Mixed Race Studies

Living in Ambiguity with Carl Olsen

Mixed Race Radio
2012-09-05, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Carl Olsen
Colorado State Univeristy

Carl is a regular guest on Mixed Race Radio and self- identifies as Japanese and White. Originally Carl was going to discuss his experience being marked as white on a traffic ticket (that I got for speeding…).

Now however, I have invited Carl on to the show to discuss his thesis entitled, “Living in Ambiguity: Perceptions of Mixed Race and the Mixed Race Experience at Colorado State University.”

In addition, Carl is  conducting interviews with CSU students who self identify as having two or more races, checked the multiracial box on the admission form, and/or self-identify as mixed/multi/biracial.  Hopefully, this data will help Carl to  develop a model for creating a “Mixed Race Resource Center” of some sort, modeled after centers such as Black/African-American Cultural Centers, Asian/Pacific American Cultural Centers, etc. Carl is also serving as the advisor for SHADES of CSU, the mixed-race student organization on campus.

Carl has a perception survey to administer, and it’s one question: When you think of a mixed race/biracial/multiracial individual, what 5 words or phrases would you use to describe them?

I thought we could help him.

Play in your default player here.

Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista

Northeastern University Press (University Press of New England)
2011
304 pages
6 x 9 1/4″
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55553-754-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-55553-766-1

Erin Aubry Kaplan

Forward by:

Michael Eric Dyson

This lively and thoughtful book explores what it means to be black in an allegedly postracial America

Los Angeles has had a ringside seat during the long last century of racial struggle in America. The bouts have been over money and jobs and police brutality, over politics and poetry and rap and basketball. Minimizing blackness itself has been touted as the logical and ideal solution to the struggle, but in Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line Erin Aubry Kaplan begs to differ. With eloquence, wit, and high prose style she crafts a series of compelling arguments against black eclipse.

Here are thirty-three insightful and wide-ranging pieces of literary, cultural, political, and personal reporting on the contemporary black American experience. Drawn from the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Salon.com, and elsewhere, this collection also features major new articles on President Barack Obama, black and Hispanic conflicts, and clinical depression. In each, Kaplan argues with meticulous observation, razor-sharp intelligence, and sparkling prose against the trend of black erasure, and for the expansion of horizons of the black American story.

Table of Contents (An asterisk (*) indicates previously unpublished works)

• Foreword – Michael Eric Dyson
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• GENERATION I
  • The Butt
  • Black Like I Thought I Was: Race, DNA, and the Man Who Knows Too Much
  • Fire and Ice: Making It Up
  • Blackness Itself
  • Down and Downer*
  • Blue Like Me: On Race and Depression
• STATE OF A NATION
  • Barack Obama: Mile Traveled, Miles to Go*
  • Losing New Orleans
  • Thoroughly Modern Mammy: Of Coons, Pickaninnies and Gold Dust Twins: Why Do Black Curios Stay Chic?
  • Behind the American-History Curtain: Washington, D.C., and the Lessons of Memory
  • They’re Going Crazy Out There
• STARRING:
  • The Accidental Populist: Magic Johnson Gives Some Back
  • The Empress’s New Clothes: Serena, to the Dismay of Many, Makes the Scene
  • Falling for Tiger Woods
  • Homeboys in Outer Space and Other Transgressions: TV in Black and White
  • White Man with Attitude: How Randy Newman Went from Pop Music’s Reigning Schlub to Movie-Music Royalty
• STOMPING GROUNDS
  • Welcome to Inglewood—Leave Your Aspirations Behind! Why Coming Home Has Been a Labor of Tough Love
  • Rags to Richard*
  • The Eastside Boys
  • The King of Compton: Mayor Omar Bradley and His Reign of Chaos
  • Wearing the Shirt*
  • Lost Soul: A Lament for Black Los Angeles
• MOTHERS AND FATHERS
  • The Last Campaign
  • Mother Roux
  • Mother, Unconceived
• TEACH ON THAT
  • Held Back: The State of Black Education
  • Man and Superwoman
  • The Glamorous Life*
  • The Boy of Summer
  • Unsocial Studies: The Real Lessons of Hamilton High
• POST SCRIPT
  • The Color of Love
  • Married People Live Longer than Single People

