Watershed Moment for Critical Mixed Race Studies

Critical Mixed Race Studies Inaugural Conference

Camilla Fojas welcoming participants to CMRS 2010 on behalf of DePaul University

Welcoming Remarks Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference 9:30am Friday, November 5, 2010

On November 5-6, 2010 DePaul University in Chicago, IL hosted the inaugural 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) conference “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.” We had over 450 people registered and 430 people actually showed up from all over the U.S. from Hawaii to Tennessee to New York as well as scholars from Canada, Korea, and the UK. The programming included 62 sessions of panels, round tables, and seminars; multiple film screenings, keynote addresses by leading scholars Mary Beltran from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Andrew Jolivette from San Francisco State University, and community activist and artist Louie Gong from MAVIN and Eighth Generation; a Mixed Mixer social event with live jazz music; a performance by comedian Kate Rigg; an Informational Fair; a Book Table; Caucus and Business meetings.

From left to right: Ranier Spencer, Michele Elam, Habiba Ibrahim, Jared Sexton

Audience at Michele Elam, Ranier Spencer, Habiba Ibrahim, and Jared Sexton's panel "Back from Beyond Black: Alternative Paradigms for Critical Mixed-Race Theory"

"Creating and Performing Amerasians" panel left to right: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Cindy Howe, Ariko Ikehara

Many panels were standing room only or at capacity. We were honored to have senior scholars present at CMRS including: Kent Ono, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Stanford University; G. Reginald Daniels (via SKYPE), University of California at Santa Barbara; Ranier Spencer, University of Nevada at Las Vegas; Michele Elam, Stanford University; and Richard Lou, University of Memphis. Representatives from community organizations came out in full force from: MAVIN, SWIRL Inc., Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, Multiracial Americans of Southern California, Lovingday.org, and the Biracial Family Network. A strong contingent of undergraduate and graduate students from DePaul University and area colleges and a surprisingly high number of graduate students from across the country joined us as well.

"Exploring the Mixed Experience in New Media" round table with (left to right): Greg Carter, Tiffany Jones, Fanshen Cox, and Seven Riley

Thomas Lopez from Multiracial Americans of Southern California

Marriage Equity USA activist Stuart Gaffney, CMRS 2010 co-organizer Wei Ming Dariotis, Ken Tanabe of Lovingday.org

Representing Fusion from Rutgers University - Phillip Handy and Matthew Vaden

When Camilla Fojas (DePaul University), Wei Ming Dariotis (San Francisco State University), and I initially envisioned this conference back in 2008 at a multiracial leadership retreat outside of San Francisco, we thought CMRS might be a small gathering of 50 or so academics. We were blown away not only by the number of people who showed up but also by the level of energy. I saw a lot of people there from the 8:30am welcoming remarks on Friday am all the way through the 10pm Saturday night closing event! I kept hearing people talk about what a legitimizing experience this was for them both on a personal and professional level.

From left to right: filmmaker Jessica Chen Drammeh, CMRS 2010 keynote speaker Mary Beltran, and organizers Camilla Fojas, Laura Kina, and Wei Ming Dariotis

"Visualizing Mixed Race: Art & Ambiguity" panel from left to right: Jillian Nakorntap, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Amy M. Mooney, Myra Green

Audience members Emily Hanako Momohara and Allen Turner

We want to thank everyone who participated in making CMRS 2010 happen and we are looking forward to the next steps for Critical Mixed Race Studies: founding an association and a peer reviewed online journal; planning for CMRS 2012 at DePaul University and CMRS 2014 (hopefully at the University of Washington); looking for ways us to continue to stay in touch virtually (listserv, dedicated website); and ways to keep the momentum going for CMRS for 2011. There is a lot of work to do and we’ll be sending out the business minutes shortly with ways for you all to get involved.

Following the conference, a colleague challenged me to describe what Critical Mixed Race Studies is in layman’s terms. My best attempt for now is, “Critical Mixed Race Studies focuses on multiracial, interracial, and transracial adoption populations and is concerned with social justice.” My co-organizers and I came up with the following “academic” definition back in 2008:

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Our reason for this wordy and hopefully careful definition was an attempt to describe something that was already happening around us rather than something purely theoretical. The term “critical” builds on the field of Critical Race theory, a discipline that emerged in the 1970s in the US, which has historically been concerned with racial justice advocacy. Multiracial scholarship in the US began to emerge with key publications such as Paul Spickard’s Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century American (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Maria P.P. Root’s Racially Mixed People in America (Sage Publications, 1992). What has yet to happen is an organized effort to establish critical mixed race studies as a field with an aim towards mentoring, networking, and supporting scholarship. We wanted to highlight the interdisciplinary focus and the transnational focus that is currently emerging.  Much of the early work in multiracial scholarship has been focused within national boundaries (e.g. the US racial paradigm) or rooted and aimed at only one specific discipline (e.g., psychiatry, sociology). We want to describe something more expansive while at the same time not erase important work that continues in specific geographic regions and within disciplinary contexts.

