Mixed Race Studies

Other Tongues: Call for Submissions VOLUME 2

I Wonder As I Wonder
2019-09-16

Adebe DeRango-Adem

Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Again!)

Co-editors Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson are seeking submissions of writing and/or artwork for a follow-up anthology of work by and about mixed-race women, intended for publication by Inanna Publications in 2020-21.

Deadline for Submissions: SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

The purpose of this anthology is to explore the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century. The anthology will also serve as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, while investigating more general questions around what racial identity has come to mean today. We are inviting previously unpublished submissions that engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race…

…WHAT IS OTHER TONGUES?

The first edition of Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out was born from a desire to see a new and refreshing literature that could be at the forefront of mixed-race discourse and women’s studies, while providing a space for the creative expression of mixed-race women. Through an inspirational and provocative mix of visual art, literature, orature, creative non-fiction and academic analysis, Other Tongues chronicled the changes in social attitudes towards race, mixed-race, gender and identity, and the each of the contributors’ particular reactions to those attitudes.

The diversity of each woman’s story demonstrated the breadth and depth of the lived reality of the mixed experience for women in North America at that particular moment in time. In this way, the book became a snapshot of the North American racial terrain in the afterglow of the inauguration of the first mixed-race/Black American President—a pivotal point in history that many mistakenly labeled the dawning of a “post-racial” age….

For more information, click here.

Sense of Place with Minelle Mahtani – Adebe DeRango-Adem and George Elliot Clarke

Sense of Place with Minelle Mahtani
Roundhouse Radio 98.3 FM
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2017-02-27

Minelle Mahtani, Host and Associate Professor of Human Geography and Planning, and the Program in Journalism
University of Toronto, Scarborough

Minelle speaks with Canada’s current Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliot Clarke and poet and PhD student Adebe DeRango-Adem about the mentor-mentee relationship.

Listen to the interview (00:19:08) here.

A few minutes with … Adebe DeRango-Adem

Open Book
2017-02-21

Throughout my month here at open-book.ca I’ve been sharing my conversations with various members of the literary community. Our last conversation is with noted poet, Adebe DeRango-Adem. To learn more about her current collection, Terra Incognita please visit here or her Facebook page.

DS:
In the description for Terra Incognita, I noticed the phrase, “geography is fate.” Since I’ve moved to Canada, artists, authors, musicians and academics I’ve known from the black community have migrated to the US. As a person who has lived on both sides of the border, what is the fate of the black Canadian intellectual in the United States? What are the opportunities that can only be found there?

ADA:
I’m still busy building my audience/readership in United States, since most of my affinities/ties in the literary world have tended to be in Canada, more specifically in Toronto. The last few years have seen my life become a moment where art imitates life (imitates art). The publication of Terra Incognita coincided with a turn of events that left me in a relative state of exilic questioning, both in terms of my geographic displacement (being between cities, namely New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto), but moreover the turn of events that offered an unknown territory through which I had to find new ways to resolve to keep going. The one thing I will give credit to the United States for, in the literary sense, is the palpable & intimidating feeling you get from practically everyone you meet – a drive towards success. A lot of people want to be successful in United States & the states has a lot of successful people; as such, the hunter kind mentality rubs off even on the most humble of poets. I do see certain opportunities in the US coming my way, namely through the poets who I have either worked with – Ameri Baraka, Ann Waldman, Sonia Sanchez, Charles Bernstein, and the estate of Langston Hughes (The first poem I ever read on American soil was at the house, actually the living room, of Hughes’s home in Harlem) – or who I would like to work with at length – Claudia Rankine, Terrence Hayes, & about twenty talented writers of color. The way things are going these days for arts funding in the US is a bit precarious, so the word opportunity is largely a big question mark. However the general feeling of desire, and the willingness coupled with the ability to network and get out there, puts a lot of American poets at an advantage. It’s a mentality, modality of being/way of thinking, that can be used to walk through the fire & surge ahead with ones literary dreams…

Read the inter interview here.

Terra Incognita: Poems by Adebe DeRango-Adem

Inanna Publications
2015-05-25
80 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-77133-217-0

Adebe DeRango-Adem

Titled after the Latin term for “unknown land”—a cartographical expression referring to regions that have not yet been mapped or documented—Terra Incognita is a collection of poems that creatively explores various racial discourses and interracial crossings buried in history’s grand narratives. Set against the similarities as well as incongruities of the Canadian/American backdrop of race relations, Terra Incognita explores the cultural memory and legacy of those whose histories have been the site of erasure, and who have thus—riffing on the Heraclitus’s dictum that “geography is fate”—been forced to redraw themselves into the texts of history. Finally, Terra Incognita is a collection that delves into the malleable borders of identity and questions what it means to move physically and spiritually, for our bodies to arrive and depart, our souls to relocate and change their scope.

