I Would Meet You Anywhere, A Memoir

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Forthcoming Media, Identity Development/Psychology, United States on 2023-06-09 17:04Z by Steven

I Would Meet You Anywhere, A Memoir

Mad Creek Books (an imprint of Ohio State University Press)
2023-11-04
248 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8142-5883-5

Susan Kiyo Ito

Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Part 1
    • I Would Meet You Anywhere
    • Go for Broke
    • The Place I Came From
    • Not a Japanese Girl
    • Searching
    • One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
    • What Do You Need?
    • A Small Crime
    • What I Did Over Spring Break
    • I Would Meet You at the Holiday Inn
  • Part 2
    • Your Mother Is Very Nice
    • The Mouse Room
    • Totaled
    • Lucky
    • I Would Meet You in a Hospital
    • Long-Lost Daughter
    • Just a Bee Sting
    • Dairy Queen
    • I Would Meet You at a Wedding
    • Origami
    • Undertow
    • Guest Room
    • Separation
    • Like a Heartbeat
  • Part 3
    • A Small Hole
    • Spit
    • I Would Meet You at the Ferry Building
    • I Had an Aunt
    • Got OBC?
    • Look at the Baby
    • The Most Japanese Person in the Family
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
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Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Books, Forthcoming Media, Latino Studies, Monographs on 2023-05-24 14:20Z by Steven

Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

HarperCollins
2023-03-14
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063220430

Michelle Miller

The award-winning journalist and co-host of CBS Saturday Morning tells the candid, and deeply personal story of her mother’s abandonment and how the search for answers forced her to reckon with her own identity and the secrets that shaped her family for five decades.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”

Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. Michelle traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in white-dominated world. From the wealthy white schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with white, largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped Michelle’s understanding of herself and her own Blackness.

As she charts her personal journey, Michelle looks back on her decades on the ground reporting painful events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd, revealing how her struggle to understand her racial identity coincides with the nation’s own ongoing and imperfect racial reckoning. What emerges is an intimate family story about secrets—secrets we keep, secrets we share, and the secrets that make us who we are.

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BUILDING A MIXED RACE COMMUNITY: The People, Building and Sites of the Winton Triangle

Posted in Articles, Forthcoming Media, History, United States on 2023-03-13 02:10Z by Steven

BUILDING A MIXED RACE COMMUNITY: The People, Building and Sites of the Winton Triangle

Chowan Discovery Group
2023-03-06

Marvin Tupper Jones

The exhibit tells of Civil War escapes on the Chowan River in Tunis, NC.

The history covered in this exhibit spans from 1851 to 1973 and takes the viewer from the antebellum time through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the modern Civil Rights eras. It tells stories about over 30 people along with photographs and text. Four women are featured, as well as business people, farmers, carpenters, educators, church leaders, soldiers (Civil War and WWII), Civil Rights activists and organizations. One building included among the thirty 20”x30” panels is the exhibit’s first venue, the C.S. Brown Auditorium in Winton, NC

For more information, click here.​

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Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, Forthcoming Media, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Monographs, United States on 2023-03-08 15:21Z by Steven

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Rutgers University Press
2023-06-16
194 pages,
8 bw, 3 color
6.12 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 9781978835535
Cloth ISBN: 9781978835542
EPUB ISBN: 9781978835559
Kindle ISBN: 9781978835566
PDF ISBN: 9781978835573

Rena M. Heinrich, Assistant Professor of Theatre Practice
University of Southern California

Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people.

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter 1: Stages of Denial
  • Chapter 2: Tragic Eurasians: Mixed-Asian Dramas in the Late-Nineteenth Century
  • Chapter 3: Shape Shifting Performances in the Twentieth Century
  • Chapter 4: Cosmopolitan Identity in Mixed Dramatic Forms
  • Chapter 5: Multiraciality in the Post-racial Era
  • Chapter 6: Beyond Monoracial Hierarchies: Recovering Lost Selves
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
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A Real Negro Girl: Fredi Washington and the New Negro Renaissance

Posted in Arts, Biography, Books, Forthcoming Media, Monographs, Passing, United States, Women on 2023-03-08 15:20Z by Steven

A Real Negro Girl: Fredi Washington and the New Negro Renaissance

Oxford University Press
2023-10-02
320 Pages
25 black and white illustrations
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780197626214

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

  • First biography of dancer, actor, and activist Fredi Washington
  • Highlights the role of the performing arts in the history of the New Negro Renaissance, which has tended to be focused on literary arts
  • Focuses on an African American who could have but chose not to “pass

The first biography of performing artist, writer, and civil and human rights activist Fredi Washington.