With this in mind, it quickly became apparent at CMRS 2010 that we might never agree what “critical mixed race studies” is (and that’s perfectly healthy for this to be contested terrain) but I think we can come to a consensus as to our mission “to advance Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) as an academic discipline and a professional field committed to excellence in teaching, research and service to the community.”

Like so many others, I first became interested in issues of mixed race as part of a personal journey to understand my own family history and place in the world. I’m Okinawan, Spanish-Basque, French, English, Irish and Dutch….in other words Asian/White. I grew up in California and the Pacific Northwest identifying as “hapa.” Following the 2000 US Census, I was eager to move beyond biography to find out what other mixed folks were up to. In 2002 I created a series of oil paintings, The Hapa Soap Opera series, starring an all mixed race Asian cast. Living in the Midwest since the early 90s and entrenched in Asian America, I could only imagine such a community in a virtual space. By the time I created my 2006 Loving charcoal series (named in honor of the Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court Case, which overturned the nation’s last anti miscegenation laws), my work reflected the growing number of mixed race peers that had come into my life. By and large they were members of the post 1967 bi-racial baby boom but, who despite our shared mixed heritage, we were still quite disconnected.

Artists Maya Escobar and Laura Kina, writer Tina Ramirez, composer Alejandro Acierto, filmmaker Jonathan Reinert. Round table organized by Alejandro Acierto "Creating Resistance: Using the Arts in Challenging Racial Ideologies"

In 2008, I created a course for DePaul “Mixed Race Art and Identity” for which there was no existing textbook or sample syllabus to model after. This meant me, as a studio artist, having to set down the brush for a season and pick up the pen (or rather MP3 recorder) to begin to collect artist interviews and assemble a bibliography and index of readings and resources to bring back to my students. At the same time I began to became more involved with MAVIN, “the nation's leading organization that helps build healthier communities by raising awareness about the experiences of mixed heritage people and families.” I currently serve on MAVIN's board. I mention all of this because my story as an academic working on multiracial issues and wearing multiple hats (artist, writer, curator, community organizer etc.) is probably quite typical. It’s been a circuitous, albeit exciting, route of finding existing resources, building my own and navigating uncharted waters. Surely there must be an easier way! Joining efforts with Camilla Fojas and Wei Ming Dariotis, we began to imagine what we might have in common as a larger academic and activist community. With the 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies conference, our virtual connections have become a physical reality.

CMRS 2010 keynote speaker Andrew Jolivette

Rather than celebrating the arrival of the watershed moment of research on multiracial issues, in which we find ourselves, our three keynote speakers all offered cautionary advice and provocations. In Andrew Jolivette’s November 5, 2010 opening keynote presentation, “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race & and Representation”, he asked us, “How do we make coalitions with other oppressed people? How do we break out of the divide of immigrant and citizen or native and non-Native…are these simply binaries and what does all of this have to do with mixed race identity?” He went on to say,

….So what does it mean to be critical, and what can critical mixed race studies offer in dialogues and movements for new directions in the politics of race and representation…what can this critical mixed race studies do about social justice, about human rights, about ending rape, ending economic genocide, about Islamaphobia…and transnational exploitation through capitalist systems of forced and cheap or free labor…in prisons and sweat shops…on borders and in wars…what is our call to action…what will it take for us as Indigenous people and folks of color to work across the divides that have been intentionally set-up to divide us…

Jolivette set the terms for a Critical Mixed Race Pedagogy as he challenged us to “Keep the Revolution Moving.”

Critical mixed race pedagogy as I define it contains four basic components: 1) social justice; 2). Self-determination; 3). cross-ethnic and transnational solidarity; and 4). Radical love. Social justice as articulated by critical mixed race pedagogy asserts that all communities regardless of history, socio-economic circumstance, educational background, health status or national origin require access to the same rights of national and global citizenship as all other bodies.

CMRS keynote speaker Mary Beltran

Mary Beltran in her Saturday morning November 6th keynote address, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”, laid out the current media landscape presence of multiracials and as her title implies, we seem to be everywhere but yet there are very few nuanced stories being told on either the big screen or the small screen about the lives of multiracial individuals. What’s happening instead is that mixed race (as in half white) characters fill the diversity requirement and are used to reinforce normative standards of whiteness. Beltran called for more multiracial screenwriters to take on this challenge. What I took away from Beltran’s talk was how she looked at the pros and cons of focusing on mixed race within her own hybrid position as an Associate Professor in Communications and Chican@ and Latin@ studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Because we do not have a set field or departments within the institution, we must work across fields. Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality thus become key theoretical and methodological approaches. The flip side is that many of us work in isolation. Simply finding who else out there is working on related topics poses a significant challenge.

