Mixed Race Studies

Obama signs measure striking ‘oriental’ and ‘negro’ from federal law

The Hill
2016-05-20

Jordan Fabian, White House Correspondent

President Obama has signed legislation striking outdated racial terms such as “Oriental” and “Negro” from federal laws.

Obama signed the bill without fanfare on Friday along with six other pieces of legislation, the White House said…

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Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History

University Press of Kentucky
1999-12-16
224 pages
6 x 9 photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8131-2143-7

Janet Gabler-Hover, Professor of English
Georgia State University

Winner of the SAMLA 2001 Book Award

Hagar, the Old Testament Egyptian heroine who bore Abraham’s son at the behest of Sarah, was traditionally regarded as an African. Yet the literature and paintings of the nineteenth century depicted Hagar as white. During this period, she became a popular subject for writers and artists, with at least thirteen novels published between 1850 and 1913 taking Hagar as their theme. Dreaming Black/Writing White examines how, for white feminists, Hagar became a liberating symbol to empower their own rebellion against patriarchal restrictions. Hagar’s understood blackness allowed her to represent a combination of sexual passion and artistic creativity that empowered women in the process of taking on male roles of economic power in American society. Because of Hagar’s ethnic complexity, she stands as an ironically positive figure at the center of several southern proslavery women’s novels such as The Deserted Wife, Hagar the Martyr, and The Modern Hagar. Through the persona of Hagar, women novelists felt free to create heroines whose suggestive blackness allowed readers to imagine themselves in rebellion against a restrictive patriarchy, but whose recoverable whiteness provided a safety hatch through which blackness could be disavowed. By exploring these complex and often contradictory depictions, Janet Gabler-Hover contends that the figure of Hagar is central to the canonized romance of nineteenth-century New England literature. The book also affirms Toni Morrison’s claim that blackness—indeed black womanness—lies at the heart of the white literary imagination in America.

Mixed-Race Mixtape Explores Identity Through Hip-Hop Theater at UCI

OC Weekly
Fountain Valley, California
2016-05-17

Gabriel San Roman

If Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump can tweet a picture of himself eating a taco bowl while declaring “I love Hispanics,” the national discussion around race has gotten soggier than the bottom of his bowl. Thankfully, Andrew “Fig” Figueroa is coming to UC Irvine this week to elevate the debate with Mixed-Race Mixtape, a much needed dose of hip-hop theater. Born to a Mexican dad and a white mom, Fig explores the intricacies of his own identity through song and stage.

“It’s funny because I was always aware that I had one parents who was Mexican and one that was white European, but I never dealt with the stress and confusion that I do now as an adult,” says Fig, who grew up in Irvine. “My white mother not only spoke perfect Spanish, but also had lived in Mexico for 15 years. So, we took pride in being a Mexican household.” It wasn’t until he moved out of Irvine that he realized all the issues he had that would later inform Mix-Raced Mixtape.

The one-night only production is a blend itself, incorporating hip-hop music, theater and spoken word elements together. The end result takes the audience through his experience of growing up as “ambiguously brown” as, say, Saved By the Bell’s A.C. Slater. Whether talking about encounters with police, family or school teachers, Fig’s bridging of both worlds becomes a balancing act. The feat is often wrought with subtle and not-so-subtle jabs along the fault lines of race and class…

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Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film

University of Minnesota Press
2007
200 pages
24 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN 978-0-8166-3412-5
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-3411-8

Cindy Patton, Canada Research Chair in Community Culture and Health
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada

Though largely forgotten today, the 1949 film Pinky had a significant impact on the world of cinema. Directed by Elia Kazan, the film was a box office success despite dealing with the era’s most taboo subjects—miscegenation and racial passing—and garnered an Academy Award nomination for its African American star, Ethel Waters. It was also historically important: when a Texas movie theater owner showing the film was arrested for violating local censorship laws, his case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the censorship ordinance unconstitutional.

In Cinematic Identity, Cindy Patton takes Pinky as a starting point to meditate on the critical reception of this and other “problem films” of the period and to explore the larger issues they raise about race, gender, and sexuality. Films like Pinky, Patton contends, helped lay the groundwork for a shift in popular understanding of social identity that was essential to white America’s ability to accept the legitimacy of the civil rights movement.

The production of these films, beginning with Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947, coincided with the arrival of the Method school of acting in Hollywood, which demanded that performers inhabit their characters’ lives. Patton historicizes these twin developments, demonstrating how they paralleled, reflected, and helped popularize the emerging concept of the liberal citizen in postwar America, and in doing so illustrates how the reception of projected identities offers new perspectives on contemporary identity politics, from feminism to the gay rights movement.