Mixed Race Studies

American Son: A Novel

W. W. Norton & Company
May 2001
256 pages
5.6 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN 978-0-393-32154-8

Brian Ascalon Roley

A powerful novel about ethnically fluid California, and the corrosive relationship between two Filipino brothers.

Told with a hard-edged purity that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomas’s waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from their American father, struggles to keep her sons in line while working two dead-end jobs. When Gabe runs away, he brings shame and unforeseen consequences to the family. Full of the ache of being caught in a violent and alienating world, American Son is a debut novel that captures the underbelly of the modern immigrant experience.

Artist At Work: Mequitta Ahuja Wins A Guggenheim

BmoreArt
Baltimore, Maryland
2018-04-16

Cara Ober, Founding Editor

An Interview with Mequitta Ahuja About Success, Heartbreak, and a Recent Guggenheim Award by Cara Ober

The July 24, 2017 issue of the New Yorker described Mequitta Ahuja‘s work, then on view at the Asia Society Museum, as “whip-smart and languorous.” According to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, where she was just named a 2018 Fellow, Mequitta Ahuja’s works have been widely exhibited, including venues such as the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Saatchi Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Crystal Bridges, Baltimore Museum of Art and Grand Rapids Art Museum. Ahuja, a Baltimore-based artist whose parents hail from Cincinnati and New Delhi, has long employed her own image to challenge historic traditions of portrait painting.

I caught up with the artist to ask about her momentous Guggenheim award, announced April 5, 2018, and to discuss the new opportunities and ideas abounding in her studio…

Read the entire interview here.

Mizuko

Hapa Japan
2018-04-13

Fredrick Cloyd

Featured Image by Edward M. Haugh

During the years of gathering research and thoughts, memory and conversations into some sort of cohesive unit for a book–which would eventually become the forthcoming (Spring 2018 by 2Leaf Press) entitled: Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, I had not thought of a title, or a way to fit all the pieces together for the vast amount of links and connections I wanted to make in relation to world historical archive and a definite anti-colonial stance. Yet another story of a unique person in the world was not my goal, although it would also be taken that way. I wanted to reach those who were concerned with looking at the historical present.

In focusing on my mother and myself, it came one day in a dream. Just as the opening scene in my book presents, I am suddenly woken up in the middle of the night to write:　みずこ　水子　ミズコ (mizuko) on a notepad I pull out from the bedside drawer. It puzzled me because, at least consciously, I did not know what this word meant or what it was. Then, the next day, I looked it up on the internet. The term mizuko, was the postwar euphemism for aborted fetus, or dead fetus. An entire religious ceremonial ritual grew out of this when the U.S. Occupation lifted its ban on religious ceremonies in Japan. Many women flooded to the countless shrines and statues to pray for those babies gone. Some were so ashamed, they did it in secret. But most women, even after given “permission,” could now do prayers in the forest and write their babies names or burn their incense in the name of that baby they let go from their bodies…

Read the entire article here.

A Visit to the 2018 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

Pacific Citizen: The National Newspaper of the JACL
Los Angeles, California
2018-03-28

Rob Buscher, Contributor

Ken Tanabe, left, and Jeff Chiba Stearns lead the Community Caucus at CMRS. (Photo: Rob Buscher)

Leaders in the multiracial movement gather to ‘Resist, Reclaim, Reimagine’ – a direct call to action amidst the current political climate faced by historically underrepresented communities in the U.S.

Over the past few decades, the Japanese American community has become increasingly inclusive of multiracial and multiethnic individuals. However, for those of us who appear less phenotypically Japanese, it is sometimes difficult explaining our connection to people who are less familiar with interracial marriage and mixed-race children.

Multiracial Japanese Americans are in many ways the direct result of institutionalized racism that stigmatized Japanese-ness in the 20th century. From the Alien Land Laws to the mass incarceration during World War II, the very existence of our Japanese immigrant ancestors was deemed objectionable. Is it any wonder that so many of our parents and grandparents would choose intermarriage with partners from other ethnic and racial communities?

Yet, despite the growing prevalence of mixed-race Japanese Americans, there are many outside our community who do not acknowledge the legitimacy of our existence within the spectrum of Japanese American identity.

This is why it was so empowering to attend an event like the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, where nearly every one of the 200-plus participants were mixed race. While each individual has a totally different experience being mixed race (even within the same mixed community) the fact that multiracial folks were a super majority in this space meant that everyone had at least a basic understanding of the shared complexities surrounding our mixed identities.

Hosted at the University of Maryland on March 1-3, the 2018 conference’s theme was “Resist, Reclaim, Reimagine” — titled with a direct call to action amidst the current political climate faced by historically underrepresented communities in the United States…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Intimacies Symposium

University of Chicago
5733 South University Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637
2018-04-18 through 2018-04-19

Please join us for a two-day symposium examining the history of interracial intimacies in comparative and transnational perspective. This symposium offers emerging and established scholars an opportunity to come together to discuss issues of interracial intimacies broadly construed.

Doris L. Garraway, Associate Professor of French at Northwestern University, and Sarah Kovner, Senior Research Scholar in the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, will be the keynote speakers.