CMRS 2010 keynote speaker Louie Gong

On the evening of November 6^th, Louie Gong who describes himself as “a Native of mixed heritage (Nooksack, Squamish, Chinese, French, Scottish)“ asked us to consider issues of access in his talk, “Halfs and Have Nots.” Gong shared his own story of growing up in a Nooksack tribal community and what the stakes and terms are for education both in Native communities and for mixed race youth. He talked about the multi-generational trauma of the boarding school system on Native communities and how he started high school with 11 other fellow Nooksack tribal members and how by his senior year, only 2 ended up graduating. He asked us all to raise our hands if we had an undergraduate degree or were on our way to receiving one. I’m pretty sure almost the entire audience raised their hands. He went for the heart. Our privilege was obvious. So what are we in Critical Mixed Race Studies going to do about those other 9 kids? He went on to talk about how his work with MAVIN, Mixedheritagecenter.org and the multiracial movement and how it has been through his artwork with his custom Coast Salish shoes (see http://www.eighthgeneration.com/) that he has really been able to open doors to talk about multiracial issues within Native and youth communities. At the end of his talk, Gong told a story of coming home from school each day and grabbing a juicy red apple and going out to get the mail. As he would walk across the res, kids would yell out, “cannibal!” It wasn’t until years later that he figured out why they were yelling that. The audience was silent for a moment….no one laughed. Gong had to go on to gently prod us…”you know, apple - red on the outside, white on the inside….” No, we aren’t all the same as mixed folks. That silence, that space that starts as misunderstanding, is very important. It’s really the beginning of understanding.

and now for the CREDITS:

Help behind the scene. Cristina Rodriguez and Maria Ochoa from Latin American and Latino Studies and the Center for Latino Research

Kenji Tran from Global Asian Studies holding up a conference bag. Logo design and conference cover design by Sandra Franco.

ORGANIZERS

I first want to thank my fellow CMRS organizers WEI MING DARIOTIS, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies San Francisco State University, and CAMILLA FOJAS, Professor and Chair Latin American and Latino Studies.

HOSTS
We wish to especially thank DePaul University Department of Latin American and Latino Studies and the Global Asian Studies program for HOSTING the inaugural 2010 CMRS conference. We are deeply indebted to the countless hours MARÍA ISABEL OCHOA and CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ put in to make sure all the big and little details for the conference were covered. We also want to thank MAYRA ALANIS, JOVANI PEREZ, ANTHONY RODRÍGUEZ, and CESAR ALANIS of the Latin American and Latino Studies and Center for Latino Research and ELIZABETH LILLEHOJ and KENJI TRAN of the Global Asian Studies. None of this would have been possible without the continued support of the Dean of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Dean CHARLES SUCHAR.

CO-ORGANIZERS/PARTNERS
We would like to thank our partners MAVIN for helping spread the word about CMRS far and wide and MAVIN’s ERIC HAMAKO, AMANDA EREKSON, JENEE JAHN, MONICA NIXON, and THERESA RONQUILLO for organizing workshops for this year.

I have to give a special shout out to KATRINA CALDWELL and LAILA MCCLOUD of the Center for Intercultural Programs for sponsoring and organizing the November 5^th mixed mixer and the November 6th event with comedian Kate Rigg.

Comedian Kate Rigg messing with an audience member after the show

We would also like to thank the following DEPAUL UNIVERSITY units for their generous co-sponsorship:
African &Black Diaspora Studies
American Studies
Art, Media, & Design
Center for Latino Research
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
LGBTQ Studies
Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity - President’s Signature Series  - especially ELIZABETH ORTIZ and MIRANDA STANDBERRY-WALLACE
The Society of Vincent de Paul Professors
Women’s and Gender Studies
Women’s Center

SPECIAL THANKS to all the other individuals who helped organize CMRS 2010. Thanks to SANDRA FRANCO for her amazing logo design and for creating a graphic design identity for CMRS, JENNIFER MANGUINO of Broughton Hotels for shuttle services and delightful accommodations at the Willows, City Suites, and the Majestic Hotels. None of this would have been possible without the assistance of faculty and staff across DePaul including: ASTRA STEPHENS and the staff of the Student Center; LINDA GRECO from DePaul’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office for creating the CMRS 2010 website; WEN-DER LIN and the staff of Information Services; AISLINN CALLAHAN-BRANDT of Parking Services; MARK GOLDBERG-FOSS and the staff of the DePaul Bookstore; and ELIZABETH SOSA and the staff of Chartwells Catering Services.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference Nov 5-6, 2010

“Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” the first annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University's Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield Avenue Chicago, IL 60614 November 5-6, 2010.

http://las.depaul.edu/aas/About/CMRSConference/index.asp

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have reached a watershed moment, the 2010 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

DePaul University and CMRS is proud to host over 200 participants from all over the world gathering for two full days of programming, including 62 sessions of panels, round tables, and seminars; caucus sessions in one large room so no one has to choose one part of themselves to the complete exclusion of others; multiple film screenings; keynote addresses by leading scholars Mary Beltrán and Andrew Jolivétte and community activist and artist Louie Gong; a Mixed Mixer social event; a performance by comedian Kate Rigg; an Information Fair and a Book Table at which the De Paul Bookstore will sell relevant texts from presenters and other key texts in the field.
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The 2010 CMRS is organized by Camilla Fojas and Laura Kina (DePaul University) and Wei Ming Dariotis (San Francisco State University

Hosts

DePaul University Global Asian Studies

DePaul University Latin American and Latino Studies

Co-organizers/sponsors

MAVIN

DePaul University Center for Intercultural Programs

Depaul University co-sponsors

African & Black Diaspora Studies

American Studies

Center for Latino Research

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

LGBTQ Studies

Art, Media & Design

President's Signature Series - Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity

Women's Center

Women's and Gender Studies

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For updates and information about the conference join our Facebook group: Critical Mixed Race Studies

All queries should be directed to the conference chairs cmrs@depaul.edu or 773-325-4048

The conference is free and open to the public.
Preregister at:
http://condor.depaul.edu/~aas/CMRSconference/
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CONFERENCE AT A GLANCE

Friday, November 5, 2010
8:30am-6:00pm             Registration
9:00am-6:00pm             Information Fair
9:30am-10:00am           Welcoming Remarks - continental breakfast 
Sponsored by DePaul University’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office

10:15am-12:15pm         Session One
12:15pm-1:30pm           Lunch Break/Caucus Meetings/CMRS Business Meeting
1:30pm-3:30pm             Session Two
3:00-6:00pm                  Book Table
3:45pm-5:45pm             Session Three
6:00pm-7:00pm             Plenary Session Keynote Address - Andrew Jolivétte
7:00pm-8:30pm             Mixed Mixer Social - appetizers, live music, cash bar 
Sponsored by DePaul’s Center for Intercultural Programs

8:30pm-9:30pm             Film Screening - Anomaly

Saturday, November 5, 2010
8:30am-5:00pm             Registration
9:00am-6:00pm             Information Fair
8:45am-9:45am             Plenary Session Keynote Address - Mary Beltrán

10:00am-12:00pm         Session One
12:00pm-3:00pm           Book Table
12:15pm-1:15pm           Lunch Break/Caucus Meetings/CMRS Business Meeting
1:30pm-3:30pm             Session Two
3:45pm-5:45pm             Session Three
6:00pm-7:00pm             Plenary Session Keynote Address - Louie Gong

                                       Film Screening UNRESERVED: The Work of Louie Gong

7:00pm-8:30pm             Dinner Break
8:30pm-10:00pm           Comedian Kate Rigg

Sponsored by DePaul’s Center for Intercultural Programs
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Here are the two session event that I'm going to be part of at CMRS (besides the welcoming address, CMRS business meeting, and introducing other speakers):

Friday, Nov 5 10:15am-12:15pm
DePaul Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield Room #324
CMRS Round Table “Creating Resistance: Using the arts in challenging racial ideologies”
Laura Kina (moderator) DePaul University
Alejandro Acierto , Musician/Improviser/Composer/Sound Artist (DePaul University Alumni)
Maya Escobar , Performance Artist/Internet Curator/Editor
Tina Ramirez, Writer/Educator/Youth Organizer (DePaul University Alumni)
Jonathan Reinert, Filmmaker (DePaul University Alumni)

Saturday, Nov 6 10:00am-12:00pm
DePaul Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield Room #312
CMRS Panel “Arts ReMix: Exhuming Ethnicity Koden, Obake, & Anthropolocos          
Laura Kina (chair) DePaul University
Richard Lou , University of Memphis -“UnEarthing Whiteness and the White-Fying Project: Examining Los Anthropolocos As They Look Back At Their Future Richard A. Lou – ½ of Los Anthropolocos”
Emily Hanako Momohara – Art Academy of Cincinnati - “Koden”
Laura Kina - DePaul University - "Painting Paradise: Cane Fields, Kasuri, and Obake Talk"

