Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in the Postrevolutionary Mexico

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Mexico, Monographs on 2022-02-23 19:59Z by Steven

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in the Postrevolutionary Mexico

University Press of Florida
2018-08-28
250 pages
6×9
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9781683400394
Paper ISBN 13: 9781683403104

David S. Dalton, Assistant Professor of Spanish
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

After the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, postrevolutionary leaders hoped to assimilate the country’s racially diverse population into one official mixed-race identity—the mestizo. This book shows that as part of this vision, the Mexican government believed it could modernize “primitive” Indigenous peoples through technology in the form of education, modern medicine, industrial agriculture, and factory work. David Dalton takes a close look at how authors, artists, and thinkers—some state-funded, some independent—engaged with official views of Mexican racial identity from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Dalton surveys essays, plays, novels, murals, and films that portray indigenous bodies being fused, or hybridized, with technology. He examines José Vasconcelos’s essay “The Cosmic Race” and the influence of its ideologies on mural artists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. He discusses the theme of introducing Amerindians to medical hygiene and immunizations in the films of Emilio “El Indio” Fernández. He analyzes the portrayal of indigenous monsters in the films of El Santo, as well as Carlos Olvera’s critique of postrevolutionary worldviews in the novel Mejicanos en el espacio.

Incorporating the perspectives of posthumanism and cyborg studies, Dalton shows that technology played a key role in race formation in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. This cutting-edge study offers fascinating new insights into the culture of mestizaje, illuminating the attitudes that inform Mexican race relations in the present day.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

How Cross-Discipline Understanding and Communication Can Improve Research on Multiracial Populations

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2022-02-22 22:04Z by Steven

How Cross-Discipline Understanding and Communication Can Improve Research on Multiracial Populations

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Issue 3, 90
Published online 2022-02-22
13 pages
DOI: 10.3390/socsci11030090

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Jennifer Patrice Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Huntsville

One of the strengths of Critical Mixed Race Studies is that it represents research methodologies and frameworks from multiple disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. However, if these disciplines are not in dialogue with each other, that benefit may be lost. Here, we use psychological and sociological research on Multiracial populations as examples to argue how strict disciplinarity and methodological trends may limit scientific production. We propose that reading and citing work across disciplines, expanding methodological training, and rejecting hegemonic “white logic” assumptions about what is “publishable” can enhance Multiracial research. First, the ability to cite effectively across disciplines will shorten the time it takes for new theories to be developed that focus on empirically underrepresented populations. Secondly, increasing understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methods will allow more effective reading between disciplines while also creating opportunities to engage with both causality and the richness of experiences that comprise being Multiracial. Finally, these changes would then situate scholars to be more effective reviewers, thereby enhancing the peer-reviewed publication process to one that routinely rejects color evasive racist practices that privilege work on majority populations.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Tags: , , , , ,

The Films of Branwen Okpako: CfP for a GSA Panel Series

Posted in Europe, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers, Women on 2022-02-21 23:00Z by Steven

The Films of Branwen Okpako: CfP for a GSA Panel Series

DEFA Film Library

January 2022

We invite contributions for a series of panels on Branwen Okpako’s films, for the 2022 GSA conference, September 15-18, 2022. Co-sponsored by the Black German Heritage & Research Association (BGHRA) and the DEFA Film Library, these panels seek to explore the range of stories and rich imagery in the films of this groundbreaking director.

The deadline for submission is 2022-02-28.

Relevant topics might include:

  • Afro-Germanness and Afro-German creativity and artistic production;
  • Form, filmmaking, and aesthetics;
  • Postcolonial and feminist consciousness at the intersections of multiple cultural and familial
  • traditions, norms, values;
  • Regimes of the body; femininity and gender;
  • Engagement with disciplinary regimes, e.g. the police, political regimes, or language;
  • German reunification and its repercussion on discourses of racialization, positionality and representation in Europe and Germany;
  • Family his- and herstories;
  • Affiliation and belonging;
  • Political activism and self-empowerment; and
  • The reception of Branwen Okpako’s films.

For more information, click here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Mixed-Race Identity in the American South: Roots, Memory, and Family Secrets

Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States on 2022-02-21 21:41Z by Steven

Mixed-Race Identity in the American South: Roots, Memory, and Family Secrets

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
May 2021
236 pages
6½ x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7936-2706-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7936-2707-0

Julia Sattler, Assistant Professor of American Studies
TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

This interdisciplinary investigation argues that since the 1990s, discourses about mixed-race heritage in the United States have taken the shape of a veritable literary genre, here termed “memoir of the search.”

