Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race…So What!

Spare Rib Magazine
Issue: 131 (June 1983)
page 58-60

Sonia Osman

This piece was going to be called ‘Women of mixed Race’, but after many discussions and thought I have decided not to call it that as I find the term ‘mixed race’ racist. Therefore I have gathered together various women’s pieces and have put them in a ‘suitable’ order for you to read. The concept of race is a strange one having no genetic validity at all. There are no genetic differences between Black and White people even though white, male, scientific intellectuals would like us to believe differently. Even anthropology does not include the concept of race. Race is seen as a specific term of abuse. The concepts of ‘mixed race’ or ‘half-caste‘ are racist, they imply that there is a pure race, an idea reminiscent of  ‘Mein Kampf‘ and fascist ideology.

This piece is a very personal piece for me and does not intend to put over any specific political line; it does not intend to educate, but I hope it will make people think.

Sonia’s Piece

To be a woman of mixed race, a halfcaste, a half-breed doesn’t that sound exotic, romantic, erotic …. To Hell with the lot of you I Those are your LABELS, your racist interpretation, your fears internalized and LAID on. I don’t care anymore, do what you will, think what you will, safe in your whiteness, your blackness, your superior purity.

I am ME and I will always stay ME. I will never be white, Anglo-Saxon and PURE. Sorry, you’ll have to make do with a half-Finnish and half-Indian woman born and brought up in the splendours of Brixton, London. Am I angry with my lot? Wouldn’t you be angry if ever since you were knee high you had to put up with taunts, fights, bloody noses, put-downs, comments and insults? But perhaps that is my lot and I should be grateful for it. Thank you so much people, allowing me to be born and brought up in this glorious country of ours. It’s great to feel unwanted.

It’s strange and yet wonderfully weird, ‘cos I know that around the world I am seen as something else: In France I am taken to be a native French woman, (I do speak French, so that helps), in Spain I am taken to be Spanish. People have thought me South American, from Peru or Brazil, or from Turkey or Iran. Strange ain’t it here I am, the unwanted, the unloved, and the uncared for.

I do feel ‘lucky’ because I have learned things from both my mother and my father. From my father I learnt the proper way to make curry, chapatis and carrot halwa. He would take me to the mosque and show me where and how to pray. From my mother I learnt about her country’s history, the continual war with Sweden and Russia. Strange to think that Finland used to [be] a Russion Duchy. Memories of Finland are full and varied, miles and miles of sweet-smelling pine forest, millions of lakes, fresh-water fish, wild exotic berries, hay-making, and hot days of strawberry-picking. But yet, here in the country which is my Home, I am denied my right to be here. ‘Go home Paki’,—Ha I, where is my home? My home is HERE, and I intend to stay…

Read the entire article here.

Passion – Blackwomen’s Creativity: an interview with Maud Sulter

Spare Rib Magazine
Issue 220 (February 1991)
pages 6-8

Ardentia Verba

An Interview with Maud Suiter

In 1977 Maud Suiter stepped on a train from Glasgow to London and began her current journey into the interior of Blackwomen’s Creativity. She didn’t know at the time that some day she would call herself ‘artist’ or ‘writer’ – not many teenage coloured girls from the Gorbals in Glasgow had trailblazed a path in that direct­ion, so it was a real exploration into the unknown for her when at sixteen she set out to go to college to study fashion. Since then she has gone on to create exhibitions, including Zabat – a stunning series of Blackwomen’s portraits which will be exhibited at Camerawork Gallery in London from March 15-April 19, and has now edited Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, recently published by Urban Fox Press

‘Passion’ features many visual artists including Lubaina Himid, Robyn Kahukiwa, Sutapa Biswas and Janet Caron. However Maud Suiter’s vision of Blackwomen’s Creativity includes activities as diverse as Hairbraiding, Poetry and Performance. The many women included in the book were chosen because of their involvement with the Blackwomen’s Creativity Project, an organisation which Maud Suiter founded in 1982. In creating ‘Passion’, she has not only document­ ed the activities of BWCP but also provided ‘an excellent introduction to the range and intensity of Blackwomen’s Creativity in Britain’

Artists Newsletter

Why did you decide to create ‘Passion’?

