Mixed Race Studies

Chan by Hannah Lowe

The London Magazine
2016-12-08

Amanda Merritt

Hannah Lowe’s latest collection of poetry Chan (Bloodaxe, 2016) revisits the characters and stories from her first collection, Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013), which won the Michaels Murphy memorial Award for Best First Collection, and was short-listed for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. Named one of the 20 Next Generation poets, the bar variably has been set for her second collection. With remarkable ease Chan surpasses all expectations. Dealing directly with the issues of poverty, (im)migration and marginalisation, Lowe braids the experiences of famous jazz musicians, her own family and newly arrived British immigrants of the 1950s throughout this musically accomplished narrative that spans continents and generations.

The collection is divided into three parts. The first, What I Play is Out the Window, pays homage to the lives of  jazz musicians Joe Harriott, Charles Mingus, Shake Keane and Phil Seamen. Lowe opens the book with the personification of her mother, who had once been Joe Harriott’s girlfriend. By introducing the connection between her family and the world of jazz in this way, Lowe achieves a subtle tone of nostalgia while also painting the backdrop against which the life of Joe Harriott, and his cousin, nick-named ‘Chan’, plays:

Those days decades in history
when men like Joe and my father were shadows
on English streets…

Yet, instead of simply imagining the part of her mother or father in events that predate her, Lowe also introduces her own, lived experience in ‘Partita, 1968’, not only exploring the relationship between music and memory, but also excavating the layers of family narrative left behind by each generation—material that features predominantly in her work…

Read the entire review here.

Elizabeth Anionwu’s Memoir: Mixed Blessings From A Cambridge Union Exceeds All Superlatives

The Huffington Post
2016-12-28

Claudia Tomlinson, Author, campaigner, entrepreneur
London, England

Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Anionwu: Photograph by Barney Newman

Elizabeth Anionwu is a diminutive woman of colossal talent in everything she has turned her hand to, and to top off a high achieving career, her memoir has now outed her as a wonderful author.

She was born in 1947, from the relationship between her father, a Nigerian student, and her mother Mary, a Classics student whose family came from County Wexford and County Down, in Ireland, to settle in Liverpool.

Their romance blossomed at Cambridge University, at a time of discrimination against both black and Irish people in England.

Born into a strong Catholic family on her mother’s side, Elizabeth’s arrival, to unmarried parents, was a shock to her mother’s family threatening to bring great shame to the family…

Read the entire review here.

Partnered fathers bringing up their mixed-/multi-race children: an exploratory comparison of racial projects in Britain and New Zealand

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Published online: 2015-09-23
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2015.1091320

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology; Social Sciences Director of Research and Enterprise; Co-director, ESRC National Centre for Research Methods
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

This article explores how fathers in couple relationships where their partner is from a different racial background understand bringing up their children. Drawing on a small-scale, in-depth comparison of fathers’ accounts in Britain and New Zealand, and using the analytic concept of racial projects, fathers’ activities towards and hopes for their children’s identity and affiliation are revealed as keyed into historically situated social and political forces. Particular national racial projects and histories of coloniser and colonised are (re)created and reflected in the various typifications (ideal orientations) informing the fathers’ racial projects. These might be concerned with mixed, single or transcendent senses of belonging, in individual or collective ways, each of which was in various forms of dialogue with race.

Read or purchase the article here.

Special Relationships: mixed-race couples in post-war Britain and the United States

Women’s History Review
Volume 26, 2017 – Issue 1: Revisioning the History of Girls and Women in Britain in the Long 1950s
pages 110-129
DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2015.1123027

Clive Webb, Professor of Modern American History
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

This article uses a transatlantic lens to reassess interracial relationships in 1950s Britain. Although mixed-race couples in this country suffered serious discrimination, Britain appeared relatively progressive to African Americans on the other side of the Atlantic engaged in a struggle for recognition of their constitutional rights. In contrast to the United States, there were no laws in Britain that prohibited interracial marriage. The British also appeared more open to public discussion of relationships that crossed the colour line including the production of several films that focused attention on this controversial subject. This apparently more inclusive attitude towards gender and race relations provided an inspirational model to African Americans in their fight for equality.

Read or purchase the article here.

My fear killer will get pension, by daughter of train IRA bomb victim

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-17

David Young

Jayne Olorunda

The daughter of a man killed in an IRA blast on a train has claimed her elderly mother would be excluded from a proposed victims’ pension scheme while the IRA terrorist whose bomb killed her father would be eligible – because he was injured but survived.

Read the entire article here.

How a mixed-race love affair between an African prince and an Englishwoman caused an international furore

The Daily Telegraph
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
2016-12-16

Marea Donnelly, History writer

Ruth Williams and her husband Prince Seretse Khama in London in 1949.

ONE can only surmise as to whether bank clerk Ruth Williams and her Bechuanaland prince Seretse Khama ever shuffled around the dance floor to The Ink Spots’ hit Prisoner Of Love. United in their affection for the harmonising American doo-wop band, within a year of their meeting at a post-war London dance hall the Ink Spots’ 1946 hit could have been their anthem.

Their black-white romance offended not only their families, but the British and South African governments and the Church of England, which all aggressively opposed their 1948 marriage. Already the subject of a book A Marriage Of Inconvenience, and a film of the same name released in 1990, a new British film about the Khama marriage, A United Kingdom, opens in Sydney on Boxing Day…

Read the entire article here.

