Mixed Race Studies

‘Show Boat’ Steams On, Eternally American

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2013-05-07

Nina Totenberg, Legal Affairs Correspondent

It’s been more than eight decades since Show Boat — the seminal masterpiece of the American musical theater — premiered on a stage in Washington, D.C. Now the sprawling classic is back, in a lush production put on by the Washington National Opera.

Based on Edna Ferber’s epic best-selling novel, Show Boat was nothing like the frothy musicals and scantily clad Broadway revues of its time. Sure, the story is about a traveling showboat that plays to audiences along the Mississippi River, but the plot focuses on serious subjects: racial injustice, alcoholism, abandonment.

Panoramic in scale, the show spans 40 years, from 1885 in the South — not long after the Civil War — to the Roaring ’20s in Chicago. And displayed in all their glory are some of the most beautiful love songs of the 20th century: “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Make Believe,” “Bill.”

Show Boat made musical-theater history, pioneering the merging of music and plot, integrating them for the first time to provide a seamless transition from scene to song. Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, just 31 years old, worked closely with composer Jerome Kern to replicate Ferber’s sweeping narrative. In a 1958 interview released on vinyl by MGM Records, he explained how he used the Mississippi itself as the thread that would hold all the plot elements together.

“I thought that we lacked something to make it cohesive,” Hammerstein told interviewer Arnold Michaelis. “I wanted to keep the spirit of Edna’s book, and the one focal influence I could find was the river, because she had quite consciously brought the river into every important turn in the story. The Mississippi. So I decided to write a theme — a river theme.”

That theme, of course, became “Ol’ Man River,” one of the most primal American melodies ever sung.

‘Misery’ Restored, And Threaded Throughout The Show

Director Francesca Zambello, who pushed and prodded to get the current revival staged at the Kennedy Center, says she was drawn to the show because of the timeless issues it dramatizes — not least that key underlying theme of race, embodied in the show by Julie, the showboat’s star performer.

“Julie is the fulcrum of the show, because she brings the dramatic issue that changes everything,” Zambello says.

Secretly biracial, but “passing” — living publicly as a white woman — Julie has married a white man. That makes their relationship a crime in Mississippi, and in much of the rest of the country besides.

No surprise, then, that even before Julie is found out and forced to leave the showboat, the company’s mother figure, who’s in on her secret, senses trouble. “Misery’s comin’ around,” sings Queenie, the showboat’s cook, in a gorgeously melancholy melody that was cut from the original production for time.

“The theme of ‘Misery’ you hear not only with Queenie and all the women working, but it also weaves its way underneath the dialogue every time Julie speaks after that,” Zambello points out. “It becomes her sadness, and her secret.”

There are no U.S. laws against interracial marriage anymore; they were struck down in 1967 by the Supreme Court’s . But as Show Boat plays at the Kennedy Center this month, the court — just a couple of miles away — is considering questions of same-sex marriage, affirmative action and voting rights, while Congress focuses on how we as a nation treat immigrants.

“To do this kind of work that has such deep social underpinnings to it, and really speaks about social change, is I think rare in music theater,” Zambello says. “If you wrote this musical today, I’m not sure that it would get on.”…

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Acclaimed Actress Performs Play on Race, Love

The Daily Nexus
University of California, Santa Barbara’s Independent, Student Run Newspaper
2013-05-08

Carissa Quiambao

William Zhou / Daily Nexus

Award-winning actress and playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni performed her one-woman play, “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval” at the UCSB Multicultural Center Theater yesterday evening.

DiGiovanni, who has appeared in the Academy Award-winning film “Argo,” is the co-creator and co-host of award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat and a co-founder and co-producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival.

Her solo performance, “One Drop of Love,” co-produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chay Carter, begins with DiGiovanni counting the number of “whites” and “blacks” in the audience in a portrayal of a United States Census Bureau employee in 1790, then transitions into her present-day narrative meeting her husband and getting married in 2006, only to have her father decline attending her wedding…

…DiGiovanni alternates between scenes of racial categorization by the U.S. Census Bureau in the late 1700s and her personal narrative about growing up as a multiracial youth in cities across the United States and in West and East Africa. Using filmed images, photographs and animation, she explains the development of “race” in the U.S. and how it affected her identity and her relationship with her black, Jamaican father.

Over the course of the play, DiGiovanni explores her family history in order to reconstruct her racial identity and confront her father about his absence at her wedding. She said this process gave her insight into her heritage and ultimately allowed her to feel more comfortable with her personal identity.

