Mixed Race Studies

Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991

Talonbooks
2015
640 pages
6 W x 9 H inches
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9780889229471; ISBN 10: 0889229473

Fred Wah

Edited and Introduction by:

Jeff Derksen, Associate Professor of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local.”

Most of Wah’s early work is out of print. This collection allows readers to (re)discover this groundbreaking work. The volume contains:

Lardeau (1965)
Mountain (1967)
Among (1972)
Tree (1972)
Earth (1974)
Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975)
Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980)
Owner’s Manual (1981)
Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981)
Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982)
Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985)
Rooftops (1988)
So Far (1991)

The collection has been organized according to a chronology of composition (rather than a chronology of original publication): this reveals new connections and thematic trajectories in the body of work as a whole, and makes the book an eminently “teachable” volume. The book includes full-colour facsimiles of two early books, Earth and Tree, reproduced to show the “hands-on” object-based aspect of chapbook publishing.

A short interview with Fred Wah

Jacket2
2015-03-05

Rob McLennan

Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1939, but he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960s where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s where he taught at Selkirk College and was the founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. He retired from the University of Calgary in 2003 and now lives in Vancouver. He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. His work has been awarded the Governor General’s Award, Alberta’s Stephanson Award for Poetry and Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Writing on Canadian Literature, and B.C.’s Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. He was Parliamentary Poet Laureate 2011-2013 and he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2013. He has published over 20 books of poetry and prose. Recent books include Sentenced to Light, his collaborations with visual artists, is a door, a series of poem about hybridity, and a selected, The False Laws of Narrative, edited by Louis Cabri. A recent collaboration, High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem, is available online (http://highmuckamuck.ca/). His current project involves the Columbia River. Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991 will be published by Talonbooks in the fall of 2015.

Q: I’m curious about your tenure as Poet Laureate. From 2011 to 2013, you were Canada’s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate, following in the footsteps of George Bowering (2002–2004), Pauline Michel (2004–2006), John Steffler  (2006–2008) and Pierre DesRuisseaux (2009–2011). In hindsight, what do you feel you were able to bring to the position, and do you feel your tenure was a successful one? What did the position allow you to do that you might not have been able to do otherwise?…

Read the entire interview here.

Douglas Todd: Mixed unions applauded by some, but dismissed by others as brownwashing

The Vancouver Sun
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2015-07-24

Douglass Todd, Vancouver Sun columnist

Ethnically mixed couples — involving whites, blacks, Japanese, Hispanics, Chinese, South Asians or others — were heralded not long ago as the wave of a tolerant, open, non-racist future.

National Geographic and Time magazine ran cover features with photos of mixed-race people, celebrating The New Face of America. The hero in the Warren Beatty movie, Bulworth, trumpeted inter-marriage as the way to end racial discrimination.

Polls consistently reveal many whites, blacks, Asians and others are attracted more to other ethnicities than their own, particularly for dating. British writer Laura Smith, who has a Guyanese mother and Scottish father, says she’s often told her mixed-race children “look cool.”

In the age of multi-ethnic celebrities such as Paula Abdul, Vin Diesel, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry and Mariah Carey, Smith, who frequently writes about mixed unions, says white mothers, in particular, confess to her they yearn for mixed offspring; they want a society that’s less white and more “brown.”

But three cultural trends are shaking up this utopian dream, which places inter-ethnic couples at the vanguard of cultural fusion…

…Scholars SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Spiers, editors of Mixing it Up: Multiracial Subjects, also maintain the melting pot ideal, in which people of different ethnicities inevitably join up to make babies together, is a “problematic” form of “brownwashing.”

“To embrace a ‘brown’ or raceless society and to dispense with concepts of race are to deny the beauty there is in difference,” say Kwan and Spiers.

“Brownwashing hopes to erase the ugly patterns of racism and in one grand gesture homogenize us all.”

Roosevelt University Professor Heather Dalmage’s book also questions the vision of a society replete with mixed marriages. In The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking, contributors criticize white people who seek a “colour-blind” society, claiming they just want to deny the prevalence of racism.

British researcher Miri Song, of Kent University, also suggests a Western inter-marriage involving a white person can lead to questionable “assimilation,” in which the ethnic minority loses their identity to the so-called “dominant culture.”

