Mixed Race Studies

Mixing Matters: Critical Intersectionalities: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium on Critical Mixed Race Studies

Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS)
University of Leeds
2013-05-18, 08:45-17:15 BST (Local Time)

Key note speakers:

Dr. Suki Ali is a Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include feminist cultural studies, theories of identity and embodiment and particularly the interplay between gender, ‘race’ and class. Dr. Ali is the author of several books, articles and chapters including ‘Mixed-Race: Post-Race: Gender, New ethnicities and cultural practices’ and ‘Reading Racialised Bodies: Learning to see Difference’.

Dr. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain is a Senior Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her research interests are in people of mixed descent; emotions, technology and globalization; race/ethnicity; critical race theory; beauty; and Japanese Americans. She has published in Ethnicities, Sociology Compass, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Amerasia Journal. Her book Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (University of Minnesota Press) examines the use of blood quantum rules in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. She is currently researching and writing about ‘Global Mixed Race’ and ‘The Globalization of Love’.

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is a rapidly growing body of scholarship and through the continued challenging of essentialized conceptions of ‘race’ and ethnicity, CMRS becomes an emerging paradigm for examining the politics of ‘race’, racism and representation. CMRS can be defined as “the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization” (Critical Mixed Race Studies Association). In this transnational, interdisciplinary symposium, we seek to explore these components through the lens of intersectionalities in individual experience, theorising and activism.

For more information, click here. View the program here.

Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole

Biography
Volume 23, Number 2, Spring 2000
pages 309-331
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2000.0009

Evelyn J. Hawthorne, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

“ . . . unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all.”

Written at the height of the Victorian period, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is a paradigmatic black woman’s text of self-authoring that has been lauded as “one of the most readable and rewarding black women’s autobiographies in the nineteenth century” (Andrews, Introduction xxviii). Representing a locus classicus of culturally sanctioned feminine self-reliance, it was written and published in England by Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-1881), a free-born Jamaican who achieved fame for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War, meriting several medals. Transgressing gender, race, and class roles as an adventuring businesswoman in Jamaica, London, Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, and as a female who, undaunted by the horrors of the battlefield, deployed herself to the Crimean War, this heroine is extraordinary by any standard. But in addition to its biographical importance, this work is an invaluable means of espying how the free(d) female subject fashioned her identity, from a socially, racially, and economically disempowered position in the post-Emancipation historical environment. Wonderful Adventures is a cultural text that reveals how Seacole, a woman of color, exploited critical historical moments to construct a new social identity. At the same time, though, Seacole’s independence raises questions about the role of the dominant power in the free(d) subject’s search for equality and social rights, for Seacole seems to have advanced through her own machinations, rather than through the inconsistent British script of freedom offered to the colonial, racial subject.

I will argue that Seacole’s textual and rhetorical strategies encode contestatory practices that enable her to author herself and to critique and unsettle Victorian ideology. By manipulating genre and linguistic conventions, Seacole promotes a double-voicedness that allows her to challenge “disciplining” systems (in Foucault’s sense of non-coercion)—practices which mark her as a resisting subject. By foregrounding cultural issues of race and gender, thus forcing them into higher public visibility, Seacole also contends against the contradictory and conflictual text of freedom. Though seemingly ideologically compliant, then, the work’s signifying strategies produce a text that contests authority while textualizing the authenticity of difference and hybrid subjectivity.

When the location of the center shifts from Jamaica to England, Seacole finds this new site of difference less predictable than the colonial one. The rejection Seacole encountered when she applied to serve as a nurse under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War suggests how confusing the faces of freedom were for the post-Emancipation subject in nineteenth-century Britain. In Jamaica, Seacole had learned medicine from British surgeons. Her work there and in Panama, especially during cholera and yellow fever epidemics, had earned her a reputation as a nurse, and the title of “yellow doctress.” When she became aware of the desperate conditions at the Crimean warfront — the newspapers were full of stories about untended soldiers dying more from diseases and lack of care and sanitation than from war wounds — a self-assured Seacole traveled to England to volunteer, carrying letters of recommendation from well-ranking surgeons. But despite her training and her letters of support, both the Secretary of War and the Office of Quatermaster-General ignored her. Seacole responded by getting to the Crimea on her own. Forming a corporation with an old family friend, she financed her own expedition to set up there as a “sutler.” Sailing first from England to Constantinople with her warehouse of provisions, she then made her way to Balaclava. At a place near the battlefield, she spent the considerable sum of eight hundred pounds to erect her store, the “British Hotel.” Since she had also…

