Mixed Race Studies

British-Asian cinema: the sequel

The Guardian
2011-02-17

Sarfraz Manzoor

Aqib Khan in West Is West.

Twelve years on from the hugely acclaimed East Is East comes its sequel, West Is West. Sarfraz Manzoor examines the new directions British-Asian film-makers are taking

Twelve years on from the hugely acclaimed East Is East comes its sequel, West Is West. Sarfraz Manzoor examines the new directions British-Asian film-makers are taking

Ayub Khan-Din was in his first year at drama school in Salford when his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Khan-Din, the mixed-race son of a Pakistani Muslim father and a white Catholic mother, found that each time he came home, another slab of his mother’s memory had disappeared. The past, with all its stories, was slipping into the void, and Khan-Din became determined to try to preserve his parents’ history and his own experience of growing up.

Although he was studying to be an actor, Khan-Din started writing. At the time, Asians were rarely glimpsed on screen in the UK unless they were being beaten up by racist skinheads, running corner shops or fleeing arranged marriages. Khan-Din wanted to tell a different story—about growing up with a Pakistani father who had married an English woman, but who wanted his boys to marry Pakistani girls. The play Khan-Din wrote, East Is East, was performed on stage, then released to great acclaim as a film in 1999. Now, 12 years on, comes the release of West Is West, Khan-Din’s long-awaited sequel…

…Like Khan-Din and Monica Ali—whose novel Brick Lane would later be adapted for the screen—Kureishi grew up in a mixed-race family. The particular conflicts inherent in such a background, and the subsequent struggles for identity, were not shared by those such as Chadha and Syal, whose parents were both Asian. My Beautiful Laundrette was not only a personal work but also, Kureishi suggests, the product of an emerging curiosity of mainstream Britain about Asian society. “Around the mid-80s, people in film and publishing realised that Britain was changing,” he says. “I was lucky because I had this great opportunity to write about something that no one else had written about.” The freshness of this material to a wider audience meant many of the films that have come out of the British-Asian subgenre—including Prasad’s My Son the Fanatic, based on another Kureishi short story—operate not only as fictional works but also as quasi-documentaries, revealing a hitherto unknown world. The frisson of familiarity felt by Asian audiences on seeing families like theirs was coupled by the shock of the new that white audiences experienced…

Read the entire article here.

A “Mixed-Race” Nation Isn’t the Same as a Post-Race One

ColorLines
2011-02-04

Dom Apollon

The Web is still buzzing with chatter over a New York Times feature last weekend that explored how and why an increasing number of young people identify as “mixed-race.” The Census Bureau will release race-based data from its 2010 decennial count later this month, and everybody from sociologists to marketers are eagerly waiting to see what the next generation of Americans, dubbed the “Millennials,” looks like. If the Times story is correct, a whole lot more of them are people who aren’t invested in a racial identity—or, at least not a singular one.

But the story got me thinking about focus groups I’ve been conducting for the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, over the past few months. We’re talking in Los Angeles with separate groups of 18 to 25 year old African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Whites. Our project is not yet complete, but already the conversations we’ve heard within our four groups, including with a handful of respondents from multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds, suggest a significant gap between the sort of individual identities that the Times explored and the broader reality in which those young, post-identity people live.

It’d be easy for the casual reader to conclude from the Times piece that this growing group of individuals who refuse to be pigeon-holed into distinct racial or ethnic classifications will inevitably transform our society into one without racial prejudice. As the Times’ reporter explained, optimistic observers “say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.”

Well, that sounds so nice and inevitable, doesn’t it? The problem is, it’s an optimism born of our society’s collective, subconscious yearning for relief. Relief from what, you ask? Relief from the deep discomfort we continue to feel about race, and the continued racial disparities (in high school and college graduation, unemployment, wages and work standards, homeownership, etc.) that challenge America’s understanding of itself as a place defined by equal opportunity…

…But the fact that some young folks are ticking off multiple boxes on surveys to express their racial and ethnic identities doesn’t mean much if the opportunity gap between whites and people of color throughout society is not changing, too. When we see less disparity in outcomes in education, in health and health care, in housing and more, then we’ll know we’re approaching something close to a “post-racial” society…

Read the entire article here.

‘Of Many Colors: Portraits of Multiracial Families’ traveling exhibit bridges diverse backgrounds

Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2011-05-22

Lenika Cruz

Starting this evening, UCLA will act as a home for 20 families, each with a story to tell about being multiracial Americans.

