Play means to help people of mixed race find sense of belonging

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Audio, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2015-12-16 16:49Z by Steven

Play means to help people of mixed race find sense of belonging

MPR News
Minnesota Public Radio
2015-12-15

Marianne Combs, Arts and Culture Reporter


Purple Cloud,” written by Jessica Huang and directed by Randy Reyes, looks at three generations of hapa, or mixed race, Chinese immigrants as they search to find a place where they belong. Courtesy Keri Pickett | Mu Performing Arts

“What are you?” It’s a question that people of mixed race get all the time.

Purple Cloud,” a new play produced by Mu Performing Arts, explores what it means to be of mixed race. It’s inspired by playwright Jessica Huang’s own experiences growing up mixed race, and it tells the story of one family’s journey of self-discovery.

“For most of my life I had been struggling with feeling outside, because I’m not white and I’m not Chinese, and I didn’t really know where I belonged,” she explained. “But there was a theater director in town … and she saw me across the room and she pointed at me and said, ‘You — you’re hapa.’

“And I had no idea what that word meant.”…

Read or listen to the story here.

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Rethinking Multiracial Formation in the United States: Toward an Intersectional Approach

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2015-12-16 09:06Z by Steven

Rethinking Multiracial Formation in the United States: Toward an Intersectional Approach

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2016)
pages 27-41
DOI: 10.1177/2332649215591864

Celeste Vaughan Curington
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This article forwards an integrative multiracial formation perspective that analyzes race, class, and gender as complex social systems, predicated on racism, patriarchy, and economic exploitation. I apply this new framework to three distinct racial projects—slavery, miscegenation law, and the multiracial movement of the 1990s. An analysis of the linkages between the several racial projects that have produced multiraciality over time shows the larger context in which those in power were able to shape the meaning of multiraciality in a way that was created by and constitutive of privilege and power at the intersections of class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.

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