Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging

Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging PDF Author: Nicole Stamant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000594572
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging provides a fresh look at the complex dialogue of race and identity in memoir, examining three generations of biracial African Americans’ experiences in their autobiographies. Exploring writers from James McBride and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip to Barack Obama, Toi Dericotte, Natasha Trethway, Rebecca Walker, and Emily Raboteau, this volume explores the ways in which these memoirists refute terms regarding race and simple understandings of belonging, using their contested embodied positions as sites for narration, quest, and protest. Organized chronologically, this volume will provide readers insight into memoirs from Jim Crow America to the Civil Rights period and finally those considering the post-soul (and post-Loving v. Virginia) generation. Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging interrogates these difficult spaces surrounding identity construction, encouraging new conversations surrounding visibility of mixed-race individuals and experiences for future generations. Through archives and personal testimony, this book provides a model for interweaving theoretical and personal accounts of color in American culture to encourage discussions that transgress disciplinary boundaries in the today’s dialogue.

Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging

Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging PDF Author: Nicole Stamant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000594572
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book

Book Description
Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging provides a fresh look at the complex dialogue of race and identity in memoir, examining three generations of biracial African Americans’ experiences in their autobiographies. Exploring writers from James McBride and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip to Barack Obama, Toi Dericotte, Natasha Trethway, Rebecca Walker, and Emily Raboteau, this volume explores the ways in which these memoirists refute terms regarding race and simple understandings of belonging, using their contested embodied positions as sites for narration, quest, and protest. Organized chronologically, this volume will provide readers insight into memoirs from Jim Crow America to the Civil Rights period and finally those considering the post-soul (and post-Loving v. Virginia) generation. Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging interrogates these difficult spaces surrounding identity construction, encouraging new conversations surrounding visibility of mixed-race individuals and experiences for future generations. Through archives and personal testimony, this book provides a model for interweaving theoretical and personal accounts of color in American culture to encourage discussions that transgress disciplinary boundaries in the today’s dialogue.

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging PDF Author: Kym Ragusa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393609553
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty. Kym Ragusa's stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa's working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them. From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker's observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa's sensuous memories are a reader's delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage. A Finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

Memoir of a Race Traitor

Memoir of a Race Traitor PDF Author: Mab Segrest
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620973006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Back in print after more than a decade, the singular chronicle of life at the forefront of antiracist activism, with a new introduction and afterword by the author "Mab Segrest's book is extraordinary. It is a 'political memoir' but its language is poetic and its tone passionate. I started it with caution and finished it with awe and pleasure." —Howard Zinn In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she "had become a woman haunted by the dead." Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family's history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina. Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. bell hooks called it a "courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences." Adrienne Rich wrote that it was "a unique document and thoroughly fascinating." Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. Now, amid our current national crisis driven by an increasingly apocalyptic white supremacist movement, Segrest returns with an updated edition of her classic book. With a new introduction and afterword that explore what has transpired with the far right since its publication, the book brings us into the age of Trump—and to what can and must be done. Called "a true delight" and a "must-read" (Minnesota Review), Memoir of a Race Traitor is an inspiring and politically potent book. With brand-new power and relevance in 2019, this is a book that far transcends its genre.

Say I'm Dead

Say I'm Dead PDF Author: E. Dolores Johnson
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1641602775
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
"With unflinching honesty, E. Dolores Johnson shares an enthralling story of identity, independence, family, and love. This timely and beautifully written memoir ends on a complicated yet hopeful note, something we need in this time of racial strife." —De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills Say I'm Dead is the true story of family secrets, separation, courage, and transformation through five generations of interracial relationships. Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana's antimiscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo, New York. When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother's white blood in her identity. Later, as a Harvard-educated business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father's black genealogy. But in the process, Johnson suddenly realized that her mother's whole white family was—and always had been—missing. When she began to pry, her mother's 36-year-old secret spilled out. Her mother had simply vanished from Indiana, evading an FBI and police search that had ended with the conclusion that she had been the victim of foul play.

When I Was White

When I Was White PDF Author: Sarah Valentine
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250146763
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The stunning and provocative coming-of-age memoir about Sarah Valentine's childhood as a white girl in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and her discovery that her father was a black man. At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the white girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race. And so Sarah began the difficult and absorbing journey of changing her identity from white to black. In this memoir, Sarah details the story of the discovery of her identity, how she overcame depression to come to terms with this identity, and, perhaps most importantly, asks: why? Her entire family and community had conspired to maintain her white identity. The supreme discomfort her white family and community felt about addressing issues of race–her race–is a microcosm of race relationships in America. A black woman who lived her formative years identifying as white, Sarah's story is a kind of Rachel Dolezal in reverse, though her "passing" was less intentional than conspiracy. This memoir is an examination of the cost of being black in America, and how one woman threw off the racial identity she'd grown up with, in order to embrace a new one.