The study uses four different texts to explore this non-fictional genre, including Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s The Sweeter the Juice. All feature a protagonist using methods from archival investigation to DNA-testing to explore an intergenerational family secret; photographs and family trees; and the trip to the American South, which is identified as the site of the secret’s origin and of the family’s past. As a genre, these texts negotiate the memory of slavery and segregation in the present.

In taking up central narratives of Americanness, such as the American Dream and the Immigrant story, as well as discourses generating the American family, the texts help inscribe themselves and the mixed-race heritage they address into the American mainstream.

In its outlook, this book highlights the importance of the memoirs’ negotiations of the past when finding ways to remember after the last witnesses have passed away. and contributes to the discussion over political justice and reparations for slavery.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Memoir of the Search: The Emergence of a Mixed-Race Literary Genre
  • Chapter 1: Writing Mixed Selves at the Turn of the Millennium
  • Chapter 2: Family Secrets: Uncovering Mixed Race Heritage
  • Chapter 3: Media of Memory: Generating the Family
  • Chapter 4: Narrating the Mixed-Race Nation
  • Chapter 5: The Past in the Present: Encounters with the South
  • Conclusion: Making History at the Turn of the Millennium
Tags: , , ,

On Reading Dialect in Harper’s ‘Iola Leroy’

Posted in Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2022-02-20 04:01Z by Steven

On Reading Dialect in Harper’s ‘Iola Leroy’

The Dickens Project
2021-12-08

A roundtable conversation with Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Eric Gardner (Saginaw Valley State University), Jennifer James (George Washington University), Derrick R. Spires (Cornell University), and Richard Yarborough (University of California, Los Angeles).

We staged this conversation with expert scholars in nineteenth-century African American literary studies in order to give viewers a glimpse into the ongoing conversations about Black dialect in US literature, African American literature, and [Frances E. W.] Harper’s novel. This glimpse appears in the form of a roundtable discussion with teacher-scholars who have written about Harper, taught her work, and engaged deeply in conversations on this complex topic with students, colleagues, and the broader public.

Watch the discussion (01:06:07) here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

“A Free America for All Peoples …”: Fredi Washington, the Negro Actors Guild, and the Voice of the People

Posted in Articles, Biography, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States, Women on 2022-02-15 17:41Z by Steven

“A Free America for All Peoples …”: Fredi Washington, the Negro Actors Guild, and the Voice of the People

The Journal of African American History
Volume 105, Number 3 (Summer 2020)
DOI: 10.1086/709201

Laurie A. Woodard, Assistant Professor of History
The City College of New York, New York, New York

Focusing on the work of New Negro performing artist Fredi Washington as a writer and activist during the 1930s and 1940s, this article places an African American female performing artist at the center of the narrative of the New Negro Renaissance, illuminates the vital influence of Black female performing artists on the movement, and demonstrates the ways in which Washington and the New Negro Renaissance are central components of the social transformation of twentieth-century America. Washington’s fusion of artistry and activism, her determination to fight oppression on myriad fronts and in myriad forms, casts her as an influential actor in the unremitting African American quest for civil and human rights. Her life and her work make visible the significance of the performing arts within the movement and enhance our understanding of the scope and texture of the activism of Black performing artists and of Black women. Her experience brings the Renaissance into the progressive movements of the early twentieth century and illuminates its role as a keystone in the foundation of the Black Freedom Movement.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Así son los cubanos: narratives of race and ancestry

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2022-02-02 17:55Z by Steven

Así son los cubanos: narratives of race and ancestry

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 44, 2021 – Issue 11
pages 2135-2153
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2020.1823447

Elizabeth Obregón, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology
University of Illinois, Chicago

This paper will focus on the ways in which conceptualizations of race are (re)produced through Cuban genealogical narratives in Western Cuba. Ethnographic interviews collected among eleven Cubans in Havana were collected during summer 2017 and are described here. My ethnographic data argue that despite Cuba’s colourblind racial democracy – where race “does not matter” because all races are “treated equally” – the familial narratives of ancestry actively reinforce the complex racial landscape and illustrates the superiority of whiteness that belie this ideal. These same family narratives ultimately highlight the various ways interlocutors negotiate racial self-identities and narrate family ancestry across lingering gendered and racial hierarchies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , ,

