Race Card: Corinne Bailey Rae and Zadie Smith Navigate Race and ArtPosted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, New Media, Social Science, Women on 2010-03-19 20:13Z by Steven |
Race Card: Corinne Bailey Rae and Zadie Smith Navigate Race and Art
Bitch Magazine
2010-01-21
Nadra Kareem
Works by two mixed-race Brits—musician Corinne Bailey Rae and writer Zadie Smith—have recently been profiled in the New York Times. Both women navigate their collective white and Caribbean ancestry by embracing hybridity instead of relegating themselves to one group. Their doing so challenges entrenched American notions of race that say that multiracial people must choose one ethnicity or another, not all.
The English-Jamaican Smith, who rose to fame upon the publication of her 2000 bestselling book White Teeth, regards Zora Neale Hurston and Barack Obama as her sister and brother in arms. In her new book of essays, Changing My Mind, Smith praises Hurston for making “‘black woman-ness’ appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals.”…
…For singer Corinne Bailey Rae, whose mother is white and father is from the West Indian island of St. Kitts, being mixed-race had a direct impact on her music. Now, 30, Bailey Rae gravitated towards grunge in her teens…
Read the entire article here.