While these families will not be physically present, their photographs and interviews will be, as part of “Of Many Colors: Portraits of Multiracial Families,” a traveling exhibit that began circulating the country in the early ’90s.

The exhibit came to UCLA from the organization Family Diversity Projects as part of a collaboration between Multiracial Americans of Southern California and UCLA’s Mixed Student Union. An opening reception with a speech from Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kinnery Shah will take place in the Ackerman second floor lounge, after which the exhibit will move to the Kerckhoff Art Gallery until Friday.

The project is the work of Peggy Gillespie and Gigi Kaeser, co-founders of Family Diversity Projects. They interviewed and photographed more than 40 families living in and around Amherst, Mass., who identified as multiracial. One family consisted of a Puerto Rican mother, an African American father and their children, while another family featured Caucasian parents who had adopted children from Peru and China…

Read the entire article here.

After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority

New York University Press
January 2004
336 pages, 8 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814735428; Paper ISBN: 9780814735435

Mike Hill, Associate Professor of English
State University of New York, Albany

As each new census bears out, the rise of multiracialism in the United States will inevitably result in a white minority. In spite of the recent proliferation of academic studies and popular discourse on whiteness, however, there has been little discussion of the future: what comes after whiteness? On the brink of what many are now imagining as a post-white American future, it remains a matter of both popular and academic uncertainty as to what will emerge in its place.

After Whiteness aims to address just that, exploring the remnants of white identity to ask how an emergent post-white national imaginary figure into public policy issues, into the habits of sexual intimacy, and into changes within public higher education. Through discussions of the 2000 census and debates over multiracial identity, the volatile psychic investments that white heterosexual men have in men of color—as illustrated by the Christian men’s group the Promise Keepers and the neo-fascist organization the National Alliance—and the rise of identity studies and diversity within the contemporary public research university, Mike Hill surveys race among the ruins of white America. At this crucial moment, when white racial change has made its ambivalent cultural debut, Hill demonstrates that the prospect of an end to whiteness haunts progressive scholarship on race as much as it haunts the paranoid visions of racists.

Read the Introduction here.

Table of Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: AFTER WHITENESS EVE
• I: INCALCULABLE COMMUNITY: MULTIRACIALISM, U.S. CENSUS 2000, AND THE CRISIS OF THE LIBERAL STATE
  • 1.1 LABOR FORMALISM
  • 1.2 DISSENSUS 2000
  • 1.3 THE WILL TO CATEGORY
  • 1.4 REBIRTH OF A NATION?
  • 1.5 AMERICA, NOT COUNTING CLASS
• II: A FASCISM OF BENEVOLENCE: GOD AND FAMILY IN THE FATHER-SHAPED VOID
  • 2.1 OF COMMUNISM AND CASTRATION
  • 2.2 MUSCULAR MULTICULTURALISM
  • 2.3 WHEN COLOR IS THE FATHER
  • 2.4 A CERTAIN GESTURE OF VIRILITY
  • 2.5 THE EROS OF WARFARE
• III: RACE AMONG RUINS: WHITENESS, WORK, AND WRITING IN THE NEW UNIVERSITY
  • 3.1 BETWEEN JOBS AND WORK
  • 3.2 THE MULTIVERSITY’S DIVERSITY
  • 3.3 AFTER WHITENESS STUDIES
  • 3.4 MULTITUDE OR CULTURALISM?
  • 3.5 HOW COLOR SAVED THE CANON
• NOTES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sonic spaces: Inscribing “coloured” voices in the Karoo, South Africa

University of Pennsylvania
2006
228 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3246175

Marie R. Jorritsma

A Dissertation in Music Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

A common stereotype of those classified as “coloured” in apartheid South Africa was that, because of their mixed racial heritage, they had no authentic racial or cultural identity and history. This dissertation counters that lingering stereotype by examining how musical performance enabled “coloured” community members around the town of Graaff-Reinet to claim a place for themselves collectively under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. Nurtured and sustained by a policy of racial purity, the apartheid regime held a deeply ambivalent position towards those it categorized as “coloured,” the racial group it defined as “not a white person or a native.” Oral and written sources typically convey “coloured” people’s ethnic identity, cultural history, and musical heritage as similarly lacking. Despite this, music has been and continues to be an integral part of the religious practices of this community though its performance has survived practically unnoticed by those outside.