Black Like I Thought I Was: Race, DNA, and the Man Who Knows Too Much

October 2003

Wayne Joseph is a fifty-one-year-old high school principal in Chino whose family emigrated from the segregated parishes of Louisiana to central Los Angeles in the 1950s, as did mine. Like me, he is of Creole stock and is therefore on the lighter end of the black color spectrum, a common enough circumstance in the South that predates the multicultural movement by centuries. And like most other black folk, Joseph grew up with an unequivocal sense of his heritage and of himself; he tends toward black advocacy and has published thoughtful opinion pieces on racial issues in magazines like Newsweek. When Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test he saw described on a 60 Minutes segment last year, it was only to indulge a casual curiosity about the exact percentage of his black blood; virtually all black Americans are mixed with something, he knew, but he figured it would be interesting to make himself a guinea pig for this new testing process, which is offered by a Florida-based company called DNA Print Genomics Inc. The experience would at least be fodder for another essay for Newsweek. He got his kit in the mail, swabbed his mouth per the instructions, and sent off the DNA samples for analysis.

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery’s worst legacies—the Southern “one-drop” rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke—was also slavery’s only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It’s a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a ” black community” as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or L.A.’s South Central (a liberty that’s often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole—even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name. Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral—the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists—has never made any emotional or real-world sense. Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. I can’t imagine growing up any other way.

Wayne Joseph can’t either. But when the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he’d taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian—and 0 percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify. “My son was flabbergasted by the results,” says Joseph. “He said, Dad, you mean for fifty years you’ve been passing for black?'” Joseph admits that, strictly speaking, he has. But he’s not sure if he can or wants to do anything about that at this point. For all the lingering effects of institutional racism, he’s been perfectly content being a black man; it’s shaped his worldview and the course of his life in ways that cannot, and probably should not, be altered. Yet Joseph struggles to balance the intellectual dishonesty of saying he’s black with the unimpeachable honesty of a lifelong experience of being black. “What do I do with this information?” he says, sounding more than a little exasperated. “It was like finding out you’re adopted. I don’t want to be disingenuous with myself. But I can’t conceive of living any other way. It’s a question of what’s logical and what’s visceral.”

Race, of course, has always been a far more visceral matter than a logical one. We now know that there is no such thing as race, that humans are biologically one species; we know that an African is likely to have more in common genetically with a European thousands of miles away than with a neighboring African. Yet this knowledge has not deterred the racism many Europeans continue to harbor toward Africans, nor the wariness Africans harbor toward Europeans. Such feelings may never be deterred. And despite all the loud assertions to the contrary, race is still America’s bane, and its fascination; Philip Roth’s widely acclaimed novel set in the 1990s, The Human Stain, features a Faustian protagonist whose great moral failing is that he’s a black man who’s been passing most of his life for white (the book was made into a movie that was released in 2003).

Joseph recognizes this, and while he argues for a more rational and less emotional view of race for the sake of equity, he also recognizes that rationality is not the same thing as fact. As much as he might want to, he can’t simply refute his black past and declare himself white or Native American. He can acknowledge the truth but can’t quite apply it, which makes it pretty much useless to other, older members of his family. An aunt whom he told about the test results only said that she wasn’t surprised. “When I told my mother about the test, she said to me, Tm too old and too tired to be anything else,'” recalls Joseph. “It makes no difference to her. It’s an easy issue.”

After recovering from the initial shock, Joseph began questioning his mother about their lineage. He discovered that, unbeknownst to him, his grandparents had made a conscious decision back in Louisiana to not be white, claiming they didn’t want to side with a people who were known oppressors. Joseph says there was another, more practical consideration: some men in the family routinely courted black women, and they didn’t want the very public hassle such a pairing entailed in the South, which included everything from dirty looks to the ignominy of a couple having to separate on buses and streetcars and in restaurants per the Jim Crow laws. I know that the laws also pointedly separated mothers from sons, uncles from nephews, simply because one happened to be lighter than the other or have straighter hair. Determinations of race were entirely subjective and imposed from without, and the one-drop rule was enforced to such divisive and schizophrenic effects that Joseph’s family—and mine—fled Louisiana for the presumably less boundary-obsessed West. But we didn’t flee ourselves, and didn’t expect to; we simply set up a new home in Los Angeles. The South was wrong about to; we simply set up a new home in Los Angeles. The South was wrong about its policies but it was right about our color. It had to be.