I couldn’t cope with seeing Sinn Fein’s new MLA on TV or radio… I’d be thinking all the time: your father killed my father

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-16

Stephanie Bell

Harrowing life: Jayne Olorunda whose father Max Olorunda was killed in an IRA train bomb during the Troubles

Jayne Olorunda’s dad was killed by an IRA bomber whose daughter has been made a Sinn Fein MLA. Jayne tells Stephanie Bell this is the last straw and her family is now set to quit Northern Ireland

News that the daughter of the IRA man who killed her father is to take a seat for Sinn Fein in Stormont has left Belfast author and community worker Jayne Olorunda and her family determined to leave Northern Ireland. The distraught 38-year-old says she couldn’t bear to see new MLA Orlaithi Flynn in the news now that she had been appointed by Sinn Fein to replace Jennifer McCann in the Colin area of west Belfast.

Jayne was only two when her Nigerian-born father Max Olorunda was killed by an IRA incendiary bomb which detonated prematurely in Dunmurry on a train travelling from Ballymena to Belfast in January 1980.

She says her mother Gabrielle (66) has never got over it and to this day suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Orlaithi Flynn

Orlaithi Flynn’s father Patrick Flynn was convicted of double manslaughter and possession of explosives for the attack.

In a heartbreaking interview, Jayne revealed how her family has also suffered years of racial hatred and had planned to leave Northern Ireland last month to try and escape the abuse…

…She has spent most of her life working in the community and has also written a powerful book called Legacy which tells the story of how her family were plagued by racism, poverty and grief after the death of her father.

Her father Max (35), an accountant, had been visiting a client in Ballymena and was on the train when the IRA prematurely detonated a device on January 17, 1980.

The blast engulfed a carriage of the train killing her father, as well as 17-year-old Protestant student Mark Cochrane and one of the bombers, Kevin Delaney (26)…

Gabrielle and Max Olorunda

Read the entire article here.

Event Review: Salena Godden’s #LIVEwire Album Launch

Welcome to the MA in Black British Writing
The world-first Masters programme in Black British literature at Goldsmiths, University of London
2016-12-09

Heather Marks

Soho holds many secrets, and last night revealed one of them to be Salena Godden’s spoken word album launch at Carnesky’s Finishing School. Descending the steps into the basement of the old Foyles, I was met by the gaze of pop art portraits at every turn, until I entered the intimate setting for the evening’s entertainment. Against the brightly lit stage, I slunk into the oh-so-Soho dimly lit claret background to watch the evening unfold…

…Salena Godden took to the stage to perform some of her poems to an eagerly awaiting audience. Godden delved into The Good Immigrant to read her excerpt ‘SHADE’. Lines such as “Some days I look like Beyoncé, some days I look like Rihanna” touched on colourism and its exotification of light skinned black women. Other lines like “It all depends on the filter and the time of year…it depends on what point people are trying to make” spoke to the oft-touted lie of ‘not seeing people’s colour’ as Godden listed the world events which do and do not make the news – “oh, Boko Haram black? No, not today”. Godden spoke to the world around her and kept her work current, making reference to the refugee crisis in Calais in her readings from ‘SHADE’, and Can’t Be Bovvered from her album LIVEwire. Godden threw punches at colourism and political inaction,  and the frustration one could sense in her words landed well with the audience…

Read the entire article here.

Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is a dance to the rhythms of womanhood

iNews
2016-11-02

Salena Godden

Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016)

Swing Time is a quiet and rhythmic book. Just as the title suggests, this book swings, oscillating from past to present, like the steady rhythm of a pendulum.

This is the story of two brown girls who dream of dancing. Tracey is the skint but talented one; our unnamed first person narrator… not so much. Where Tracey’s mother serves Angel Delight in a kitchen with a cork board heaving with gold medals, our narrator’s mother wears a cocked beret and keeps her head buried in books to better herself.

Living on the same estate, the mothers come from two different worlds, and the girls’ friendship blossoms awkwardly. They compare and compete, outgrow each other to take different paths, then come full circle.

This is a book about living in the spotlight and living in the wings. It time-travels using music and dance, from north London to west Africa, from the ghosts of Chicago swing to Hollywood musicals, jazz and ragtime, to reggae and the golden era of hip-hop. It is also, centrally, about female friendships: the strange envy one might feel when a friend seems to be moving on, moving away, moving faster, almost betraying us with their successful career or by having a baby or getting married. We all have had that friend or maybe we are that friend to someone else…

Read the entire review here.

What Being of Mixed Heritage Has Taught Me About Identity

VICE
2016-12-10

Salma Haidrani

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

“What are you?” When you think about it, it’s a pretty stupid question to ask another person, especially when you already know the answer: a human, just like you mate. But that doesn’t stop people directing it at people like me, who are of dual ethnic heritage or “mixed-race.” If your parents are of distinctly different ethnic groups, you feel like you have to “pick a side”—and the inevitable questions vary from ones shouted in a crowded pub to those staring up in black-and-white next to a checkbox on a form.

We’re so far down the road of thinking about race as a biological reality that we’ve forgotten it’s a construct. There are no links between how much melanin someone has in their skin and their culture. There are no links between melanin and intellect, physical abilities or creative skills. Proximity and language have tended to have more to do with what makes people of the same ethnic group seem similar—the colour of their skin doesn’t determine that.

For that reason, it’s silly to think that the experiences of the 1.2 million people in the UK who identify as “mixed” would be identical. Some are happy to define themselves in that way, while last year the British Sociological Association deemed deemed the term mixed-race as “misleading since it implies that a ‘pure race’ exists”…

Read the entire article here.