Mixed Race Studies

Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography

University of Washington Press
2001
282 pages
6” x 9”
Paperback ISBN: 9780295980799

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Award-winning videomaker, performance artist, and pop-culture provocateur Kip Fulbeck has captivated audiences worldwide with his mixture of high comedy and personal narrative. In Paper Bullets, his first novel, Fulbeck taps into his Cantonese, English, Irish, and Welsh heritage, weaving a fictional autobiography from 27 closely linked stories, essays, and confessions. By turns sensitive and forceful, passionate and callous, Fulbeck confronts the politics of race, sex, and Asian American masculinity head-on without apology, constantly questioning where Hapas fit in a country that ignores multiracial identity.

Raised in southern California by a Chinese-born mother and a Caucasian father, Fulbeck pushes the conventions of literary form as he simultaneously draws from, recreates, and fabricates his own life history. His range of experiences – from college professor to youth outreach volunteer, blues player to surfer and lifeguard—informs his witty and humane writing. Like himself, his protagonist is a young man shaped by the conflicting mores, stigmas, desires, and codes of male conduct in America. He searches for and mismanages love and independence, continually experimenting with sex along the way. Sometimes hilarious, always heartfelt, surfing the trivia of pop culture and sound bits, his inner voice shifts continually among the real, the perceived, and the imagined.

Kip Fulbeck is an ocean lifeguard, guitar junkie, dubbed kung fu grandmaster, Lakers fanatic, and associate professor of art studio and Asian American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The River Between Us

Puffin
2005-04-21
176 pages
5.06 x 7.75 in
8 – 12 years
Paperback ISBN: 9780142403105

Richard Peck

Awards

• National Book Award: Finalist
• Scott O’Dell Award
• ALA Notable Book
• ALA Best Book for Young Adults
• Riverbank Review Children’s Books of Distinction
• Booklist Editor’s Choice
• NYPL’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing
• IRA Book Award
• Book Sense 76 Top Ten Selection
• Parents’ Choice Award

The year is 1861. Civil war is imminent and Tilly Pruitt’s brother, Noah, is eager to go and fight on the side of the North. With her father long gone, Tilly, her sister, and their mother struggle to make ends meet and hold the dwindling Pruitt family together. Then one night a mysterious girl arrives on a steamboat bound for St. Louis. Delphine is unlike anyone the small river town has even seen. Mrs. Pruitt agrees to take Delphine and her dark, silent traveling companion in as boarders. No one in town knows what to make of the two strangers, and so the rumors fly. Is Delphine’s companion a slave? Could they be spies for the South? Are the Pruitts traitors? A masterful tale of mystery and war, and a breathtaking portrait of the lifelong impact one person can have on another.

Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

University Press of Mississippi
1998
184 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-57806-798-5

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Never before published, a 1920s novel disputes prevailing attitudes on racial character and identity

Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, but set it in a time and place favored by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand: Free Man of Color examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts, as well, against the traditional stance that fiction by leading American writers of the previous generation had taken on the issue of miscegenation. After living for many years in France, the wealthy and sophisticated Paul Marchand returns to his home in New Orleans and discovers through a will that he is white and is now head of a prosperous and influential family. Since mixed-race marriages are illegal, he must renounce his mulatto wife and bastardize his children.

Chesnutt resolves Marchand’s dilemma with a surprising plot reversal. Marchand, although white, chooses to pass as a black so that he can keep his wife and children. Thus by altering the traditional narrative that Cable, Twain, and Howells had developed for their fiction on mixed-race themes, he exposes the issue of race as a social and legal fabrication. Moreover, Chesnutt shows Marchand’s awareness that traits of inferiority and superiority are not based on “blood” but on other factors. In him Chesnutt has created an admirable male character responsive to human needs and civility rather than to artificial institutions.

Also by Mail

Edition Assemblage: Begleiterscheinungen emanzipatorischer Theorie und Praxis
2013-02-20
96 pages
Paperback, 142×205 mm
ISBN 978-3-942885-38-6
Series: Witnessed Edition 2

Olumide Popoola

Also by Mail is a modern family comedy-drama that follows the experiences of Nigerian German siblings Funke and Wale who fly to Nigeria to bury their suddenly deceased father. Their upbringing clashes with their uncle’s expectations and initial misunderstandings soon come to an éclat. When Wale returns to Germany, frustrated, he is bitterly reminded of how little his father acknowledged and prepared them for racist encounters there.

Loss and racism, sibling rivalry and cross-cultural etiquette, the play incorporates and subverses it’s urban, neo-African elements of story-telling to give a contemporary picture of a family that struggles not only with the legacy of its patriarch but with being racialized within the German context as well. Where does each stand in a circle of relations and needs? Where does each want to end up? And who is willing to help? It takes an inside-outside job to lighten the mood and the surprise startles them all.

