Mixed Race Studies

Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids

Chronicle Books
2010-03-17
264 pages
7 x 7 in; 127 color photographs
ISBN 9780811874083
ISBN10 0811874087

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Foreword by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng

Afterword by Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian)

Mixed — From beloved writer and artist Kip Fulbeck, author of Part Asian, 100% Hapa, this timely collection of portraits celebrates the faces and voices of mixed-race children. At a time when 7 million people in the U.S. alone identify as belonging to more than one race, interest in issues of multiracial identity is rapidly growing. Overflowing with uplifting elements—including charming images, handwritten statements from the children, first-person text from their parents, a foreword by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng (President Obama‘s sister), and an afterword by international star Cher (who is part Cherokee)—this volume is an inspiring vision of the future.

Visit the official website at www.MixedKids.com.

Interview with Ngozi Onwurah

African Women in Cinema
African Literature Association Conference
April 1997
East Lansing, Michigan

Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,  2000.

In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.  You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.

As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats.  Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that’s the priority at that particular event.  Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker.  Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.

As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania.  The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make the films for are different.  So, in terms of who I am on a professional level, it gets very complicated.

It is less complicated on a personal level.  On a personal level, I know who I am; I know where I am from.  But in terms of talking about it, you cannot lump together a woman who lives in London, who gets funding from the BBC to make films, with someone who is living in Nigeria, where literally the budgets, the facilities, everything, would be completely different in terms of how she has to work.  So it gets complicated and sometimes I don’t think there is enough differential made between black people or people of African descent working outside of Africa and people of African descent working in Africa.  It is two different experiences.

In terms of how you bring your identity into your work, would you say that your work often centers around being of mixed race within the context of being British as well as Nigerian?

The fact that I have a white mother and a black father is essential to my identity.  Obviously, it gives me a unique perspective politically.  Politically I am black; emotionally I’m black.  But once you say that “unequivocally, I’m black,” there are specifics that come out of the fact that I have a white mother and a black father and that I lived half my childhood in Africa and half my childhood in an all-white neighborhood in Newcastle in England, that give me a specific viewpoint on everything I see.

On another level, there are issues around a kind of polarization, especially in America, but also in England, though nowhere near to the extent as in America: The two races are incredibly polarized in America, there’s black and there’s white and they seem to very rarely mix.  They seem to very rarely live in the same neighborhoods, and that’s not the case in England.

If I had to choose…if someone says to me, choose…if there was a war between black people and white people and someone says choose who you are going to shoot, obviously I’d go over to the black side, but I don’t particularly want my mother to be my enemy and I think that informs a lot of what I do.  Basically, the woman, the person who has loved me most in my life—who has loved me more than Malcolm X, who has loved me more than Mandela, has loved me more than any person on the face of this earth—is my mother; second my grandmother.  These are two white women.  These are the people who have formed me.  And yet I am completely removed from them culturally and politically, there is a whole world between us.  This is a strange place to be.  It informs everything you do basically.

In the context of African cinema, how do you situate yourself as a filmmaker in terms of being African, in terms of being black British?  You talk about different hats, I had not before necessarily associated you as an African woman filmmaker, I am familiar with you more as a black British filmmaker.  A lot of your work appears to address your experiences as a black British, as a mixed-race woman, where, as the director of Monday’s Girls, you are viewed as an African woman filmmaker.

It’s more complicated than that.

Could you talk about these complicated identities?

It is incredibly complicated.  All I can say is that my whole life has been a training ground to live this life.  Basically, since I came out of my mother’s womb it’s been a chameleon situation for me.  It’s much more complicated than saying I have a lot of hats I wear.  I have a lot of hats I have to wear but I wear them all simultaneously…

Read the entire interview here.

