Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

…Onwurah’s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother’s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah’s comment on “a world that sees only in black and white” is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film is any indication). But on a fundamental level, Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful remains an unusual example of a film directed by a woman of white-black racial heritage, which centralizes the consciousness of the mixed-race identity. The film delivers a rare message by encouraging viewers to challenge ethnic absolutism and essentialist codes of gender. To borrow an appropriate quotation from Françoise Lionnet, The Body Beautiful effectively “subverts] all binary modes of thought by privileging (more or less explicitly) the intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and Manichean categories collapse into each other.” And it is precisely where binaries and essentialist codes of identity are subverted that the process of identification becomes constructive, rather than a site for problematic exclusion, inclusion, and marginalization.

Diana Adesola Mafe. “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2008, Volume 29, Number 1, pages 37-50.

Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case

Posted in Books, History, Law, Media Archive, Novels, United States, Virginia on 2017-03-06 23:03Z by Steven

Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case

Chronicle Books
2017-01-31
260 pages
7-1/4 x 10 in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781452125909

Patricia Hruby Powell

Illustrated by Shadra Strickland

From acclaimed author Patricia Hruby Powell comes the story of a landmark civil rights case, told in spare and gorgeous verse. In 1955, in Caroline County, Virginia, amidst segregation and prejudice, injustice and cruelty, two teenagers fell in love. Their life together broke the law, but their determination would change it. Richard and Mildred Loving were at the heart of a Supreme Court case that legalized marriage between races, and a story of the devoted couple who faced discrimination, fought it, and won.

Tags: Chronicle Books, Loving v. Virginia, Patricia Hruby Powell, Richard and Mildred Loving, Shadra Strickland

Comments Off on Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case

Mixed Race Studies

Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta