Mixed Race Studies

Japanese-Canadian hapa woman makes opera fun

Global Asian Women: Stories for and about Asian women around the world
2013-07-31

Elizabeth Noh

Her name means a solo piece in an opera, and it just so happens that Aria Umezawa is a trained opera singer.

The mixed Japanese-Canadian is also the co-founder and artistic director of Opera 5, a small production company in Toronto, Canada.

Fate or coincidence? Her parents had no idea when they named her 25 years ago.

“My parents joke that if they knew I would follow my namesake, they would have named me lawyer or doctor,” says Aria.

Her calling came at the age of 6, when she saw her first opera, Turandot by Puccini. “The music touched me.”

The experience lead her to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and later at McGill University in Montreal. She trained as an opera singer, but she found that she wasn’t cut out to be a performer and was more suited to be a director…

…Aria is bi-racial. Her mother is Caucasian from the province of Alberta in western Canada. Her father is Japanese who came to Canada as a teenager. Aria was born and raised in Toronto. She has two younger brothers.

Some people say Eurasian, but “hapa” is commonly used in North America. The term originates from Hawaii and means a person of mixed blood. We talk about her mixed background.

“Growing up, it never occurred to me that my family was different on any sort of substantial level. We ate foods that my friends didn’t eat, and I was enrolled in karate instead of ballet, but I figured every family had its quirks,” she says…

Read the entire article here.

Are Mixed Race Couples and Families Still Fighting for Acceptance in Alberta?

Alberta Primetime
Edmonton, Alberta
2013-06-12

Jennifer Martin, Host

Monica Das, Registered Psychologist

Yvonne Breckenridge
University of Alberta

Alberta Primetime is a daily current affairs show airing weeknights from 7pm MST to 8pm MST. Airing across Alberta on CTV Two Alberta, Alberta Primetime drills through the surface of current issues to explore the ideas and concerns of Alberta’s real energy sector – its people.

The face of Alberta families is changing, but are Albertans still struggling to catch up?

We talk to Monica Das, registered psychologist and Yvonne Breckenridge, from the University of Alberta.

Watch the video here.

A Conversation with Lawrence Hill

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 5-26
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0072

Winfried Siemerling, Professor of English
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

When Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic offered an alternative account of modernity that placed transnational, black transatlantic lives and cultures at the center, Canada was not on his map. Slavery, however, did not stop at the borders first of New France and then the Canada’s until it was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, and the Underground Railroad made Canada an important site of black writing especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. To be fair, the current surge of impressively strong African Canadian writing, heralded by some authors and anthologies since the 1960s and 1970s, was still gathering steam in the early 1990s.

Lawrence Hill, a novelist and nonfiction writer whose parents immigrated to Canada from the United States after WWII, has become one of the most important contributors to black culture here. His first novel, Some Great Thing (1992), was followed by Any Known Blood (1997), a multi-generational border-crossing novel in which the allusively named Langston Cane V explores his own mixed race and family. In the process, he uncovers a forebear’s slave narrative that recounts his involvement in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Hill’s third novel, The Book of Negroes (2007), is a neo-slave narrative in its entirety that redraws the map of Gilroy’s black Atlantic. The protagonist Aminata, abducted in West Africa, flees first from slavery in South Carolina, then from Americans taking control of New York in 1783, and finally from Nova Scotia to return to Africa. She travels to Sierra Leone in 1792, and from there sails to London to support the abolition of the slave trade. In Hill’s transfiguration of these historical events, Aminata herself becomes a scribe of Guy Carleton’s “Book of Negroes,” recording the 1783 black exodus from New York. The use of the word “Negroes” in Hill’s title, although taken from that historical document, has proven controversial, and the novel appeared in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia as Someone Knows My Name. A breakthrough for Hill internationally, the novel won among other awards the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Hill’s work offers United States readers an especially inviting entrance into contemporary black Canadian literature, not only because of his fiction’s frequent transborder thematic but also since his nonfiction—€”for example Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada—often speaks to issues of race from a United States-Canadian comparative perspective. The following interview conversation, though concentrating on the novels, seeks to provide an introduction to his entire career, including his formative travels in Africa. It is divided by short subtitles for orientation and ease of reading.

