Mixed Race Studies

France: The Socialists’ New Head, Harlem Désir

The Daily Beast (In Newsweek Magazine)
2012-10-29

Tracy McNicoll, Paris correspondent

The faded star of a French anti-racist icon.

In a country that went tipsy with Obamania four years ago, Harlem Désir’s election to lead France’s ruling Socialist Party might seem an occasion for bubbly. Désir—whose gifts include the coolest name in French politics—is the nation’s first black party leader. But his rise has elicited stunning indifference. In September, 74 percent of French poll respondents said they didn’t care. Only half of card-carrying Socialists bothered to cast their ballots. And the critics have been even less kind…

Read the entire article here.

Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema

Bloomsbury Continuum
2012-05-10
328 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781441190437

Shelleen Greene, Assistant Professor of Digital Studio Practice and Theory
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

A thorough study of the portrayal of race in Italian cinema, from the silent era to the present, illuminating issues in contemporary Italian society.

Equivocal Subjects puts forth an innovative reading of the Italian national cinema. Shelleen Greene argues that from the silent era to the present, the cinematic representation of the “mixed-race” or interracial subject has served as a means by which Italian racial and national identity have been negotiated and re-defined. She examines Italy’s colonial legacy, histories of immigration and emigration, and contemporary politics of multiculturalism through its cultural production, providing new insights into its traditional film canon.

Analysing the depiction of mixed-race subjects from the historical epics of the Italian silent “golden” era to the contemporary period, this enlightening book engages the history of Italian nationalism and colonialism through theories of subject formation, ideologies of race, and postcolonial theory. Greene’s approach also provides a novel interpretation of recent developments surrounding Italy’s status as a major passage for immigrants seeking to enter the European Union. This book provides an original theoretical approach to the Italian cinema that speaks to the nation’s current political and social climate.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: From “Making Italians” to Envisioning Postcolonial Italy
• Chapter 2: From Meticci and the “Challenging Realisms” of the Colonial Melodrama to a Postcolonial Consciousness
• Chapter 3: The Negotiation of Interracial Identity, Citizenship and Belonging in the Post-War Narrative Film and Beyond
• Chapter 4: Transatlantic Crossings: Re-encountering Blackness in the Cinema of the “Economic Miracle”
• Chapter 5: Zummurud in her Camera: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Global South in Contemporary Italian Film
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index

Editor who grew up black in Nazi Germany dies

The Miami Herald
2013-01-21

Freida Frisaro, Associated Press

MIAMI — Hans Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a distinctive memoir about his unusual childhood growing up black in Nazi Germany, has died. He was 87.

His son said Massaquoi died Saturday, on his 87th birthday, in Jacksonville. He had been hospitalized over the Christmas holidays.

“He had quite a journey in life,” said Hans J. Massaquoi, Jr., of Detroit. “Many have read his books and know what he endured. But most don’t know that he was a good, kind, loving, fun-loving, fair, honest, generous, hard-working and open-minded man. He respected others and commanded respect himself. He was dignified and trustworthy. We will miss him forever and try to live by his example.”…

…He writes that one of his saddest moments as a child was when his homeroom teacher told him he couldn’t join the Hitler Youth.

“Of course I wanted to join. I was a kid and most of my friends were joining,” he said. “They had cool uniforms and they did exciting things – camping, parades, playing drums.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

“Family Portrait in Black and White” Arrives on DVD

Interfilm Productions
2012-11-29

Julia Ivanova, Director

Family Portrait in Black and White – Award Winning Documentary on Super-Foster Mom and her 16 Bi-racial Children Arrives on DVD December 4, 2012

On the heels of National Adoption Month comes a documentary that explores the growing pains of the foster system in Ukraine, dissecting one foster mother Olga Nenya and her brood of 16 mixed race orphans. A martyr for the cause of abandoned children, this foster mother fights tooth and nail to keep her family together. Unfortunately, her overbearing control of the children’s freedom limits their future opportunities. This engaging film raises many questions about parenting and is available online at regular DVD retailers including Barnes & Noble, Best Buy and Amazon or can be saved on Netflix.

Documentary Family Portrait in Black and White introduces headstrong Olga Nenya, a foster-mother to 16 Ukrainian-African orphans struggling in a small village in racially charged Ukraine. Despite hardships caused by their lack of money and the racist attitudes of their compatriots, these abandoned kids function as a family under Olga’s relentless dictatorial guidance. The film offers deep insight into a fraught community surrounding this one-of-a-kind clan and into the passions, hopes and hardships of a unique self-made family. http://www.familyportraitthefilm.com/…

Read the entire press release here.