By placing the voices of “coloured” people at the center of this study, I move beyond the myopic apartheid view that saw “coloured” people purely in terms of their ethnic origins and capacity for labor. Instead, I approach “coloured” music and history in terms of the sounds and spaces of their religious performance culture. My research provides a narrative of “coloured” social history in the Graaff-Reinet region that is drawn from regional archives and empirical research in the form of fieldwork, specifically participant observation. I concentrate on religious musical practice, namely, hymns, koortjies (little choruses), choir performance, and the singing at women’s society meetings. Studying song performance creates a complex nexus of music, race, religion, and politics, and constitutes a vital way of retrieving history and oral repertories. This music thereby provides one vehicle for groups and individuals in this community to articulate a more “legitimate” place for themselves in the contemporary landscape of South African history and culture.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter One – Introduction: Sonic Spaces, Inscribing “Coloured” Voices
• Chapter Two – Senzeni na: Music, Religion, and Politics in Three Kroonvale Congregations
• Chapter Three – Singing the “Queen’s English”: Church Choirs in Kroonvale
• Chapter Four V – Mothers of the Church: Women’s Society Music and South African Gender Issues
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Bibliography

List of Illustrations

1. View of Umasizakhe, Graaff-Reinet, and Kroonvale
2. View of Kroonvale, Santaville, Asherville, Koebergville, and Geluksdal
3. Map of Kroonvale
4. Old DRMC Building in Graaff-Reinet
5. Last Church Service Held at the DRMC Building, c. 1964
6. URC Building in Kroonvale
7. Old PSCC Building in Graaff-Reinet
8. PSCC Building in Kroonvale
9. Old Klein Londen Building in Graaff-Reinet
10. ESCC Building in Kroonvale
11. View of URC and PSCC from ESCC Grounds
12. Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 13 February 2005
13. East Street Congregational Church, 17 July 2005
14. Uniting Reformed Church, 15 August 2004
15. Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
16. Wat bring jy myn die domme?: Cape Malay Ghomma-liedjie notated by I.D. du Plessis
17. Juig aarde juig sung by Mrs J.S. Beukes, Mr W.S. Adonis and Mr J.W. Beukes, 16 April 1980
18. Hy’s hier om ons te seen (He’s here to bless us), Uniting Reformed Church, 5 December 2004
19. Jesus is so lief virmy (Jesus loves me very much), East Street Congregational Church, 26 June 2005
20. Dit was nie om te oordeel nie (It was not to judge), Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 6 March 2005
21. Worstel mens (Wrestle sinner), Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
22. Graaff-Reinet Mayor Daantjie Jaftha
23. Zion, City of God (G. Froflich)
24. Holy Holy Holy (Franz Schubert)
25. Program of Concert Tour and Performance in Kimberley, 3 September 1972
26. Restored Slave Cottages at Stretch’s Court, Drostdy Hotel
27. Wees stil en weet, Women’s World Day of Prayer Service, East Street Congregational Church, 3 March 2005
28. Wees stil en weet, “Official” Hymnbook Version

PREFACE

As a child, the Karoo always symbolised an escape for me. It was a refuge from the routine of school attendance, extra-mural activities, and the restlessly windy, unpredictable weather of the coastal city of Port Elizabeth. The family farm lay only three and a half hours1 drive away from the city, where huge breakfasts of porridge, toast, and tea fortified me for seemingly endless sunny and windless days spent walking in the surrounding veld, participating in (and most likely, hindering) the usual farming activities, and playing in the water furrows. A typical Karoo child displays an endless fascination with the precious commodity of water, and diverting the small rivulets in the furrow to flow smoothly over the muddy gravel guaranteed countless hours of captivation.

My grandmother used to tell me, as a child, to look for San tools such as grinding stones or arrowheads when walking in the Karoo veld. To this day, this collection remains displayed in the farmhouse. It never occurred to me then that the San people, the forebears of many present-day “coloured” people, suffered merciless persecution on the part of my ancestors, the colonial settlers.

When I returned to the Karoo for fieldwork on the music of “coloured” people, this memory of looking for San ”treasure” and proof of their existence in this area contrasted very strangely with the historical accounts I read about the violent treatment of the San people by the settlers. Immersed in my research, I seldom visited the veld, and instead explored my childhood memories in new contexts of colonial history and apartheid. As much as this project was originally driven by a deep appreciation of and interest in this music and then an ongoing desire that it not be ignored, my own background as the granddaughter of a Karoo farmer had to be revisited and recontextualised as the project continued.

