Mixed Race Studies

Fanny Eaton: The Black Pre-Raphaelite Muse that Time Forgot

AnOther
2016-03-07

Shola von Reynolds

Walter Fryer Stocks, British, 1842–1915: Mrs. Fanny Eaton, ca. 1859 / Black, red, and white chalk on cream wove paper / 43.2 × 34.9 cm (17 × 13 3/4 in.) / Museum purchase, Surdna Fund / 2016-1 / Princeton University Art Museum

The enigmatic model made her way to London from Jamaica in the early 19th century to sit for the Pre-Raphaelites, and her legacy lives on in their impactful work

Who? Lizzie Siddal has long reigned supreme in the minds of historians, artists and writers as the embodiment of the artist’s muse. Her fellow Pre-Raphaelite models, such as Marie Spartali, Jane Morris or Maria Zambaco are less well known, but renewed attention has given many of these women a rightful place in art history beyond the typically limited conception of “the muse”. If you haven’t heard of Fanny Eaton, however, there would be meagre cause for surprise, though surprise there should be: little exists in the way of information about her, and until recent years all that remained was the series of paintings and drawings she sat for.

Fanny Eaton was a black Victorian Londoner and, for some time, painter’s model. Born in Jamaica in 1835, Eaton was the daughter of an ex-slave and, it is suspected, a white slave owner. She came to London in the 1840s and began modelling in her twenties. It has been discovered that she was working as a regular portrait model at the Royal Academy, which is potentially where she caught the attention of the many renowned painters of the era she sat for…

Read the etnire article here.

Florence Nightingale supporters in row over black rival’s new statue, claiming she is venerated based on ‘false achievements’

The Daily Mail
2016-06-20

Martin Robinson, UK Chief Reporter

• Mary Seacole set to have £500,000 statue unveiled at St Thomas, London
• But critics say that her legacy is hugely oversold for political reasons
• Florence Nightingale Society says statue is based on ‘false achievements’

Plans to give Britain’s most famous black nurse a statue have today been blasted by Florence Nightingale fans, who say it is a ‘history hoax’ because all she did was ‘sell wine and sandwiches’ in Crimea.

Mary Seacole is set to have a £500,000 bronze unveiled in her honour at St Thomas’ Hospital in London this month – the first public memorial to celebrate the ‘black pioneer nurse’.

It will be taller than Florence Nightingale’s statue in Pall Mall and Edith Cavell’s off Trafalgar Square.

And it will be unveiled this month at St Thomas Hospital where Nightingale founded her nursing school, and Seacole has no connection to whatsoever, critics say…

…Mary Seacole is regarded as our greatest black Briton, a woman who did more to advance the cause of nursing – and race relations – than almost any other individual.

On the bloody battlefields of the Crimea, she is said to have saved the lives of countless wounded soldiers, and nursed them back to health in a clinic she paid for out of her own pocket.

But some historians have long complained that she has become almost as famous as that other nursing heroine, Florence Nightingale…

…Born in Jamaica in 1805, she was the daughter of a white Scottish officer called Grant, and a Creole woman, from whom Mary learned her ‘nursing skills’. In her early 20s, Seacole married a Jamaican merchant called Edwin Seacole and travelled with him around the Caribbean, Central America and England until his death in 1844.

Seacole then set up a ‘hotel’ in the town of Cruces in Panama, where she is reputed to have treated cholera victims.

With the outbreak of the Crimean War later that year, Seacole was determined to offer her nursing services to the British, and, when she was turned down by the authorities, she paid her way to the peninsula out of her own pocket…

Read the entire article here.

Revealed: MP’s alleged killer ‘bought manual on how to make a handgun and bombs from a US far-right group and has links to neo-Nazi organisations going back decades’

The Daily Mail
London, England
2016-06-17

James Tozer, Chris Greenwood, Andy Dolan, and Claire Duffin For The Daily Mail
Richard Spillett, Stephanie Linning, and Lucy Crossley for MailOnline

• Detectives were last night questioning Thomas Mair over Jo Cox’s murder
• US civil rights group say their records show he bought far-Right books
• Claims the quiet loner had been recently released from psychiatric care
• Mair was brought up by his grandmother and lived in his childhood home
• Half-brother says Mair never expressed any ‘racist tendencies’, adding: ‘I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother. We got on well’

The man suspected of killing Labour MP Jo Cox previously bought a book on how to make a handgun, it was claimed this morning.

Thomas Mair has been described as a loner who was ‘socially isolated and disconnected from society’ as a result of long-term mental illness.

Detectives were last night questioning 52-year-old Thomas Mair, amid fears he was motivated by Mrs Cox’s political campaigning.

