Mixed Race Studies

Mary Seacole statue: Why Florence Nightingale fans are angry the Crimean War nurse is being commemorated

The Independent
2016-06-27

Kashmira Gander

Some Florence Nightingale experts say Mary Seacole isn’t a nurse

It should be a symbol of pride in a black British heroine. Instead, a statue of Mary Seacole, to be unveiled on 30 June, has become a source of controversy

Staring proudly across the River Thames towards Big Ben, her cape caught in a gust as she strides away from a backdrop of the Crimean battlefield. This is how the Crimean War heroine Mary Seacole will be memorialised in a powerful 10ft bronze statue by the distinguished sculptor Martin Jennings, to be unveiled outside St Thomas’ hospital in central London on Thursday.

The campaign to commemorate the nurse once voted the greatest black Briton began when a group of Caribbean women approached their local MP in Hammersmith. Seven years later, the sculpture – the first public statue of a named black woman in the UK – is complete thanks to donations from tens of thousands of people. Happy days.

Except a small faction of hand-wringing Florence Nightingale experts and fans are not at all happy. To them, placing Seacole’s statue outside the hospital where the Lady with the Lamp established her revolutionary nursing school is an affront…

…Then there’s the argument that Seacole is a symbol of political correctness gone mad because the great black British icon isn’t, er, black. In a Spectator piece Rob Liddle took the baffling stance that Seacole was “three-quarters white”. This is despite contemporary depictions of her as a person “of colour” (and her own recollection that a white American at a dinner party said he wished he could bleach her skin).

But how tiresome this mud-slinging is. If we were going to pick holes, we could point out that even Nightingale couldn’t compete with the fact that her military hospital at Scutari was placed over a sewer, meaning many patients died. But we celebrate the best in her: her initial impulse; her skill in creating and organising the British nursing profession in later life…

Read the entire article here.

Inside Facebook’s Totally Adorable, Kind of Racist Mixed Race Baby Community

Broadly
2016-06-21

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

Thousands of people have signed up to Instagram and Facebook communities to celebrate the beauty of multiracial children. But not everyone is convinced that they have the purest intentions at heart.

In a world plagued by racism and prejudice, some people have hit on what they believe to be a simple but obvious solution. “Biracial babies!” they coo. “And they’re so cute, too!”

This is tongue in cheek, of course, but speaking as someone whose father is white and whose mother is black Caribbean, there does seem to be a growing and pervasive fascination with multiracial people. And in particular, babies…

…Recent census figures show mixed-race people are the fastest growing ethnic minority both in the US and the UK. These numbers are only set to rise, as predictions suggest that white people will no longer make up the majority of the US population by 2043. In the UK, one University of Oxford professor has said white Britons are set to become a minority in 2066.

Like many children, the lives of multiracial babies are intimately documented on social media, but they are arguably fixated on to a larger extent than most. Their pictures are all over the internet, under hashtags such as #BiracialBabies, #KardashianKids, #MixedLove, and #Diversity. On Instagram, accounts like Beautiful Mixed Kids and Mixed Babies Feature amass thousands of followers, along with regular picture submissions from doting family members…

Read the entire article here.

No Telephone to Heaven

Plume
March 1996 (Originally published in 1987)
224 Pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780452275690

Michelle Cliff (1946-2016)

A brilliant Jamaican-American writer takes on the themes of colonialism, race, myth, and political awakening through the experiences of a light-skinned woman named Clare Savage. The story is one of discovery as Clare moves through a variety of settings – Jamaica, England, America – and encounters people who affect her search for place and self.

The structure of No Telephone to Heaven combines naturalism and lyricism, and traverses space and time, dream and reality, myth and history, reflecting the fragmentation of the protagonist, who nonetheless seeks wholeness and connection. In this deeply poetic novel there exist several levels: the world Clare encounters, and a world of which she only gradually becomes aware – a world of extreme poverty, the real Jamaica, not the Jamaica of the middle class, not the Jamaica of the tourist. And Jamaica – almost a character in the book – is described in terms of extraordinary beauty, coexisting with deep human tragedy.

The violence that rises out of extreme oppression, the divided loyalties of a colonized person, sexual dividedness, and the dividedness of a person neither white nor black – all of these are truths that Clare must face. Overarching all the themes in this exceptionally fine novel is the need to become whole, and the decisions and the courage demanded to achieve that wholeness.

Chan

Bloodaxe Books
2016-06-23
72 pages
234 x 156 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781780372839
E-book ISBN: 9781780372846

Hannah Lowe

Chan is a mercurial name, representing the travellers and shape-shifters of the poems in this collection. It is one of the many nicknames of Hannah Lowe’s Chinese-Jamaican father, borrowed from the Polish émigré card magician Chan Canasta. It is also a name from China, where her grandfather’s story begins. Alongside these figures, there’s Joe Harriott, the Jamaican alto saxophonist, shaking up 1960s London; a cast of other long-lost family; and a ship full of dreamers sailing from Kingston to Liverpool in 1947 on the SS Ormonde.

Hannah Lowe’s second collection follows her widely acclaimed debut, Chick, which took readers on a journey round her father, a gambler who disappeared at night to play cards or dice in London’s old East End to support his family.

Fanny Eaton: The Black Pre-Raphaelite Muse that Time Forgot

AnOther
2016-03-07

Shola von Reynolds

Walter Fryer Stocks, British, 1842–1915: Mrs. Fanny Eaton, ca. 1859 / Black, red, and white chalk on cream wove paper / 43.2 × 34.9 cm (17 × 13 3/4 in.) / Museum purchase, Surdna Fund / 2016-1 / Princeton University Art Museum

The enigmatic model made her way to London from Jamaica in the early 19th century to sit for the Pre-Raphaelites, and her legacy lives on in their impactful work

Who? Lizzie Siddal has long reigned supreme in the minds of historians, artists and writers as the embodiment of the artist’s muse. Her fellow Pre-Raphaelite models, such as Marie Spartali, Jane Morris or Maria Zambaco are less well known, but renewed attention has given many of these women a rightful place in art history beyond the typically limited conception of “the muse”. If you haven’t heard of Fanny Eaton, however, there would be meagre cause for surprise, though surprise there should be: little exists in the way of information about her, and until recent years all that remained was the series of paintings and drawings she sat for.

Fanny Eaton was a black Victorian Londoner and, for some time, painter’s model. Born in Jamaica in 1835, Eaton was the daughter of an ex-slave and, it is suspected, a white slave owner. She came to London in the 1840s and began modelling in her twenties. It has been discovered that she was working as a regular portrait model at the Royal Academy, which is potentially where she caught the attention of the many renowned painters of the era she sat for…

Read the etnire article here.

Florence Nightingale supporters in row over black rival’s new statue, claiming she is venerated based on ‘false achievements’

The Daily Mail
2016-06-20

Martin Robinson, UK Chief Reporter

• Mary Seacole set to have £500,000 statue unveiled at St Thomas, London
• But critics say that her legacy is hugely oversold for political reasons
• Florence Nightingale Society says statue is based on ‘false achievements’

Plans to give Britain’s most famous black nurse a statue have today been blasted by Florence Nightingale fans, who say it is a ‘history hoax’ because all she did was ‘sell wine and sandwiches’ in Crimea.

Mary Seacole is set to have a £500,000 bronze unveiled in her honour at St Thomas’ Hospital in London this month – the first public memorial to celebrate the ‘black pioneer nurse’.

It will be taller than Florence Nightingale’s statue in Pall Mall and Edith Cavell’s off Trafalgar Square.

And it will be unveiled this month at St Thomas Hospital where Nightingale founded her nursing school, and Seacole has no connection to whatsoever, critics say…

…Mary Seacole is regarded as our greatest black Briton, a woman who did more to advance the cause of nursing – and race relations – than almost any other individual.

On the bloody battlefields of the Crimea, she is said to have saved the lives of countless wounded soldiers, and nursed them back to health in a clinic she paid for out of her own pocket.

But some historians have long complained that she has become almost as famous as that other nursing heroine, Florence Nightingale…

…Born in Jamaica in 1805, she was the daughter of a white Scottish officer called Grant, and a Creole woman, from whom Mary learned her ‘nursing skills’. In her early 20s, Seacole married a Jamaican merchant called Edwin Seacole and travelled with him around the Caribbean, Central America and England until his death in 1844.

Seacole then set up a ‘hotel’ in the town of Cruces in Panama, where she is reputed to have treated cholera victims.

With the outbreak of the Crimean War later that year, Seacole was determined to offer her nursing services to the British, and, when she was turned down by the authorities, she paid her way to the peninsula out of her own pocket…

Read the entire article here.

Revealed: MP’s alleged killer ‘bought manual on how to make a handgun and bombs from a US far-right group and has links to neo-Nazi organisations going back decades’

The Daily Mail
London, England
2016-06-17

James Tozer, Chris Greenwood, Andy Dolan, and Claire Duffin For The Daily Mail
Richard Spillett, Stephanie Linning, and Lucy Crossley for MailOnline

• Detectives were last night questioning Thomas Mair over Jo Cox’s murder
• US civil rights group say their records show he bought far-Right books
• Claims the quiet loner had been recently released from psychiatric care
• Mair was brought up by his grandmother and lived in his childhood home
• Half-brother says Mair never expressed any ‘racist tendencies’, adding: ‘I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother. We got on well’

The man suspected of killing Labour MP Jo Cox previously bought a book on how to make a handgun, it was claimed this morning.

Thomas Mair has been described as a loner who was ‘socially isolated and disconnected from society’ as a result of long-term mental illness.

Detectives were last night questioning 52-year-old Thomas Mair, amid fears he was motivated by Mrs Cox’s political campaigning.

