Mixed Race Studies

Winnefred and Agnes: The Story of Two Women

Independent Publishing Group
September 2002
288 pages, Cloth, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
6 B/W Photos, 1 Chart, 1 Map
ISBN: 9780795701139 (0795701136)

Agnes Lottering

This is a rare, possibly the first, first-person account of being part of the group of mixed-race families who came into existence at Ngome in the province of KwaZulu-Natal when, in the late 19th century, well-to-do British and Irish traders took Zulu wives and adopted Zulu cultural practices, including polygamy. The author recounts her life and that of her mother in this true account of a Zululand family whose lives were touched in equal measure by tribal belief and Christianity, healing herbs, magical birds, and the tokeloshe, a mischievous creature surrounded by myth and sexual innuendo. It is also a tale of betrayal, grand passion, bewitchment, abuse, and the triumph of love. Part love story and family saga, part social history, it is above all a uniquely South African tale.

Agnes Lottering was born in Ngome Forest in 1937. Due to financial and other constraints, she never completed her schooling. Yet she is a gifted storyteller, telling her tale with freshness and authenticity. She lives in Durban, South Africa.

“The New Kubla Khan: Mixed Race Multi-Nationalism”

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association
2009-05-24

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English, Professor, Director of African & African American Studies
Stanford University

This paper examines how, and to what ends, people of the “mixed race experience” are being discursively contextualized as posterchildren of the “post-race,” “post-nation” era. As early as 1996, Stanley Crouch was proclaiming that “race is over;” since then, others also have rung race’s death knell: Holland Cotter in a 2001 New York Times piece, for example, has claimed that the time for “ethno-racial identity” is past, that we are now witnessing the coming of “postblack or postethnic art” that represents what Anthony Appiah recently called a “New Cosmopolitanism.” This presentation argues that “mixed race” has emerged in the context of these “post-race” cultural discourses, discourses which suggest, as Belize in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America puts it, that “race, taste and history” are “finally overcome.” Hybridity for many represents “life after race”(Naomi Zack), a step “beyond race” (Dinesh D’Sousa), a gesture “against race”(Paul Gilroy), the “new racial order” (G. Reginald Daniel), a “new frontier”(Maria Root) advanced by a “new people” (Jon Michael Spencer) who are ushering in a new world beyond race, identity, and nation. My presentation examines this problematic representation of mixed race people as post-nation vanguards in both mainstream media and in the field of pop-culture, and the send-up of the idea that “mixed race” people constitute a new nation-beyond-nationalism in Danzy Senna’s novel, Symptomatic (2005).

Half-Caste and Other Poems

Hodder Literature
2005-09-15
Paperback: 80 pages
19.4 x 12.2 x 0.8 cm
ISBN-10: 0340893893
ISBN-13: 978-0340893890

John Agard

‘Half-Caste’, the title poem of this collection, is one of the set poems for GCSE English for AQA A, the largest spec with 375,000 candidates. But its influence and presence extends well beyond the ‘AQA’ schools, making John Agard one of the most popular, well-known and respected poet-performers on the schools circuit.

Through his 45 poems, John Agard explores a wide variety of themes: racial harmony, tension and diversity; war and religion; society, patriotism and politics; as well as more personal ideas on relationships, love and attraction. This is all delivered with a range and depth in terms of content, language, poetic form and technique that will engage and motivate KS3 and KS4 pupils while developing their understanding. An ideal collection to sit at the heart of a scheme of work on cross-cultural themes.

Table of Contents

And All Was Good
My Move Your Move
Union Jack and Union Jill
Half-caste [Read here.]
Rainbow
Tongue
A Word
Message From Your Mobile
Right-On Mr Left
Smoke-loving Girl Blues
Angels For Neighbours
Flag
A Vampire’s Priorities
A Hello From Cello
The Hurt Boy and The Birds
Boomerang
That Mouth
Behold My Pen
Punctuating The Silence
Poetry Jump-Up
Follow That Steel Pan
Coal’s Son and Diamond’s Daughter
A Date With Spring
volte For Your Local Shadow
Twins
Quest
Clouds
The Ozone Liar
Cowtalk
Who’ll Sve Dying Man?
For the Record
One Question From A Bullet
A Hand On A Forehead
Not Arms
Checking Out Me History
Toussaint L’Overture Acknowledges Wordsworth’s Sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Overture’
Windrush Child
Crybaby Prime Minister
Skin
A Social Skeleton
The Giant With A Taste For Mongrel Blood
Behind The Menu
Salt
Coal
Marriage of Opposites
Notes

Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Also published in the United States by Harvard University Press as Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line)

Routledge
2004-08-26
424 pages
Trim Size: 234X156
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-34365-7

Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory
The London School of Economics and Political Science

In this provocative book, now reissued with a new introduction, Paul Gilroy contends that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modern democracy.  He compels us to see that fascism was the principal political innovation of the twentieth century – and that its power to seduce did not die in a bunker in Berlin.

Between Camps addresses questions such as:

• Why do we still divide humanity into different identity groups based on skin colour?
• Did all the good done by the Civil Rights Movement and the decolonization of the Third World have such little lasting effect?

Gilroy examines the ways in which media and commodity culture have become pre-eminent in our lives in the years since the 1960s and especially in the 1980s with the rise of hip-hop and other militancies. With this trend, he contends, much that was valuable about black culture has been sacrificed in the service of corporate interests and new forms of cultural expression tied to visual technologies. He argues that the triumph of the image spells death to politics and reduces people to mere symbols.

At its heart, Between Camps is a Utopian project calling for the renunciation of race. Gilroy champions a new humanism, global and cosmopolitan, and he offers a new political language and a new moral vision for what was once called ‘anti-racism’.

Hey Mum, What’s a Half-Caste?

Independent Publishing Group
April 2010
316 pages, Trade Paper, 5.75 x 8.25
35 B/W Photos
ISBN: 9781921248030 (1921248033)

Lorraine McGee-Sippel

Compelling and honest, this memoir recounts the diffuse effects of a governmental policy that required the author’s adoptive parents to be informed of her Afro-American ancestry. Chronicling her personal search for cultural identity, this account also delves into indigenous studies, Australian history, and psychology. This remarkable story is simultaneously universal and deeply personal and will educate and inspire readers.

Lorraine McGee-Sippel is a descendent of the Yorta Yorta people from the Murray-Goulburn region on the Victorian-NSW border. She is a contributor to numerous anthologies and publications, and in 2008 she received the Inaugural Yabun Elder of the Year Award for her contribution to reconciliation and community work.

Lara

Bloodaxe Books
2009
192 pages
Paperback ISBN: 1 85224 831 9

Bernardine Evaristo

Lara is a powerful semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse based on Bernardine Evaristo’s own childhood and family history. The eponymous Lara is a mixed-race girl raised in Woolwich, a white suburb of London, during the 60s and 70s. Her father, Taiwo, is Nigerian, and her mother, Ellen, is white British. They marry in the 1950s, in spite of fierce opposition from Ellen’s family, and quickly produce eight children in ten years. Lara is their fourth child and we follow her journey from restricted childhood to conflicted early adulthood, and then from London to Nigeria to Brazil as she seeks to understand herself and her ancestry.

The novel travels back over 150 years, seven generations and three continents of Lara’s ancestry. It is the story of Irish Catholics leaving generations of rural hardship behind and ascending to a rigid middle class in England; of German immigrants escaping poverty and seeking to build a new life in 19th century London; and of proud Yorubas enslaved in Brazil, free in colonial Nigeria and hopeful in post-war London. Lara explores the lives of those who leave one country in search of a better life elsewhere, but who end up struggling to be accepted even as they lay the foundations for their children and future generations.

This is a new edition of Bernardine Evaristo’s first novel Lara, rewritten and expanded by a third since its first publication in 1997.

The Loving opinion treated race as a monolithic and meaningful category, even though the realities of the case itself subverted this account. The litigation arose in Caroline County, Virginia, a place called the “passing capital of America” because so many light-skinned blacks were mistaken for whites. In addition, the Jeters made clear that “Richard [wasn’t] the first white person in our family,” suggesting that Mildred’s own racial background was complex.

Rachel F. Moran, “Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences,” (Wisconsin Law Review, Issue 2, 2007), 241-281. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265218010_Loving_and_the_Legacy_of_Unintended_Consequences.