Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”

Posted in Africa, Articles, Asian Diaspora, Campus Life, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States on 2022-04-05 01:42Z by Steven

Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”
Published 2022-02-21

Guest Editors:

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia

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

Dear Colleagues,

Social scientific scholarship on Multiracial experiences and processes of identity development have been the subject of social scientific scholarship for over three decades. During this time, scholars from a wide variety disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, geography, history, political science, and the humanities, along with the critical interdisciplinary work of women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Black studies, and others, have contributed to the present state of knowledge.

We now know that multiracial identities are dynamic and intersectional. We also know that mixed-race experiences are embedded within social institutions, social structures, political movements, histories, and stories. Processes like racialization and microaggressions, family and peer dynamics, and other important social, cultural, economic, historical, collective, and political realities are known to manifest in unique ways for mixed-race populations. Far from heralding an end to race and racism, we know that multiraciality is woven within structures of white supremacy across a broad range of social, political, and national contexts…

Read all of the nine (9) papers here.

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An Interview with Paisley Rekdal

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Interviews, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2022-03-24 21:31Z by Steven

An Interview with Paisley Rekdal

Kenyan Review
2021-07-07

Ruben Quesada

Paisley Rekdal is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of West: A Translation, as well as the community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. In May 2017, she was named Utah’s Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets’ Poets Laureate Fellowship. Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, was published from W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021.

Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.

RUBEN QUESADA: What is the earliest memory you have about your relationship to literature?

PAISLEY REKDAL: I recall when I felt I understood something about literature that other people didn’t. It was in fifth grade, when we were discussing Lord of the Flies, and the teacher asked who the self-sacrificial character Piggy might also remind us of. Piggy was meant to stand in for Jesus and I remember muttering that in class while the rest of the students looked a little baffled. I understood then that works of literature were often telling multiple stories at once; this multiplicity of meaning seemed to irritate other people, though it didn’t irritate me…

Read the entire interview here.

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Learning Your Own Name

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, United States on 2022-03-24 15:49Z by Steven

Learning Your Own Name

The Gay & Lesbian Review
2022-02-25

Ren Iris

The author in fourth grade, holding a basketball trophy

IF GENDER had a tagline, it would be “Gender: Paradoxes Abound.” Every day, we make countless assumptions based on gender expectations and societal norms. Sex assigned at birth and gender are often conflated and/or repurposed to fit institutional check-the-box guidelines. Gender—the abstraction, the perceived reality—is a chimera. Like most other words acting as a placeholder for an abstract concept, it is ever shifting and always context-dependent, even if it’s relegated to a box to be checked on a form.

We’ve gotten less restrictive lately, thanks to activists and antidiscrimination policies, and thanks also to the dissemination of intersectional training, often featuring educational resources such as the “gender unicorn” or “gender bread” person. But even with all that knowledge, we must constantly unlearn the restrictive, prescriptive understandings of gender. And in real time, during present interactions, referring to a gender-inclusive cheat sheet before responding is usually a thankless endeavor…

Read the entire article here.

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Theorizing People of Mixed Race in the Pacific and the Atlantic

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Social Science on 2022-03-21 02:04Z by Steven

Theorizing People of Mixed Race in the Pacific and the Atlantic

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Issue 3 (Published 2022-03-14)
14 pages
DOI: 10.3390/socsci11030124

Yasuko Takezawa, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, Kyoto

Stephen Small, Professor
Department of African Diaspora Studies
University of California, Berkeley

The most extensive theoretic and empirical studies of people of mixed racial descent extant today have addressed nations across the Atlantic. This article reveals how this literature on people of mixed racial descent is limited in its claims to represent a “global model”. In contrast, we argue that by juxtaposing institutional factors in the Atlantic region and Japan we can expand our understanding of people of mixed racial descent across a far wider range of social and political terrains. A consideration of Japan uncovers a fascinating combination of factors impactful in the emergence of populations of mixed origins in the Pacific region more generally. By identifying this range of variables, we believe this analysis can be instructive for scholars of race focusing on the Atlantic and can contribute to a more encompassing approach for theorizing people of mixed racial descent.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

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A Daughter’s Quest: On Anne Liu Kellor’s “Heart Radical”

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2022-03-17 19:13Z by Steven

A Daughter’s Quest: On Anne Liu Kellor’s “Heart Radical”

Los Angeles Review of Books
2021-11-12

Amy Reardon

Anne Liu Kellor, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging (Berkeley, California: She Writes Press, 2021)

GROWING UP ASIAN AMERICAN in Seattle, Anne Liu Kellor struggled to understand the ache she carried inside. Her debut memoir, Heart Radical, tracks the author’s journeys to China and back home again in the late ’90s and early 2000s in search of her true self.

We meet Kellor after college, having become consumed with the need to learn the Chinese language and live in China. What she can’t seem to get her hands around is why. “All I knew was — I was filled with an intense longing and sorrow. Sorrow for the magnitude of suffering in the world, in China and Tibet, and within myself. Sorrow which I felt so clearly, but couldn’t understand why I felt so deep.”

There are clues. First among them, a general sense of opacity in her relationship with her mother, who immigrated from China as a girl, married a white man, and had two daughters. Also, there is this: “[N]or had anyone ever talked to me about what it was like to grow up multiracial — neither white nor fully Chinese, nor yet invited into a wider inclusivity as a person of color. Instead, everywhere I went, even at family reunions, I was simply reminded of my difference.”…

Read the entire review here.