A Knock Out: A film by Tessa Boerman and Samuel Reiziger

Women Make Movies
Netherlands, 2004
53 minutes
Color, VHS/DVD
Subtitled
Order No. W05882

Boxing champion Michele Aboro grew up in South London, where life for a girl was never easy, let alone for a mixed-race lesbian girl. Thanks to her tenacious spirit and an uncanny talent for combat sports, she put her difficult past behind her and managed to sign a contract with the biggest boxing promoter in Europe. She won all 21 fights, 18 of them with a knockout – an exceptional achievement in women’s boxing. But despite her spectacular record in the ring, her career came to a sudden halt when her promoter broke her contract under the belief that she was not “promotable.”

Refusing to vamp up her image and pose naked in magazines, this undefeated world champion was abandoned by an industry more interested in selling sex than sport. A Knock Out interweaves Aboro’s personal story with interviews with boxers whose wild success strikes a painful contrast with Aboro’s struggles. Searching for logic behind Aboro’s case, this poignant documentary captures a universal story of fighting for one’s identity and offers a probing look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the increased commercialization of women’s sports.

Coffee Colored Children: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

Women Make Movies
England, 1988
23 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm/DVD
Order No. W99160

• National Black Programming Consortium, Prized Pieces
• San Francisco Film Festival, Golden Gate Award

This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage. Suffering the aggression of racial harassment, a young girl and her brother attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. Starkly emotional and visually compelling, this semi-autobiographical testimony to the profound internalized effects of racism and the struggle for self-definition and pride is a powerful catalyst for discussion.

The work opens with a video essay showing adults and children of many ethnicities interacting harmoniously to an upbeat and soulful song with a chorus about “coffee-colored people.” Through narration by her and her brother and dramatization, Onwurah relays incidents from her own childhood. She recounts the brutal and racist vandalization of her apartment. In reenactments, she is seen making up her face with white makeup and scrubbing her body in the bathtub with chemical abrasives. At the close of the piece, she and her brother stand in front of a fire, burning symbolic mementos of their pain and confusion over their own physical identities. “Melting pot,” she asks, “or incinerator?” The work is approximately 16 and one-half minutes long.

Director:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Producers:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

Editor:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Performers:
Onwurah, Madge
McKay, Haley
McKay, Michael
McKay, Anette
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

IC Documentarians: Incongruities Investigator – Nisma Zaman

Ithica College Quarterly
2006/4

Mbeti Hyess

Nisma Zaman ’92 solidified her passion for documentary filmmaking at IC, where she began work on a short 16mm film exploring mixed-race identities. Beyond Black and White went on to debut at the Asian American International Film Festival in 1995 and remains in distribution with Women Make Movies.

After graduating, Zaman began a four-year stint at the New York Center for Visual History, a nonprofit arts and culture documentary organization, where she worked on a variety of productions including the PBS series American Cinema. Simultaneously she moonlighted on the postproduction of Jennifer Fox’s acclaimed film series American Love Story, following the lives of an interracial family. In 1996 Zaman served as a production coordinator on Walk This Way, a program exploring children’s experiences of race and difference for USA Network’s “Erase the Hate” campaign. This provided a perfect segue into her ever-increasing role on Nickelodeon’s Little Bill, a 52-episode digital animation series based on Bill Cosby’s children’s books, for which she won an Emmy as a coordinating producer…

Read the entire article here.

…Onwurah’s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother’s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah’s comment on “a world that sees only in black and white” is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film is any indication). But on a fundamental level, Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful remains an unusual example of a film directed by a woman of white-black racial heritage, which centralizes the consciousness of the mixed-race identity. The film delivers a rare message by encouraging viewers to challenge ethnic absolutism and essentialist codes of gender. To borrow an appropriate quotation from Françoise Lionnet, The Body Beautiful effectively “subverts] all binary modes of thought by privileging (more or less explicitly) the intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and Manichean categories collapse into each other.” And it is precisely where binaries and essentialist codes of identity are subverted that the process of identification becomes constructive, rather than a site for problematic exclusion, inclusion, and marginalization.