BamBUDDHAed Opening Night Oct 16, 2010

installation view - BamBUDDHAed art portageARTspace in Chicago

Blurring the literal boundary between home and gallery, between art and decoration, between curatorial practice and interior design, between (Far) East and West, MOLAR Productions and portage ARTspace proudly presents

BAMBuddhaed!
Or I Ching, You Ching, We All Ching… for I Ching.

portage ARTspace

Oct 16 - Nov 20, 2010

4837 West Berenice (Enter through rear gate)

Chicago, IL

... (Co-curated by Larry Lee and Johannah Silva)
Imagine an empty room.

Where to put things, all your personal stuff including artwork neatly or not requires geomancy or the art of placement which the Chinese call feng shui. Otherwise the flow of chi is disrupted and negative energy results from lack of Kansei engineering.

But no need to fret or fear.

With fu dogs, ba quas and joss sticks in hand, Johannah Silva (portage ARTspace Founder & Director) and Larry Lee along with their ersatz team of select artists, designers and craftspeople such as

Gabriel Bizen Akagawa, Christina Dougherty, Sean M. Gallero, Surabhi Ghosh, Ling-An Fang, Avika Bhansali, Greyson Hong, Molly Jinam Kim, Cecca Morrone, Joanne Aono, Hui-min Tsen, Hee Jin Koo, Regin Igloria, Naomi Yorke, Shreya Sethi, Laura Kina, James Kao, Martin Kim, Ana Kei Ut, Emily Lin and Jeanne Medina

accessorize if not transform a boring white cube into an exotic den/parlor/showroom inspired by Pier One, Cost Plus World Market, IKEA and other fine home furnishing stores.

*portage ARTspace is a year-long curatorial/experimental art project started by Johannah Silva. Johannah regards this project as an extension of her artistic practice and intends for the project to inspire dialogue, build and promote community, and create new experiences both for herself and the project's participants.

installation view - BamBUDDHAed art portageARTspace in Chicago

installation view - BamBUDDHAed art portageARTspace in Chicago

Curator Larry Lee giving a tour

Curator Larry Lee sitting on a bench designed by Gabriel Bizen Akagawa/in front of my Devon Avenue Sampler textile

PortageART space founder/director Johannah Silva, friend Carlton Mok, curator Larry Lee, me, friend John Dodge

Gabriel Bizen Akagawa cooking up some yakitori for the opening

My family - Abby Moy, Midori Aronson, Sam Kina chillin at the opening

BamBUDDHAed art portageARTspace in Chicago - Opening night Oct 16, 2010

BamBUDDHAed! Opens Saturday October 16th

Art & Activism: Telling stories to change the world

Q. Do you believe that art can actually have an effect on the general society?

Of late I've found myself involved with the practice of oral history - listening carefully to other people's stories and the responsibility of recording, transcribing, and the process of editing, retelling and/or transforming these stories. It started with teaching seminar courses on "Asian American Arts & Culture" and "Mixed Race Art" and simply not being satisfied with the materials out there so for the past two years, my students have been interviewing artists across the country and specifically in the Midwest for the Asian American Artist Oral History Project Archive I started at DePaul. I've also been conducting my own interviews with mixed race artists for a book project. Trauma, loss, pain, suffering, and victimization are not central themes in my own work but when you open yourself up to listening to others....it's all part of the story. So what good can retelling a story of trauma do? How does this empower the original story giver? What toll does this take on the story teller as vessel? What action are we the audience supposed to take after we hear the story?

Cherry Blossom artwork by Alfred Li Tsao

On Sat. Oct 2, 2010, I had the pleasure of attending FALLING PETALS. The show was presented by the theater group Erasing the Distance  and Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative (AASPI). I went to support a fellow artist, Alfred Li Tsao, whose work was on display during the show and also used as the set design. Professionally trained actors and one real life story teller, got on stage and retold true stories of "people of Asian and Indian descent, impacted by mental illness and suicide." Following their intense and emotional performance/sharing, the actors debriefed the audience and conducted a Q&A. We came to find out that many family members and friends of the original story tellers were in the audience. They shared. We all cried. It was very powerful. Leaving the theater, I dashed back to a kids birthday party that I was supposed to be attending at the same time as the play. I ate an amazing red velvet cup cake from Sweet Mandy B's and this took my mind off of what I'd just seen temporarily but I found that I couldn't get rid of the weight of hearing these painful stories. I guess empathy feels like heartburn.


On a side note, if you would like to bring one of the story tellers or the entire play to your organization (say for Asian American Heritage month in May...hint, hint...), please contact the director Brighid OShaughnessy.

