Mixed Race Studies

Archive Fever

Bookforum
2019-10-03

Tiana Reid, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University, New York, New York

Autobiography and archival research collide in Hazel Carby’s memoir

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby. Verso. 416 pages. $29.

“Are we going to burn it?” A question about the fate of the future concludes Hazel Carby’s Race Men (1998), a powerful academic book about suffocating representations of black American masculinities based on a lecture the author delivered at Harvard. In her newest book, Carby is already burnt, the result of a smoldered past. “Imperial Intimacies is a very British story,” she writes in the preface. It is also her story: about growing up after World War II, about her childhood in the area now known as South London, about the family histories of her white Welsh mother and black Jamaican father, about, in all, the public and private agonies of imperialism and colonialism.

Probing the auto-historical, Carby studies her parents’ experiences in Jamaica and the United Kingdom, the “two islands” of the book’s subtitle. Her parents’ islands are connected not only by biological reproduction or a chance romance but also by the entanglement of ideologies. Her familial research at the National Archives of Jamaica and the United Kingdom offers at the same time a glimpse into the machinery of colonialism: the vexing racial iconography of postwar Britain, the psychic drains of poverty, the endlessness of wartime…

Read the entire review here.

ARC Introduces Tiana Reid as Junior Arts Writer

ARC: Art. Recognition. Culture.
2014-02-03

Tiana Reid

I laboured for quite some time over what to write as my introduction to joining ARC Magazine’s team as Junior Arts Writer. How to approach the unstarted?

I was thinking first of preparing a brief manifesto-like document. That was one approach that could explicate the nuts and bolts of how I see the world. And in a few paragraphs or less! Perhaps, drawing on the words of Singapore artist Heman Chong and Sweden-based artist Anthony Marcellini’s 2013 video collaboration, I would mock up plots for things to come.

Another approach would be a biography. You know, “I was born in Toronto. I went to school at McGill. I have my M.A. in African-American Studies at Columbia. I live in Brooklyn.” I would likely pause on my non-art history background and explore my academic interest in visual culture against my permanent and affected interest as a writer in reading and speculation. When it comes to the former, my master’s thesis illuminated the shared yet dissimilar aesthetic practices of poet Natasha Trethewey and conceptual artist Adrian Piper. My thesis used ‘mixed-race’ studies as a vexed entryway to trouble claims to a speculative hybrid future, and argued that the desire and alleged ability to see a mythical (post)-racially hybrid body is intimately connected to the disavowal of black life and histories of violence…

Read the entire article here.

crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures

The State
Dubai, U.A.E.
Voicing
2013-03-30

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

“Cyaan live split. Not in this world.”

The first time I read Michelle Cliff’s 1987 book No Telephone to Heaven, I immediately forgot which character had said this line. Was it Harry/Harriet, the queer Jamaican character? Or was it Clare Savage, the cosmopolitan “bi-racial” protagonist? It could have been either/both really. And that was partially the point.

What I did remember, however—what I felt—was the resonances of feeling the impulse of having to choose identity. The backdrop, for Clare, and to some extent for Cliff too, is about negotiating an existence in between races, cultures, nationalities and an endless act of et cetera. In the book, Clare undergoes a process of becoming(s) through a series of transatlantic yearnings, which culminate in her realization that she must choose her identity. And then, well, dies for that choice. In an essay called “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character,” Cliff writes that “in [Clare’s] death she has complete identification with her homeland; soon enough she will be indistinguishable from the ground. Her bones will turn to potash, as did her ancestors’ bones.”

All the same, Clare is never accepted and never accepts herself. I’m still not sure what’s worse. No Telephone to Heaven complicates the idea of wholeness and that in order to “be true to yourself” if you have one parent, say, of European ancestry and the other of African ancestry, you should, as a citizen of the West (or perhaps the global West, i.e., the world) acknowledge the ambiguity of your both/and state of being, as if everyone doesn’t exist in a similar mode of being. A multimodal existence— a similar vacillating position of entering, understanding and being in the world. Don’t we all exist between things—parents, cultures, lovers, yesses and nos, life and death?

What I remembered, then, was what I didn’t think I had to be aware of. What I remembered was that until then, until that very moment when I read No Telephone to Heaven, I had identified as “mixed,” which would refer to my White mom and my Black Jamaican dad, who got married and had sex and had miscarriages and then had me. But I mean, isn’t a child always a mixture? Aren’t we (and is the “we” here decidedly North American?) all products of mixings and jumbles and breaking of the law pre-Loving v. Virginia and also victims and perpetrators of rape before abolition, and, and, and…?

I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,” how I began to understand that “mixed-race” in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only Black. Soon, I understood “mixed” as an intermediary between Black and White, a cushion almost, between racism and progress…

Read the entire article here.

imagining hybrid cities

The State
2013-07-25

Tiana Reid

I started this series on crossing and mixing by considering temporality and its hold on how we imagine hybridity. The recent discourse centered on the unshakable ‘browning’ or ‘beiging’ of mostly urban populations in the decades to come offers itself up through the prevailing ‘hybrid futures’ narrative. In The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, NYU professor Tavia Nyong’o made it clear that his 2009 book was not “yet another attempt to claim mixed-race America as a utopian future that ‘will’ just happen ‘in time,’ as Theodore Tilton held.” And last month, still, a claim against this mixed futurism persisted in my writing for The State as I drew on Lee Edelman to consider the “figural Child” as the ultimate citizen.