Joseph remains tortured by the possibility that maybe nobody is right. The essay he thought the DNA test experience would prompt became a book that he’s already 150 pages into. He doesn’t seem to know how it’ll end. He’s in a kind of limbo that he doesn’t want and that I frankly wouldn’t wish on anyone; when I wonder aloud about taking the $600 DNA test myself, Joseph flatly advises against it. “You don’t want to know,” he says. “It’s like a genie coming out of a bottle. You can’t put it back in.” He has more empathy for the colorblind crowd than he had before, but isn’t inclined to believe that the Ward Connerlys and other professed racial conservatives of the world have the best interests of colored people at heart. “I see their point, but race does matter, especially with things like medical research and other social trends,” he says of Connerly’s Proposition 54, the much-derided state measure that sought to outlaw the collection of ethnic data. “Problems like that can’t just go away.” For the moment, Joseph is compelled to try to judge individually what he knows has always been judged broadly, to reconcile two famously opposed viewpoints of race not for the sake of political argument — he’s made those — but for his own peace of mind. He’s wrestling with a riddle that will likely outlive him, though he doesn’t worry that it will be passed on to the next generation—his ex-wife is black, enough to give his children the firm ethnic identity he had and that he embraced for most of his life. “The question ultimately is, are you who you say you are, or are you who you are genetically?” he muses. The logical — and visceral — answer is that it’s not black and white.

The Dougla in Trinidad’s Consciousness

History in Action: Online Journal of The University of the West Indies (St. Augustine. Trinidad and Tobago) Dept. of History
Volume 2, Number 1 (April 2011)
7 pages
ISSN: 2221-7886

Feme Louanne Regis
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad is a complex multi-ethnic society where the two major ethnic groups – Africans and Indians – are in competition for power: economic, political and social. These contestations force the meeting and mixing of these two groups but militate against their merger. This is a reality that impacts significantly on the lives of their offspring the Dougla who are birthed into this complex social, cultural and linguistic situation and whose social position within this divide remain unclear and uncertain. Before 2011, Douglas were not designated in official censuses as a marginal ethnic community or even a biracial minority group leaving them free to declare themselves African, Indian or members of the umbrella categories Mixed and Other. Despite the steady increase in the number of people who define themselves as Douglas, their position in Trinidadian society remains ambivalent and indeterminate. This presentation maps the comparative invisibility of Douglas in Trinidadian society from the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries via an examination of social history and anthropology, creative writing, and popular culture.

Introduction

Douglas, the offspring of Indo-African unions, occupy an ambiguous position in Trinidadian society. Etymologically, the word Dougla is linked to dogla which is of India origin and is defined by Platts (1884, 534) as “a person of impure breed, a hybrid, a mongrel; a two-faced or deceitful person and a hypocrite.” In Bihar, Northern India, from where many Indian indentured labourers migrated to Trinidad, dogla still carries the meaning of a person of impure breed related specifically to the “progeny of inter-varna marriage, acquiring the connotation of ‘bastard’, meaning illegitimate son of a prostitute, only in a secondary sense” (Reddock 1994, 101). We do not know how and when the term Dougla became equated to the offspring of Indian-African unions in Trinidad but we may surmise that it originated in traditional Indian contempt for the darker-skinned (Brereton 1974, 24).

Recognition of Douglas

Wood (1968) does not recognise a Dougla presence in 19th century Trinidad. He trusts the official report of the Protector of the Immigrants that as late as 1871, 26 years after their arrival, “no single instance of co-habitation with a Negro existed among the 9,000 male and female indentured labourers” (1968, 138). He overlooks the 1876 testimony of John Morton, to the effect that “a few children are to be met with, born of Madras and Creole parents and some also of Madras and Chinese parents—the Madrasee being the mother” (Moore 1995, 238).

