Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The specific details being reported aside, the deeper structural problem with mainstream media stories on the alleged postracial power of mixed-race identity or the supposed significance of changing racial demographics is that the information presented is often one-sided, simplistic, geared to a tabloid sensibility, and does not reflect the multiform ways that edifices of power have race embedded within them, whether visible or not. It is a matter of sensationalism taking precedence over serious analysis. David Roediger identifies this tendency of providing sensationalism without substance, noting that “often multiracial identities and immigration take center stage as examples of factors making race obsolete” and that “we are often told popularly that race and racism are on predictable tracks to extinction. But we are seldom told clear or consistent stories about why white supremacy will give way and how race will become a ‘social virus’ of the past.” Roediger’s words highlight the importance of unmasking this postracial aspiration for what it is: an effort to provide comfort to a nation that is unwilling to do the hard work required to deal effectively with centuries of entrenched racism and the resultant consequences.

Spencer, Rainier, “‘Only the News They Want to Print’: Mainstream Media and Critical Mixed-Race Studies,” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, (January 30, 2014). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b34q0rf

Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Posted in Barack Obama, Course Offerings, Gay & Lesbian, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2011-05-01 04:12Z by Steven

Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Angelo Robinson, Associate Professor of English

“Am I Black or White? Am I Straight or Gay? CONTROVERSY?” Since its founding, and long before recording artist Prince penned these lyrics in the 1980s, America has been a space and a place demanding and mandating polarized definitions of race and sexuality. This course will examine the reasoning behind and ramifications of these dichotomies from the Colonial Period to the present in genres that include literature, film, and music. We will also explore how these binaries affect people who identify as biracial and bisexual.

This discussion-based course requires intensive reading, viewing, and listening and will foster your critical thinking and analytical writing. Topics of discussion will include the “one-drop rule,” the slavery debate, miscegenation, racial passing, segregation, integration, interracial desire, and sexual passing. Special attention will be given to individuals who and organizations that refuse to follow racial and sexual dictates. Authors will include Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Adrienne Rich, E. Lynn Harris, and Barack Obama.

Tags: Adrienne Rich, Angelo Robinson, Audre Lorde, E. Lynn Harris, Goucher College, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, James Weldon Johnson, June Jordan, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, Prince, Ralph Ellison, Stevie Wonder, Thomas Jefferson

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Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-01-26 21:57Z by Steven

Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 2, Issue 2 & 3 (October 2002)
pages 53-71
DOI: 10.1300/J159v02n02_04

Sikorski Grace, Associate Professor of English
Anne Arundel Community College, Maryland

Passing novels, exemplified here by E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life, often perpetuate the representation of bisexuality and/or bi-racial identity as a tension on the border between communities and bodies that threatens to break down or leak when tested. Alice Walker offers an alternative representation of sexual and racial terrain for such hybrid identities. In The Temple of My Familiar, the characterization of Lissie, a multiple reincarnation, and the use of skin as a charged metaphor bring categories of sexual and racial purity to the point of collapse, suggesting the potential to reimagine identity as plural, fluctuating, regenerative, erogenous and permeable.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: Alice Walker, E. Lynn Harris, Journal of Bisexuality, Sikorski Grace

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Mixed Race Studies

Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

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