Adebe DeRango-Adem explores her identity in art and poetry

The Toronto Star
2016-02-26

Debra Black, Immigration Reporter

Adebe DeRango-Adem was recently hailed as a young Canadian author to watch by Canada’s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke. She is a poet and doctoral student in English literature at University of Pennsylvania.

Adebe DeRango-Adem was recently hailed as a young Canadian author to watch by Canada’s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke. She is a poet and doctoral student in English literature at University of Pennsylvania.

Adebe DeRango-Adem was recently hailed as a young Canadian author to watch by Canada’s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke. DeRango-Adem is a poet and doctoral student in English literature at University of Pennsylvania. Her latest work, Terra Incognita, a collection of poetry published last year, examines racial identity. The winner of the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005, she served as Toronto’s first junior poet laureate. She spoke to the Star about Black History Month and what it means to her, as well as the importance of exploring identity in art.

I’m wondering what your feelings are about the designation of Black History Month and what that means for you as a writer. Is it important?

A colleague of mine, Andrea Thompson, who is pretty well known in the poetry world, described my book as an excellent and complete mapping of racial topography in Canada. We’re still struggling with the notion of post-race world and post-racial identities. My book and how it speaks to Black History Month is about pushing for malleable borders of identity and identification, in terms of blackness. I happen to be of mixed race — black identified mixed race — and so my book kind of inhabits the same questions that I think are important for everyone to consider. Questions such as: What’s our fixation on the attempts to envision a post-racial world all about? Who is to say, for example, that this idea of mixed races — what makes that radical? That term blackness itself is being opened in good ways. So those are the questions that I think my book is asking. It’s referring to the inter-racial experience as a grounding, but it also wants to ask about immigration. I, myself, am a child of immigrant parents. From Italy and Ethiopia. I came to the U.S. to study, also making me an immigrant. My book is also about asking how blackness in Canada relates to roots, movement and differentiation…

Read the entire interview here.

The Hybridity Revolution

Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review
2012-05-31

Michelle La Flamme

Adebe DeRango-Adem (Editor) and Andrea Thompson (Editor), Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out.

Societies that pride themselves on an imagined monoracial norm have rare glimpses into the multi-racial experience. The contemporary literary phenomenon some refer to as the “boom in bi-racial biography” (Spickard) has offered nuanced reflections on the ontological impact of this liminal hybrid position. At their thematic core, most bi-racial and multiracial narratives demonstrate the complexity of this form of embodiment and the semiotics of a body continually affected, and constructed, by the racialized gaze. Several thematic issues are repeated in both Carol Camper’s seminal anthology, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), and the more recent Other Tongue: Mixed Race Women Speak Out (2010). The writing in both anthologies is a bold testament to the pervasiveness of multiraciality and ultimately counters many social scientific conclusions. The interest in such anthologies is also in keeping with the rise in autobiography and critical race theories. In both fields there is a consistent tendency to privilege personal accounts of the mixed race experience and, as Camper claims in her preface, the importance of “speaking for ourselves” as “experts on our own lives.”

The women writers in Other Tongues outline moments of interpellation, the power of the racialized gaze, and the stages of their shifting notions of self based on multiply-coded bodies that challenge monoracial definitions of identity. The work accounts for various individual experiences of “passing” and the complexities of a body that is repeatedly read for signs of authenticity. These writers contest the notion of a “post-racial” world in that these poems, memoirs, short stories, and art work continually reference the fact that visual identifiers of race are understood within “always already” historical and cultural conditions that lead to the racialization of the body despite the individual’s efforts (or best intentions) to defy these norms. The editors of Other Tongues suggest that it offers unique perspectives on the “changing racial landscape that [has] occurred over the last decade” in order to offer a “snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North American identify in the twenty-first century” in a time that is marked by “the inauguration of the first mixed-race Black president in North America.” However, the anthology is more personal than critical, privileges women’s voices, and fails to represent the range of mixedness in North America. Given that the themes and content echo Camper’s 1994 anthology, the uniqueness of this collection is perhaps overstated…

Read the entire review here.

