Mixed Race Studies

One Drop of Love at New York University

New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 LaGuardia Place
New York, New York 10012
Friday, 2015-04-17, 20:00 EDT (Local Time)

One Drop of Love is a multimedia solo show written and performed by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. It asks audiences to consider: how does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships? The show travels near and far, in the past and present, to explore family, race, love and pain – and a path towards reconciliation. Audiences will go on a journey from the 1700s to the present, to cities all over the U.S, and to West and East Africa, where both the narrator and her father spent time in search of their racial roots.

Produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.

One Drop of Love is the closing program for NYU Ally Week.

For more information click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

Jennifer Lisa Vest to explore ‘post-racial present’ at Women’s and Gender Studies Symposium

Report: Faculty/Staff Newsletter
Illinois State University
2015-04-02

Rachel Hatch, Editor

Performing artist and scholar Jennifer Lisa Vest will be the keynote speaker for the 20th annual Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) Symposium.

Vest will present Black Lives Matter: [Trans]Gender Violence, Disability, and Women in a ‘Post-racial,’ ‘Post-Sexist’ Present at 1 p.m. Friday, April 17, in the Bone Student Center. The talk is free and open to the public.

In celebration of the event, there will be a poetry reading at 7 p.m. Thursday April 16, at the University Galleries, 11 Uptown Circle, Normal.

Vest is a self-described “mixed-race queer feminist philosopher, poet, and artivist whose philopoetic works combine philosophy, poetry and feminist theories to provide intersectional analyses of social justice issues by explicating raced, gendered, and sexualized components of privilege, ablelism, and oppression.”…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Iran | The Unknown Minority
2015-04-16

Mahdi Ehsaei, Photographer

The photographic series shows a side of Iran, which is unknown by even Iranians. A trip to a place which is inhabited and dominated by the descendants of slaves and traders from Africa.

The Hormozgan province in the Persian Gulf is a traditional and historical region with a diverse and unexplored population. It is framed with unique landscapes and people with profound personalities. Iranians, who still have African blood in them and continue their African heritage with their clothing style, their music, their dance and their oral traditions and rituals.

The resulting portraits reveal new facets and unfamiliar faces, which are not typical for the common picture of Iran. They show details documenting the centuries-long history of this ethnic minority. A confrontation between the Persian culture and the, for Iran unusual, African consciousness.

A surprisingly new experience for the viewer, which shows the current presence of Afro-Iranians in Iran.

For more information, click here.

First Listen: Alabama Shakes, ‘Sound & Color’

First Listen
National Public Radio
2015-04-12

Ann Powers, NPR Music Critic

The Alabama Shakes’ new album, Sound & Color, comes out April 21. Brantley Gutierrez/Courtesy of the artist

In the six years I’ve lived in the region, I’ve developed a mantra: Southern freaks are the best freaks. For me, the word “freak” can be both positive and downright spiritual. It describes serious individualists who are tolerant of others whose own paths may diverge from their own; people whose ways of thinking connect to form an antidote to the deep conventionality that often surrounds them. Southern freaks, like the four young musicians in Alabama Shakes, face multiple challenges: not only the love of tradition (and defensive attitude about it) that their neighbors nurture, but also the prejudices of those who live elsewhere and expect Southerners to be somehow limited by their native surroundings. Southern freaks are the best freaks because they have the resilience to flourish in a home that can feel foreign, while also recognizing that legacies can’t be simply processed. They must be lived, confronted and altered from within.

Brittany Howard expresses this more fancifully in “Gemini,” the first song the band recorded for its boundary-leaping second album, Sound & Color. “On a planet not so far away, we were born together,” she sings, maybe to her lost sister, a lover or a best friend, in a voice that contains shadows of Richmond, Virginia‘s son, D’Angelo. Howard’s imagined pair washes up in Athens, Alabama, “suckled on the honey of the Tennessee,” whose wet banks are both adorned with the flower whose name she’s playing with and rife with the snakes she mentions in the next verse. The dream Howard spins in “Gemini” could have come from the pen of South Carolina native Dorothy Allison. The thick, expansive bed of druggy funk the band creates to convey it recalls the deepest experiments of Denton, Texas, native Sly Stone. The resonance the band achieves with the help of producer Blake Mills turns the track into serious funk: something George Clinton, born in North Carolina and now living in Tallahassee, would enjoy…

Read the article here. Listen to the story here.

The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, and Japan’s Miss Universe Reveal Biracial Realities

Will Wright: Cinéma, Style, Race and Politics Permeate Our Lives. That Fascinates Me.
2015-04-09

Will Wright

Thanks in part to the changing of the guard at The Daily Show, biracial experiences and related politics have made headlines, and snuck into our minds. South African, Trevor Noah, once a correspondent for The Daily Show, has been named to host it, succeeding Jon Stewart. His immediate family tree seems about as strange to Americans as Senator Obama’s did when he began running for president; Mr. Noah’s mom is a Xhosa South African and his father Swiss.

But his mixed heritage is not the only one being discussed. If you pay attention to headlines about mixed race folks (who doesn’t, right?) then you’ve felt shockwaves from Japan’s Miss Universe contestant…

Read the entire article here.

