having candy vendors in Cape Verde, West Africa, come up to her (while on a pilgrimage of sorts to trace back her African roots and understand her father\u2019s pan-African attitudes) to ask her why she was so \u201cwhite\u201d\u2014was interspersed with scenes that traced the evolution of the practice of racial categorization by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contrast brought to the forefront her sense of frustration from continually being racially defined by others, and the puzzling practice of placing someone in the category of \u201cblack\u201d as long as they possessed even \u201cone drop\u201d of Negro blood<\/a>\u2014hence the play\u2019s title.<\/p>\n

At the post-show dialogue with UCSB\u2019s professor of sociology G. Reginald Daniel<\/a>, Cox DiGiovanni reiterated the importance of engaging in \u201cscary conversations about race and racism,\u201d reflecting that her work producing and performing \u201cOne Drop of Love\u201d completely transformed the nature of her family relations after their involvement in her show…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018One Drop of Love\u2019 Creates Ripple Effect at UCSB The Bottom Line Weekly Newspaper of Associated Students, UC Santa Barbara: News, Features, Video & Investigative Journalism for UCSB 2013-05-13 Yuen Sin, Staff Writer The personal is very much the political, as actress-playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni illustrated through her solo show \u201cOne Drop of Love: A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,125,8,394,20],"tags":[118,12646,142,14721,4494,14722],"class_list":["post-31174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-fanshen-cox","tag-fanshen-cox-digiovanni","tag-g-reginald-daniel","tag-the-bottom-line","tag-university-of-california-at-santa-barbara","tag-yuen-sin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31174","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=31174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}