Ramesar (1994) accepts the reality of inter-racial sexual relations in the early twentieth century, but seems reluctant to acknowledge Africans as sexual partners for Indians and nowhere mentions the word Dougla. The Dougla presence is instead hidden in the generic term “Indian Creoles.” Examining the statistics testifying to Indian inter-racial sexual liaisons, Ramesar argues that such relationships happened more readily in Port of Spain and in Cedros than in central Trinidad, where the majority of Indian communities were located. Yet, the demographic evidence indicates African-Indian unions even in areas dominated by Indians (Harewood 1975).

According to Ramesar, the Indian fathers of mixed-race children were “probably westernized individuals who sought educated spouses.” She concedes, however, that “changed social relationships had also affected the lower levels in society” (146). Yet, the literary works of C.A. Thomasos (1933), C.L.R. James (1929; 1936), and Alfred Mendes (1935) demonstrate that inter-racial mixing was not necessarily inspired by social climbing. In these works, Douglas are presented as deracinated individuals engaged, as part of Black urban lower class, in the amoral struggle for survival.

In the 2005 feature address at the launch of the Indian Arrival Day Heritage Village, Elizabeth Rosabelle Sieusarran, a University of the West Indies lecturer, said:

In our quest for establishing unity among our people, it is imperative for us to note a rapidly increasing phenomenon of westernisation of the Indian community. This has resulted in the prevalence of inter-caste, inter-religious and inter-racial marriages. The Indian community has to decide how to handle the offspring of this significant group locally referred to as douglas. Do we accept them or ostracise them? Whatever course is adopted, the fragmentation of the Indian community must be avoided (Trinidad Express 16th May 2005, 5).

Sieusarran thus reduces the problems caused by westernisation to the fragmentation within the Indian community allegedly created by exogamy. She then ignores the progeny of many such relationships and targets Douglas as the source of that fragmentation. While acknowledging the organic connection of the Douglas to the Indian communities, Sieusarran indicates that Douglas are still perceived as a problem by some Indians even while they advocate co-existence in a multi-cultural society….

Read the entire article here.

Four years later, Barack Obama still a mystery in some ways

The Dallas Morning News
2012-09-01

From staff and wire reports

File: The welcome in Austin in 2007 was warm and Texan for presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Still somewhat unknown

Even after four years as president, Barack Hussein Obama remains unknown in some ways. He seemed to come out of nowhere. He had served seven years in the Illinois Senate — and less than four years in the U.S. Senate a meager political resume, augmented by a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Just four years later, he won the presidency over John McCain by almost 9.5 million votes. Now, at age 51, he appears to face a much closer battle for re-election.

Roots in Africa, America, Asia

Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu. His story was like no president before him — son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. Obama was just months old when his father, a brilliant but troubled economist, left to study at Harvard. He would never return. Obama spent his youth alternately in the care of his grandparents in Hawaii and his mother, who moved to Indonesia and a short-lived marriage to a geologist there. He studied at Occidental College in California, Columbia University and Harvard Law, and along the way struggled to come to terms with his identity as a black man of mixed heritage in a white society. He went to Chicago, where he learned to identify with the black community as a social activist.

Calm manner

A supporter dubbed him “No-Drama Obama” in the 2008 campaign, and it stuck because it reflects his personality. “The president is an intellectually ambitious man who is temperamentally cautious,” says Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton. His measured approach has not always worked in his favor; he has frustrated supporters who say he does not express righteous anger when he should…

Read the entire article here.

Latin America and mixed heritage

The Prisma: The Multicultural Newspaper
Westwood Hill, London, United Kingdom
2012-08-27

Claudio Chipana (Translated by Viv Griffiths)

“…we are neither Indian, nor European, but a species lying somewhere in between the legitimate owners of the land and the Spanish usurpers…” Simon Bolivar (Letter from Jamaica).

People of mixed heritage, mestizos, are a challenge to racial purity and the idea of a monolithic nation. The mixing of race is a cultural as well as racial process that began from the moment the Conquistadors arrived in the Americas in the 16th Century. The historian, Inca Garcilazo de la Vega, is considered to be the first Peruvian of mestizo. But, why Garcilazo and not the Indian historian Guaman Poma?
 