In 1982 I was the first Blackwoman to join the Sheba Feminist Publisher’s collective. At that time a variety of the women’s presses were mooting ideas for conventional anthologies of Black writing in the UK. I felt that it was too easy for what were essentially white women’s publishers culling some short stories and poems from Blackwomen and then hailing the fact that they had published x-dozen Blackwomen writers. This especially at a time when they were earning significant incomes from Blackwomen writers such as Alice Walker and Maya Angelou.

As Alice Walker has pointed out, Blackwomen must read history for clues not facts, and it seemed essential to leave clues as to a more holistic range of our artistic pursuits. Obviously no academic course in Britain is geared towards working class Blackwomen’s experience across the board, but so many of us have a vast appetite for knowledge—for a herstory. We must create our own, which is what I set out to achieve with Passion.

There comes a time in many of our lives when we say ‘Girl, get yourself a piece of paper’. Around 1985 I was getting so many requests from students, mainly from Blackwomen, to give interviews to inform their dissertations. Hours and hours of Blackwomen’s work goes—unpaid and unacknow­ledged—into quite literally saving Blackwomen from failing their degrees. So few informed Blackwomen artists are employed in institut­ions, that we are co-erced into helping out, at the very last minute, to save Blackwomen artists, no, let me correct that, Black students across the board, that it was obvious that the wheel could not be eternally re-invented.

Passion offers schools, colleges and commun­ity venues the opportunity to invest in a vast wealth of information about our work during the 80’s and then draw from that information in a more creative and challenging way. All of us face racism and sexism in our explorations, and the wonderful articles and portfolios in Passion signpost a continuum of experiences, our litany of survival, which has created the situation where we can, like the Blackwomen’s Creat­ivity Project, network internationally from a position of equality not imperialism.

And so to recap, my ambition was to look at Blackwomen’s Creativity across a spectrum of activities including fine art, childbearing, opera, theatre etc. It is not possible to create a hierarchy of our artistic fields as we are living as Blackwomen in the aftermath of slavery and imperialism. Therefore we need to recognise our creative practices as survival and press for their development from that position. It is no use to sit back on our laurels and think OK, so we were there. We need to be here now, and we need to ensure that we continue to create in the future…

Read the entire interview here.

Two Systems or A Reading Towards New Work

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (Sherr Room)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2015-10-28 (Published 2015-11-06)

Sarah Howe, the 2015–2016 Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, presents “Two Systems,” a new sequence of poems in which she explores the historical encounter between China and the West.

Photographing Multiracial Families In Scotland: Celebrating mothers, daughters and diversity through portraits

Medium for Pixel Magazine
2015-12-17

Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

Portrait photographer Kim Simpson began her Exottish project after her daughter, who is of mixed heritage, experienced a series of racial insults in her primary school in Scotland.

Kim says she hopes her portraits — which feature families with some “visual differences” between their members — will encourage viewers to revisit their engrained ideas of what it looks like to be Scottish.

For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with Kim about the work and her experience as a parent in a multiracial family.

Emily von Hoffmann: “Girls and Their Mothers” is one part of the larger Exottish project. What does “Girls and Their Mothers” entail? Who are these women?

Kim Simpson: “Girls and Their Mothers” is a collection of portraits of mixed race girls, of all ages, with their mothers — 48 portraits featuring 16 different families in a mix of individual and group portraits.

Instead of questioning their ancestry or scrutinizing their appearance, I chose to photograph girls and women of mixed heritage and their mothers with an intent to question social perception. These images display their relationships, linking these girls and their mothers together while at the same time respecting their disparity…

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

…EvH: What sort of national dialogue, or vocabulary even, around race and appearance exists in Scotland? Is it discussed in school, for instance? I’m interested in thinking about this in comparison to the current Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., and the greater mainstream attention to identity issues of multiracial individuals.