In new book, two Kentucky families discover surprising racial histories

Lexington Herald-Leader
Lexington, Kentucky
2011-05-15

Linda B. Blackford

Freda Spencer Goble of Paintsville knew that she hailed from a proud and hardworking clan that carved a life out of the hills and hollows of frontier Johnson County. What she didn’t know was that one of those frontiersmen, her great-great grandfather, was partly black.

William LaBach is a Georgetown lawyer and genealogist who has long studied his Gibson relatives, a clan of Louisiana sugar planters who made a second home in Lexington before the Civil War. He’d heard that a colonial forebear was part African, but could never confirm it.

These two Kentucky families are now the subject of a new book by Vanderbilt University law professor Daniel Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White reveals the complex and shifting history of race in America, a history about people’s most basic — and yet most unreliable — assumptions about their own identity…

…Thanks to books like Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball and revelations about President Thomas Jefferson’s black descendants, people have become more used to the idea that family trees branch with different ethnicities. However, the idea they might be a different ethnicity themselves is a new idea that is only recently emerging in genealogy and other historical studies.

“This is a more unsettling story. … The story really changes the way people approach race,” Sharfstein said. “For a lot of the descendants I spoke with, being white meant they really didn’t have to think about race for most of their lives. But now they’re really paying attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Cornel West: ‘They say I’m un-American’

The Guardian
2013-05-12

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

The American academic and firebrand campaigner talks about Britain’s deep trouble, fighting white supremacy and where Obama is going wrong

Cornel West, the firebrand of American academia for almost 30 years, is causing his hosts some problems. They are on a schedule but such things barely move him, for as he saunters down the high street there are people to talk to, and no one can leave shortchanged. Everyone, “brother” or “sister”, is indeed treated like a long lost family member. And then there is the hug; a bear-like pincer movement. There’s no escape. It happens in New York, where the professor/philosopher usually holds court. And now it’s the same in Cambridge.

The best students accord their visitors a healthy respect, but West’s week laying bare the conflicts and fissures of race and culture and activism and literature in the US and Britain yielded more than that during his short residency at King’s College. There are academics who draw a crowd, but the West phenomenon at King’s had rock star quality: the buzz, the poster beaming his image from doors and noticeboards; the back story – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, his seminal work Race Matters, his falling-in and falling-out with Barack Obama.

Others can teach, and at Cambridge the teaching is some of the best in the world, but standing-room-only crowds came to see West perform. He performed. Approaching 60 now, he is slow of gait. But he always performs…

Read the entire article here.

First Person: ‘We’ve made diversity our official civic religion in Leicester’

This is Leicestershire
Leicester Mercury
2013-03-27

Ben Ravilious

I was delighted to learn the city mayor has given the green light to Leicester’s City of Culture bid. However, I already have nagging doubts about the direction this might be taking.

It’s the flogging of the word “diversity” that concerns me. We’ve made diversity our official civic religion in Leicester but I think we should place more emphasis on the ways in which we mix to give us the best chance of winning.

Let’s be clear, my wife is of a different race, religion and nationality to me, we have two mixed-race daughters and my life is far richer as a result.

I also think it’s essential to continue the battle for equality so everyone in Leicester can all feel equally represented and respected.

But diversity alone is just a statistic and having diversity doesn’t necessarily mean harmony or cultural significance. It’s what we do with it that counts…

Read the entire article here.

Census 2011: Leicester ‘most ethnically diverse’ in region

BBC News
2012-12-11

Leicester is one of the most diverse cities in the UK and the largest in the East Midlands, the latest census shows.

Information from the 2011 survey shows there are 329,000 people living in the city, 24,000 more than in Nottingham, while 250,000 live in Derby. [See Leicester details here.]

Half of Leicester’s population describe themselves as white British, compared with 80% nationally and 63.9% in 2001.

