Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The talk of Obama as a presidential contender centers on this power to unite. But if Obama’s capacity for racial unification is to be credibly assessed, then the white heritage with which he is intimately familiar must be acknowledged as prominently as his black identity is. His black identity has been imposed without incident and paraded in public with fanfare. Yet, while Obama is known as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he in fact is more probably the periodical’s first biracial president. He is celebrated as only the fifth African-American ever elected to the United States Senate, although he is more accurately among a tiny group of Americans of equal black and white heritage who have been elected to the United States Senate. It is as if the well researched and now-officially-recognized racial category for mixed Americans does not exist-or, if it does, never should be taken seriously as a category of its own, lest history be subject to significant revision informed by an enlightened embrace of ethnic distinctions that matter to every American’s identity.

Amos N. Jones, “Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here,” Thurgood Marshall Law Review, Volume 31 (2005): 84-85.

American novelist & memoirist Danzy Senna to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

Posted in Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2010-08-18 04:26Z by Steven

American novelist & memoirist Danzy Senna to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

University of Richmond
Richmond, Virginia
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Wednesday, 2011-03-16 19:00 EST (Local Time)

Danzy Senna is the author of two novels and a memoir that focus on issues of race, gender and cultural identity. Her debut novel, “Caucasia,” the story of two biracial sisters growing up in racially charged Boston during the 1970s, became an instant national bestseller. It won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and an Alex Award from the American Library Association, was named Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Of mixed-race heritage, Senna writes extensively on the experience of being mistaken for white. Her latest work is a collection of short stories.

For more information, click here.

Tags: Danzy Senna, University of Richmond

Werner Sollors to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

Posted in History, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2010-08-18 04:10Z by Steven

Werner Sollors to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

University of Richmond
Westhampton Living Room, Westhampton Center
Richmond, Virginia
2010-09-30 16:30 EDT (Local Time)

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His major publications include “Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture;” “Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature;” and a book-length contribution on “Ethnic Modernism” in Sacvan Bercovitch’s “Cambridge History of American Literature.” With Greil Marcus he wrote “Ethnic Modernism and A New Literary History of America.”

Sollors is the recipient of a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Constance Rourke award for the best essay in American Quarterly in 1990. In 2000 he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie. His talk is entitled “The Rise of Ethnic Modernism in the US, 1910-1950.”

For more information, click here.

Tags: University of Richmond, Werner Sollors

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Mixed Race Studies

American novelist & memoirist Danzy Senna to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

Werner Sollors to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

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