Bringing together our collective stories

The African Courier: The International Magazine Published in Germany
October/November 2012

Gyavira Lasana

The second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey took place at Barnard College in New York City recently. Our New York-based contributing editor Gyavira Lasana reports on the convention, which focused on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?”

“Black German studies did not come from academia,” insisted Peggy Piesche, “but from young people who wanted to know their own history.” Professor Piesche, who was born and raised in the former East Germany and who now teaches at Hamilton College in New York, asserted her observation during an early-morning panel discussion on “Teaching the Black German Experience” at the second conference of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS) held recently at Barnard College in New York City.

Piesche’s words echoed a decided difference between Black Americans and Black Germans on the study and teaching of the Black German experience, a difference that would reverberate throughout the conference. The panel also included Noah Sow, the German poet/writer and music performer who was the keynote speaker at the first BGCS conference last year in Washington DC. Sow suggested that the term Afro-German be replaced by Afro-Deutsch, which is surely more German. All in all, the panel noted that Afro-Deutsch studies continue to fascinate students in the US, and are thriving and growing. That is questionable.

Here in America, Black professors of German are reaching retirement age, and they are not being replaced. Black American students are following the global trend and pursuing Asian studies – Chinese, Japanese and Korean. German lies quite low on the list of options for study. Still, the Black professors of German maintain a high degree of enthusiasm, fuelled mostly by the emerging focus on the history and culture of Blacks in Germany…

…These highly personal stories reflect the heartache, confusion and repeated dysfunction of many (but not all) biracial children growing up in the American milieu. Their quest is often identity: Am I Black or White (in this case German)? Or something in between? Is a mixed-race identity desirable/acceptable?

There is a growing discourse and body of literature on these topics in the US, but they tend to be marginalised by the journey of Blacks born and raised in Germany who more often cite systemic and day-to-day racism. For example, during an earlier panel discussion on “Claiming the Black German Experience”, Lara-Sophie Milagro, a Black German actress and founder of Label Noir, a Berlin-based Black theatre company, stated that “what I had considered to be my personal struggle is really the struggle of all people of colour in Germany, and what I had regarded as my personal problem and failure – not to be a real German and full-value human being – was really the problem and failure of a privileged and ignorant White majority.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Mischling Experience in Oral History

The Oral History Review
Volume 35, Issue 2 (2008)
pages 139-158
DOI: 10.1093/ohr/ohn025

Peter Monteath, Associate Professor of History
Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

This paper examines the usefulness of oral history in dealing with the fate of the so-called Mischlinge in Nazi Germany; that is, people categorized by the authorities as being of “mixed race.” It argues that oral history provides an invaluable supplement to the written, official record. The latter is by its nature a view “from above” and from the perpetrators; it generally excludes the perspective of the victims of Nazi racial policy. Moreover, as an overview of the treatment of Mischlinge demonstrates, there were stark discrepancies between policy and practice which are difficult to comprehend on the basis of the written record alone, but which are well exemplified through a study of individual experiences. The paper uses several examples of such experiences collected from three separate video testimony repositories to analyze the nature of those experiences, detecting discrepancies between official policy and practice and observing the considerable variations in the nature and harshness of those experiences. Finally, the oral history record is found to be invaluable in tracing some of the longer-term consequences of the Third Reich for surviving Mischlinge, especially in terms of their constructions of identity and the ways in which, for the period after the Second World War, they dealt with the ascribed identities which had so heavily impacted them in their early years.

Read or purchase the article here.

Germans Loving Others: Narrating Interracial Romance in Kenya, North America, and Guatemala

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 70: Central European History Society 3
Friday, 2013-01-04: 08:30-10:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University

Papers:

• “Seeking Winnetou: German Women and the Appeal of American Indian Masculinity” / H. Glenn Penny, University of Iowa
• “Romantic Dimensions of the Second Scramble for Africa: ‘A White Lady Is Like Gold for Us’” / Nina Berman, Ohio State University, Columbus
• “Between Twin Souls: German-Maya Children and Politics of Interracial Romance in Guatemala, 1930–45” / Julie A. Gibbings, University of Manitoba

Comment: Lora Wildenthal, Rice University

The German fascination with the non-European world and its native populations, as documented and imagined in various forms of the German cultural archive, presents intriguing questions for scholars of race, sex, and empire. The German love affair with natives, including North American Indians, Bedouin nomads, and Masai warriors, dates back to the early days of colonial expansion, and gave rise to romanticized representations and staged performances of native nobility and ethnic pride. These cultural representations produced sentiments and desires that shaped contact and conduct as Germans sought out and stumbled upon native peoples abroad. While scholarship of the past two decades has explored a wide range of political, economic, and cultural aspects of the colonial and postcolonial encounter, interracial contact has received less attention. Scholars have given short shrift to the stunning array of unofficial, personal, and often quite intimate interconnections between Germans and non-Europeans during the modern era.

