The Souls of Mixed Folk Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium By Michele Elam

[Laura Kina]

NEW from Stanford University Press:

The Souls of Mixed Folk
Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium

By Michele Elam

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=11382

The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in
literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and
politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works
—novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art
installations—as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil
Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical.
Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the
social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of
Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson
Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All
these writers and artists address mixed race as both an aesthetic
challenge and a social concern, and together, they gesture toward a
poetics of social justice for the "mulatto millennium."

The Souls of Mixed Folk seeks a middle way between competing
hagiographic and apocalyptic impulses in mixed race scholarship,
between those who proselytize mixed race as the great hallelujah to
the "race problem" and those who can only hear the alarmist bells of
civil rights destruction. Both approaches can obscure some of the more
critically astute engagements with new millennial iterations of mixed
race by the multi-generic cohort of contemporary writers, artists, and
performers discussed in this book. The Souls of Mixed Folk offers case
studies of their creative work in an effort to expand the contemporary
idiom about mixed race in the so-called post-race moment, asking how
might new millennial expressive forms suggest an aesthetics of mixed
race? And how might such an aesthetics productively reimagine the
relations between race, art, and social equity in the twenty-first
century?

[Wei Ming Dariotis]

thanks, Laura.

 

Wei Ming Dariotis, PhD                                                                                 

Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies, SFSU
Vice-Chair, Academic Senate, SFSU
Co-Chair, Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, De Paul
Advisor, Variations Mixed Heritage Student Group, SFSU

Email: wmdar...@yahoo.com                                                                          
Office: EP 414

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From: Laura Kina <lkin...@depaul.edu>
To: CriticalMixedRaceStudies <criticalmixe...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Fri, February 25, 2011 3:58:28 PM
Subject: [criticalmixedracestudies] The Souls of Mixed Folk Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium By Michele Elam