KS: Black Lives Matter is extremely relevant in Scotland, especially at the moment. We have had an awful tragedy that saw the senseless end of Sheku Bayoh’s life at the hands of police officers as he was suffocated during an arrest in Fife, Scotland. Justice has not been served in this instance and it echoes all the hallmarks of what has been going on across the water with concerns of interactions between police officers and members of the black community…

Read entire the interview here.

Maud Sulter

The Herald
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
2008-03-21

Artist and writer; Born September 19, 1960; Died February 27, 2008. MAUD Sulter, who has died after a long illness aged 47, was an extraordinarily gifted visual artist, writer, playwright and cultural historian.

She was born in Glasgow, of Scots and Ghanaian descent: in her poem Circa 1930, she pointed out that these two cultures “are not as disparate as they might/at first seem. Clan-based societies/With long memories and global diasporas”. The exploration of the continuing presence of Africa in Europe was one of her principal themes, explored through her art in a variety of media: text, photography, sound and performance.

She was active in feminist communities in London in the early 1980s, and while working with a women’s education group programmed Check It, a groundbreaking two-week show at the Drill Hall showcasing black women’s creativity…

…As well as her academic writing, she published several collections of poetry: As a Blackwoman (1985), which won the Vera Bell Prize for poetry that year; Zabat (1989); and Sekhmet (Dumfries & Galloway Council, 2005); and a play about Jerry Rawlings, Service to Empire (2002). “I often address issues of lost and disputed territories, both psychological and physical,” she wrote in 1994. “The central body of my poetic work is unequivocally the love poetry which is addressed to both genders.” Sekhmet begins with a roll-call of love and gratitude to friends, lovers, family across the world, to medics, and to the ancestors, “who walked beside me when I needed them most and carried me forward when the terrain was too rough but never absolve me of the responsibility for my own life and identity”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Phoebe Boswell: The Matter of Memory

Africanah.org: Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art
Amsterdam, Kingdom of the Netherlands
2015-02-05

Yvette Greslé, Art Historian/Writer

Edited by Rob Perrée

Phoebe Boswell. ‘The Matter of Memory’, 2013-14. Installation view at Carroll/Fletcher [detail]. Courtesy the artist and Carroll/Fletcher.

I settle into an armchair and am surprised by voices audible from a mechanism buried in the fabric. I hear the voice of the artist, Phoebe Boswell, but also simultaneously, the voice of another. I discover that the chair on the right hand side (as I face the screen) transmits the voice of Boswell’s mother; and the other that of her father. Each parent narrates their memories of life in Kenya, where both were born, raised and married. As they narrate, their child (the artist) repeats their words. This device of multiple, simultaneous narration, does not obscure the speech of each. When the father pauses, the daughter pauses, when the mother sings, the daughter sings. This is a work of memory, a deliberate, staged act of remembering, but it is also a work of familial intimacy. The daughter appears to cherish the memories of the parents, repeating them so as not to forget. This gesture is poignant, it resists erasure and forgetting, and anticipates the inevitability of loss.

The armchairs, with their audio, are titled ‘When I Hear My Own Voice, I Can Hear Kenya’ (2013/14). These sound-objects are an important component in what is an immense spatial installation occupying the whole of the basement level of the Carroll/Fletcher Gallery. Titled ‘The Matter of Memory’ the work encompasses sound, looped projections, animations, objects, and drawings. It embodies the existence of multiple, simultaneous narratives functioning strategically to oppose assumptions about the world in which we live. Deeply sedimented racial prejudices that still hold the world in their thrall are potently countered and resisted. Boswell’s ‘The Matter of Memory’ draws attention to the continued critical significance of human subjectivity, and memory-work, as a counterpoint to the tyranny of singular, overarching narratives…