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and New Negro Indigeneity

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2022-02-01 23:19Z by Steven

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and New Negro Indigeneity

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 45, Issue 3, Fall 2020
pages 104–128
Published: 03 July 2020
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlaa033

DeLisa D. Hawkes, Assistant Professor of English
University of Texas, El Paso

Among New Negro Renaissance greats such as Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Wallace Thurman, early twentieth-century African American newspapers referred to the Afro-Montauk Olivia Ward Bush-Banks as “the grand dame of the literati” (Byrd A8).1 Her poetry and plays often feature representations of African American and Native American life and speculate on the ways these groups’ interactions with each other influenced cultural and racial identity formation. The few scholars that remember her name today might argue that her earlier works reflect on her African-Native American heritage, while her later works focus exclusively on her African American culture (Grant).2 However, Bush-Banks’s writings on self- and imposed identities, spanning from the 1890s to the 1940s, challenge ideas about indigeneity, race, and…

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , , , ,

Eugenics, Admixture, and Multiculturalism in Twentieth-Century Northern Sweden: Contesting Disability and Sámi Genocide

Posted in Articles, Europe, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism on 2022-02-01 18:53Z by Steven

Eugenics, Admixture, and Multiculturalism in Twentieth-Century Northern Sweden: Contesting Disability and Sámi Genocide

Terry-Lee Marttinen, Independent Researcher/Writer

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
February 2022
28 pages
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32472.37125

This article examines twentieth-century northern Swedish geographical isolate studies in Norrbotten Province involving Torne-Finns and northern Sámi, who have historically shared pronatalist Laestadian religious beliefs pathologized by mainstream eugenicists. Deemed a sign of religious fanaticism, Laestadianism was associated with the stigmatization of Torne-Finns and Sámi people and conceptualized as an early sign of schizophrenia. Geneticists, as an outgrowth of early twentieth-century eugenics, structured schizophrenia as a genetic disease caused by first-cousin marriage. These consanguineous marriages, which were reported as prevalent in Torne-Finn and Sámi reindeer-herding communities practicing Laestadianism, legitimated race-based sterilization of psychitrized Tornedalian and Sámi women. Similarly, the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, established in 1922 by Herman Lundborg, advanced reorganizing race along family lines and populations, which supported gendered disability and Sámi genocide. Torne-Finn, as well as Sámi, religious minority women, who were sterilized at first admission to psychiatric facilities, require redress for colonial violence. Current academic and direct-to-consumer admixture research on Finnish and Sámi peoples is recognized as upholding colonial logics of difference in Swedish multicultural policies. This, in turn, results in ongoing gendered genocide. It is concluded that in a radical break from eugenic theories, major psychoses associated with common infections lie in the neglected half of the human genome rather than according to classical genetic rules.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

‘Passing’ keeps its writing simple, asking viewers to lean in for greater understanding

Posted in Arts, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2022-01-21 02:00Z by Steven

‘Passing’ keeps its writing simple, asking viewers to lean in for greater understanding

The Los Angeles Times
2022-01-18

Rebecca Hall

Adapting Nella Larsen’s slim novella took writer-director Rebecca Hall 13 years. “Ultimately, I did my best to build my script and my film, not so much out of language as out of small moments of behavior,” she says. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

My adaptation of Nella Larsen’s “Passing” had a slow birth, even by the often glacial standards of script development. When I started writing, I was an actress in my 20s with vague but fervent aspirations to one day direct. I wrote the first draft in 10 days, immediately after first reading the novel, in something of a fugue state. I was fascinated but also mystified by that fascination, and my first draft was crude and impractical. I didn’t think for a second that I would ever have the means or the courage to turn it into a film.

In retrospect, I probably could never have written it otherwise. Over the years, I tinkered, adjusting it radically and then minutely and then radically again until it became something of a piece of me — not so much a project or a process as a thing that I have lived in dialogue with for the better part of my adult life.

The main challenge of the adaptation revolved around the character of Irene. Contemporary reviewers often missed both Irene’s centrality and her fundamental unreliability. Clare, the object of Irene’s obsession, was frequently taken to be the main character, rather than one half of the extraordinary — and extraordinarily complicated — relationship that drives the action…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , ,