Mixed Race Studies

Addressing Issues of Biracial Asian Americans

Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies
Washington State University Press
1988
Chapter 15, pages 111-116

Edited by: G. Y. Okihiro, S. Hune, A. A. Hansen, and J. M. Liu

Stephen L. Murphy-Shigematsu

Revising the Asian American Studies curriculum

One of the more dramatic changes in the post-World War II Asian American population is the increase in those of biracial ancestry. Over the past forty years large numbers of Asian women have married Americans and come to the United States. [n 1] During this period, too, thousands of Asian American men and women have married outside their ethnic group. [n 2] The burgeoning population of biracial youth that has resulted from these developments, represents a significant change in the face of Asian America.

In the light of the above situation, one of the challenges confronting Asian American Studies is to adapt and revise a curriculum created in the early 1970s that was designed primarily for American born Chinese and Japanese. It has become necessary to redesign courses to better accommodate the needs, interests, and backgrounds of the more diverse group of Asian Americans who are presently underrepresented in the curriculum, and increasingly in Asian American Studies classes and in the general population. Those of biracial ancestry are one emerging group whose experiences and needs must be addressed in curriculum development…

Read the entire chapter here.

Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher

Callaloo
Volume 19, Number 2, Spring 1996
E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492
pages 337-339
DOI: 10.1353/cal.1996.0074

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

What she said once, unforgettable, was that the stereotype is the distance between ourselves—our real, our black bodies—& the image

[T]he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; … for to use metaphors well is to see the similarity in dissimilars. —Aristotle, The Poetics Image

These three sites have been crucially linked in recent cultural theory and practice. Thirty years old and a native of New England, painter Ellen Gallagher has been described as working “in the gap between image and body (the gap that is language).” That understanding of her project, of course, simultaneously echoes and significantly revises a late modernist agenda epitomized by Robert Rauschenberg: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” Post-pop, post-painterly, and post-minimal, Gallagher operates in a space cleared by contemporary feminist, semiotic, black, and cultural studies discourses. Yet her art negotiates these busy intersections in a starkly independent fashion. In conversation, she readily shifts from charting the ancestry of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (whose origins, she…

Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art

Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture
Volume 14, Number 53 (Winter 2001-2002)
pages 43–54

Kymberly N. Pinder, Associate Professor of Art History
School of the Art Insitute of Chicago

An article on work by artists responding to racial hybridity that features a discussion of Lorraine O’Grady’s diptych, “The Clearing”.

For when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow something much more significant than Jordan or Charles Barkley. We swallow hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face, that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Wood’s face: handsome and smiling and ready to kick all comers’ asses.

The hope in ‘the yellow-black-red-white man’, reflected in the Tigermania that swept the US in the mid-1990s, is indicative of the racial crossroads at which the US, as a nation, finds itself at the close of the twentieth century. As Stanley Crouch describes, ‘We have been inside each other’s bloodstreams, pockets, libraries, kitchens, schools, theatres, sports arenas, dance halls, and national boundaries for so long that our mixed-up and multiethnic identity extends from European colonial expansion and builds upon immigration.’ Where are we as a nation regarding race when Woods can consider himself ‘Cablinasian’ while some southern states are still officially ending their ‘one-drop’ rules and [taking] laws against mixed marriages off the books? How can we address the concerns of those who see Affirmative Action as all but dead?

Some contemporary artists in the US have been struggling with these issues during the 1980s and 1990s. Lorraine O’Grady is one of them. She originally titled her photomontage diptych The Clearing in 1991, however, later, she lengthened the title to The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N and Me to clarify the historical and personal relevance of the work. The left half of the piece presents the relationship between the black woman and white man as loving while the right as malevolent. The skeletal face of the man and the gun in the pile of clothing provide elements of violence and death. Yet O’Grady says, ‘it isn’t a “before/after” piece; it’s a “both/and” piece. This couple is on the wall in the simultaneous extremes of ecstasy and exploitation.’ The complex relationship between exploitation and defiance for such ‘women of color’ as La Malinche and Sally Hemings has become a trope of American hybridity and assimilation.