Diana Adesola Mafe. “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2008, Volume 29, Number 1, pages 37-50.

Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Number 1 (2008)
pages 37-50
E-ISSN: 1536-0334 Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0004

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse.

Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled-the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”21 wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned.

Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautifuloperates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.” And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences.

Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost. . . but not quite” the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity.

Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model. But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”

Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned…

Read the entire article here.

Census snapshots: An evolving portrait

Chicago Tribune
2010-03-14

Oscar Avila, Tribune reporter

Dahleen Glanton, Tribune reporter

Multiracial, gay and immigrant Americans question whether 2010 form captures country’s fast-changing makeup

Look in the mirror and what do you see?

When the census form arrives in mailboxes this week, the complex answers to that question will help paint America’s evolving portrait, with repercussions for a decade and beyond.

For most people, the census will be a simple 10-minute process. For others in this nation of Barack Obama, Jessica Alba, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Apolo Ohno and Joakim Noah , questions of mixed race and ethnicity will prompt soul-searching over how to categorize themselves among a small but growing minority in the national fabric.

The census is a montage of self-portraits that will detail the ways a nation of nearly 309 million has changed since 2000, including migration, family size and housing patterns. While that data is easier to quantify, critics say a rote list of boxes and checkmarks can’t adequately reflect all the racial and ethnic transformations…

On Chicago’s South Side, the daughter of a black father and white mother will check both. Her brother will check black. Their children will write in “mixed” or “biracial.”

A Brazilian immigrant will mark a box that says Hispanic, though she doesn’t accept the label. A woman from Jordan won’t check Asian, though she is. A man born to a Japanese mother and white father considers himself white only at census time.

Another respondent may check four racial boxes like the multi-ethnic Woods, who invented his own identifier: “cablinasian,” a mix of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. Obama jokingly labeled himself a “mutt,” but he won’t find that box on the form…

…”The lesson is that, like reality, like our lives, census data are messy,” said Jorge Chapa, a University of Illinois professor who has consulted for the Census Bureau. “But the messiness does reflect the growing diversity and our complexity as a people. It’s closer to the truth.”…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation Facts […From 1879]

Daily British Colonist
Vicoria, British Columbia
1879-10-07
21st Year
Page 1, 2nd Column

David W. Higgins, Editor and Proprietor

The child of colored parents of different tints, such as quadroon and mulatto, or mulatto and black, will be nearer to the tint of the darker parent.  If both parents of the same color, the child will be a shade darker, and singularly enough, the second child will be darker than the first, the third darker than the second, and so on to the last. In other words, a colored community, left to itself, is fatally destined to return to the original African black after a limited number of generations.  Thus, while each alliance with an individual of pure Caucasian blood brings the negro a step nearer to the white standard, the reverse is the case the moment the Caucasian element is withheld, and the color retrogrades from light to dark…

Continue reading the “facts” in this article here.

My People Will Sleep for One Hundred Years: Story of a Métis Self

University of Victoria
2004
106 pages

Sylvia Rae Cottell, B.F.A.
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies at the University of Victoria.

“My people will sleep for one hundred years when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.”
Louis Riel

As a result of the current political debate that surrounds the definition of Métis, the issue of Métis identity on both community and individual levels is often challenged in a public forum. Metis people outside of the areas considered the main hubs of Metis culture are likely to be faced with a myriad of different factors that impact their identity, including lack of community connections and limited contact with Métis cultural influences. There is a need to openly voice the diverse experiences of being Métis in order to affirm the experiences of many Métis people. This autoethnographic study aims to provide an account of an experience of being Métis and to salvage a sense of identity after many generations of assimilation. Autoethnography provides the freedom necessary for the representation of cultural values that are beyond the traditional assumptions of academic discourse (Spry, 2001) and aims to engage the reader on an emotional level. A purpose of this study is to validate the experience of many Métis readers and to enhance the level of culturally relevant practice provided to Métis individuals and communities by counsellors.

Read the entire thesis here.