{"id":45810,"date":"2016-02-28T18:45:41","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T18:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45810"},"modified":"2017-05-17T18:20:47","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T18:20:47","slug":"adebe-derango-adem-explores-her-identity-in-art-and-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45810","title":{"rendered":"Adebe DeRango-Adem explores her identity in art and poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adebe DeRango-Adem explores her identity in art and poetry<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Toronto Star<\/a>
\n2016-02-26<\/p>\n

Debra Black<\/strong><\/a>, Immigration Reporter<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nAdebe DeRango-Adem<\/a> was recently hailed as a young Canadian author to watch by Canada\u2019s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke<\/a>. She is a poet and doctoral student in English literature at University of Pennsylvania.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Adebe DeRango-Adem<\/a> was recently hailed as a young Canadian author to watch by Canada\u2019s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke<\/a>. She is a poet and doctoral student in English literature at University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

Adebe DeRango-Adem was recently hailed as a young Canadian author to watch by Canada\u2019s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke. DeRango-Adem is a poet and doctoral student in English literature at University of Pennsylvania. Her latest work, Terra Incognita<\/em><\/a>, a collection of poetry published last year, examines racial identity. The winner of the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005, she served as Toronto\u2019s first junior poet laureate. She spoke to the Star about Black History Month<\/a> and what it means to her, as well as the importance of exploring identity in art.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m wondering what your feelings are about the designation of Black History Month and what that means for you as a writer. Is it important?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A colleague of mine, Andrea Thompson<\/a>, who is pretty well known in the poetry world, described my book as an excellent and complete mapping of racial topography in Canada. We\u2019re still struggling with the notion of post-race world and post-racial identities. My book and how it speaks to Black History Month is about pushing for malleable borders of identity and identification, in terms of blackness. I happen to be of mixed race \u2014 black identified mixed race \u2014 and so my book kind of inhabits the same questions that I think are important for everyone to consider. Questions such as: What\u2019s our fixation on the attempts to envision a post-racial world all about? Who is to say, for example, that this idea of mixed races \u2014 what makes that radical? That term blackness itself is being opened in good ways. So those are the questions that I think my book is asking. It\u2019s referring to the inter-racial experience as a grounding, but it also wants to ask about immigration. I, myself, am a child of immigrant parents. From Italy and Ethiopia. I came to the U.S. to study, also making me an immigrant. My book is also about asking how blackness in Canada relates to roots, movement and differentiation…<\/p>\n

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

Adebe DeRango-Adem was recently hailed as a young Canadian author to watch by Canada\u2019s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke. She is a poet and doctoral student in English literature at University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,19,125,8,25],"tags":[2424,21453,23085,4798,2117],"class_list":["post-45810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-canada","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-adebe-derango-adem","tag-black-history-month","tag-debra-black","tag-the-toronto-star","tag-toronto-star"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45810","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=45810"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53953,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45810\/revisions\/53953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}