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A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, Communications/Media Studies, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2022-03-17 14:31Z by Steven

A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War

New York University Press
January 2020
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781479872329
Ebook ISBN: 9781479815869

Kori A. Graves, Associate Professor of History
University at Albany, State University of New York

The origins of a transnational adoption strategy that secured the future for Korean-black children

The Korean War left hundreds of thousands of children in dire circumstances, but the first large-scale transnational adoption efforts involved the children of American soldiers and Korean women. Korean laws and traditions stipulated that citizenship and status passed from father to child, which made the children of US soldiers legally stateless. Korean-black children faced additional hardships because of Korean beliefs about racial purity, and the segregation that structured African American soldiers’ lives in the military and throughout US society. The African American families who tried to adopt Korean-black children also faced and challenged discrimination in the child welfare agencies that arranged adoptions.

Drawing on extensive research in black newspapers and magazines, interviews with African American soldiers, and case notes about African American adoptive families, A War Born Family demonstrates how the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights led child welfare agencies to reevaluate African American men and women as suitable adoptive parents, advancing the cause of Korean transnational adoption.

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Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda review – millennial vampire tale with bite

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2022-03-15 21:57Z by Steven

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda review – millennial vampire tale with bite

The Guardian
2022-03-14

Lucy Popescu

Claire Kohda: ‘excellent at conveying Lydia’s alienation and sense of powerlessness’. Photograph: Misha Gafarova

This debut novel is a surefooted, art-filled and wholly 21st-century take on bloodsucking

Claire Kohda’s debut is memorable for the refreshing perspective of her conflicted heroine: a vampire of mixed ethnicity and recent art graduate. Lydia struggles to accept the demon inside her and yearns to love, live and eat like a human. Her father, a successful Japanese artist, died before she was born. Lydia has committed her mother, a Malaysian-English vampire in declining health, to a home in Margate and accepted an internship with a contemporary London gallery known as the Otter.

Woman, Eating opens with Lydia renting an artist’s studio in a converted biscuit factory. She’s shown around by the kind and friendly Ben, to whom she is immediately attracted. At the gallery, Lydia is given banal jobs cleaning labels off bottles and adding velvet pads to coat hangers in preparation for the next opening. Largely ignored by the staff, Lydia receives the unwanted attention of the director – cold, predatory Gideon – who, she learns, had collected her father’s art. He stands in the shadows observing her, unaware that, as a vampire, Lydia can see him in the dark and the blood coursing through his veins. One day, passing on the stairs, he gropes her buttock. It’s an act he’ll later regret…

Read the entire review here.

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Your Attention Please: Initiative 29 – Tao Leigh Goffe • Hulu

Posted in Arts, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, United Kingdom, United States, Videos on 2022-03-11 04:04Z by Steven

Your Attention Please: Initiative 29 – Tao Leigh Goffe • Hulu

Hulu
2021-05-29

Tao Leigh Goffe, Assistant Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural History
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Journey through time with professor and DJ Tao Leigh Goffe as she uncovers her story at the intersection of Black and Chinese culture in this month’s #Initiative29 episode.

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Half ‘Asian’/Half ‘Arab’: Reconciling with my Palestinianness

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Canada, Media Archive on 2022-02-26 17:18Z by Steven

Half ‘Asian’/Half ‘Arab’: Reconciling with my Palestinianness

Medium
2021-05-20

Sarah Barzak

“Oh, your dad’s Palestinian? I have so much respect for you now!” said the Arab girl who sat in front of me in Arabic school.

Disgusted. Small. was how I felt.

She sat in front of me every Saturday and only acknowledged my existence on the last day of Arabic school.

We were 17. Which, frankly, was too old to behave this way under my tiger mom’s standards.
Kurang ajar, I thought. Who raised you?

These interactions didn’t stop in my teens. While working at Baba’s convenience store, an Amtu came in and made small talk as we completed the transaction.

“Oh, you know, the man who works here is Palestinian,” she said.

“Yes, I know. He’s my dad,” I responded calmly, “My mother is Malay”…

Read the entire article here.

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All mixed up: Multiracial students at CVHS say they don’t fit in one box

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Texas, United States on 2022-02-21 19:26Z by Steven

All mixed up: Multiracial students at CVHS say they don’t fit in one box

The Upstream: The Student-Run News Site of Carnegie Vanguard High School
Houston, Texas

2022-02-02

Sofia Hegstrom, Contributing Writer

Noah Mohamed, Staff Writer

Senior Xen Villareal identifies as mixed-race indigenous and is one-quarter Black.
Photo courtesy of Xen Villareal

My eyebrows furrowed as I stared blankly at the question in front of me. My pencil hovered hesitantly over the scholarship form, which posed the question- What is your race?, followed by a bolded phrase: Please select one answer.

This is perhaps one of the most universal experiences for Multiracial Americans. After all, the official census only allowed checking more than one box in the year 2000. However, only recently has this become the norm. And while something like being forced to check the ‘other’ box on an occasional survey may seem trivial, it is indicative of the larger erasure and invalidation of Multiracial identity.

Junior Muna Jallad understood she was bi-racial when she was first asked to fill out school enrollment forms.

“In middle school when I was filling out forms and when they would say check only one race I’d be like, ‘What do I do here? Other? do I put White, do I put Asian?’ so I feel it kind of clicked then,” said Jallad.

Xen Villareal, who identifies as mixed-race indigenous and is one-quarter Black, also grew up confused about his race…

Read the entire article here.

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