Mixed Race Studies

“War Baby/Love Child~Capturing the Artistry of Mixed Identity

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-08-07, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Born in Riverside, California in 1973 to an Okinawan father from Hawai’i and a Spanish-Basque/Anglo mother, Laura Kina was raised in Poulsbo, WA, a small Norwegian town in the Pacific Northwest, and currently lives and works in a Jewish and South Asian neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. She is a visual artist, curator, and author whose research is focused on Asian American and mixed race identities and history. Kina is a Vincent de Paul associate professor of Art, Media, & Design at DePaul University and the coeditor, along with Wei Ming Dariotis, of War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013).

Laura Kina is a cofounder of the DePaul biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies conference and cofounder and co-managing editor of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies. She has exhibited her artwork across the U.S. and internationally including at the Chicago Cultural Center, India Habitat Centre, Nehuru Art Centre, Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, the Rose Art Museum, and the Spertus Museum.

Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis have curated an exhibition “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” which features the work of 19 contemporary artists. It debuted at the DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago this past spring and will open up tomorrow night, April 8, 2013 at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle and will run through January 19, 2014.

For more information, click here.

Fannie’s legacy: How a mixed-race couple settled early Lake Worth

The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Florida
2013-08-06
pages D4-D5

Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

They thrived until Jim Crow laws forced them from the town.

Before there was Lake Worth, there was a town called Jewell.

It wasn’t a big town — the initial population consisted of 13 people — but a town nonetheless, with those people mostly engaged in wrenching a living out of boggy soil, with a post office founded and manned by a black woman named Fannie James.

There are no extant photos of Fannie, or, for I that matter, of her husband Samuel, even though Fannie lived until 1915. But their immeasurable importance is attested to by the comments of their peers m the Jewell community as well as in the historical record. Historian Ted Brownstein reconstructs both of these lives and the town they helped found In “Pioneers of
Jewel,” recently published to celebrate the centennial of Lake Worth.

It’s a fascinating excavation of the past made possibly mainly by the profusion of on line databases that have become available in the last 20 years.

“The Post ran some articles about Fannie and Samuel in 1999, which is not that long ago,” says Brownstein. “At that time, It wasn’t known where they came from, whether they were black, Seminoles, or mulattos. There was nothing about their histories before they arrived at the Lake…

…Sam and Fannie were lightskinned, which probably worked to their advantage Sam’s death certificate states that his mother was Irish, more proof the early history of America was a place of fairly open intermarriage, far more than was acknowledged at the time, far, far more than was allowed In the 20th century, when the Jim Crow laws came down…

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Pioneers of Jewell: A Documentary History of Lake Worth’s Forgotten First Settlement (1885 – 1910)

Lake Worth Herald Publication
2013
254 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 098326094X; ISBN-13: 978-0983260943
11 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches

Ted Brownstein

A documentary history of Jewell, Florida, a lost community of everglades pioneers founded in 1885 by Samuel and Fannie James, an African American couple, believed to be former slaves. Jewell eventually grew into the City of Lake Worth, its earliest history largely forgotten.

Pioneers of Jewell rediscovers the world of Fannie and Samuel James in the context of their neighbors and the wider context of Race and Segregation in the aftermath of the American Civil War. For the first time, groundbreaking research reveals the flight of Fannie’s family from North Carolina to Ohio during the Civil War along the track of the Underground Railroad, and traces the Jameses’ trek back south through Tallahassee and Cocoa, Florida, before taking up a homestead on the western shore of Lake Worth. Once in South Florida, the Jameses overcame many of the hindrances of race in those troubled times, and became the nucleus of a vibrant, mostly white, farming community.

Meet Dr. Harry Stites, a well-known physician who gave up a successful medical practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to ‘rough it’ on the South Florida frontier. Meet Squire John C. Hoagland, the area’s first Justice of the Peace, who loved boating and spent much of his time sailing between Palm Beach and Jewell. Meet Michael Merkle, a hermit who lived an austere life in a lean-to west of Jewell, eating unseasoned fish and berries. Merkle, rumored to be a defrocked Catholic priest, was known to walk the pinewoods chanting in Latin when he thought no one was listening.

Relying upon primary historical sources, Pioneers of Jewell reveals:

• Bios of a dozen previously unknown Jewell pioneers.
• The dispute that challenged the Jameses’ land holdings.
• An in-depth look at the Jameses’ stunning financial success.
• Investigation of the Jameses’ slave background.
• The establishment of the Osborne Colored District.
• Klu Klux Klan activity in Lake Worth during the 1920s.
• The fate of Jewell and its pioneers.

BGHRA Convention 2013

Black German Heritage & Research Association
2013-05-15

We are pleased to announce the Third Annual International Convention of the Black German Heritage & Research Association to be held August 8-11, 2013 at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Maisha Eggers, Professor of Childhood and Diversity Studies at the University of Magdeburg, a screening of the 1952 film “Toxi” and presentations by guest artists Sharon Dodua Otoo and Sandrine Micossé-Aikins, editors of “The Little Book of Big Visions: How To Be an Artist and Revolutionize the World“.

For more information, click here. View the conference schedule here.

Rereading Pauline Johnson

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 46, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 45-61
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2012.0018

Carole Gerson, Professor of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

This essay argues for a broader appreciation of Pauline Johnson’s creative range and poetic accomplishment. Rereading her work in relation to some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s ideas about narrative and about home brings fresh perspectives to her writing and reception in relation to her reversal of the White masculine gaze in her representations of Native peoples, Canadian history, wilderness, and gender. Her first Euro-Canadian audience used her work to assist with their own indigenization and help them feel at home in Canada. Because most current readers construct Johnson as figure of resistance, concentrating on a small selection of her poetry on Native topics, they continue to ignore her poems that invoke a female voice to possess the wilderness, along with her innovative erotic verse that reinhabits the female body by empowering the female gaze.

Having written extensively about Pauline Johnson in the past—most recently in relation to celebrity (Gerson 2012)—I welcome the opportunity created by this collection of essays associated with the Grand River Forum to bring some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s observations about storytelling to bear on my current interest in returning approaches to Johnson. My goal is to bring fresh attention to the craft and range of her poetry and to the complexity of her reception. Chamberlin’s analysis of narrative as essential to human experience, however contradictory the stories on a given topic might seem, is amply borne out by the unusual life and career of Emily Pauline Johnson (1861-1913). The well-known part-Mohawk poet was closely associated with the Grand River region, where she honed her skills in canoeing and authorship, her talents converging in…

Disparity in Breast Cancer Between Black and White Women Can Be Eliminated by Regular Mammography Screening

Rush University Medical Center
News Release
2012-09-25

(CHICAGO) — Regular mammography screening can help narrow the breast cancer gap between black and white women, according to a retrospective study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in August.

Earlier studies have shown that black women in Chicago are more than twice as likely to die of breast cancer compared to white women. Black women with breast cancer reach the disease’s late stages more often than white women, and their tumors are more likely to be larger and more biologically aggressive.

But according to the study, when women of both races received regular breast cancer screening — a mammogram within two years of breast cancer diagnosis — there was no difference in the rate of how many of them presented in the disease’s later stages…

Read the entire news release here.