In Full Color

In Full Color PDF Author: Rachel Dolezal
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1944648178
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A lot of people have made up their minds about Rachel Doležal. But none of them know her real story. In June 2015, the media "outed" Rachel Doležal as a white woman who had knowingly been "passing" as Black. When asked if she were African American during an interview about the hate crimes directed at her and her family, she hesitated before ending the interview and walking away. Some interpreted her reluctance to respond and hasty departure as dishonesty, while others assumed she lacked a reasonable explanation for the almost unprecedented way she identified herself. What determines your race? Is it your DNA? The community in which you were raised? The way others see you or the way you see yourself? With In Full Color, Rachel Doležal describes the path that led her from being a child of white evangelical parents to an NAACP chapter president and respected educator and activist who identifies as Black. Along the way, she recounts the deep emotional bond she formed with her four adopted Black siblings, the sense of belonging she felt while living in Black communities in Jackson, Mississippi, and Washington, DC, and the experiences that have shaped her along the way. Her story is nuanced and complex, and in the process of telling it, she forces us to consider race in an entirely new light—not as a biological imperative, but as a function of the experiences we have, the culture we embrace, and, ultimately, the identity we choose.

Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing

Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing PDF Author: Christina Schönberger-Stepien
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000850293
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This book explores 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narrative perspective, and its effects on the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book traces relevant guiding principles that the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. Situating the narratives in their socio-political and cultural context, the book uncovers to what extent these autobiographical narratives reflect the authors’ position between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and celebrity status.

Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness

Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness PDF Author: Jane Lazarre
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374145
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
"I am Black," Jane Lazarre's son tells her. "I have a Jewish mother, but I am not 'biracial.' That term is meaningless to me." In this moving memoir, Jane Lazarre, the white Jewish mother of now adult Black sons, offers a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America as she tells the story of how she came to understand the experiences of her African American husband, their growing sons, and their extended family. Recounting her education, as a wife, mother, and scholar-teacher, into the realities of African American life, Lazarre shows how although racism and white privilege lie at the heart of American history and culture, any of us can comprehend the experience of another through empathy and learning. This Twentieth Anniversary Edition features a new preface, in which Lazarre's elegy for Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others, reminds us of the continued resonance of race in American life. As #BlackLivesMatter gains momentum, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is more urgent and essential than ever.

Love Imagined

Love Imagined PDF Author: Sherry Quan Lee
Publisher: Loving Healing Press
ISBN: 1615992332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
ÿLove Imaginedÿis an American woman?s unique struggle for identity. "Joining the long history of women of color fighting to claim literary space to tell our stories, Sherry Quan Lee shares her truth with fierce courage and strength in Love Imagined. ... Quan Lee crafts a riveting tale of Minnesota life set within the backdrop of racial segregation, the Cold War, the sexual revolution while navigating it all through the lens of her multi-layered identities. A true demonstration of the power of an intersectional perspective." --Kandace Creel Falc¢n, Ph.D., Director of Women?s and Gender Studies, Minnesota State University, Moorhead "Love Imagined: this fascinating, delightful, important book. This imagining love, this longing for love. This poverty of No Love, this persistent racism, sexism, classism, ageism. The pain these evils cause the soul...This is an important document of a mixed-race contemporary woman, a memoir about her family lineages back to slavery, back to China, back to early Minneapolis, and about the struggle of finding herself in all of these." --Sharon Doubiago, author ofÿMy Father?s Love "When I read Sherry?s story [Love Imagined], I recognized feelings and meanings that mirrored mine. I felt a sense of release, an exhale, and I knew I could be understood by her in a way that some of my family and friends are unable to grasp, through no fault of their own. It?s the Mixed experience. Sherry Lee?s voice, her story, will no doubt touch and heal many who read it." --Lola Osunkoya, MA Founder of Neither/Both LLC, Mixed-Race Community Building and Counseling Learn more at www.SherryQuanLee.com From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com BIO002000 Biography & Autobiography: Cultural Heritage SOC028000 Social Science: Women's Studies - General SOC043000 Social Science: Ethnic Studies - Asian American Studies

Divided Inheritance

Divided Inheritance PDF Author: Eveline Podgorski
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640230574
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Paderborn, course: Contemporary American Memoirs, 14 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Besides the novel and the autobiography, the memoir has become very popular, especially in the United States. What makes a memoir special? What are the key aspects the writer of a memoir has to observe? And what is it that differentiates the memoir from a simple novel or an autobiography? In our seminar "Contemporary American Novels", we dealt with some recent outcomes that talk about different subjects - growing up with a divided inheritance, dealing with a rape and overcoming the death of a beloved person. In this term paper, I will take a closer look at the first subject, namely growing up with a divided inheritance, and memoir we read - "The Color of Water" by James McBride. To analyse several different issues that are raised in this book, I will compare it to another memoir, which also deals with the subject of growing up as a part of two different cultures. "Dreams from My Father" was written by the senator-elect from Illinois Barack Obama in the year 1995 and describes his life as the son of a white mother and a black father - just as James McBride. Firstly, I will discuss the theoretical conditions of the memoir as a genre on the basis of the three questions given above. Afterwards, I will go over to the two memoirs that shall be analysed. Since both authors grew up in almost the same time of racial discrimination a short introduction on the historical background of the two memoirs will be given. This is followed by a detailed analysis on different issues that are treated in the two memoirs: The relationship between Barack and his father compared to the relationship of James and his mother, as well as how the subjects of race and identity as they are experienced by the two authors. I will conclude this thesis in the final c