So today I found myself on a panel discussion about "Activist Art and Social Transformation" as part of the Iraq History Project Art Festival at DePaul University directed by artist, writer, and activist Tom Block and organized by Tom and the DePaul International Human Rights Law Institute. It was an incongruous place for me to be in one sense. I am not involved in any way in art or activism about Iraq. Here again, the day started out with listening to more stories of trauma.

Tom Block's "Mazlum: Artist Book"

First about the Iraq History Project and the Art Festival:

Iraq History Project (2005 – 2009)
The Iraq History Project (IHP) gathered and analyzed first person narratives of severe human rights violations committed under the government of the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein (1968 – 2003) and by a variety of groups after the U.S.-led invasion (2003 – 2008). While some data on past and recent human rights violations in Iraq is available, the suffering of the Iraqi people has been inadequately documented making it difficult to understand the severity and impact of political violence over the past four decades. The IHP addresses this issue by collecting over 8,900 testimonies representing over 55,000 pages of personal narratives. The material documents the individual experience of torture, massacres, assassinations, rape, kidnapping, disappearances and other violations. The IHP is one of the largest independent human rights data collection projects in the world and provides important insight into both past and current violations in Iraq. The project provides Iraqis with an opportunity to talk about their experiences of political violence, analyzes patterns of violence to provide a better understanding of the systematic nature of political violence, and presents policy suggestions regarding transitional justice in Iraq and mechanism of improving human rights protections.

For the Iraq History Art Festival, artists were asked to make a work of art in response to one or more of the 8,900 testimonies. One of the artists that really stood out to me who took on this brave task of responding and retelling was Benjamin June. He created three handmade artists books (Loss, Trauma, and Hope), in which he hand embroidered excerpts from these testimonials followed by the name of the original teller. His use of embroidery made one slow down to read the text. You had to don white gloves to read the book so this also reminded me that this was something that must be respected. That you had to slow down. I was surprised how much the simple shift of changing the color of thread (black for loss, red for trauma, green for hope), changed the way I read the text.

After viewing the art works at the fair, four students from the DePaul students School of Law, one of whom is from Iraq, took the stage and shared testimonials.The act of listening as an audience member is not a passive thing. My heart began to race and my cheeks turned red, listening to the horrors of war retold on this very personal and specific level. This was not the distanced voice of a news report that we have grown accustomed to. Surly I shouldn't be sipping a coffee or nibbling on snacks while hearing these stories?

After a brief break, I joined my fellow panelists, Miles Harvey, Rachel Albers, and Sufyan Sohel, to take on the more general question of the role of the arts and activism.

One of the prompts we were given as panelists was, "Do you believe that art can actually have an effect on the general society?" More heartburn, anyone? I share my brief notes here in part as my own "therapy"....I'm not sure what to do with these two experiences of listening this past weekend.
__

First of all, I’m a visual artist. In one sense I’m quite traditional. I make paintings. I draw pictures. I embrace the genres of portraiture, landscape, and history painting. My work is aesthetically pleasing, and hopefully beautiful. You can buy it and hang it over your couch, if you wish. I have a solo show called Sugar up right now at Women Made Gallery in Chicago through Oct 28^th:

Set during the 1920’s-1940’s, the paintings in SUGAR recall obake ghost stories and feature Japanese and Okinawan picture brides turned machete carrying sugar cane plantation field laborers on the Big Island of Hawaii. Sugar take us into a beautiful yet grueling world of manual labor, cane field fires and flumes.

My work is not, on the surface, what I think you might think of as “Activist” work. What does align my practice with “activist intentions” is the subject matter of my work, which focuses squarely on underrepresented if not invisible histories – specifically Asian American history and representations of mixed race individuals in the United States.

Just down the hall in DePaul’s Center for Intercultural Programs you can see my 2006 Loving series, which was inspired by the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia that overturned this nation’s last anti-miscegenation law. The Loving series consists of nine life-sized charcoal portraits of “mixed-race” friends and acquaintances and one self-portrait. We are all rainbow children of the civil rights movement and members of the post-1967 biracial baby boom. Through the process of drawing and subtle gestures in the sitters’ poses, I wanted to capture a sense of community, the ability to connect with others and the distances between each of us.

(what follows here in my talk are excerpts, in part, from a chapter of a forthcoming book I'm working on with Wei Ming Dariotis titled "War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art")

As an artist, I began to find that it was exasperating to have to tell my whole life story before the viewer could get the nuances of my cultural signifiers. Art can speak for itself but it helps to have a critical discourse between the artwork and artists and the audience – whether that audience is the marketplace, critics, academia or other artists.