Deputy Mayor of Leicester Rory Palmer said they viewed its diversity as a major strength.

The details emerged in the latest round of information released from the 2011 census taken in March.
 
Leicester was widely tipped to be the first city with a minority white population but just missed out on the landmark with 50.6% describing themselves as white.

But it does have one of the lowest rates of residents who identify themselves as white British, at 45%, and the highest proportion of British Indians, at 28.3%…

Mr. Palmer, deputy city mayor, said: “What it means is that we have a very diverse population and we view this as a great strength and something the city can be very proud of.

“We saw the Queen and the royal family kick off their Diamond Jubilee in March this year here in Leicester, probably because Leicester is a very real reflection of modern, vibrant, multi-cultural Britain.”

While Nottingham’s population remains smaller than Leicester’s at 305,680 – 38,692 more than in 2001 – it does have a higher than average mixed race community.

About 6% are mixed ethnicity, with 4% white and black Caribbean…

Read the entire article here.

Researching ethnicity, identity and ‘mixed-race’

Social Science Research: Discussing Methods and Resources
The British Library
2012-11-19

This post discusses our latest Myths and Realities event on ethnicity, identity and ‘mixed-race’ and points readers in the direction of some relevant British Library collections.

On the evening of 13 November we hosted our latest Myths and Realities event (in partnership with the Academy of Social Science) on ‘Our ethnicity and identity – what does it all mean?’ Speakers Professor Miri Song and Professor Ann Phoenix spoke about how we think about our ethnic identity, and how the meanings we attach to this identity can change across time, space and social context. The event was chaired by Rania Hafez of Muslim Women in Education.

Ann Phoenix’s talk entitled ‘Why are ‘race’ and ethnicity crucial to identities and social lives, but not central?’ explored how debates about multiculturalism have produced contradictory ways of thinking about ‘race’, ethnicity and identities. Miri Song’s title was ‘Does the growth of ‘mixed race’ people signal the declining significance of ‘race’?’. Here she examined what is signalled by the growth in interracial partnerships and of ‘mixed’ people…

Read the entire article here.

Imperial Relations: Histories of family in the British Empire

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2013
DOI: 10.1353/cch.2013.0006

Esme Cleall, Lecturer in the History
University of Sheffield

Laura Ishiguro, Professor of History
University of British Columbia

Emily J. Manktelow
King’s College London

In early 1860, Mary Moody gave birth to a daughter, Susan, at the Royal Engineers camp in New Westminster, British Columbia, where her husband was stationed as detachment commander, chief commissioner of lands and works and lieutenant governor of the colony. Writing to her Newcastle family, she longed for the emotional and practical support that her sister Emily could have offered in person in the immediate post-partum period, concluding that “€œ[o]ne really needs relations in a Colony.”€ While rooted in her own concerns and experiences in New Westminster, Moody’s sentiment resonates more widely: family connections were often critical to securing a new immigrant”€™s position in an unfamiliar context, and more generally to navigating colonial configurations of power, identity and everyday life for men, women and children across the British imperial world.

Indeed, as a rich and growing scholarship suggests, family and empire were entangled in a wide range of ways. Familial connections could be vital elements in networks of political patronage and power, while the family also worked as a site of economic strategy and capital accumulation; colonial employment and enterprise, for example, often supported the flagging fortunes of metropolitan relatives. Ideas about marriage, gender, sexuality, childrearing and domesticity both shaped and were shaped by configurations of imperial power and identity, while family communication also helped to produce personal forms of colonial knowledge for those who remained in the metropole. In these ways, the British Empire became a “€œfamily affair”€ or an “€œintimate project”€;  in ideal and practice, imagination and experience, duty and emotion, blood and metaphor, family constituted key sinews of empire.