Documents obtained from a US far-right group show a 1999 receipt for a manual on how to build a homemade gun with Mr Mair’s name and address on the top…

…Duane St Louis, age 41, the suspect’s half-brother and Mary’s son with second husband Reginald St Louis, said Mair had obsessive compulsive disorder and cleaned himself with Brillo pads because he was ‘obsessed with his personal hygiene’.

Reginald, who is believed to be from Grenada, and Mary had married when Mair was around 16. The couple lived with Duane and Mair’s younger full brother Scott, while Mair stayed with his grandmother. Reginald died in the 1980s. It is not known if Mair’s father, named locally as James, is still alive.

Speaking from his home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, he added: ‘He’s never expressed any views about Britain, or politics or racist tendencies. I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother, we got on well. He never married. The only time I remember him having a girlfriend was as a young man, but a mate stole her off him. He said that put him off [women] for life.’…

Read the entire article here.

Report from The York Union: Stephen Woolfe MEP: The Futures of Britain and UKIP

The Yorker
2016-06-07

Jack Harvey, Editor/Editorial Director

Photo credit: James Hostford

For some voters, a mixed-race candidate for UKIP doesn’t quite add up. “UKIP? But they’re against immigrants, aren’t they?” one might say. This is not true, says Stephen Woolfe, the MEP for North West England and the party spokesman for Economic Affairs and Migration. UKIP is not against immigration nor the immigrants themselves.

Born in Manchester in 1967, Stephen Woolfe comes from a working-class family. When his parents’ relationship ended, he and his siblings were taken to live with his grandmother until his family could acquire a council house. The family slept in a single room and as a child Woolfe was washed in the kitchen sink. His mother worked in a biscuit factory, cleaned the local bookmaker’s and manned a shoe shop all at once to make ends meet. By his own admission, Woolfe didn’t have much, but his family ensured that he came away from his childhood in the possession of two distinct things: a determination to work hard and an education. “I was always being given books. We read; my mum would read to me at night.” Woolfe secured a scholarship at an independent school, St. Bede’s College and went on to study Law at Aberystwyth University. From his youth, Woolfe learned the value of hard work and the possibility to better oneself…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race author on the struggle of having to ‘pick a side’

The Voice
2016-06-05

Davina Hamilton, Entertainment Editor

LIFETIME OF LOVE: Gus and sister Chi-chi with their parents Michael and Margaret

Author Gus Nwanokwu on growing up with a Nigerian father and Irish mother in 1960s Britain

THE PRESSURE to ‘pick a side’, the struggle to find acceptance, and the sense of alienation are issues that have been addressed by many academics when examining the mixed race experience.

But rarely has the subject of mixed race identity been chronicled through literature, by authors who have lived the experience. Gus Nwanokwu seeks to fill this void with his new book, Black Shamrocks – a powerful memoir, in which he charts his experiences as a mixed race child in post-colonial England.

Growing up in London in the 1960s and 70s, Nwanokwu would often see the ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs hanging in the windows of rented accommodation. The experience was all the more poignant for the youngster, as he was born to an Irish mother and Nigerian father.

“My parents met at the Hammersmith Palais in 1955,” Nwanokwu explains. “Mum was collecting her coat as she was about to leave when my dad walked in. He was instantly smitten and persuaded her not to leave, but to accompany him to the dance floor. They stayed together forever after that point.”…

Read the entire article here.

Recovering the Afro-Metropolis Before Windrush

Christian John Høgsbjerg
University of Leeds

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 13, Issue 1 (The Caribbean Radical Tradition)
May 2016

Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015), 410 pp.

In Black London, Marc Matera’s wide-ranging historical overview of the small but significant African and Afro-Caribbean presence in London from the 1920s to the 1940s, we have an important work which can take its place proudly alongside classic works such as Peter Fryer’s Staying Power and complementing more recent works such as John Belchem’s study of “black Liverpool,” Before the Windrush. Synthesizing scholarship both old and new in a sophisticated manner with an impressive level of archival research undertaken over a decade, Matera provides a powerful, indeed unanswerable, rebuttal to all those who would persist in seeing the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 as the critical watershed marking the birth of “black British history”. The range of themes explored in Black London – political anticolonial agitation, social questions around interracial sex, imperial metropolitan cultural themes around British film-making and portrayals of Africa on the big screen, and the counter-cultures of resistance forged by black women and a host of musicians from across the African diaspora – mean that the work will appeal and be appreciated by not only historical specialists but also a wider public and popular audience…