American art and cultural critic Dave Hickey visited DePaul last spring and in his talk “on Art and Democracy”[i] he argued,

…works of art have no intrinsic value….all the value of a work of art is invested into it from without. Works of art are elected. And just like our senators, they have no virtue beyond their being elected for us to particularly like them. They aren’t the truth. They are just who got elected. …[The arts] have no stable function. The function of all of these practices shifts and they function in culture as a wild card in the sense that what art, literature, music, dance and theater do is what we need done at that moment.

Like Hickey, I believe that the arts can be a “wild card” and can play a crucial role in envisioning, forming and reflecting (and disrupting) our communities…I need Art to restore what the Culture Wars and rigid multicultural identity politics of the 1990s rendered mute and ineffectual. I need Art to talk about issues of identity, race and ethnicity in a nuanced and non-essentialized way. One of the jobs of Art is to raise questions and complicate things rather than provide us with succinct and tidy answers…

This messy mission, this “wild card” agenda frames my work as an academic, curator, writer, and community organizer and activist and my practice as an artist. I’ve developed and teach classes at DePaul on “Asian American Arts & Culture” and “Mixed Race Art and Identity”; I serve on the board of MAVIN, “the nation's leading organization that helps build healthier communities by raising awareness about the experiences of mixed heritage people and families.”; I’m in the middle of co-curating an exhibition and writing a book called War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art; and next month at DePaul (Nov 5-6, 2010) you can join us for a national conference I’m co-organizing titled, “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Individual identity, while interesting and important, can easily fall into the realm of mere identity politics and is limited in its power to affect social change, write history, or demand representation. If this is about getting elected, we need constituents.  Perhaps my Evangelical Christian childhood years conditioned me towards a collectivized search for meaning. Art can be our wild card to get done what we need done at this moment. From the physical nature and objectness of painting, drawing, sculpture to the ephemeral and sometimes virtual nature of video, film or performance, Art's ability to recall the past, reflect the present and imagine the future equips us with the perfect tool to present our multifacited hybrid selves. Beyond an academic dissection of words, intentions, and an analysis of political shortcomings in this country, I believe that we need community. For it is through community that we can begin to answer primary questions of origin and purpose, or as the famous/infamous post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin asked - Where Do WE Come From? What Are WE? Where Are WE Going?
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My glib comments aside, a very real question of what should be done next with these stories still lies on the table. What can and should art do? If you want to get involved or have some ideas for the Iraq History Project, contact Chuck Tucker, Executive Director, International Human Rights Law Institute.

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[i] Hickey, Dave. “Art and Democracy.” DePaul Humanities Center. DePaul University Chicago, IL. 21 May 2010.

Obake talk - the scoop behind my Sugar series

Save the date! If you live on the Big Island of Hawaii, please come out to the 6th Annual Obake Night - local style Halloween ghost stories featuring "Tita" Kathy Collins and Brada Jo Hadeley Pidgin Storytellers Extraordinaire. See the flier above for details.

Through six degrees of separation and total coincidence (if you believe that anything can be a coincidence), my Chicago friend, Czerina Salud who had just come back from Hawaii from her honeymoon, connected my artwork with some community folks who then passed the images along to some aunties (Akiko Masuda and Charlene Asato) on the Big Island, one of which (Charlene Asato) who also happens to be former Hilo High School classmate of my dad! All of this to say, we all started chatting on line about obake stories, Hawaii, and talking story and they asked to use my images for the flier above.

When my images leave the white cube of the gallery wall (where presumably I have more control over context) and land on a community flier in Hawaii (with my permission of course), the context and meaning naturally changes. There are simply more story tellers here and the geographic location and audience is also shifting quite radically.

I want to take this opportunity to put a few of the images in context and to provide some historic information and my own perspective, as an Unchinanchu living in Chicago, about the use of cane fires, cane field workers clothing, obake tales, and hajichi (the Okinawan tattoo), in my Sugar series. The 10 works in the Sugar series highlight ho hana (hoeing cane), cutting cane, burning cane, fluming cane, as well as an image based on a historic labor protest, an Obon celebration, and images of my own hands covered in Okinawan tattoos.

First the easy one....

Cane Fires

Burning cane is a normal part of the cane harvest, it's not really supposed to be "scary" but we can use our imagination. The growing cycle for sugar cane is 18-months. Before they used to cut the cane for fluming and mill processing, they had to get rid of the cane top and excess grass (or "junk"). This was either done by hand cutting or by burning. It's a controlled fire that simply gets rid of the "junk." In Hilo (Pi'ihonua), where my family is originally from, it was usually far too wet and rainy to burn the cane so this image is not historically accurate but it makes for a hopefully dynamic scene that makes you think about the grueling nature of this manual labor. FYI - watch the movie the Picture Bride! The perspective in my Cane Fire painting is also a mash-up. I took the source image of Mauna Kea from Coconut Island in Hilo Bay.