Following Fredi Washington’s debut in her first dramatic role in 1926, Alfred Spengler of the New York North Side News reported that she was “astonishingly pretty for a real Negro girl.” Throughout her career, Washington was vulnerable to discrimination because her near-white skin and hazel eyes, coupled with her self-identification as Negro, cast her as too physically white to play black and too culturally black to play white. The multifaceted Washington was of course a great deal more than her looks; she was a performing artist, a writer, and a civil and human rights activist. Embracing the genres of dance, theater, and film, she used her talent, creativity, and determination to sustain a thirty-year career in the arts and in labor and political activism during the New Negro Renaissance and beyond.

Although Fredi Washington has been largely forgotten, A Real Negro Girl shows that, at the zenith of her career, she was a household name in the black community, well known in mainstream America, and a darling of the European press. Most famous for her role in the film “Imitation of Life,” she was a part of a cohort that included Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Delving into her professional and personal experiences in Harlem, nationally, and internationally, this book illuminates Washington’s significance to the New Negro Renaissance and reveals the vital influence of black performing artists and of black women on the movement. Over the years, Washington expanded her social and political consciousness and anti-racism activism, encompassing journalism, labor organizing, protests, and support of progressive politics. As a founder and executive director of the Negro Actors Guild of America, she sought to protect black artists from professional exploitation and physical abuse.

Incorporating close readings of images and films, interviews, and fan mail, as well as writings by and about Washington, A Real Negro Girl highlights Fredi Washington as an influential actor in the African American quest for civil and human rights.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: The Roots of the New Negro Renaissance
  • Chapter 2: Dancing All Day: Reading Blackface and Black Bodies
  • Chapter 3: Boxers, Blacks, and a Real Negro Girl: White Expectations and Imagined Conceptions of Authentic Blackness
  • Chapter 4: Race, Place, and Miscegenation: Fredi Washington in Imitation of Life
  • Chapter 5: Beyond the Footlights: New Negro Performing Artists and More Tangible Forms of Activism
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Select Bibliography
  • Index
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Dialogues Beyond the Master’s Map: An Invitation

Posted in Forthcoming Media, Identity Development/Psychology, Philosophy, Social Justice, Social Science, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers on 2022-02-02 03:28Z by Steven

Dialogues Beyond the Master’s Map: An Invitation

Carlos Hoyt, Ph.D., LICSW
2022-01-08

My journey has taken me past constructions of race,
past constructions of mixed race,
and into an understanding of human difference
that does not include race as a meaningful category.
–Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour, Rainier Spencer

Introduction

About ten years ago I invited people who resist the practice of racialization to talk with me about why, when, and how they arrived at a point beyond personal and social identity defined and confined by the dogma of race.

Since then, I’ve had the privilege of being able to write, talk, and teach about the implications of the non-racial worldview in a wide variety of contexts. And all along the way, I’ve heard from folks wishing to gather with others who share an anti-racialization orientation. This is an invitation to such a gathering.

If, despite being told and trained and pressured to embrace and perform a sense of identity that represents a false construct of human differences, you defy racial reduction and seek the company of others who resist racialization, please contact me. About a month from the posting of this invitation, sometime in early February, I’ll contact everyone who expressed interest with a date and time for our first gathering (via Zoom) where we’ll share perspectives and narratives of life beyond the master’s map…

To continue reading, click here.

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Jackie Kay International Conference

Posted in Family/Parenting, Forthcoming Media, Gay & Lesbian, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Live Events, United Kingdom, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers, Women on 2020-02-13 18:57Z by Steven

Jackie Kay International Conference

Gylphi Contemporary Writers
February 2020

Liverpool, England, United Kingdom
2020-05-06
Contact: kay.conference@gylphi.co.uk

Organisers:

Natasha Alden, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British Fiction
University of Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, Wales, United Kingdom

Fiona Tolan, Senior Lecturer in English
Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Keynote speaker:

Deidre Osborne, Reader in English Literature and Drama
Goldsmiths, University of London

Jackie Kay is the author of some 30 works, including plays, poetry, prose (fiction and non-fiction), children’s literature, short stories and a ground-breaking novel. She has won or been shortlisted for over 20 literary awards and prizes, including the Guardian Fiction Prize, the inaugural Forward Prize for Poetry for a single poem, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Costa Poetry Award. She is the Scots Makar, professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, Chancellor of the University of Salford and a CBE.

Kay’s work is remarkable for its range of genres, its consistent reinvention of forms, and its marriage of intimate, domestic depictions of individual lives with broad political and philosophical themes. In works such as her breakthrough poetry collection, The Adoption Papers (1991), the novel Trumpet (1998) – a path-breaking depiction of trans identity – and the autobiographical Red Dust Road (2010), her publications explore identity, individuality and belonging, and love between family members, lovers and friends. Amongst many other questions, her works asks what Britishness is, what race means, what it is to love, and what gender is, and can be.