Early Writing and Travels in Africa

Siemerling:

In your last novel, The Book of Negroes (named after a historical document but published in the United States as Someone Knows My Name), you thematize the back-to-Africa journey of 1,200 people from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, and you talk about the fact that it is the first one historically. We also know that for many people still today it is a very emotional and important event, to “go back” to Africa.

Hill:

Yes, and many people of African American or African Canadian origin are seeking some sort of validation from or connection with the motherland. It’s a connection with one’s extended family, metaphorically. Of course, why should a typical African who is selling coffee in his street stand in Niamey, Niger, look at some kid from Toronto and say “hey, here’s my brother.” Sorry, that’s just not going to happen, especially with the way I look, which to many of them was white. Many African Americans and African Canadians have observed this kind of rocky reception that they received. When I went there, I wanted to be welcomed as one of the race and have my blackness celebrated. I wanted to be brought into the arms of my people, in a way. And it’s a natural thing for a twenty-two-year-old to…

Homeland to Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of the Red River Métis in the Nineteenth Century

University of Toronto Press
November 1996
268 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780802008350
Paper ISBN: 9780802078223

Gerhard J. Ens, Professor of History
University of Alberta

Most writing on Métis history has concentrated on the Resistance of 1869-70 and the Rebellion of 1885, without adequately explaining the social and economic origins of the Métis that shaped those conflicts. Historians have often emphasized the aboriginal aspect of the Métis heritage, stereotyping the Métis as a primitive people unable or unwilling to adjust to civilized life and capitalist society.

In this social and economic history of the Métis of the Red River Settlement, specifically the parishes of St Francois-Xavier and St Andrew’s, Gerhard Ens argues that the Métis participated with growing confidence in two worlds: one Indian and pre-capitalist, the other European and capitalist. Ens maintains that Métis identity was not defined by biology or blood but rather by the economic and social niche they carved out for themselves within the fur trade.

Ens finds that the Métis, rather than being overwhelmed, adapted quickly to the changed economic conditions of the 1840s and actually influenced the nature of change. The opening of new markets and the rise of the buffalo robe trade fed a `cottage industry’ whose increasing importance had significant repercussions for the maintenance of ethnic boundaries, the nature of Métis response to the Riel Resistance, and the eventual decline of the Red River Settlement as a Métis homeland.

Hamilton school board asks aboriginal families to “self identify”

CBC News
Hamilton
2013-04-19

Taylor Ablett

The Hamilton Wentworth District School Board is asking aboriginal families to “self identify” as First Nations, Métis, or Inuit.

“We are encouraging families to self-identify because it will enable us to determine programming and supports to increase First Nation, Métis and Inuit student success and achievement,” said Sharon Stephanian, Superintendent of Leadership & Learning in a press release. The board will keep the information collected confidential.

“The information will only be used for the purpose of developing relevant support programs, services and resources”.

The board has sent out notices to parents and caregivers of children under the age of 18 and directly to students over 18…

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”€…

Race Is a Four-Letter Word

National Film Board of Canada
2006
00:55:21

Sobaz Benjamin

Speaking biologically, ‘race’ is a spectral concept. Black, brown, red, white, and yellow, considered purely as skin colours, merit no more significance than a tattoo. The ‘skin your’re in’ is about as meaningful as ectoplasm.

Scientists remind us that not only are we all essentially the same, but we all have the same genetic ancestor. Eve was a black, African woman.

Nevertheless, history and politics, sociology and economics, transform skin colour – ‘race’ – into either a golden sheathe or a leaden prison of shame.

In Europe and North America, blackness can still seem a burden. It can still brand its possessors as uncivilized, exotic, and menacing. But it can also be prized, lusted after and viewed as a precious enhancement, like gold foil.