Though anthropologists have established the mixed-race heritage of all humans with the discovery of ‘missing link’ hominids in Central and South Africa, racial purity, mixing and conflict are still hotly debated issues in American society. I am not contesting any scientific definitions of race and human origins in this essay, but I will focus on representations of multiraciality and their socio-political currency in American society, specifically contemporary popular culture. Throughout this article, I will use the terms biracial, mixed-race, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, racial hybridity and multicultural with the understanding that such terms are socially constructed and based on perceptions, either of oneself or by others in our society. These terms and their instability reflect the challenge we face to discuss meaningfully the reality of racial mixing, as well as to create the very language needed to do so. Of course, the reality of a nation of immigrants, the legacy of slavery, and the genocide of native populations prevents issues of race and difference from being resolved in the US. In the last decade or so, as the collapse of Affirmative Action initiatives and the rise of white supremacy groups attest, racial divides seem to be widening rather than narrowing. Some race scholars such as Crouch think otherwise and see the increased mixing of the races in the US as the ‘end of race’:

The international flow of images and information will continue to make for a greater and greater swirl of influences. It will increasingly change life on the globe and also change our American sense of race… In that future, definition by racial, ethnic and sexual groups will most probably have ceased to be the foundation of special-interest power… Americans of the future will find themselves surrounded in every direction by people who are part Asian, part Latin, part African, part European, part Indian.

As panaceas or true saviors, historical figures, like Hemings, and contemporary celebrities, like Woods, have become national touchstones for unity. These biracial or multiracial individuals who were once outcast traces of taboo sexual transgressions, the stereotypical ‘tragic mulattos’, are now signifiers of a future of racial harmony. In February 1995, Newsweek devoted an entire issue to the ‘New Race’ in America and though its surveys showed some significant pessimism among blacks and whites regarding our nation’s race relations, the magazine presented the nation’s growing mixed-race population as a future remedy for current racial conflicts. As one biracial writer responded, the magazine declared it ‘hip to be mixed’. Another article, with a markedly flippant tone, in Harper’s Magazine in 1993, even recommended a more practical ‘need’ for racial mixing: melanin rich skin for the survival of future generations as our ozone layer erodes. Popular movies such as Bulworth (1998), written and directed by Warren Beatty, present a jaded white politician who, after living a few days with a black family in South Central Los Angeles, makes ‘procreative, racial deconstruction’ his political platform, his remedy for racial discrimination and the economic disparities it has caused in this country…

Read the entire article here.

Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art

American Art
Volume 5, Number 3 (Summer, 1991)
pages 88-107

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

miscegenationn. [Latin miscere to mix + genus race…]: a mixture of races; esp: marriage or cohabitation between a white person an a member of another race.
—Webster’s Seventh  New Collegiate Dictionary

Today, most physical anthropologist do not believe that pure races ever existed.
—Bruce G. Trigger

What the matter came down to, of course, was visibility.  Anyone whose appearance discernibly connected him with the Negro was held to be such.
—Winthrop Jordon

“Race” is a peculiarly optical system of classification as Hugh Honour and Albert Boimehave observed. In the English-speaking world, it is a concept that characteristically stresses a single feature or color—value—and is structured by polarities “white” and “black,” “white” and “non-white,” “the white race” and “the darker races,” 0r “white people” and “people of color.” Miscegenation, the sexual union of individuals assigned to different racial categories, blurs such distinctions, thereby threatening race-based systems of social order and privilege. Indeed, as both anthropologist Bruce Trigger and philosopher Anthony Appiah have suggested, the age-old historical fact of miscegenation undermines the validity of race as either a scientific or a philosophical construct.

North American attitudes toward race are notoriously rigid and denial oriented in their insistence upon what anthropologist Virginia R. Dominguez has labeled “the binary system”:

Whereas descendants of Africans and Europeans in the United States, regardless of miscegenation, are typically allowed membership in only two racial categories—white and black—the Afro-Latin world… has long used miscegenation as a mechanism for the construction of a new category of people epistemologically separate from both whites and blacks.

North American practice is unique, not only in its tendency to view miscegenation primarily in African- versus European-American terms—a tendency that both excludes additional levels of genealogical complexity (e.g., the possibility of African, European, and Native American ancestry) and erases other histories (e.g., the record of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation, with its accompanying prohibitions of interracial sex). Thus reduced to a black-white issue, the sex-race conjunction has given rise to forms of literary and cinematic representation that are well known: American authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner have shared a preoccupation with the supposed tragedy of mixed ancestry, and filmmakers ranging from D. W. Griffith to Spike Lee have lamented the alleged horrors of interracial sex…

Read or purchase the article here.