Mixed Race Studies

Fifteen Projects Selected for Tribeca Film Institute All Access Grants

Filmaker
2015-03-19

Scott Macaulay, Editor-in-chief

Fifteen works — scripted, documentary and interactive — were selected today for the Tribeca Film Institute‘s All Access program, which offers grant monies and other non-monetary support to projects by creators from statistically underrepresented communities. The projects were chosen from a submission pool of 710 entries. In addition to the 15 projects, two filmmakers from the LGBT community were chosen to take part in TFI Network Market, a one-on-one industry meeting forum, with their feature films. They are Ingrid Jungermann, a 25 New Face appearing with her project Women Who Kill, and Hernando Bansuelo, with Martinez, CA.

The complete list of selected projects, from the press release, is below…

… So Young So Pretty So White: Directed by Chanelle Aponte Pearson and Terence Nance; produced by Yaba Blay and Michelle Serieux. Weaving together the lives of several compelling men and women from across the globe, the film is a window into the world of skin bleaching, unveiling what drives people to lighten their skin and the complex factors that make it difficult to stop…

Read the entire article here.

New Orleans Loving Festival

2015-03-21

The New Orleans Loving Festival™ is a Multiracial Community Celebration and Film Festival that challenges racism through outreach and education. The “Loving Festival” was inspired by the actions of a Hammond, Louisiana Justice of the Peace who refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple in 2009.

The festival is an important community platform for showcasing films and other creative works that explore racial stereotypes and inspire people to work together for racial justice.

The Loving Festival is modeled after Loving Day multicultural celebrations across the country that organize people to fight racial prejudice through education and build multicultural community. The Loving Festival also honors the legacy of Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple whose 1967 landmark civil rights lawsuit “Loving v. Virginia” ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

For more information, visit the website or the Facebook page.

Scholar’s debut novel ties black, Native-American history

The Detroit Free Press
2015-03-22

Cassandra Spratling

Tiya Miles got it honest.

Straight from her grandmother’s garden. That knack for telling stories that pull at your heartstrings.

“I’m one of those people who had a storytelling grandma,” says Miles. “We’d be in the garden or snapping peas on the porch and my grandma would be telling stories, about life in Mississippi, about how the family lost their farm to a white man, about how they came up North on a train. Those stories riveted me and they shaped me.

“If my grandmother had had my life, she would have won three MacArthur Fellowships,” Miles says of her grandmother, the late Alice King.

But it was Miles, 45, who was granted a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2011, and it was that award that gave her the shot of confidence she needed to up her game and write her first novel, which will be released next month.

Friends and coworkers at the University of Michigan are hosting a book launch party for “the Cherokee Rose” (John F. Blair, $26.95) Tuesday…

…Not that she doesn’t greatly appreciate the fellowship that annually doles out a ton of money to selected people in a variety of areas so that they can pursue their areas of interest, unencumbered by money woes.

Without it, she doubts she would have completed “the Cherokee Rose,” a novel that uses three modern day women to take readers on a haunting, sometimes horrific, but redemptive journey to a little-known past on a Southern plantation where Native-American and African-American lives were intertwined. In the process, the women make unexpected connections to one another and others…

Read the entire article here.

The Cherokee Rose: A Novel Of Gardens & Ghosts

John F. Blair
2015-04-07
264 pages
6×9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-89587-635-5

Tiya Miles, Elsa Barkley Brown Collegiate Professor of African American Women’s History
University of Michigan

Written by an award-winning historian and recipient of a recent MacArthur “Genius Grant,” The Cherokee Rose explores territory reminiscent of the bestselling and beloved works of Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and Louise Erdrich. Now, Tiya Miles’s luminous but highly accessible novel examines a little-known aspect of America’s past—slaveholding by Southern Creeks and Cherokees—and its legacy in the lives of three young women who are drawn to the Georgia plantation where scenes of extreme cruelty and equally extraordinary compassion once played out.

Based on the author’s in-depth and award-winning research into archival sources at the Chief Vann House Historic Site in Chatsworth, Georgia, and the Moravian mission sponsored there in the early 1800s, Miles has blended this fascinating history with a contemporary cast of engaging and memorable characters, including Jinx, the free-spirited historian exploring her tribe’s complicated racial history; Ruth, whose mother sought refuge from a troubled marriage in her beloved garden and the cosmetic empire she built from its bounty; Cheyenne, the Southern black debutante seeking to connect with a meaningful personal history; and, hovering above them all, the spirit of long-gone Mary Ann Battis, a young woman suspected of burning a mission to the ground and then disappearing from tribal records. Together, the women’s discoveries about the secrets of the Cherokee plantation trace their attempts to connect with the strong spirits of the past and reconcile the conflicts in their own lives.

Miss Universe Japan — spectacle, race, and dreams

Grits and Sushi: my musings on okinawa, race, militarization, and blackness
2015-03-19

Mitzi Uehara Carter

The newly crowned Miss Universe Japan is Blackanese. No, she’s Japanese. No, she’s Haafu. Multiracial? Mixed? Japanese enough to represent Japan in a silly beauty contest? Ariana Miyamoto is from Nagasaki, Japan and her win has whipped up both excitement and disdain. The issue of representation has emerged yet again for those anxious about the nation’s performance on the global beauty stage. National beauty pageants are always a site where race and gender intersect in messy ways and the spectacle of “national authentic beauty” in international pageants can be even more convoluted. Miyamoto’s racial difference has sparked a series of interesting questions about how to identify “Japaneseness” through the body of women.

Weather you’re a pageant supporter or not, you can’t ignore how potent the social commentary these kinds of wins can be in everyday discourse. A careful analysis can tell us more about the framing of race in mainstream Japanese and transnational media circuits. While people outside Japan seem to be generally fascinated by the fact that this Japanese woman with her obvious African ancestry has been named “Ms. Universe Japan,” the commentary in Japanese social media is a bit more varied and well, echoes some made in the US, when a New Yorker of Indian descent, Nina Davaluri, won the Ms. America pageant in 2013…

Read the entire article here.