Mestizos are neither Hispanic nor indigenous and have been viewed both negatively and positively depending on their social class and ideology. Over time, being mestizo has developed into a form of identity for those living on the Latin American continent, and a way of staking a claim for themselves and forging ahead in the process of transculturation…

…It is still common for Latin Americans to identify themselves as being mestizo. This raises the question, if a person considers themselves mestizo, does this exclude them from identifying themselves as Latin American? At the same time, it should be acknowledged that there is a significant indigenous population resistant to any kind of homogenisation…

Read the entire article here.

Roots: Saint Lucia’s Hindu Legacy

Hinduism Today
October/November/December 2012

Gajanan Nataraj
Saint Lucia

I am a Saint Lucian citizen. I was born in the US Virgin Islands and lived briefly on the mainland (USA), but for the better part of 23 years I was raised on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I am roughly two-quarters Indian and two-quarters Negro–meaning both my parents were themselves of mixed heritage. This is common in Saint Lucia. We are called dougla–which comes from doogala (“two necks”), a demeaning label meaning mixed race or half-caste in Bhojpuri and Hindi. In Saint Lucia, the term is sometimes used affectionately, sometimes not so affectionately.

Though many on the island are of Indian heritage, I am one of the very few Hindus. I have a Hindu name, perform daily puja to Lord Ganesha and consider the cow a sacred creature. I believe in karma, dharma, reincarnation, the divinity of the Vedas and in the need for a satguru to guide my spiritual journey. Of all the Indian families who came to Saint Lucia from Kolkata as indentured workers in the 19th century, mine is one of the few to reclaim our Hindu heritage. In being Hindu, I am almost unique among the fifth generation of Indian immigrants. Even among my close relatives, almost all are Christians.

How did I come to be a Hindu in a land where Christianity reigns supreme, even among Indians? I attribute my discovery of this beautiful religion to the interplay of my soul’s natural calling and God’s blessing of being born to parents who are ardent seekers of spiritual truth. Indeed, my growth from non-religious, Christian-influenced spiritual confusion can only be credited to the marvelous journey of my parents…

Read the entire article here.

Latinos may get own race category on census form

The Seattle Times
2012-08-30

Lornet Turnbull, Staff Reporter

Under proposed changes under consideration by the Census Bureau in its once-a-decade census forms, Latino and Hispanic would be added to the list of government-defined races, rather than being listed separately as an ethnicity. And people from the Middle East and North Africa, now counted as white, would be allowed to write in their country of origin.

U.S. residents of Spanish origin typically have no trouble checking the box on their census form that asks whether they are Latino, Hispanic or Spanish.

It’s a different question — the one that asks their race — that apparently gives some of them pause.

In the 2010 census, well over one-third — perhaps unsure how to answer that question — either checked “some other race” or skipped the question entirely.

Now, in advance of the 2020 count and as part of its ongoing effort to allow Americans to better reflect how they see themselves, the U.S. Census Bureau is researching ways to clear up the confusion by adding Latino or Hispanic to a list of government-defined race categories that includes White, Asian, Pacific Islander, Black and American Indian, along with a “two or more races” option…

…Luis Fraga, a political-science professor at the University of Washington who directs its Diversity Research Institute, said, “identifying ourselves by racial grouping is at the very core of who we are as a nation and how we understand political power.”

Results from the decennial survey not only help direct more than $400 billion in federal funds are distributed each year, but they also help evaluate how well government policies are responding to historical disparities among various racial and ethnic groups.

“As much as we hope we become a country where these racial distinctions don’t matter — and that’s a worthy goal — it is central to how we understand ourselves as a people and how we decide who has opportunity, rights, privileges and protection under the law,” Fraga said…

Read the entire article here.