In Race Is a Four-Letter Word, director Sobaz Benjamin highlights Canadian contradictions and conflicts around race. Heroically, he exposes himself, too: a black man who grew up hating himself, trying to bleach his skin with chemicals, and then struggling to appreciate the meaning of his culture and heritage as an ‘Afro-Saxon’ Briton, then Grenadian and now Haligonian-Nova Scotian-Canadian.

Courageously, Benjamin strips away the masks and armour of race, of blackness and whiteness, to reveal the vulnerable and human, including that very sex that inspires so much primal envy and dread. This brave film forces us to unmask and to look unflinchingly at our real selves.

Sobaz Benjamin showcases the stories of a white man who is culturally and psychologically black; of a black woman who wants to be considered iconically Canadian; of another black woman who retreats to England rather than continue to face Canada’s racial cold war; and of himself, a black man who has learned to love his complexity.

In the end, Race Is a Four-Letter Word teaches us that the soul has no colour. Yet, we also learn that race is a marathon we are all forced to run.

Race Is a Four-Letter Word was produced as part of the Reel Diversity Competition for emerging filmmakers of colour. Reel Diversity is a National Film Board of Canada initiative in partnership with CBC Newsworld.

The Colour of Beauty

National Film Board of Canada
2010
00:16:50

Elizabeth St. Philip

Renee Thompson is trying to make it as a top fashion model in New York. She’s got the looks, the walk and the drive. But she’s a black model in a world where white women represent the standard of beauty. Agencies rarely hire black models. And when they do, they want them to look “like white girls dipped in chocolate.”

The Colour of Beauty is a shocking short documentary that examines racism in the fashion industry. Is a black model less attractive to designers, casting directors and consumers? What is the colour of beauty?

View the French version here.

Between: Living in the Hyphen

National Film Board of Canada
2005
00:43:43

Anne Marie Nakagawa

Anne Marie Nakagawa’s documentary examines what it means to have a background of mixed ancestries that cannot be easily categorized. By focusing on 7 Canadians who have one parent from a European background and one of a visible minority, she attempts to get at the root of what it means to be multi-ethnic in a world that wants each person to fit into a single category. Finding a satisfactory frame of reference in our ‘multicultural utopia’ turns out to be more complex than one might think. Between: Living in the Hyphen offers a provocative glimpse of what the future holds: a departure from hyphenated names towards a celebration of fluidity and being mixed.

A Curious Confluence: Where Racism & Privilege Collide

(1)ne Drop Project
2012-12-20

Rema Tavares, Founder
Mixed In Canada

Rema Tavares

When two sources of water come together to form one body, it is called a confluence.  This is a place where two distinct sources of water crash and tumble over each other, churning and frothing. Here, a new river is born that cuts through the terrain as a single system. Some of these amalgamated rivers are rough and rocky, others are smooth and calm; however most consist of intermittent turbulence and serenity until they meet their final destination: a lake or an ocean. This concept stems from an analogy shared with me by a great friend and colleague, one with whom I often discuss my Mixed-race identified experience. So how does this relate to racism and privilege? And how does this fit into my story? Arguably a more pressing question for the reader: Who am “I”?

Born in the 80’s, I am the daughter of a Jamaican-Canadian immigrant father of African & Sephardic heritage and a European-Canadian mother of Irish & Italian descent. I grew up in a village of approximately 1000 people in rural Canada. This country was colonized by Europeans, not unlike the U.S., and the legacy of colonialism can still be felt by people of colour (and infinitely more so by Canada’s Aboriginal population). With respect to the African Diaspora however, Canada is often stereotyped as “the good guy” and the haven beneath the North Star. I am proud of that aspect of Canadian history; however this is by far not the whole story…

…Choice—especially around identity—is a fascinating subject in and of itself. How we choose to identify is intensely personal for many, and perhaps particularly perplexing for some Mixed-race identified people, as it inherently calls into question our notions of “race”. Having said that, I can only speak for myself, and I have chosen to identify as Black-Mixed. Although how I have identified in the past has evolved, and will most like continue to do so into the future, I have always held my Blackness as the centre of gravity – the place from which all my many other identities flow…

Read the entire article here.