What the Heck Are You? The Racial Guessing Game I Don’t Want to Play

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2015-04-13

Melinda Frank, Guest Blogger
Growing Up Ethnic

“I thought you were Dutch–you’re Indonesian?”

“I thought you were Irish–you’re Dutch?”

“Wait, you’re white and Asian?”

“What are you anyways?”

I hate answering the question “What are you,” because in my experience, that question always overshadows the more meaningful question of “Who are you?”…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop Of Love Solo Show April 15, 2015

Amherst Togther Presents: One Drop of Love by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

Amherst Regional Middle School Auditorium
170 Chestnut Street
Amherst, Massachusetts 01002
Phone: (413) 362-1820
Wednesday, 2015-04-15, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Admission is free and open to the public

Produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, this extraordinary one-woman show by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni incorporates filmed images, photographs and animation to tell the story of how the notion of race came to be in the United States and how it affected her relationship with her father. To tell her story, DiGiovanni travels back in time to the first US census in 1790, to cities across the United States, and to West and East Africa, where both father and daughter spent time in search of their racial roots.

An award-winning actor, producer and educator, Cox DiGiovanni has been featured in the New York Times and on NPR as a spokesperson on using the arts to explore racial identity. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cape Verde, West Africa, and has designed curricula for and taught English as a Second Language to students from all over the world. She has been honored with the Peace Corps’ Franklin H. Williams Award and with Peace Corps Fellows and Hollywood Foreign Press Association scholarships. She holds a bachelor of arts in Spanish and education, a master of arts in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and a master of fine arts in television, film and theater. DiGiovanni developed “One Drop of Love” as the thesis project for her Master of Fine Arts degree in film, television, and theater from California State University Los Angeles. DiGiovanni, who appeared in the Academy Award-winning film “Argo,” is also the co-creator, co-producer, and co-host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat, and co-founder and co-producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival.

“There are many different kinds of conversations occurring in our community regarding identity,” says Carol Ross. “Not everything is black or white, literally and figuratively. What Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni brings to the table is a moving and insightful microscope to our belief that there is such a thing as race and how the assignment of identity plays out in destructive ways that impact each and every one of us. This is a critical component that often gets missed in our attempts to dismantle this social construct.”

Beauty queen brings light to Japan’s racial issues

CBS News
2015-04-13

Walking through the Shibuya section of Tokyo, Ariana Miyamoto certainly turns heads — and she wants to use that attention to change attitudes.

When Miyamoto was crowned Miss Universe Japan in March, selected by a panel of seven Japanese judges, her surprise on stage was real, reports CBS News correspondent Seth Doane. She was the first-ever winner to be biracial. Her father is African-American, and her mother is Japanese.

“At first, I didn’t want to compete,” Miyamoto said in Japanese. “But then a close friend who was also biracial committed suicide. That’s when I decided to do something about the suffering he’d endured.”

She said the friend “really hated being half Japanese and not being fully accepted into Japanese society.”

“Japan still has racial issues, and I wanted to do something about it,” she said.

Japan, an island nation that didn’t open to the world until the late 1800s, still lacks real diversity today. Mixed-race children made up less than 2 percent of births in 2013.

At the Tokyo gym where she works out twice a week, it’s hard to imagine this now confident, stunning 20-year-old was once a bullied kid…

Read the article and watch the video here.

Brazilian soap operas slowly cast black middle class

Al Jazeera America
2015-04-11

Matt Sandy

Morgann Jezequel

Actor Sílvio Guindane poses on the set of the telenovela Vitória at Record studios, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October, 2014. Rafael Fabres / Getty Images Assignment for Al Jazeera America

Black actors move beyond roles as maids, thieves and drug dealers, but insiders say more diverse film/TV writers needed

RIO DE JANEIRO – Dressed in a fitted white designer shirt, Sílvio Guindane stood beneath a chandelier on a grand wrought iron staircase and smiled confidently. Below, a set of ornate drinking glasses sat next to a collection of spirit bottles. Above, framed monochrome prints and color landscapes adorned the walls.

It is an archetypal image of upper middle class Brazil. And for good reason as this is the set of “Vitória,” one of the country’s ubiquitous novelas, the phenomenally popular soap operas that for more than 50 years have thrived on the country’s major television networks — often by portraying lavish lifestyles beyond the means of most viewers.

There is just one thing that is unusual: Guindane, 31, who plays a successful engineer, is black…

Read the entire article here.

Mashpee Musician Produces Documentary About Native, African Music

CapeNews.net
Falmouth, Massachusetts
2015-01-19

Sam Houghton

Morgan J. Peters, a Mashpee troubadour in Afro-Native-American-inspired music, with his band the Groovalottos, is on his way to producing a full-length album as well as a documentary. The “mini-film” will explore the combination of black and Native American music and how their blend gave rise to traditional and contemporary blues and funk.

The film, Mr. Peters said, will be the first of its kind. While there have been several films about folk music, mostly Euro-American, he said none have been produced exploring the “Black Indian” music experience.

Mr. Peters said that traditional Native American music has influenced such musicians as James Brown as well as contemporary and traditional blues music…

Read the entire article here.