The Slum [O Cortiço]

Oxford University Press
March 2000 (First published in 1890)
240 pages
Paperback ISBN 13: 9780195121872; ISBN 10: 0195121872

Aluísio Azevedo

Edited and Translated by David H. Rosenthal

Features an informative introduction by translator David H. Rosenthal

First published in 1890, and undoubtedly Azevedo’s masterpiece, The Slum is one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed novels ever written about Brazil. Indeed, its great popularity, realistic descriptions, archetypal situations, detailed local coloring, and overall race-consciousness may well evoke Huckleberry Finn as the novel’s North American equivalent. Yet Azevedo also exhibits the naturalism of Zola and the ironic distance of Balzac; while tragic, beautiful, and imaginative as a work of fiction, The Slum is universally regarded as one of the best, or truest, portraits of Brazilian society ever rendered.

This is a vivid and complex tale of passion and greed, a story with many different strands touching on the different economic tiers of society. Mainly, however, The Slum thrives on two intersecting story lines. In one narrative, a penny-pinching immigrant landlord strives to become a rich investor and then discards his black lover for a wealthy white woman. In the other, we witness the innocent yet dangerous love affair between a strong, pragmatic, “gentle giant” sort of immigrant and a vivacious mulatto woman who both live in a tenement owned by said landlord. The two immigrant heroes are originally Portuguese, and thus personify two alternate outsider responses to Brazil. As translator David H. Rosenthal points out in his useful Introduction: one is the capitalist drawn to new markets, quick prestige, and untapped resources; the other, the prudent European drawn moth-like to “the light and sexual heat of the tropics.”

A deftly told, deeply moving, and hardscrabble novel that features several stirring passages about life in the streets, the melting-pot realities of the modern city, and the oft-unstable mind of the crowd, The Slum will captivate anyone who might appreciate a more poetic, less political take on the nineteenth-century naturalism of Crane or Dreiser.

Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self

Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
February 2004 (Originally Published in 1903)
224 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0743467698; ISBN-13: 9780743467698
eBook ISBN-10: 1451604351; ISBN-13: 9781451604351

Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930)

Introduction by:

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Of One Blood is the last of four novels written by Pauline Hopkins. She is considered by some to be “the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the twentieth century, though she is one of the lesser known literary figures of the much lauded Harlem Renaissance. Of One Blood first appeared in serial form in Colored American Magazine in the November and December 1902 and the January 1903 issues of the publication, during the four-year period that Hopkins served as its editor.

Hopkins tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who couldn’t care less about being black and appreciating African history, but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost treasures—which he does find in the ancient land. However, he discovers much more than he bargained for: the painful truth about blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told. Hopkins wrote the novel intending, in her own words, to “raise the stigma of degradation from [the Black] race.” The title, Of One Blood, refers to the biological kinship of all human beings.

The Bone People: A Novel (Hardcover Reissue)

LSU Press
April 2005
464 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807130728

Keri Hulme

• Winner of The Booker Prize
• The Pegasus Prize for Literature
• The New Zealand Book Award for Fiction

Integrating both Māori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Māori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that “to care for anything is to invite disaster.” Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Māori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character’s thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment.

Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness,The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

A Little Too Much Is Enough

W. W. Norton & Company
November 1996
240 pages
5.4 × 8.1 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-31559-2

Kathleen Tyau

Filled with love and food, this story of the Hawaiian Wong family is an exuberant banquet of characters and stories.

Mahealani Wong was named for the full moon she was born under as her Chinese grandmother believed it would bring her good luck. She has a full helping of her fathers full Hawaiian lips and the rebellious heart of an American teenager. In this vibrant tale, Mahi tries to get more than the “little too much” that is enough for the loving and hard-to-let-go-of-one-another Wong family.

A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel

Picador
2005 (Originally published in 1995)
192 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780312422738; ISBN10: 0312422733

Sigrid Nunez

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents’ stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet—these are the elements that shape the young woman’s imagination and her sexuality. It is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

Me: A Book of Remembrance

University Press of Mississippi
1997 (Originally published in 1915)
368 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0878059911 (9780878059911)
Paper ISBN: 087805992X (9780878059928)

Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954)

Afterword by:

Linda Trinh Moser, Professor of English
Missouri State University

A Chinese-Eurasian’s autobiographical novel tracing a woman’s dual quest for a writing career and romance

Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry.

In Me: Book of Rembrance her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but in the plot, as Nora journeys from her birthplace in Canada to the West Indies and to the United States, Eaton recounts her own early life and writing career. One of sixteen children, Nora leaves her destitute family in Quebec to earn a living. Only seventeen and with ten dollars in her pocket she sets sail for Jamaica and the chance to do newspaper work. Nora ends up in Chicago, moving from job to job, trying all along to sell stories she writes in her spare time. When she discovers that the man with whom she is in love is married, she moves to New York and gains achievement as a novelist. Against this nineteenth-century sensibility of Nora’s search for success and love, Eaton conveys the powerlessness of the typical young woman of the working class. Her autobiographical plotline discloses a remarkable secret, Eaton’s reticence about her own half-Chinese ancestry.

Despite the silence of the text, Me: A Book of Rembrance reveals turn-of-the-century views on race, gender, and class. In Jamaica Nora describes the racial inequities and disparities. Moreover, when she says, “I myself was dark and foreign-looking, but the blond type I adored,” she reveals the extent of her own internalized oppression. Although the author believes her own mixed ancestry precludes prejudice on her part, the text proves otherwise. Like other ethnic immigrants, Nora is indoctrinated into America’s Anglo preference.