…Narratives of multiple-heritage and displacement are ones that many twenty-first century subjects, emerging out of historical conditions of travel and migration, can relate to. Boswell’s British-born, Kenyan father, is a fourth generation Kenyan settler and her mother is Kikuyu Kenyan. Visual significations of colonial settler life into which the artist’s father was born, and the Kikuyu Kenyan heritage of her mother is present throughout the installation. The story of this family is one wound up in migration: Boswell who moved to London in 2000, was born in Kenya but grew up in the Middle-East. She now lives and works in London having studied painting at the Slade School of Art and 2D Character Animation at Central St Martins. ‘The Matter of Memory’ invites us into the most intimate spaces of Boswell’s family history. It speaks about the presence of love despite the borders dreamed up by the historical obsession with racial difference. But this work is certainly no idealistic account of the transcendent capacities of love in conditions of trauma and social and political violence. Kenya inhabits the memories and the emotional life of mother, father and daughter who negotiate belonging, displacement, and ideas of ‘Home’….

Read the entire article here.

A Mixed Race Feminist Blog Interview with Isabel Adonis

A Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-01-15

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

About Isabel Adonis

I’m a private tutor, artist and writer and I live in Wales. My mother was a white Welsh woman and my father was a black man from Georgetown in Guyana. He was quite a well-known writer and artist. I was born and brought up in London until I was six when my father began working in Khartoum in the Sudan. I lived and went to school there until I was nine when my parents bought a house in Wales. For the next nine years I lived and went to school in Wales and travelled to Africa in the holidays. After five years in the Sudan my father worked in different universities in Nigeria. My parents split up when I was seventeen and my father returned to the Caribbean. My mother did not remarry. In my twenties I trained as a teacher but because of an incident at the school, which I think was race related I decided I would never teach. I have four grown up children.

Do you remember when you first came to understand that you are mixed race?

Yes, around the time that ethnic monitoring was introduced in the UK in the early nineties. I had no notion of being mixed race prior to that. I was not brought up to call myself anything. However I do not call myself mixed race now. I leave it to others to do that kind of thing. I resist being categorised in this way, since it is problematic. Identification functions by inclusion and therefore exclusion. I’m not happy with that…

Read the entire interview here.

Musician Chi-chi Nwanoku discussing her life and work on Talking Africa

BlackRook Media
2015-05-12

Musician Chi-chi Nwanoku has been discussing her life and work on Talking Africa. Chi-Chi is a passionate advocate of music and particularly the double bass. She is a Principal Double Bass and founder member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Endymion Ensemble. Born in London of Nigerian and Irish parents, Chi-Chi is also a Professor at Royal Academy of Music, a broadcaster, writer and mentor.

On Being Mixed Race: I am Not a Percentage or a Fraction

The Radical Notion
2016-01-12

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

I’ve noticed frequently when I’m having a conversation with someone about my racial identity, I start to feel frustrated by some of the language that comes up. To clarify my father is black Jamaican, Nigerian and white British, and my mother is white British.

My earliest memories are of being described racially as ‘half-caste’. This was an acceptable term back in the 80’s, in the UK, to describe someone whose parents are of different races. People don’t tend to use this word anymore unless they are from older generations and unaware that it is not politically correct. The word ‘caste’ originates from the Spanish/Portuguese word ‘casta’ which means ‘pure’. Describing someone as half-caste is to imply they are only half pure which has obvious racist implications. This term was my first introduction to the idea that I had an identity that could be broken down into numerical fractions…

Read the entire article here.

TS Eliot prize: poet Sarah Howe wins with ‘amazing’ debut

The Guardian
2016-01-11

Mark Brown, Arts correspondent

Sarah Howe, a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, could ‘change British poetry’. Photograph: Hayley Madden/FMcM/PA

Judges hail daring use of form in a collection that examines poet’s joint British and Chinese heritage

A new voice, who judges say “will change British poetry”, has won the TS Eliot poetry prize. Sarah Howe, a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, was awarded the £20,000 prize for Loop of Jade, which explores her dual British and Chinese heritage.

Howe’s work – the first debut poetry collection to win the British prize since it was inaugurated in 1993 – triumphed over a particularly strong shortlist, which featured some of poetry’s biggest names, including Don Paterson, Claudia Rankine, Sean O’Brien and Les Murray…

Read the entire article here.