The proposed panel addresses this lacuna in scholarship, and focuses on the question of whether interracial love subverts or replicates the colonial and postcolonial histories that produced socio-economic inequalities, gendered norms, and racial hierarchies. The papers in this panel explore these questions through the lives, narratives, and memories of Germans, native peoples, and mixed-race children in three vastly different places: postcolonial Kenya, North America, and Guatemala. They collectively challenge and problematize assumptions of colonial and postcolonial scholars about the regulatory norms of interracial sex that shielded white female sexuality from dark, colonized men and often made interracial children the subject of state scrutiny and care. The papers demonstrate how German romance with natives could, in practice, vary widely across historical and geographical contexts, particularly with regard to cultural, economic, and political dimensions of these relationships. Finally, the papers consider the agency of the non-German partners in these interracial and binational relationships. The panels intends to shed new light on interracial and binational romance by probing questions of power and inequality in a comparative and transnational framework.

From Kongo to Othello to Tango to Museum Shows

ARTnews
2012-10-25

Robin Cembalest

Jacopo da Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci), Portrait of Maria Salviati de’ Medici and Giulia de’ Medici, ca. 1539, oil on panel. THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM, BALTIMORE, ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS WITH THE MASSARENTI COLLECTION, 1902 (37.596).

Artists and scholars are taking increasingly nuanced approaches to tracking the image—and influence—of Africans in Western art

In 1902 the Walters Art Museum acquired a Pontormo painting of an Italian noblewoman, Maria Salviati, dated ca. 1539. Back then it was considered a portrait of a woman whose hands were “in funny places,” as Gary Vikan, the museum’s director, puts it. Then in 1937, restorers removed some over-painting—and discovered a child was there. That child was assumed to be a portrait of Maria’s son, Cosimo de’ Medici.

And Then He Was a She
 
Now curators say the boy was a girl–Giulia de’ Medici. The daughter of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, who was believed to be the son of a black female servant, Giulia is thought to have been the most prominent European woman of African descent at that time.

Darkness Visible
 
This discovery helped inspire “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” an inventive show at the Walters that enlists familiar faces of art history to spotlight lesser-known ones in social history. Focusing on the period between 1480 to 1610, an era of increased contact as trade routes expanded, diplomats traveled more widely, and Africans were imported to Europe en masse to serve as slaves, the show includes works by Dürer, Rubens, Pontormo, and Veronese, among many others, depicting Africans living in or visiting Europe. The museum describes the show as an effort to restore an identity to individuals who have been invisible–in various senses of the word.
 
The show uses representations of slaves in Europe to find out who they were, how they lived, and what their depictions say about Renaissance society. A Caracci portrait of a slave woman is a fragment of a double portrait of her owner, of whom a bit of veil remains. She is holding a clock, meant to announce her mistress’s Christian concern for the quick passage of time…

Read the entire article here.

A Spectrum From Slaves to Saints (Art Review)

The New York Times
2012-11-08

Holland Carter, Staff Art Critic

“The Three Mulattoes of Esmereldas” (1599) is one of the works in “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. More Photos

‘African Presence in Renaissance Europe,’ at Walters Museum

BALTIMORE — In a fall art season distinguished, so far, largely by a bland, no-brainer diet served up by Manhattan’s major museums, you have to hit the road for grittier fare. And the Walters Art Museum here is not too far to go to find it in a high-fiber, convention-rattling show with the unglamorous title of “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe.”

Visually the exhibition is a gift, with marvelous things by artists familiar and revered — Dürer, Rubens, Veronese — along with images most of us never knew existed. Together they map a history of art, politics and race that scholars have begun to pay attention to — notably through “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a multivolume book project edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. — but that few museums have addressed in full-dress style.