…Matera registers in passing how the interracial relationships and marriages often resulting in such working class communities transgressed racial boundaries and upset imperialist sensibilities, noting for example that John Harris, who headed up the Committee for the Welfare of Africans in Europe, proposed to the Home Office in 1936 the gradual repatriation of black seafarers in Britain and suggested “steps might be found for raising the standard” of their mixed offspring “to that of the white races rather than leave them to drift down to that of the black” (210). Yet Matera’s work tells us little for example about the more general institutional racism suffered by this group of workers at the hands of the British state and the ship-owners (sometimes in collusion with the official National Union of Seamen), and perhaps more needed to be said about the “colour bar” that operated more widely across London (and Britain generally), for example in housing. Incidentally, it is noted that black actors such as Orlando Martins and Robert Adams survived by part-time work as wrestlers, but the role of black wrestlers as an aspect of wider inter-war multiracial working class culture might have been usefully developed (though I only am able to write this after recently hearing Gemma Romain give a fascinating paper on this very subject). Speaking of actors, though Matera does briefly discuss black theatre in Britain, I felt he could have pushed a little further in this direction, for example, building on the recent excellent work Black and Asian Theatre in Britain by Colin Chambers…

Read the entire review here.

Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century

University of California Press
May 2015
414 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520284296
Paperback ISBN: 9780520284302
E-Book ISBN: 9780520959903

Marc Matera, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

This vibrant history of London in the twentieth century reveals the city as a key site in the development of black internationalism and anticolonialism. Marc Matera shows the significant contributions of people of African descent to London’s rich social and cultural history, masterfully weaving together the stories of many famous historical figures and presenting their quests for personal, professional, and political recognition against the backdrop of a declining British Empire. A groundbreaking work of intellectual history, Black London will appeal to scholars and students in a variety of areas, including postcolonial history, the history of the African diaspora, urban studies, cultural studies, British studies, world history, black studies, and feminist studies.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Imperial and Atlantic Horizons of Black London
• 1. Afro-metropolis: Black Political and Cultural Associations in Interwar London
• 2. Black Internationalism and Empire in the 1930s
• 3. Black Feminist Internationalists
• 4. Sounds of Black London
• 5. Black Masculinity and Interracial Sex at the Heart of the Empire
• 6. Black Intellectuals and the Development of Colonial Studies in Britain
• 7. Pan-Africa in London, Empire Films, and the Imperial Imagination
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The half-Chinese children on growing up find little difficulty in obtaining work or in entering into marriage with the surrounding white population. The girls in particular are attractive and good-looking. On the other hand, the Anglo-negroid children when grown up do not easily get work or mix with the ordinary population.

Maurice Broody, “The Social Adjustment of Chinese Immigrants in Liverpool,” The Sociological Review, Volume 3, Issue 1 (July 1955) pages 65-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1955.tb01045.x.

Marvin Rees Becomes UK’s First Elected Black Mayor

The Voice
2016-05-14

Marc Wadsworth

‘I’m the descendant of Jamaican slaves. Now I’m mayor of Bristol,’ Rees tells The Voice

BRISTOL’S NEW mayor has not only changed the face of the city after winning a huge victory but is also promising a new and inclusive way of doing politics.

Marvin Rees, 44, told The Voice in an exclusive interview: “I’m really honoured and feel the weight of the challenge I’m taking on. It’s also very exciting. I’m pleased so many good people are coming forward, wanting to work collectively, which I think this job requires. It’s not messianic leadership. It’s about fostering collective leadership around shared priorities such as poverty eradication, building homes for people and tackling inequality.”

Rees, who grew up poor in the St Paul’s area of the city, has pledged to appoint an all-party cabinet that reflects how people voted and the city’s diversity.

In 2012 Rees unsuccessfully ran for mayor when the post was first created. He amassed a whopping 31,259 votes, losing to independent George Ferguson, a wealthy architect, by less than seven per cent.

This time Rees notched up just under 70,000 votes, almost 30,000 more than Ferguson…

Read the entire article here.

Marvin Rees’s triumph as mayor defies Bristol’s racist past

The Guardian
2016-05-08

Simon Woolley

Source: Marvin Rees

The descendant of enslaved Africans is now running a former slave city. His symbolic victory gives hope – and should not be forgotten

While much has been said, rightly so, about a Muslim now leading London, we must not lose sight of the symbolism and enormous significance of Marvin Rees being elected mayor of Bristol this weekend.

Rees, the working-class son of an English mother and Jamaican father, makes history as the first directly elected city mayor in Europe of African or Caribbean heritage.

And that’s important, because the city of Bristol and its governance cannot effectively be understood without seeing it, in part, through the prism of race…

Read the entire article here.