I remember sitting in June Bosch’s home one day when for once my childhood memories did not clash with the historical and contemporary stories of “coloured” people’s oppression and marginalization. June Bosch and her cousin, Loretta Fortune, told me a story from their childhood days in Caroline Street, Graaff-Reinet. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, water from the Van Ryneveld’s Pass Dam outside the town would be led into the cement furrows lining the streets for the townspeople to use. As the neighborhood children spotted the water, they would shout up the street to announce its presence and run for any and every available container. June was under strict instructions from her grandmother to water the garden roses first, and then to spray the unpaved street in order to settle the dust. After fulfilling these duties, the children would play in the furrows until the water flow ceased. Recognizing the similarity in our childhood games and activities with their focus on water made it poignantly apparent to me that we were all once children of the Karoo.

This research project thus stems from my own connection to Graaff-Reinet and its surrounding area. Combined with a strong scholarly fascination with this music, my reasons for undertaking the project also included the opportunity to revisit and perhaps, in some small way, to recapture the past. No longer a childhood escape, it is the spaces and sounds of this Karoo community that have offered me a new perspective on my relationship to this place and its people…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Integration of a mixed race indigenous mind: A personal deconstruction of colonization

California Institute of Integral Studies
208
204 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3306675
ISBN: 9780549538394

Pamela E. Dos Ramos

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Integral Studies with a Concentration in Recovery of Indigenous Mind

This dissertation, in narrative form, documents a process of decolonization and self-integration through a transformative process, called Recovery of Indigenous Mind (RIM). At the California Institute of Integral Studies, this process was created to assist non-native people to reconnect with their own indigenous ancestral knowledge, rituals, and ways of being. The author was enrolled as a graduate student in the RIM Doctoral Program, which shook her to the core and initiated her journey towards wholeness. Through the uncovering of indigenous roots and ancestral histories, the process served as a healing mechanism to integrate all parts of the author’s being, some of which had previously been blocked out and denied unconsciously.

The question implicit in this work is: what makes mixed race women stumble and become immobilized in their quest to find their wholeness of being and solid identity? Written in the first person, this dissertation focuses on the author’s journey by focusing on her identity as a female of mixed race ancestry. In relation to her ancestral heritage, it provides a map, a process of integration that may be followed by other women of mixed race ancestry. However, it may be of particular relevance and importance to those women of ancestral heritages similar to the author’s, who are open to non-Western ways of connecting with, listening to, and learning from the guidance of their ancestors.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1: Introduction
  • Importance of This Journey
  • Rationale
  • Personal Background
    • Diverse Origins
    • The Face of Exclusion
    • Discovering History
    • Counselor Heal Thyself
• Chapter 2: Integration of History and process
  • Introduction
  • Uncovering Ancestors’ Stories
    • Colonization: First Peoples, Amerindian Ancestors
    • Colonization: Slavery—African Ancestors
    • Colonization: Indentured Labor—East Indian Ancestors
    • Colonization Legacies of Minds, Hearts and Spirits
  • A World Away: Historical Exclusion in Canada
  • Loss of Ancestral Identity
  • Indigenous Science, Indigenous Mind Worldviews
    • Indigenous Science, Indigenous Mind
    • Worldviews
  • Racial/Cultural Identity Development
  • Mixed Race Identity
• Chapter 3: Indigenous Science, Indigenous Mind
  • Intuitive Inquiry
  • Indigenous Science Inquiry
• Chapter 4: Walking the Path of Recovery
  • Decolonization of Heart and Mind
  • Ancestral Connections: Honoring Grandmothers
    • The Task: Radical Trust in Ancestral Guidance
    • Older Woman Power: The Crone
    • The Crone Today
    • Qualities and Responsibilities of the Crone
    • The Croning Ritual: Planning and Organizing
    • The Croning Ritual: Ceremony
    • Ancestors in Action
  • Further Invoking of My Indigenous Mind
  • Toward Wholeness
    • Going Home
    • Dakar, Senegal: A Foreign Past
    • Full Circle
• Chapter 5: The Home in my Heart
  • Out of the Curtain of Silence
  • Integrating Experiences and Recovery of Indigenous Mind
  • Threads Interwoven
  • Ancestral Gifts
  • The Tapestry Woven
  • A Pathway
  • Mists of Lost Time
  • Limitations
  • Further work
• References
• APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY—OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS
• APPENDIX B: THE SOCIALIZATION AND ISM PRISM
• APPENDIX C: BILL OF RIGHTS FOR PEOPLE OF MIXED HERITAGE
• APPENDIX D: MULTIRACIAL OATH OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Purchase the dissertation here.