Guess who’s coming to brunch? Dating and the hybrid subject

Race-Talk
2011-10-26

Adebe D. A., Race-Talk Cultural Editor

I don’t have enough hands to count how many times people have asked me if my parents are “still together” and upon hearing that yes, they have been together for over 25 years, expressed sincere surprise at this fact. Interracial marriages are apparently not supposed to work; the miscegenation taboo prevails. I guess whoever says race doesn’t exist is not only color-blind but sleep-walking.
 
I remember reading an article a while ago on how, according to higher education research, mixed-race people are perceived as “more attractive.” Conducted by Dr. Michael Lewis of Cardiff University’s School of Psychology, the research involved a collection of 1205 randomly-chosen black, white, and mixed-race faces (a limited choice of representative faces altogether). Each face was then rated for its perceived attractiveness, and it was found that mixed-race faces took the cake. The findings were then presented to the British Psychological Society…

…Contrary to popular opinion, I am not flattered by the fact that studies are interested in my face, because frankly, they don’t really see me at all. When mixed-race gets talked about in the media, it’s often automatically celebrated as a marker of socio-political progress, completely disconnected from the racial trauma of being deemed inauthentic by others, the wounds of self-questioning, and the reality of racialized violence and fetishization. I have been asked by previous partners if my hair, eyes, and even skin color were “real” as if I were a specimen to be poked and prodded at; as if my personhood were dependent upon the undressing of some enigma. The point was not if I colored my hair or if it were naturally this or that hue; the point lied in the question, the strange liberty people have found in dissecting what I am…

Read the entire article here.

Ten Questions, with Adebe DeRango-Adem

Open Book Toronto
2011-03-25

Adebe DeRango-Adem talks to Open Book about the anthology she co-edited with Andrea Thompson, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications). The goal for this exciting anthology was not to nail down what identity means, but rather to open discussion and interrogate the diverse experiences of mixed-race identity and identification.
 
Open Book:
 
Tell us about the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out.

Adebe DeRango-Adem:
 
Other Tongues was born from a combination of necessity and a desire to see a new and refreshing literature that could be at the forefront of mixed-race discourse and women’s studies. We are very proud of the finished product and anticipate that it will make many waves in literary and academic communities across the continent!
 
OB:
 
What inspired you to put together this anthology?

ADA:
 
The idea behind this anthology of writing by and about mixed-race women in North America was planted in our minds when we each came across Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), edited by Carol Camper. While we picked up this groundbreaking book at different times in our lives, the anthology had a lasting impact on both of us, an impact that would set the stage for the collaboration that became Other Tongues. We are thrilled to have had Carol Camper contribute to our anthology and continue to be inspired by the women who have responded so warmly to this book. What inspired me personally is, as many interracial women may share experientially, a feeling that my interracial history is a ripe place for critical analysis.
 
OB:
 
The subtitle, Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, suggests that identity is a significant theme for Other Tongues. What are some of the ways that your contributors approach issues of identity?
 
ADA:
 
In seeking work for this book, we asked our prospective contributors to share their own individual experiences and tell their unique stories in relation to the way(s) in which they identified themselves. This process led to the excavation of perspectives of women from diverse backgrounds, ideologies, racial mixes, ages, social classes, sexual orientations and geographical locations. This collection has become a snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century.

Yet, Andrea and I made it clear that our agenda was not to define what or how mixed-race identity means, but to open up dialogue. Talking about identity is as dangerous as it is reifying and necessary; as contestable as it is a question of commitment. Authenticity is as much about finding oneself as it is a concept shaped by social norms. In addressing these questions, we asked the women who submitted work to be considered to make a distinction between issues of race and those of cultural identity. In Other Tongues, there are multiple visions and understandings of authenticity/identity, as exemplified by the various sections we have. Where this book treats interracial identities uniquely is in our conscious effort to link creativity to identification; recognizing our potential for creativity as a source of value for writing who we are…

Read the entire interview here.

Ethics of Racial Identity

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
108th Annual Conference
2010-11-13 through 2010-11-14
Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawaii

Presiding Officer: Adebe DeRango-Adem, York University

Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii’s racial climate. This special session envisions a mixed-race literature in the age of Obama that forwards not solely theorizations of what mixed race identities are, but an ethics for treating mixed race identification in literature. It is designed to re-situate mixedness/interraciality within the field of literary inquiry as a question of the ethical treatment of racialized figures.