Passing for Black: The Life and Careers of Mae Street Kidd

University Press of Kentucky
1997
208 pages
On Demand paperback ISBN: 978-0-8131-0948-0

Wade Hall

In 1976, Kentucky state legislator Mae Street Kidd successfully sponsored a resolution ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was fitting that a black woman should initiate the state’s formal repudiation of slavery; that it was Mrs. Kidd was all the more appropriate. Born in Millersburg, Kentucky, in 1904 to a black mother and a white father, Kidd grew up to be a striking woman with fair skin and light hair. Sometimes accused of trying to pass for white in a segregated society, Kidd felt that she was doing the opposite—choosing to assert her black identity. Passing for Black is her story, in her own words, of how she lived in this racial limbo and the obstacles it presented. As a Kentucky woman of color during a pioneering period of minority and women’s rights, Kidd seized every opportunity to get ahead. She attended a black boarding academy after high school and went on to become a successful businesswoman in the insurance and cosmetic industries in a time when few women, black or white, were able to compete in a male-dominated society. She also served with the American Red Cross in England during World War II. It was not until she was in her sixties that she turned to politics, sitting for seventeen years in the Kentucky General Assembly—one of the few black women ever to do so—where she crusaded vigorously for housing rights. Her story—presented as oral history elicited and edited by Wade Hall—provides an important benchmark in African American and women’s studies and endures as a vital document in Kentucky history.

Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance

University of Toronto Press
October 2010
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9781442641402
eBook ISBN: ISBN 9781442660083

Jean E. Feerick, Assistant Professor of English
Brown University

Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.

Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks the widespread cultural concern that moving out of England would adversely affect the temper and complexion of the displaced individual, changes that could be fought only through willed acts of self-discipline. In emphasizing the decline of blood as found at the centre of colonial narratives, Feerick illustrates the unwitting disassembling of one racial system and the creation of another.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Bloodwork
• 1. Blemished Bloodlines and The Faerie Queene, Book 2
• 2. Uncouth Milk and the Irish Wet Nurse
• 3. Cymbeline and Virginia’s British Climate
• 4. Passion and Degeneracy in Tragicomic Island Plays
• 5. High Spirits, Nature’s Ranks, and Ligon’s Ladies
• Coda: Beyond the Renaissance

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America

Oxford University Press
April 2011
240 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195385854; ISBN10: 0195385853

Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English
Arizona State University

Notions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define the contemporary American experience, including America’s relationship to Shakespeare. In Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson explores the myriad ways U.S. culture draws on the works and the mythology of the Bard to redefine the boundaries of the color line.

Drawing on an extensive—frequently unconventional—range of examples, Thompson examines the contact zones between constructions of Shakespeare and constructions of race. Among the questions she addresses are: Do Shakespeare’s plays need to be edited, appropriated, updated, or rewritten to affirm racial equality and retain relevance? Can discussions of Shakespeare’s universalism tell us anything beneficial about race? What advantages, if any, can a knowledge of Shakespeare provide to disadvantaged people of color, including those in prison? Do the answers to these questions impact our understandings of authorship, authority, and authenticity? In investigating this under-explored territory, Passing Strange examines a wide variety of contemporary texts, including films, novels, theatrical productions, YouTube videos, performances, and arts education programs.

Scholars, teachers, and performers will find a wealth of insights into the staging and performance of familiar plays, but they will also encounter new ways of viewing Shakespeare and American racial identity, enriching their understanding of each.

Features

• Productively engages a topic of perennial debate: race and Shakespeare
• Offers first sustained examination of the relationship between contemporary American constructions of Shakespeare and race
• Explores the seldom considered ways Shakespeare has infiltrated American popular culture, from films like the screwball comedy Bringing Down the House to DIY performances on YouTube

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Passing Strangeness of Shakespeare in America
• 2. Universalism: Two Films that Brush with the Bard, Suture and Bringing Down the House
• 3. Essentialism: Meditations Inspired by Farrukh Dondy’s novel Black Swan
• 4. Multiculturalism: The Classics, Casting, and Confusion
• 5. Original(ity): Othello and Blackface
• 6. Reform: Redefining Authenticity in Shakespeare Reform Programs
• 7. Archives: Classroom-Inspired Performance Videos on YouTube
• 8. Conclusion: Passing Race and Passing Shakespeare in Peter Sellars’s Othello
• Works Cited
• Index