Mixed Race Studies

Half-Yella: Mixed Race Asian American Art [Lecture]

Oberlin College
King 106
2010-04-29, 16:30 to 17:30 EDT (Local Time)

Laura Kina, Professor of Art
DePaul University

Laura Kina is an artist, independent curator, and scholar whose research focuses on Asian American art and critical mixed race studies. She is an Associate Professor of Art, Media and Design, Vincent de Paul Professor, and Director of Asian American Studies at DePaul University. She is a 2009-2010 DePaul University Humanities Fellow. She earned her MFA from the school of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she studied under noted painters Kerry James Marshall and Phyllis Bramson, and she earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Riverside, California and raised in Poulsbo, WA, the artist currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. Her work has shown internationally is represented in Miami, Florida by Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts. Her work is currently on display in a solo exhibition “Laura Kina: A Many-Splendored Thing” at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, IL as well as in group shows at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago and the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Laura Kina’s work focuses on the fluidity of cultural difference and the slipperiness of identity. Asian American history and mixed race representations are subjects that run through her work. She draws inspiration from popular culture, history, textile design, as well as historic and personal photographs. Critic Murtaza Vali has described her art as “a genre of Pop art with a distinctly postcolonial edge.”

This event is sponsored by Asian American Alliance as a part of Oberlin College’s Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month 2010.

Reinventing the Color Line: Immigration and America’s New Racial/Ethnic Divide

Social Forces
Volume 86, Number 2 (December 2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-7605 Print ISSN: 0037-7732
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2008.0024

Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Contemporary nonwhite immigration from Latin America and Asia, increasing racial/ethnic intermarriage, and the growing number of multiracial individuals has made the black-white color line now seem anachronistic in America, consequently raising the question of whether today’s color line is evolving in new directions toward either a white-nonwhite divide, a black-nonblack divide, or a new tri-racial hierarchy. In order to gauge the placement of today’s color line, we examine patterns of multiracial identification, using both quantitative data on multiracial reporting in the 2000 U.S. Census and in-depth interview data from multiracial individuals with Asian, Latino or black backgrounds. These bodies of evidence suggest that the multiracial identifications of Asians and Latinos (behaviorally and self-perceptually) show much less social distance from whites than from blacks, signaling the likely emergence of a black-nonblack divide that continues to separate blacks from other groups, including new nonwhite immigrants. However, given that the construction of whiteness as a category has been fluid in the past and appears to be stretching yet again, it is also possible that the color line will change still further to even more fully incorporate Asians and Latinos as white, which would mean that the historical black-white divide could again re-emerge.

Read or purchase the article here.