Mixed Race Studies

Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind

The New York Times
2013-09-16

James Dao, Military and Veterans Affairs Reporter

SALTILLO, Miss. — Soon after he departed Vietnam in 1970, Specialist James Copeland received a letter from his Vietnamese girlfriend. She was pregnant, she wrote, and he was the father.

He re-enlisted, hoping to be sent back. But the Army was drawing down and kept him stateside. By the time Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, he had lost touch with the woman. He got a job at a plastics factory in northern Mississippi and raised a family. But a hard question lingered: did she really have his child?

“A lot of things we did in Vietnam I could put out of my mind,” said Mr. Copeland, 67. “But I couldn’t put that out.”

In 2011, Mr. Copeland decided to find the answer, acknowledging what many other veterans have denied, kept secret or tried to forget: that they left children behind in Vietnam…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed emotions: Reflections on researching racial mixing and mixedness

Emotion, Space and Society
Volume 11, May 2014
pages 79–88
DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2013.07.002

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Researching racial and ethnic issues can involve entering a highly emotive terrain and the subject of ‘mixed race’ is no exception. The growing collection of both historical and contemporary accounts of those who are perceived to be mixing or of mixed race highlight the often intense emotions involved in crossing perceived boundaries of colour and culture. Yet, whilst discussions of the sensitivities and politics facing those mixing or of mixed race form the backbone of much research into the subject, much less is said about these issues in relation to the research process. Such reflections, however, are important not only for making sense of the frequent intensity of emotion that emerges from such research but also as regards constructing, conducting and disseminating it. Drawing in particular on a number of research projects conducted by the author and colleagues, this paper will discuss some of the emotive issues involved in researching the notion of ‘mixedness’ and their methodological implications for researchers as well as the research field itself.

Read or purchase the article here.

“It’s Only Other People Who Make Me Feel Black”: Acculturation, Identity, and Agency in a Multicultural Community

Political Psychology
Published online: 2013-02-18
DOI: 10.1111/pops.12020

Caroline Howarth, Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology
London School of Economics, United Kingdom

Wolfgang Wagner, Professor of Psychology
Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain

Nicola Magnusson
The Open University, United Kingdom

Gordon Sammut, Lecturer in Psychology
University of Malta

This article explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed-heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers, and parents with mixed heritage participated in a community arts project that invited them to deliberate, construct, and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities, are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalized ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated, and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation, and culture. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.

Read or purchase the article here.

SO224: The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

London School of Economics
2013/2014 session

Helen Kim

The course provides an introduction to theoretical, historical and contemporary debates around race, racism and ethnicity. It firstly explores the main theoretical perspectives which have been used to analyse racial and ethnic relations, in a historical and contemporary framework. It then examines in more detail the areas both theoretical and lived within our contemporary social and political climate where analyses of ‘race’, racism, culture, belonging and identity are urgently needed, focusing primarily on Britain, Europe and the US. Topics include: race and ethnicity in historical perspective; race, class and gender multiculturalism; diaspora and hybridity; whiteness; mixed race; race, disease and contamination; race and the senses; race and popular culture; urban multiculture and the street; race, riots and youth culture; community cohesion; Muslim identities; asylum and new migrations; the Far Right and the white working class.

AAAS 348 (Fall 2013): Class, Race, and Gender—“Hapas, Hafus, Mestizos, and Muggles”

California State University, Los Angeles
Asian and Asian American Studies Program
Fall 2013

Michelle Har Kim

HAPA (from the Hawai‘ian Dictionary, Māmaka Kaiao)

1. Portion, fragment, part, fraction, installment; to be partial, less. (Eng. half) Cf. hapahā, hapalua, etc. Ka ’ike hapa, limited knowledge. Ua hapā na hae, the flags are at half-mast, ho’o.hapa To lessen, diminish.
2. Of mixed blood, person of mixed blood, as hapa Hawai‘i, part Hawaiian. See hapa haole.
3. A-minor in music. See lele 7.

What assumptions do many of us make about how mixed-race Asians are supposed to look, speak, and understand themselves? Is it true that mixed-race people in general, Asian and otherwise, are able “see,” understand, or translate two or more cultural worlds? Continuing on with this theme of visuality, looking, and seeing, this course will create a space for talking about how we and others see mixed-race and race generally as a thing that has always-already and naturally been around—or something that we construct and create ourselves for certain reasons. Questions regarding identity and authenticity will surely lead us to more issues including gender, sexuality, money, and class.

Students are required to make time for regular readings, writing, and online and Moodle access. One hard-copy text is required: the Asian American Literary Review’s 2013 Special Issue on Mixed Race. Assignments will be taken from this journal and other texts to be announced. Discussions will anchor themselves through submitted reaction papers in which you will have creative and critical opportunities to compare visual pieces with assigned readings.

For the month of October, we will draw from an online Synchronous Teaching Program Digital Lab as we participate in the Asian American Literary Review’s Mixed Race Initiative. This hub will link us with other students studying mixed race, in an exciting effort to participate in a conversation beyond bounds of our classroom.

For more information, click here.

Don’t miss Hapa-Palooza 2013: Celebrate mixed ethnicity and third culture in Vancouver

Vancouver Observer
Vancouver, British Columbia
2013-09-13

Jordan Yerman

Celebrate the whole you with literature, film, art, and dance. This is Hapa-Palooza.

The third annual Hapa-Palooza Festival kicks off on September 18, once again bringing three days of art and culture to Vancouver. Focusing on mixed-race identity, this is a celebration of what makes us… us.

Anna Ling Kaye, Hapa-Palooza’s Artistic Director, says, “The big thing that’s different this year is that we’re incorporated as our own society. We’re making a big push for a bigger festival.”…

Read the entire article here.

Liminality in the works: The novels of Charles Chesnutt

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 1996
154 pages
Publication Number: AAT 9709591
ISBN: 9780591169812

Susan Jane Doyle

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt’s work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt’s own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels.

I draw on Victor Turner’s definition of liminality, which comes from Turner’s rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt’s characters frequently attain liminal status in his work—they take on the “betwixt and between” characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt’s characters end up as marginals—Turner’s term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19th century in America.

Chesnutt’s novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel. The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. CLOTHING THE EMPEROR: THE ABSENCE OF TEXT IN “BAXTER’S PROCRUSTES“
• 3. FINDING THE COST OF FREEDOM: THE LIMTNAL QUALITY OF PASSING IN THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
• 4. LOST IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS: THE RACIAL SPACES IN THE MARROW OF TRADITION
• 5. PAST THE RUBICON: THE MERE ABSTRACTIONS OF THE COLONEL’S DREAM
• 6. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.