Documents obtained from a US far-right group show a 1999 receipt for a manual on how to build a homemade gun with Mr Mair’s name and address on the top…

…Duane St Louis, age 41, the suspect’s half-brother and Mary’s son with second husband Reginald St Louis, said Mair had obsessive compulsive disorder and cleaned himself with Brillo pads because he was ‘obsessed with his personal hygiene’.

Reginald, who is believed to be from Grenada, and Mary had married when Mair was around 16. The couple lived with Duane and Mair’s younger full brother Scott, while Mair stayed with his grandmother. Reginald died in the 1980s. It is not known if Mair’s father, named locally as James, is still alive.

Speaking from his home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, he added: ‘He’s never expressed any views about Britain, or politics or racist tendencies. I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother, we got on well. He never married. The only time I remember him having a girlfriend was as a young man, but a mate stole her off him. He said that put him off [women] for life.’…

Read the entire article here.

Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century exhibition, HOME, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker

The Manchester Review
Manchester, England
May 2016

Şima İmşir Parker, Graduate Teaching Assistant
University of Manchester

Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, Home, 30 April 2016 – 3 July 2016

“The melodramatic body is a body seized with meaning” writes Peter Brooks in “Melodrama, Body, Revolution.” Body is not only a sight branded with meanings and symbolism, but also a sight where resistance becomes possible through the gestures and mimics where what is repressed comes back to life. Melodramatic bodies are sights of both stigma as well as expression and resistance, something that the new Home exhibition Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century successfully brings forth by revealing the politics on and of the body, more specifically through the representations of race, gender and sexuality in the post-digital world in which we live.

The exhibition opens with Sophia Al-Maria’s new work, Scarce New Flowers, a photographic series of real products, “facial whitening creams” sold in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa with instructions only in Mandarin and Arabic. With the images of real boxes with women’s faces on them growing, being repeated and distorted, the product itself becomes melodramatic and hyperbolic, acting as a stark reminder of on-going racial stereotypes (and passing) that exist within a cross-cultural spectrum.

Passing as white is a subject widely discussed around Fanny Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life and its later movie adaptations, the work that gives its title to the exhibition. The novel was published in 1933. Almost immediately after its publication, in 1934, its first movie adaptation, directed by John Stahl, made it to the big screen. The life of the story however was not limited to one adaptation. In 1959, an iconic name for melodramas, Douglas Sirk, made another adaptation of the novel. This version, although not as loyal to the original story as John Stahl’s version, gained far greater popularity. The story, narrating two women’s struggle to take care of themselves and their daughters, was revealing of racial and gender stereotypes by portraying the black maid (Delilah/Annie) as the caregiving “mama” whose daughter (Peola/Sarah Jane) passes as white and the white single mother (Bae/Lora) who chooses a successful career at the cost of not providing care for her daughter and not uniting with her loved one. In 2002 Todd Haynes remade the movie, this time shifting the focus from race to homosexuality…

Read the entire review here.

The penalties of miscegenation

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 3, 1972
pages 10-12
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969062

Mary Dines (1927-2011)

Paragraph 24 of “Commonwealth Citizens: Control after Entry: Immigration Rules” (Cmd. 4295) reads:

“If a man who was admitted as a visitor or student, or in some other temporary capacity, marries a woman who is a resident in the United Kingdom, he is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay or any other variation of conditions to enable him to settle here unless refusal would be undesirable because of the degree of hardship which, in the particular circumstances of the case, would be caused if the woman had to live outside the United Kingdom in order to be with her husband after marriage…”

These instructions are based on a rule announced by the Home Secretary in January 1969 as an “administrative procedure” and the principles involved were never submitted to Parliament in the form of a Clause or an amendment to a Bill. At the time, Mr. Callaghan stated that the intention was to put an end to the facility allowed to male fiancés to settle in the U.K. after marriage which then existed. This facility, he claimed, was being abused, particularly by Asians, as a means of seeking entry to the U.K. without an employment voucher. It is not proposed to go into the arguments about male fiancés at this stage and indeed experience has shown that this matter was used as a camouflage for the real motives behind the introduction of the new rules. A careful study of the wording confirms this and it should be noted that the Home Office say that the man marrying a resident here “is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay” (my italics).

In any discussion on racial prejudice in Britain the question of miscegenation is bound to arise. Even in colonial times the British showed a marked aversion to mixed marriages. Significantly the majority of those that did take place were between “other ranks” of occupying armies and local women in places like…

Read or purchase the article here.

Large Abroad | London poet laureate Raymond Antrobus staying true to Jamaican roots

The Gleaner
Kingston, Jamaica
2016-06-13

Andre Poyser

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus continues to be in strong contention to be named Young Poet Laureate for London – a position awarded annually to a poet age 21-30 living in the United Kingdom capital.

Antrobus, a second-generation Jamaican born and bred in East London, has been redefining what it means to be a poet in the 21st century through monologues, which Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes describes as stunning studies of voice and substance.

While he only visits Jamaica occasionally, the young poet says he owes his graceful and finely crafted lyric poems, another characterisation penned by Dawes, to his Jamaican heritage…

Read the entire article here.