Mixed Race Studies

#262: Researching and Publishing on Multiracial Topics

The 28th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE)
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
2015-05-26 through 2015-05-30

Wednesday, 2015-05-27, 15:30-17:30 EDT (Local Time)
Columbia 3, Terrace Level

From the politics of labeling and counting mixed race students in research, to the interactions with editors who might not care about multiraciality, this session explores key issues related to researching and publishing on multiracial topics. Join several panelists from various fields in and outside of academia, as they share their experiences with various aspects of the research and publishing enterprise. From developing their own ideas for projects and conducting research, to writing for peer-reviewed journals and even turning the dissertation into a book, the panelists have a wealth of knowledge and expertise related to researching and publishing. They will share lessons learned along the way in their various roles as researchers, authors, editors, and most importantly, readers that can help others move their own work forward. Moreover, this session allows for the discussion of not only the general challenges of the research and publishing process, but also what happens when you add the complexities of multiraciality. Depending on contexts, multiracial topics can at times be viewed as too controversial or unworthy of our scholarly attention. Without conducting innovative research and disseminating new knowledge, there will continue to be limited/limiting discourses on mixed race, setting up dangers of a “single story” to encompass all experiences of such a diverse population. Publishing can be used as a way to open up new lines of inquiry, challenge narrow framings, and insist upon anti-racist approaches to research and practice. It also allows us to use various approaches to reach multiple audiences (e.g., scholarly, popular, student, literary). By exposing some of these issues, participants will have the opportunity to engage in critical conversations and move toward developing their own best practices for researching and publishing on multiraciality.

Presenters

Marc Johnston, Assistant Professor
Ohio State University

Kristen Renn, Professor of Higher, Adult, & Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

Lawrence-Minh Davis, Director
The Asian American Literary Review, Inc., College Park, Maryland

Steven Riley, Founder/Creator
MixedRaceStudies.org, Silver Spring, Maryland

Tony Williams’ “Wilderness” and Mixed-Race Identity through Jazz

Soundscapes and Such: Critical Thoughts on Sonic Subjects
2015-05-27

Shawn M. Higgins
University of Connecticut

Tony Williams (source: Wikipedia)

Why do song writers choose the song titles they do? Perhaps Herbie Hancock’s 1980 track “4 A.M.” was recorded at that exact time – or maybe finished then? The song isn’t sleepy and lethargic as I might connotatively connect with the before-dawn hour, but jazz musicians are infamously night owls, and the song’s rhythm suggests this might be the funkiest, most active hour of the cycle. The title of John Coltrane’s 1967 song “Stellar Regions”, through the frenzied, echoing cymbal work of Rashied Ali and Coltrane’s trilling, screaming saxophone, could serve in a Romantic sense to invoke feelings of a paean to the heavens. The listeners, upon closing their eyes, are sonically shot into space and flung around the cosmos through the combination of music and such a song title. And of course, one of Duke Ellington’s most famous songs, which is in turn an absolute standard of jazz today, was given a title by the composer Billy Strayhorn after Duke gave him directions to his house and told him to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” None of these songs at the time of their composure had any lyrics to support these titles either in a refrain or in any thematic way. Rather, the listener is encouraged to interpret the sounds alongside the title or through the title. What happens in this exchange between artist, product, and consumer is my primary interest, and I would like to point to one artist in particular who used his song titles as a conscious way of addressing his newly discovered mixed-race identity.

Tony Williams, the legendary jazz drummer who is credited with inventing the “blast beat” and who called legends like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and John McLaughlin his musical partners, candidly explained in a 1995 BET interview a recent revelation in his life. Williams had discovered at the age of roughly forty-nine that he was of a racially mixed ancestry – he was phenotypically African American but also of Chinese and Portuguese background…

Read the entire article here.

The Invention of Hispanics

Latino USA
2015-05-22

Hosts:

Marlon Bishop, Producer

Camilo Vargas, Producer

Guest:

G. Cristina Mora, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Before 1970, the US Census Bureau classified Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as whites. Each community of Latin American origin would go by their nationality and by the region where they lived in the United States. But all that changed in the seventies, as activists began lobbying the US Census Bureau to create a broad, national category that included all these communities. The result was the creation of the term “Hispanic”, first introduced in the US Census in 1970.

Then it was up to Spanish-language media to get the word out. The network that would later become Univision released this series of ads calling on “Hispanics” to fill out the 1980 Census. The ads feature “Hispanic” sports stars and… Big Bird:…

By the 1990s, Univision was creating the images and sounds associated to Hispanics in the US. The 1990 Census ads feature the likes of Tito Puente and Celia Cruz telling Hispanics to fill out el censo:…

Read the preview here. Listen to the story here.

On The Cherokee Rose, Historical Fiction, and Silences in the Archives

Process: a blog for american history
2015-05-26

Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

Martha S. Jones

Martha S. Jones is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan on the faculties in Afroamerican and African studies, history, and law. She is also a codirector of the university’s Program in Race, Law, and History. The author of the forthcoming Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), she is at work on a new book entitled “Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: Slavery and Law after the Haitian Revolution.” She is also an OAH Distinguished Lecturer.

The Cherokee Rose, the debut novel by historian Tiya Miles, caught me in the middle of a longstanding argument. I had pre-ordered the book from its publisher John F. Blair, and so it arrived unexpectedly, as if unsummoned. It was March, a busy moment in the term. Still, I stole time that Saturday, reading it nearly cover-to-cover in one sitting. I left the last chapter until the next day, just to savor the experience. Miles is my colleague at the University of Michigan, and that hints at why I’d let my email pile up just to read a work of fiction. Generally, I’m the sort that lets a stack of books accumulate for later summer reading. But there was more. As I said, I was trying to settle an argument and thought The Cherokee Rose might help.

Many of us know Miles for her award-winning works of history: Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family (University of California Press, 2006), The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (also coming from UNC Press this fall). Miles’ insight into the intimate dynamics of slavery at the crossroads of Native American and African American experience has won her professional accolades and an eager readership. In this sense, while The Cherokee Rose is fiction, it is no sharp departure. Miles builds upon what she had already taught us, including her exploration of Georgia’s Chief Vann House, to provide a new vantage point from which to explain the past…

Read the entire review here.

Novelist Mat Johnson Explores The ‘Optical Illusion’ Of Being Biracial

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2015-05-24

Growing up in Philadelphia, Mat Johnson lived mostly with his mother in a black neighborhood. The son of an African-American mother and an Irish-American father, his skin was so light that he might have passed for white. But being biracial meant only one thing back in the ’70s: “Um, it meant: black,” Johnson says with a laugh. “There wasn’t a lot of ambiguity there. I didn’t hear the world biracial or didn’t think of myself as biracial. And when I did hear that, I reacted to it defensively. I thought it was just black people of mixed heritage who were just trying to run away from blackness.”

Johnson was born three years after Loving Day — the historic 1967 Supreme Court decision which made interracial marriage legal. His new novel, Loving Day, is a funny, sometimes absurd look at what it means to be mixed race in this country.

These days, Johnson has a more nuanced way to describe his racial identity. He says he is a mixed person of African-American descent. But he also uses another, more loaded word, to describe himself: mulatto…

Read the entire article here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.