“Today, especially having done this and reconnected with my dad, I feel stronger in my black identity as well as in my mixed identity,” DiGiovanni said. “I feel stronger, and I feel so much more relaxed about it. Unfortunately, it took a long time, and it might take you guys a long time, but just know that you will feel comfortable at some point. I think the sooner we can all get there, it will really help in terms of looking at racism.”…

Read the entire article here.

A German doctor [Johann Friedrich Blumenbach] in 1776 divided the human species into five races. Today, nearly two and a half centuries later, these are the same five races into which the U.S. Census divides the American population, making America the only country in the world firmly wedded to an eighteenth-century racial taxonomy. Embedded in this science were theories of a racial hierarchy: there were not just different races but superior and inferior races. American politics and policy held onto this assumption for nearly two centuries.

Kenneth Prewitt, What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 8.

State of Race 2013: Presentation on the Demographics of Race

The Aspen Institute
Washington, D.C.
2013-04-24

Presenter:

Paul Taylor, Executive Vice-President and Director of Social and Demographic Trends Project
Pew Research Center

The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project

New York University Press
May 2013
303 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814790687

Kelly E. Happe, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Women’s Studies
University of Georgia

In 2000, the National Human Genome Research Institute announced the completion of a “draft” of the human genome, the sequence information of nearly all 3 billion base pairs of DNA. Since then, interest in the hereditary basis of disease has increased considerably. In The Material Gene, Kelly E. Happe considers the broad implications of this development by treating “heredity” as both a scientific and political concept. Beginning with the argument that eugenics was an ideological project that recast the problems of industrialization as pathologies of gender, race, and class, the book traces the legacy of this ideology in contemporary practices of genomics. Delving into the discrete and often obscure epistemologies and discursive practices of genomic scientists, Happe maps the ways in which the hereditarian body, one that is also normatively gendered and racialized, is the new site whereby economic injustice, environmental pollution, racism, and sexism are implicitly reinterpreted as pathologies of genes and by extension, the bodies they inhabit. Comparing genomic approaches to medicine and public health with discourses of epidemiology, social movements, and humanistic theories of the body and society, The Material Gene reworks our common assumption of what might count as effective, just, and socially transformative notions of health and disease.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Ideology and the New Rhetoric of Genomics
• 2. Heredity as Ideology: Situating Genomics Historically
• 3. Genomics and the Reproductive Body
• 4. Genomics and the Racial Body
• 5. Genomics and the Polluted Body
• 6. Toward a Biosociality without Genes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

Counting The People

San Francisco Call
Sunday, 1890-06-01
page 6, column 7
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Some of the Inquires to Be Made by the Census Enumerators in June

The eleventh census of the United States will be taken during the month of June. The census enumerators will begin their work on to-morrow, and will visit every house and ask questions concerning every person and every family in the United States. The questions that will be asked call for the name of every person residing in the United States on the first day of June, with their sex and age, and whether white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, or Chinese, Japanese or Indian. Inquiry will be made also of every person as to whether they are single, married, widowed or divorced and, if married, whether married during the year. The place of birth of every person, and the place of birth of the father and mother of each person, will also be called for, as well as a statement as to the profession, trade or occupation followed and the number of months unemployed during the census year. For all persons 10 years of age or over a return must be made by the enumerator as to the number able to read and write, and also the number who can speak English. For those who cannot speak English the particular language or dialect spoken by them in will be ascertained. For children of school age, also, the number of months they attended school will be recorded by the census enumerators. In the case of mothers an inquiry will be made as to the number of children they have had, and the number of these children living at the present time. This inquiry is to be made of all women who are or have been married, including all who are widows or have been divorced. Foreign-born males of adult age, that is, 21 years of age or over, will be asked as to the number of years they have been in the United States, and whether they are naturalized or have taken, out naturalization papers. Of the head of each family visited the question will be asked as to the number of persons in the family, and whether his home is owned or hired; also, if owned, whether the home is free from mortgage incumbrance. If the head of the family is a farmer, similar inquiries will be made concerning the ownership of the farm. In addition to these inquiries, all of which are made on the population schedule, the law under which the census is taken makes provision for special inquiries concerning such of the population as may be mentally or physically defective in any respect, that is insane, feeble-minded, deaf, blind, or crippled, or who may be temporarily disabled by sickness, disease, or accident at the time of the enumerator’s visit. Certain special inquiries will also be made concerning inmates of prisons and reformatories and of charitable and benevolent institutions. Besides this, a statement will be called for concerning all persons who have died during the census year, giving their name, age, sex, occupation and cause of death.

This official count of the people comes but once in ten years, and every family and every person should consider it to be a duty to answer the questions of the census enumerators willingly and promptly, so that definite and accurate information may be gained concerning the 65,000,000 people living within the bounds of this great country.