UW communication professor unveils new book about racePosted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2013-07-06 13:48Z by Steven |
UW communication professor unveils new book about race
The Daily of the University of Washington
2013-02-07
LaVendrick Smith
 Ralina Joseph discusses her book cover art at “Troubling the Family and Transcending Blackness” held at the UW bookstore. Photo by Dario Nanbu |
Race, reality, and pop culture collide in a new book written by one UW communication professor.
In “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial,” Ralina Joseph, a UW associate professor of communication, explores how multiracial African Americans were represented in the 10 years leading up to President Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Joseph held a joint book-signing and discussion about mixed-race relations with UW English professor Habiba Ibrahim at the U Book Store Feb. 7.
In “Transcending Blackness,” Joseph compares real-life depictions of multiracial African Americans to their roles in pop culture and politics.
“I’m just sort of interested in seeing how multiracial people have been and are represented,” she said.
Joseph, a multiracial African American herself, said that while researching the topic, she noticed a clear difference in the way multiracial people identify in real life and the way they are identified through the media.
“What I was seeing on TV, in movies, in novels, and memoirs, was not like the kind of complex people I knew in real life,” she said.
She said multiracial African Americans she encounters in real life have fluidity in the way they identify themselves, whereas she saw a constant need to identify mixed race in pop culture in a way that often degraded African Americans…
Read the entire article here.