What is in the background of this, all of this, but also undergirding it, is the hybrid city. The urban and the cosmopolitan. While ‘hybrid cities’ isn’t necessarily an accepted or used concept at large, a quick Google and Google image search shows a technology-based, almost people-free imaginary. We know, too, that hybrid cities come synonymously with hybrid cars, that is, ‘pure’ innovation and more recently perhaps, the ‘White entrepreneurial guy.’ And, what’s more, they’re Jetsons-esque, a projection in which jokes are made to signify that the future is White.

Here, I’d like to think again about hybrid futures. And, broadly speaking, how race codes the city without falling into what, say, the contested terrain of afrofuturism at large attempts to counter, i.e. that blackness and technology (/future) do not make sense together. The city, more so than the country, is emblematic of everything new. The hybrid future, then, is a decidedly urban one…

Read the entire article here.

love, desire, and impossible measures

The State
2013-06-08

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

Children rule. No, certain children rule the ways in which we measure fantasies of progress. I read Meagan Hatcher-Mays’ Jezebel piece, “I’m Biracial, and That Ad Is a Big Fucking Deal. Trust Me.,” before I saw the Cheerios commercial itself. The commercial, like most ads, is simple and taps into the unsupervised kiddie trope: it presents a chubby-cheeked maybe-blonde making a mess. Distressingly enough, my first reaction was to claim a resolutely anti stance to not watch the video but respond to the Jezebel post and say, “I’m Biracial, and That Ad Is the Worst Thing Ever. Trust Me.” Quickly, however, I felt it and thought, “Oh, fuck no. I’m black.” And it’s not the ad, but the liberal reactions to it, the way it becomes a siphon for deliciously delirious national imaginaries of cosmopolitan ideas of race that cracks my core. (For instance: how could they say those things about that cute little girl?!) But here I am, writing…

…It’s hard enough, I would think, to hate on a beautiful little “mixie” and wonder what or how her presence, no, the way in which she is presented, eclipses other lives. Hatcher-Mays, whose hyphenated name perhaps tells us what we need to know of her wholeness, went as far to say that the commercial “validates the existence of biracial and multiracial people.” (Her emphasis.) The way we think about “mixed-race,” however, is grounded in a neoliberal narrative that is narrowly individualized (again, “Mixie Me”). What does it mean for children of color to bring into “existence” this “biracial” child who is not one or the other or even both but maybe, here, a symbol of what’s to come? Who has access to this claim? What does it even mean to grope for a way to ask such questions? When visibility becomes the proxy for “the state of things”—when it becomes a measure of who we are and that we exist, what we lose is vitality….

…If the goal is to normalize mixed-race families, as Hatcher-Mays applauds Cheerios for, then we should all be scared for our lives. Normalization is a bit like reform—as simultaneously boring and dangerous—and, as American sociologist and race theorist Howard Winant wrote in a nod to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, “reformism is better understood as incorporation and absorption of conflict than as conflict resolution.” Multiculturalism, multiracialism, pluralism, diversity, and the endless etc. of 21^st century neologisms fit into this schema of subsumption rather than disruption. What isn’t embraced in the script is that Blackness isn’t that normal at all…

Read the entire article here.

slippery positions

The State
2013-05-17

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

As a self-defined Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet, Audre Lorde is the model representative for intersectionality. As such, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches has become a ubiquitous text in undergraduate courses, for the theory and practice of intersectionality; a way to look at what women’s studies scholar Leslie McCall calls “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations.” Put crudely, intersectionality is an idea used to explain the links between positions or configurations of oppression. What’s more, as a Caribbean-American (her parents were born in Barbados and Carriacou), we could say Lorde straddled two worlds—or perhaps none at all.

Lorde’s poetry as poetry and not as purely a feminist rubric, however, has been written about far less. In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, writer and scholar Alexis De Veaux describes the genesis of the poem “Sahara,” published in Lorde’s 1978 book of poems, The Black Unicorn, in a moment while Lorde was on a plane in 1977 that passed over the Sahara desert after making a stop in Madrid to refuel. The poet, flying from New York City, was on her way to Lagos, Nigeria for FESTAC, the Second World African Festival of Arts and Culture. Lorde’s trip to Nigeria is meaningful not simply because the plane ride—the birds-eye view of the vastness of the Sahara—inspired the homonymous poem. By 1977, Nigeria had emerged as what De Veaux calls the “richest black-ruled nation” in Africa because of oil wealth. Bringing together Black activists, academics, writers, artists and spectators, FESTAC acted as a transnational spectacle establishing new political, literary and racial grounds.

What’s most significant here is that despite the literal and symbolic coming together of a black diasporic vision in the name of arts and culture, Lorde stayed on the fringes and felt separate from some sense of a monolithic group identity, an identity based seemingly solely on race—and not gender or sexuality. Lorde’s participation and view on FESTAC is mostly shrouded in mystery but what we do have is the poem “Sahara.” I read “Sahara” through Lorde’s trip to FESTAC and thus, envision landscapes of diaspora as heterogeneous and transformative. Her hesitation toward FESTAC parallels the poem’s fluctuating hesitation toward the Sahara desert. I say hesitation rather than outright fear despite the all-encompassing terror that can be gleaned from Lorde’s approach to the masculine desert: “grief of sand… male sand / terrifying sand.” The hesitation emerges from the heterogeneous incarnations sand is allowed to take. Rocks, what sand is made of, take millions and millions of years to become sand, meaning the image of a desert can’t be separated from its process, from its formation through finely divided particles, a prolonged breaking down…

Read the entire article here.

I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,” how I began to understand that “mixed-race” in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only Black. Soon, I understood “mixed” as an intermediary between Black and White, a cushion almost, between racism and progress.

Tiana Reid, “crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures,” The State (March 30, 2013). http://www.thestate.ae/crossings-undone-presents-pyrrhic-futures/