The German Crocodile: A Literary Memior (Das Deutsche Krokodil)

Posted in Africa, Autobiography, Books, Europe, Monographs on 2022-01-19 23:52Z by Steven

The German Crocodile: A Literary Memior (Das Deutsche Krokodil)

DAS Editions
November 2021 (originally published in 2017)
366 pages
Hardcover 978-1838221508
eBook ISBN : 978-1838221515

Ijoma Mangold (Translated into English by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp)

In this compelling memoir of growing up different, Ijoma Mangold, today one of Germany’s best literary critics, remembers his youth in 1970s Heidelberg and the new Federal Republic, and momentous visits in early adulthood to the USA and Nigeria.

His own story is inextricably linked with that of his mother, a German from the eastern province of Silesia, forced to escape as a refugee in the expulsions from 1944, and to start afresh in utter poverty in West Germany. His Nigerian father came to Germany to train in pediatric surgery but returned before Ijoma was old enough to remember him. His reappearance on the scene forces a crash collision with an unknown culture, one he grew up suspicious of, and a new complex family history to come to terms with. Mangold explores many existential questions in this lively narrative; How does a boy cope with an absent father? What was it like to grow up ‘bi-racial’ in the Federal Republic? Was he an opportunist, a master adaptor who had over-assimilated? What is the relationship between race and class? And what is more unusual in Germany: having dark skin or a passion for Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner? Ijoma shares his story with its dramatic twists and turns, not forgetting the surprises he uncovers about himself along the way.

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Passing: A Film Discussion with Director/Writer Rebecca Hall and Actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga

Posted in Interviews, Live Events, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Videos, Women on 2022-01-19 03:07Z by Steven

Passing: A Film Discussion with Director/Writer Rebecca Hall and Actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga

National Museum of African American History and Culture
Thursday, 2022-01-13 19:00-19:40 EST (Local Time); (Friday, 2022-01-14, 00:00-00:40Z)

Join us in the New Year for a virtual discussion with Netflix film Passing screenwriter and director Rebecca Hall, alongside actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. Based on Nella Larsen’s novel of the same name, Hall’s directorial debut explores not just racial identity but gender, class, the responsibilities of motherhood and the performance of femininity from the perspective of two Black women who choose to live on opposite sides of the color line in 1929 New York. For Rebecca Hall, creating Passing was a deeply personal journey, stemming from the discovery of her own family history. NMAAHC Curator Aaron Bryant will moderate the discussion. This program will be pre-recorded, and there will be no live Q & A. Passing is available now on Netflix.

Watch the discussion here.

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Passing for Racial Democracy

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Passing, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2022-01-19 03:00Z by Steven

Passing for Racial Democracy

The Baffler
2021-12-06

Stephanie Reist

Detail from A Redenção de Cam (Redemption of Ham), Modesto Brocos, 1895. | Museu Nacional de Belas Artes

The complexities of the color line in the U.S. and Brazil

A CENTRAL POINT OF TENSION between Irene Redfield (played by Tessa Thompson) and her husband Dr. Brian Redfield (André Holland) in Rebecca Hall’s Passing, based on the Nella Larsen novel of the same name, is whether their family should remain in the United States. While Irene can pass for white out of convenience, the same is not true of her darker sons and her husband, who routinely informs his children about lynchings and white violence. Irene disapproves of this talk, despite her work for the Negro Welfare League. In one pivotal scene, she drives her tired husband home after a long day of visiting patients, and the couple discuss going to South America, specifically mentioning Brazil. The issue returns when the couple fights over the consuming role that Clare (Ruth Negga)—who has chosen to pass as white to the point of marrying a bigoted white husband and having a daughter with him—exerts in their lives and marriage.

In Larsen’s novel, Brian’s longing for Brazil, which becomes conflated with what Irene perceives as his desire for the effervescent, delightfully dangerous Clare, is even more pronounced: Brazil is the one that got away, Brian’s lost hope for a society where he and other black members of the talented tenth could be judged by their merits, not lynched because they failed to stay in their place. Irene even implicitly sanctions an affair between her husband and Clare to assuage her guilt for denying her family the chance to be truly “happy, or free, or safe”—a state she laments as impossible when speaking to Clare about her choice not to pass…

Read the entire article here.

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Americans Color Outside the Lines

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2022-01-19 02:36Z by Steven

Americans Color Outside the Lines

The Dispatch
2021-04-26

Chris Stirewalt, Contributing Editor

Photograph By Marlin Levison/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Even today, bigots and the progressive proponents of race science hold fast to the idea of fixed race and ethnicity. Thankfully, Americans largely ignore them.

In his autobiography, Life on the Color Line, Gregory Williams tells the story of discovering at the age of 10 that he was black—or at least that the world saw him that way.

Williams, who would go on to serve as president of both City College of New York and the University of Cincinnati, was raised as a white boy when and where it really mattered: rural, central Virginia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But when his parents’ marriage broke up and his mom ran off, his no-account, alcoholic father could not manage to care for his two sons. So, Williams’ dad moved them to his hometown of Muncie, Indiana. It was on the bus trip there that Williams’ dad told his boys that he was not the Italian-American called “Tony” who ran a roadhouse west of Richmond but a light-skinned black man from the wrong side of tracks in the industrial Midwest. “Miss Sallie,” the black woman who had worked at the family bar for a time, was really the boys’ grandmother.

Ultimately abandoned by both of his parents, Williams found himself brutally rejected by both cultures. And what a time to live on that line. In 1954, the year after he arrived in Muncie, the Supreme Court struck down school segregation laws. Segregationists had warned after Harry Truman integrated the military six years earlier that the federal government was intent on the mixing of the races—and ultimately making intermarriage appear to be normal, leading to the dilution of the white race. The blending of children in classrooms was to them just the next step in the demise of America’s dominant white culture by miscegenation. Williams remembered a Klansman on television saying the court was trying to encourage race mixing and the rise of the “bestial mongrel mulatto, the dreg of human society.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2022-01-19 02:15Z by Steven

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century

University of North Carolina Press
December 2021
408 pages
49 halftones, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6460-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6461-3

Yunxiang Gao, Professor of history
Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

This book explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War—journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China’s modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book’s multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.

Table of Contents

  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. Africa, Arise! Face the Rising Sun! W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois
  • 2. Arise! Ye Who Refuse to Be Bond Slaves! Paul Robeson, “the Black King of Songs”
  • 3. Transpacific Mass Singing, Journalism, and Christian Activism: Liu Liangmo
  • 4. Choreographing Ethnicity, War, and Revolution around the Globe: Sylvia Si-lan Chen Leyda
  • 5. Roar, China! Langston Hughes, Poet Laureate of the Negro Race
  • Epilogue
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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