Instead of being a sign of cultural success, Song writes, mixed marriages could “engender deep ambivalence” for minority members…

Read the entire article here.

Thinking ‘Post-Racial’ Ideology Transnationally: The Contemporary Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Americas

Critical Sociology
Published online before print 2015-07-03
DOI: 10.1177/0896920515591175

Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa, Assistant Professor, Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education
University of Alberta, Canada

This article introduces the special issue on post-racial ideologies and politics in the Americas. It argues for the necessity of a transnational frame when examining the related, yet historically variable expressions of post-racial ideology and politics across diverse moments and contexts in the Western Hemisphere. The article examines various modalities of ‘post-racial’ thinking and politics, including mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), colorblindness, and multiculturalism, elaborating their interrelated characteristics in relation to the silencing and minimization of racism and the elision of the role race plays in maintaining structural inequalities. The intersections between the post-racial and racial neoliberalism are highlighted as are the implications of post-racial ideologies for anti-racist and decolonial politics. Special issue article contributions are also described and situated.

Read or purchase the article here.

“Canadian-First”: Mixed Race Self-Identification and Canadian Belonging

Canadian Ethnic Studies
Volume 47, Number 2, 2015
pages 21-44
DOI: 10.1353/ces.2015.0017

Jillian Paragg
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta

Not being read or identified by others as “Canadian” was a common thread in semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted with 19 young adults of mixed race in a Western Canadian urban context. In this paper, I address moments of (in)ability for people of mixed race to claim “Canadian.” Mixed race people have a complex relationship with identifying and narrating their identities as “Canadian” through the operation of race and ethnicity in the Canadian context, and because of ambivalent and contradictory readings of their bodies. I found that they deploy the term in three ways: by expressing a sense of being “Canadian-first,” by stating that there exists an understanding that “Canadian means white,” and by strategically using the term “Canadian” in their interactions with others, signaling an active appropriation of the term. However, none of these deployments are mutually exclusive: they overlap and bleed into each other, playing off and impacting one another. This paper adds to nascent Canadian Critical Mixed Race studies and also redresses a gap in the literature on “Canadian identity” by examining how the ability to claim “Canadian” is racialized through a consideration of the experiences of mixed race people.

Le fait de ne pas être lus ou identifiés par d’autres comme “Canadiens” était le dénominateur commun dans les entrevues semi-structurés que j’ai menées en profondeur avec 19 jeunes adultes de races mixtes dans un contexte urbain de l’Ouest Canadien. Dans cet article, je mets en exergue les moments d’ (in)aptitude des personnes de races mixtes de se réclamer “Canadiens”. Les gens de races mixtes ont une relation complexe avec l’identification et la narration de leurs identités en tant que “Canadiens”, à cause des perceptions ambivalentes et contradictoires de leurs corps. J’ai trouvé que ceux-ci déploient leur terme de trois façons: en exprimant le sens d’être “Canadien en premier”, en affirmant qu’il existe une compréhension du “Canadien qui veut dire Blanc” et en usant stratégiquement du terme “Canadien” dans leur interactions avec les autres, signalant une appropriation active du ce terme. Cependant, aucuns de ces déploiements ne s’excluent mutuellement: ils se chevauchent et s’empiètent entre eux, jouant au large et s’impactant l’un de l’autre. Ce papier s’ajoute aux études critiques canadiennes naissantes sur les races mixtes et répare aussi une lacune dans la littérature des “identités canadiennes”, en examinant comment l’aptitude de se réclamer “Canadien” est radicalisée à travers une considération des expériences des personnes de races mixtes.

Read or purchase the article here.

Cross-country variation in interracial marriage: a USA–Canada comparison of metropolitan areas

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 38, Issue 9, 2015
pages 1591-1609
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1005644

Feng Hou

Zheng Wu

Christoph Schimmele

John Myles

While black–white intermarriage is uncommon in the USA, blacks in Canada are just as likely to marry whites as to marry blacks. Asians, in contrast, are more likely to marry whites in the USA than in Canada. We test the claim that high rates of interracial marriage are indicative of high levels of social integration against Peter Blau’s ‘macrostructural’ thesis that relative group size is the key to explaining differences in intermarriage rates across marriage markets. Using micro-data drawn from the American Community Survey and the Canadian census, we demonstrate that the relative size of racial groups accounts for over two-thirds of the USA–Canada difference in black–white unions and largely explains the cross-country difference in Asian–white unions. Under broadly similar social and economic conditions, a large enough difference in relative group size can become the predominant determinant of group differences in the prevalence of interracial unions.