For more information, click here.

hapa.me: 15 Years of the Hapa Project

Japanese American National Museum
100 North Central Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90012
2018-04-07 through 2018-10-28

The word “hapa” is the Hawaiian transliteration of the English word “half.” Much of its current usage derives from the phrase hapa haole, meaning “half white.” The phrase was originally coined by native Hawaiians to describe the mixed offspring resulting from encounters between islanders and White settlers. In subsequent years, hapa (or Hapa) has come into popular usage away from the islands, most frequently embraced by Asian/Pacific Islander Americans of mixed descent.

Artist Kip Fulbeck created The Hapa Project in 2001, traveling the country to photograph over 1,200 volunteers who identified as Hapa. The Hapa Project’s goal was to promote awareness and recognition of the millions of Hapas in the United States; to give voice to multiracial people and other previously ignored ethnic groups; to dispel myths around exoticism, hybrid superiority, and racial homogeneity; and to foster positive identity formation in multiracial children. In 2006, Fulbeck published the first book and premiered kip fulbeck: part asian, 100% hapa, the first museum exhibition to explicitly explore Hapa identity. That exhibition remains one of the most popular in the history of the Japanese American National Museum, setting attendance records before traveling throughout the US and abroad. The exhibition broke new ground in exploring identity through photographic portraits of mixed-race subjects, paired with the participants’ handwritten responses to the typically posed question, “What are you?”…

Read more here.

What does it mean to be of mixed race in America? A new book and exhibition aim to answer

The Los Angeles Times
2018-04-06

Bonnie Tsui

Artist Kip Fulbeck continues his Hapa Project, begun in 2001, photographing people who identify as being of mixed race. His original portraits are paired with new pictures of the same individuals. (Kip Fulbeck)

Natalie Coughlin and Nathan Adrian are best known as world swimming champions — Coughlin as a 12-time Olympic medalist and the first woman to swim the 100-meter backstroke in under a minute, and Adrian as an eight-time Olympic medalist and a top freestyle sprinter for the U.S. national team. On a recent Saturday morning, they dropped those identities for a lesser-known one.

“Being hapa — that’s a big part of my identity,” Coughlin said, as she and Adrian each sat for a portrait by photographer Kip Fulbeck at a makeshift studio in Oakland.

Fulbeck started photographing people of mixed racial heritage in 2001. Hapa, a Hawaiian word for “part,” has been adopted by some as a way to describe themselves. After each sitting, Fulbeck asked participants to hand-write responses to the question: “What are you?”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixing up identity, race and culture

Now
Toronto, Ontario
2018-03-28

Samantha Edwards

Zoé Doyle (left) and Vanessa Trenton star in a new production of the groundbreaking play.

MIXIE & THE HALF BREEDS written by Julie Tamiko Manning and Adrienne Wong, directed by Jenna Rodgers. Presented by fu-GEN Theatre Company at the Pia Bouman School for Ballet (6 Noble). Previews from Tuesday (April 3), opens April 5 and runs to April 15. $15-$35.

Growing up, Julie Tamiko Manning didn’t know many people who looked like her. Manning is half-Japanese and half-white, a hybrid identity that made her stick out in her hometown in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.

In the early 2000s, when Manning was in her 20s, she went to Vancouver for the first time and found herself working with a cast made up entirely of mixed race people. During that trip, she became friends with Adrienne Wong, a half-Chinese, half-white playwright and actor originally from Calgary and now based in Ottawa.

“Adrienne and I totally bonded over being mixies,” says Manning, who now lives in Montreal.

“No matter what the mix is, there’s a very similar experience that you have lived as a mixed race person.”

Like Manning, I’m half-Japanese and half-white, and I understand why she and Wong felt an immediate kinship. Mixed race people – or “mixies,” as some of us like to call ourselves – have a special, almost familial connection to one another. We can spot a fellow mixie from across a crowded streetcar or in the most minor roles in a movie. We can relate to strangers constantly asking us, “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” or feeling culturally estranged from both sides of our identity.

These ideas of identity, race and culture in Canadian society are explored in Manning and Wong’s comedic, fantastical play, Mixie & The Half Breeds, which follows the burgeoning friendship of two mixed race women who couldn’t be more different…

Read the entire article here.

Mixie and the Halfbreeds play opens tonight in Toronto

Metro Morning with Matt Galloway
CBC Radio One
2018-04-03

Matt Galloway, Host

We meet the director [Jenna Rodgers] of a new play opening tonight in Toronto and talk about what it means to be mixed-race in Canada right now.

Mixie and the Halfbreeds

fu-GEN Theater
157 Carlton Street, Suite 207
Toronto, Ontario M5A 2K3
Telephone: 416.920.2828
2018-04-03 through 2018-04-15

written by: adrienne wong & julie tamiko manning
directed by: jenna rodgers
featuring: zoe doyle & nessa trenton
choreography by: ming-bo lam
set & lighting design by: alison yanota
costume design by: jackie chau
sound design by: deanna h. choi
stage manager: bradley dunn
producer: jenna harris
production manager: suzie balogh

In Mixie and the Halfbreeds, two estranged neighbors are not as different as they think. Haunted by peroxide teeth and blondissima hair, Mixie and Trixie tackle a question that has plagued mankind through the ages: do blondes really have more fun? Mixie & the Halfbreeds invites the audience to explore complex and relevant issues of culture, identity, and race, and tackles questions of mixing in contemporary Canadian society and popular culture.