Like the best scholarship, the Walters show, organized by Joaneath Spicer, the museum’s curator of Renaissance and Baroque art, is as much about questions as answers, and makes no bones about that. Many wall labels begin with an interrogative, suggesting that a museum visitor’s reading of a particular image carries as much weight as the curator’s…

…Being a domestic slave in urban Europe was not necessarily a lifelong condition. (The situation was very different on New World plantations.) Slaves could be freed by owners and take up independent professions. The two black men, one young, one older, in a pair of fleet chalk drawings from around 1580 by Paolo Veronese might have worked as his assistants or apprentices, much as the former slave and mixed-race painter Juan de Pareja did in Velázquez’s studio in Madrid.

De Pareja went on to have a painting career of his own, though he is largely remembered as the subject of one of Velázquez’s most magnificent portraits. But in general the names of black sitters in Renaissance paintings — and, no doubt, of black artists — are lost.

Who is, or was, the slightly stunned-looking man wearing drop earrings, a gold chain and pearl-encrusted cap in “Portrait of a Wealthy African,” by an unknown 16th-century German or Flemish artist? Or the regal-looking personage, head swathed in a milk-white turban, in an oil sketch whipped up on a sheet of repurposed accounting paper by Peter Paul Rubens?

Rubens’s sitter is so attractive, we’d love to know his story. And we’d especially love to know the story — the true, gossip-free story — behind the sitter in an Agnolo Bronzino portrait whose name has survived. He’s Alessandro de’ Medici, who ruled Florence for seven years before being assassinated in 1537, and who is thought by historians to have been the illegitimate child of a pope-to-be, Clement VII, and a black or biracial woman.

Alessandro’s dark skin was remarked on by contemporaries, who nicknamed him Il Moro (the Moor), a generic term for African in 16th-century Italy. In Bronzino’s painting the subject’s complexion is inconclusively ruddy. But another portrait, this one of the ruler’s young daughter Giulia, has been cited by some scholars, who point to the child’s black facial features, as confirmation of Alessandro’s ethnic heritage.

Together these portraits probably attest to the reality of African DNA flowing through Medici blood, and through the very center of the European High Renaissance. But they are at least as interesting for the reactions they have provoked. Until recently art history has ignored, denied or at best tiptoed around their racial content, just as it has skimmed over the black presence in Europe as a whole. The Walters exhibition not only asserts that presence, but positions it as a contributing factor to a crucial moment in the forming of European cultural identity…

Read the entire article here.  View the slide show here.

Exhibition brings black Germans’ stories to light

DW
2012-11-09

Helen Whittle

An exhibit gives voice to the histories of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-Germans from the past 300 years of German history. It presents a differentiated perspective on the lives and histories of blacks in Germany.

Asked what comes to mind when they think about Germany, many foreigners conjure up stereotypical images of Oktoberfest, the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall.

But these images of Teutonic culture and society do little to reflect the diversity of the contemporary, multiethnic Federal Republic of Germany where one fifth of the population has an ethnic minority background, according to an exhibition that opened Saturday (3.11.2012) at Cologne’s Alte Feuerwache.

Jonas Behre, director at the Initiative for Black People in Germany (ISD), helped organize the exhibit titled “Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies from History and the Present” and which provides a collective self-portrait, giving voice to the complex and varied histories of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-Germans from the past three centuries of German history.

“Even though black people have lived in Germany for hundreds of years, it is not viewed as a reality of everyday life,” said Behre, who was born in Eritrea but has lived for virtually all of his life in Germany. “And that can be seen in the discrimination and exclusion in daily life, and that’s what we hope to tackle with this exhibition.”…

…Another of the biographies illuminated in the exhibition is that of Afro-German actor, journalist and activist Theodor Wonja Michael. Born in Hamburg in 1925, Michael is Germany’s oldest living Afro-German. His father moved from Cameroon—then a German colony—to Germany in 1904.

Denied access to higher education on the basis of skin color, he would have liked to have become an archeologist or an ethnologist. But as a young man, one of the few possibilities he had to earn a living wage was as an actor in colonial films or “Völkerschauen”—the ethnological expositions or “human zoos” popular in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the end of the Second World War, Michael found it hard to get work he managed to get work as an actor of the theater stage.

Michael remembers how his father always felt it was his natural right to live in Germany and how this attitude remains integral to own perspective on life as an Afro-German today.

“Afro-German means that one has two backgrounds, namely an African one and a German one,” Michael said. “I think it’s an advantage having an insight into two cultures. I see it as a very positive thing.”…

Read the entire article here.