But empire, too, could operate as a key sinew of family. It was not simply that one “€œneeded”€ relations–€”that family connections underpinned the operation of empire in political, economic, social and emotional ways—€”but also that imperial processes remade relations and created new ones. Imperialism provided new arenas for sexuality, domesticity and kinship and contestations over the implications of these opportunities were intimately entwined with understandings of identity and power in colonial contexts. Whilst absence, distance and surrogacy stretched the limits of the family, for example, sexual relationships that bridged what were construed as distinct “€œracial”€ groups could reconfigure the boundaries of colonial rule. In these ways, the emotional and structural dynamics of family life were altered by imperial separations and collisions. Overall—whether in representation or experience, regulation or expectation—€”familial “€œrelations”€ shaped and were shaped by the empire in ways that were critical to the histories of both. In this sense, while Mary Moody wrote from an “€œedge of empire,”€ her call for “€œrelations in a Colony”€ cut to its very heart.

This special issue examines the place of “€œrelations”€ in colonial life, interrogating their forms, meanings and significance in a range of contexts across the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the present. We are concerned with exploring both “€œfamily”€ and “€œempire”€ as contested categories, with particular attention to rethinking the configurations of “€œblood, contract, and intimacy”€   that might be seen as constituting imperial families. To this end, the articles consider a diverse range of ways in which family “€”broadly defined”€” operated as a key site of imperial processes, a social and economic unit at the heart of colonial life, and a building block for imperial relationships and identities. The histories of ministers and missionaries (Rhonda Semple and Sarah Duff), servants and employers (Fae Dussart), sexual relationships that crossed “€œracial”€ and cultural boundaries (Chie Ikeya), and orphans and institutions (Andrew May) provoke new considerations of who and what “€œcolonial relations”€ were, how they operated and why they were significant. Individually and collectively, these articles push the scholarship on imperial family in new directions, questioning the conceptual boundaries of family and rethinking its connections to empire.

Both within and beyond the context of the British Empire, the study of colonial families is a vast and porous field–in part because of the very fluidity and malleability of the term “€œfamily”€…

Oona King: My family values

The Guardian
2013-04-19

Roz Lewis

The Labour peer talks about her parents, growing up as the only mixed-race child in her class, and being an adoptive parent

I was born in Sheffield. My father, Preston King, is African American; my mother, Hazel, is a Jewish Geordie. I have a brother, Slater, who is two years younger than me. Slater and I hated each other and we fought like cats and dogs when we were smaller. Now I love him to bits.

My parents’ relationship quickly broke down, and my brother and I were subject to a custody battle when I was about four. My father kidnapped us and took us to Africa. My mum tracked us down in Nairobi, somehow got the money together to fight the court case, and we moved back to London. I think both our parents loved us so much, they would do anything for us.

As a single mother, my mum, who was a special needs teacher in London, often found it a struggle. She is an incredibly positive, selfless person, and I get my political awareness and desire for social change from her. Even now people will write to me, saying my mum changed their lives. She loved me limitlessly. I was a very happy child.

My dad was exiled from his home country for 40 years on trumped-up racist charges before receiving a presidential pardon. After leaving my mother, he eventually moved to Australia and married a Lebanese woman. I grew up in Camden. Back then, I was an oddity. A mixed-race child wasn’t common. I was the only one in my primary school class – there was one black child, one Asian child and me. The rest were white. Sometimes I got called a mongrel. I had no role models. I remember seeing Sade and Neneh Cherry on TV with relief, as they were the first women I’d seen like me…

Read the entire article here.

Researching ‘Mixed-Race’ Male Experiences in Education in the United Kingdom

Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds
2012-12-20

Hi all,

I’m a researcher from The University of Leeds (UK) based in the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism studies.

I’m currently carrying out research into ‘mixed-race’ male experiences in education in the UK. I’m in contact with a couple of researchers in the US and hopefully may develop some comparative work to improve experiences in both the US and the UK.

Whilst ‘black’ male education experiences are heavily theorised there is an absence of research into mixed-race male education…

I’m looking for male participants aged between 18-32 who identify as being of Black African Caribbean and White British parentage.

The research will be an interview (no more than 30 minutes), the interview arrangements will be down to interviewee preferences, I’m open to use digital methods such as Skype, Instant messaging etc… I’m also more than happy to conduct face-to-face interviews.. I’m based in Manchester and Leeds areas.

The interview will unstructured and would allow you to share your experiences and take the conversation where you want to.

Anyone interested (or want more information) please memail me; R.Salisbury@leeds.ac.uk.

Thank you,

Remi Salisbury