Read or purchase the article here.

Cultural Appropriation

Metro Morning
CBC Toronto
2015-06-16

Matt Galloway, Host

The controversial head of the Spokane, Washington branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Rachel Dolezal, has stepped down from her post. Matt Galloway spoke with Rema Tavares, she is the founder of Mixed in Canada.

Listen to the interview (00:07:21) here.

What’s Radical About “Mixed Race”?

Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
8 Washington Mews
New York, New York 10003
2015-04-20

On April 20, 2015, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU hosted “What’s Radical About ‘Mixed Race’?“. Eschewing an apolitical “celebration” of mixed race, this panel examined the movement’s implications for multiracial coalition and the future of race in the US and Canada, asking: does the multiracial movement challenge—or actually reinforce—the logics of structural racism?

Minelle Mahtani critically located how an apolitical and ahistorical Canadian “model multiracial” upholds the multicultural claims of the Canadian settler state. Jared Sexton called to task multiracial activists who leverage a mixed race identity in opposition to those who are “all black, all the time.”

A roundtable conversation moderated by Ann Morning (NYU Department of Sociology) followed.

North End Love Songs

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing
2012-03-20
108 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-897289-76-1

Katherena Vermette

Winner of the 2013 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

A self-described “tuff grrl with two ffs” there is no doubt that after poet Katherena Vermette’s first collection of poetry, North End Love Songs, she will also be known as one “tuff” poet. Chronicling several short lived affairs that follow the break-up of a long term relationship, North End Love Songs recounts a quest for love in all wrong places. In it poet Katherena Vermette pulls out all the stops with gritty stripped down lyrics about the kind of love doesn’t always talk nice, sometimes drinks way too much, smokes when it shouldn’t and winds up in bed with people it barely knows or trusts.

But North End Love Songs is more than just a poetic road trip to the wrong side of love. Described by critics as having “a complicated sense of beauty,” there is undeniable eloquence at work in Katherena Vermette’s poetry. These poems go way deeper than the usual explorations of loss and self discovery, grappling with the destructive social and cultural constructs that often keep women on the hunt for solace and stability outside of themselves instead of finding strength within.

Katherena Vermette is well known in Winnipeg for her spoken word and poetry performances. Her poems often feel like songs, sometimes country in tone, and sometimes dark, urban, and alternative. In North End Love Songs readers will find a fierce honesty, and resonant clarity that is unique to this fresh, new voice.

Katherena Vermette is a Métis writer of poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines and compilations, including the upcoming Manitoapow—Aboriginal Literary History of Manitoba (Highwater Press 2012). Vermette was the 2010-2011 Blogger in Residence for thewriterscollective.org and recently begun graduate work in the prestigious Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. A member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba since 2004, Vermette lives, works and plays in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

What’s Radical About “Mixed Race?”

Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
8 Washington Mews
New York, New York 10003
Phone: (212) 998-3700
Monday, 2015-04-20, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time) | Free

Since the 1990s, mainstream media has heralded the growing population of self-identified “mixed race” people in the US and Canada as material proof of a post-racial era (a recent example: National Geographic‘s 2013 feature “The Changing Face of America,” whose title paraphrases a Time feature [at right] from two decades prior). Meanwhile, foundational multiracial activists and scholars like Maria Root claim a doubled oppression—racism via white supremacy and ostracizing from so-called “monoracial” people of color. A growing body of Critical Mixed Race Studies literature is challenging both positions, questioning the assumption that multiracial activism and scholarship is necessarily anti-racist.

Minelle Mahtani critically locates how an apolitical and ahistorical Canadian “model multiracial” upholds the multicultural claims of the Canadian settler state. Jared Sexton calls to task multiracial activists who leverage a mixed race identity in opposition to those who are “all black, all the time.”

Eschewing an apolitical “celebration” of mixed race, this panel examines the movement’s implications for multiracial coalition and the future of race in the US and Canada, asking: does the multiracial movement challenge—or actually reinforce—the logics of structural racism?.