This international conference, the first on Kay’s work, brings together scholars from a wide range of literary and cultural studies. The British Council describe Kay as having, over the past two decades, ‘moved from marginal voice to national treasure.’ This conference will examine the work that has marked Kay’s shift from the margins to the centre, addressing a writer whose work has expanded the scope of British literature. We welcome papers on any topic related to Kay’s writing, including, but not limited to:

  • Scottish national identity
  • Autobiography and life writing
  • Black British writing
  • Trans identities
  • Lesbian writing
  • The family
  • Adoption
  • Scottish Women’s writing
  • Black Scottish Writing
  • The impact / legacy of Trumpet
  • Intersections of form (such as music, poetry, fiction, music, dramatic voice)
  • Landscape and place
  • Love
  • Humour
  • The line between life and art

We welcome papers from any disciplines and theoretical perspectives, and from scholars at all career stages, especially ECRs. Please send a title and 300 word abstract for a 20-minute paper, as well as your name, any affiliation, and a 100-word professional biography, to kay.conference@gylphi.co.uk by 6 March 2020.

The conference is sponsored by Gylphi. Selected papers from the conference will be published as Jackie Kay: Critical Essays, with a foreword by Kay, as part of Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series (Series Editor: Dr Sarah Dillon).

For more information, click here.

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Red Dust Road

Posted in Africa, Autobiography, Forthcoming Media, Gay & Lesbian, Live Events, United Kingdom on 2019-08-06 20:50Z by Steven

Red Dust Road

National Theatre of Scotland
2019-08-10 through 2019-09-21


Elaine C. Smith and Sasha Frost

Based on the soul-searching memoir by Scots Makar Jackie Kay, adapted by Tanika Gupta, and directed by Dawn Walton.

“You are made up from a mixture of myth and gene. You are part fable, part porridge

Growing up in 70s’ Scotland as the adopted mixed raced child of a Communist couple, young Jackie blossomed into an outspoken, talented poet. Then she decided to find her birth parents…

From Nairn to Lagos, Red Dust Road takes you on a journey full of heart, humour and deep emotions. Discover how we are shaped by the folk songs we hear as much as by the cells in our bodies.

Opening at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2019, and at HOME, Manchester in September 2019

Touring to Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness in autumn 2019.

For more information, click here.

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Soma Text: Living, Writing, and Staging Racial Hybridity

Posted in Books, Canada, Forthcoming Media, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Monographs on 2019-07-16 14:02Z by Steven

Soma Text: Living, Writing, and Staging Racial Hybridity

Wilfrid Laurier University Press
2019-06-30
295 pages
6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN13: 978-1-77112-240-5

Michelle La Flamme, Professor of English
University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada

Canada’s history is bicultural, Indigenous, and multilingual, and these characteristics have given risen to a number of strategies used by our writers to code racially mixed characters. This book examines contemporary Canadian literature and drama in order to tease out some of those strategies and the social and cultural factors that inform them.

Racially hybrid characters in literature have served a matrix of needs. They are used as shorthand for interracial desire, signifiers of taboo love, images of impurity, symbols of degeneration, and examples of beauty and genetic perfection. Their fates have been used to suggest the futility of marrying across racial lines, or the revelation of their “one drop” signals a climactic downfall. Other narratives suggest mixed-race bodies are foundational to colonization and signify contact between colonial and Indigenous bodies.

Author Michelle LaFlamme approaches racial hybridity with a cross-generic and cross-racial approach, unusual in the field of hybridity studies, by analyzing characters with different racial mixes in autobiographies, fiction, and drama. Her analysis privileges literary texts and the voices of artists rather than sociological explanations of the mixed-race experience. The book suggests that the hyper-visualization of mixed-race bodies in mono-racial contexts creates a scopophilic interest in how those bodies look and perform race.

La Flamme’s term “soma text” draws attention to the constructed, performative aspects of this form of embodiment. The writers she examines witness that living in a racially hybrid and ambiguous body is a complex engagement that involves reading and decoding the body in sophisticated ways, involving both the multiracial body and the racialized gaze of the onlooker.

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Hapa-Palooza: A Celebration of Mixed Roots, Arts and Ideas

Posted in Arts, Canada, Forthcoming Media, Live Events on 2013-09-02 18:01Z by Steven

Hapa-Palooza: A Celebration of Mixed Roots, Arts and Ideas

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2013-09-18, 2013-09-19, and 2013-09-21

Hapa-Palooza: A Vancouver Celebration of Mixed-Roots Arts and Ideas is a new cultural festival that celebrates the city’s identity as a place of hybridity, synergy and acceptance. A vibrant fusion of music, dance, literary, artistic and film performances, Hapa-Palooza places prominence on celebrating and stimulating awareness of mixed-roots identity, especially amongst youth.

For more information, click here.