Mixed Race Studies

‘MOsley WOtta’ Transcends Boundaries Of Music, Poetry And Art

OPB News
Oregon Public Broadcasting
2011-12-30

David Nogueras, Central Oregon Correspondent
Bend, Oregon

Note from Steven F. Riley: I will be the co-host on the February 22, 2012 podcast of Mixed Chicks Chat with featured guest Jason Graham.

It’s been a good year for Bend’s MOsley WOtta.  The hip-hop group played shows around the state, opening for acts such as Ice Cube and Tricky.  The band plans to close out this year with a New Year’s Eve show in Bend. That’s where the band will unveil its third official release, titled Amalgum X. Bend isn’t typically thought of for it’s hip hop scene. But MOsley WOtta isn’t your typical hip hop group.

“No matter where you come from, what era you come from, there is some kind of music inside of hip hop that will grab you,” says Bend artist MOsley WOtta.

“Light skin, blue blood, gentlemen and ladies, girls and boys, this is that love, pain, grow, if you are living and breathing right now.  You know exactly what I’m talking about.” MOsley WOtta is the alter ego of 28 year old Jason Graham.  It’s also the band that Graham fronts…

…“I think he’s a classic artist, a classic creative brain.  You might meet artists and creative people who are introverted or socially awkward.  This is not that case,” says Salmon. Up on stage, Jason Graham is in his comfort zone.   But growing up biracial in the 1980 he says he’s always kind of felt as if he lived between worlds.  He was born in what he describes as a somewhat rough neighborhood in Chicago and moved to Bend at age 9.  These days he’s tough to miss.  He’s tall, lanky and exudes energy.   Graham says sometimes people don’t quite know what to make of him.

“Maybe people come up and they’re like so are you Mexican?  Are you Filipino?  Indian right?  That is just like with the music, I do see a total correlation there.  Between it’s like well it’s not exactly one thing.  And it never will be one thing, cause I’m not one thing,” says Graham…

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the audio here (00:04:54).

Ciphering Nations: Performing Identity in Brazil and the Caribbean
 
University of Minnesota
June 2011
197 pages

Naomi Pueo Wood, Assistant Professor of Spanish
The Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation explores the interaction of theories of hybridity, mestizaje, mestiçagem and popular culture representations of national identity in Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century. I examine a series of cultural products, including performance, film, and literature, and argue that using the four elements of Hip Hop culture—deejay, emcee, break, graffiti—as a lens for reading draws out the intra- American dialogues and foregrounds the Africanist aesthetic as it informs the formation of national identity in the Americas.

Hip Hop, rather than focus solely on its characteristic hybridity, calls attention to race and to a legacy of fighting racism. Instead of hiding behind miscegenation and aspirations of romanticized hybridity and mixing, it blatantly points out oppressions and introduces them into popular culture through its four components—thus reaching audiences through multiple modalities. Tropes of mestizaje or branqueamento—racial mixing/whitening—depoliticize blackness through official refusal to cite cultural contributions and emphasize instead a whitened blending. Hip Hop points blatantly to persistent social inequalities. Diverse and divergent in their political histories, the geographic and nationally bound sites that form the foci of this study are bound by their contentious relationships to the United States, an emphasis on the Africanist aesthetic, and a rich history of intertextual exchanges. Rather than look at individual nation formation and marginalized bodies’ performances of subversion, this study highlights the common tropes that link these nations and bodies and that privilege an alternative way of constructing history and understanding present day transnational bodies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Introduction: De-Ciphering
• Chapter 1: Ciphered Nations
• Chapter 2: Defining Nation from the Outside-In: Las Krudas and Célia Cruz
• Chapter 3: Brasileiras no Palco: Brazilian Women on Stage
• Chapter 4: Breaking Time: Sirena Selena and Fe en disfraz
• Conclusions: Re-Freaking
• Works Cited:

Read the entire dissertation here.

‘A Yellow-Ass Nigga’?: Hip Hop and the ‘Mixed-Race’ Experience

Intermix
Academic Papers
February 2010

Dr. Kevin Searle

Hip Hop has always engaged with the politics of ‘race’ and racism. From the Black Panther Party-inspired Marxism of acts such as The Coup and Immortal Technique, to the Nation of Islam-influenced stance of Public Enemy and Ice Cube, to the black feminism of Ursula Rucker and MeShell Ndgeocello, socially conscious emcees have approached the issues from a number of angles. In the context of this engagement with the politics of ‘race’ and racism, the topics of ‘mixed race’ and interracial relationships have often featured.

This article explores some of the lyrics about the ‘mixed-race’ experience in Hip Hop. It does not aim to provide an exhaustive list of songs which have engaged with issues of ‘mixed-race,’ but to serve as an introduction. The article is borne out of my longstanding interest in Hip Hop, and much of the research involved me consulting my ever-growing record collection, and songs which have come to my attention over the years.

Hip Hop provides the soundtrack to the lives of many ‘mixed-race’ youth and adults. The genre is perhaps more relevant to the ‘mixed-race’ experience than any other form of music. Charlie Owen (2001: 138) has noted how ‘mixed-race’ people constitute a relatively young population. This population has been at its largest, at a time when Hip Hop has taken its greatest share of record sales. However, as many emcees have pointed out, in rhymes which engage with such themes as the division of labour on slave-plantations in the American South, this does not in anyway mean that ‘mixed race’ people somehow constitute a ‘new racial group.’

The present article is structured into four main sections. The first engages with songs about the ‘mixed-race’ experience, the second looks at lyrics about interracial relationships, the third about colour/shade and the final part focuses on tracks about women and colour. It is perhaps worth noting that a number of artists, from different musical genres, have commented on all of these themes, prior to the dawn of Hip Hop in the 1970s.3 In his book On Racial Frontiers…, Gregory Stephens (1999: 170) argues that Bob Marley was, ‘a master of employing double-voiced lyrics,’ and Marley’s line: ‘I’m a rainbow too,’ on the track Sun is Shining constitutes a comment on the artists’ ‘biraciality.’ Nina Simone described a woman who was the product of interracial rape in her song Four Women. The blues artist, Big Bill Broonzy drew upon the African-American expression: If you’re white, you’re all right, If you’re brown stick around, if you’re black, get back’, in the song Black, Brown and White. And, socially conscious soul singer, Curtis Mayfield, admonished ‘high yellow girls’ in We the People who are Darker than Blue, additionally, as Mike Rugel (2007) shows, the theme of women and colour has also been present in a number of blues songs…

Read the entire article here.