The clothing for the cane field workers in my Sugar series are what Japanese and Okinawan women used to wear prior to the 1940s (1868-1940s). After the 40's you really saw them wearing Western style clothing and often times even men's work cloths (jeans, palaka plaid or whatever they felt like). Many of the women came over initially as picture brides and they would re-purpose their old kasuri kimonos into work jackets. The head scarf (to protect them from sun, dust, and getting poked from the cane) as well as the apron were made from bleached rice sacks (sometimes the aprons were made from ahina/denim). They used to wear a straw hat to protect them from the sun. Their shoes were initially made from hand stitched ahina (denim) and later they would have rubber tabi's (people still use these today). They also had oiled rain coats. They wore protective arm and leg coverings. To learn more about the clothing, visit Textured Lives at the Japanese American Museum and the work of pioneering scholar Barabara Kawakami.

Why are all the women ghosts and why don't they have any faces?

When I showed my work to the aunties in Hawaii, they read the faceless floating women as a feminist take on the Native Hawaiian legend of the Night Marchers, which puts a new and meaningful spin on the work (meaning isn't fixed by the way). Why did I make my ancestors ghosts in the Sugar series? We (my family or the community) don't have a lot of images or material culture (clothing etc.) from this time period because: 1) there was an urgency both for economic survival and in many times personal safety to assimilate following WWII/internment etc. Items which marked you as Japanese or Okinawan might not have been kept as a result. 2) if you were going to get your photograph taken (on the outside chance you had access to a camera) you certainly wouldn't want to be pictured in your grubby work clothes.  You would want to be pictured in your finest clothing. So most of the photos that do exist are of people at weddings, funerals, and graduations and they are wearing Western style dresses, suits, or black kimonos and later more colorful Hawaiian print kimonos. Most of the images of cane field workers were taken by plantation owners or the State. The viewpoint is far from personal.

I always wanted to know what my great grandma, Makato Miyanhira Gibu [later Hiyane], looked like when she went to work in the fields. I just remember meeting her when she was very old (in her 90's) and I was 5 years old. I don't know a lot about her. She had a glass eye ball because (legend has it) my own grandma accidentally poked her eye out with a sugar cane stalk. Naturally this image of an old woman with a glass eye was sort of scary for a young kid. So the combination of not being able to see the past (literally), made me start thinking about my ancestors as ghosts or an absence. So I went hunting for ghost stories in Pi'ihonua. In the summer of 2010, I interviewed seven elders (Nisei and Sansei) in the community to gather stories that I then used as inspiration for this series.

Going into the series I knew everything was going to be indigo blue (coming out of my Indigo show in India and the Devon Avenue Sampler series) and I was influenced by a combination of Utagawa Hiroshige's New Year's Eve, Fox Fires by the Nettle Tree at Ōji , 1857 and Bruegel's 1568 The Beekeepers and the Birdnester. I also hatched this idea while in midnight fender bender on a tour bus on a highway in Agra, India coming back from a tour of the Taj Mahal in January of 2010 but that's another story....

Obake tales and Hinotama (literally fireballs that shoot from graves that are thought to be souls of the dead)

I was curious about ghost stories so I asked my dad and Pi'ihonua community member Yushie "Carole" Oshiro and others if they remembered any ghost stories and this didn’t seem to be something that was very important to them personally. I guess I had expected the Japanese tradition of the Obake stories to be part of the Okinawan Hawaiian culture as well. Some interviewees speculated that one of the reasons why ghost stories were not part of the culture is that they had to travel from camp to camp late at night in the dark and you really wouldn’t want everyone scared. That said, everyone acknowledged the Native Hawaiian mythology (e.g., Pele stories etc.) but they did not see these as “myths” but rather something that even if you don’t believe, to show respect. There is definitely a sense that our ancestors are physically with us still...if you want to call that a ghost or not, that's up to you.

My dad did remember, however, walking home one night and seeing a “hinotama” (fire ball) shoot out from the old graveyard located near Pi'ihonua Camp 5. In between Camp 4 and 5 on the other side of the cane field, there was an old graveyard. The road to this no longer exists. Mrs. Oshiro recalls that sometime in the 1940’s or 1950’s, the State asked the families in Pi’ihonua to relocate the remains of any family members buried in this cemetery. She remembers that one of her family members was exhumed, cremated, and then the ashes were placed in a family mausoleum in another location. At any rate, dad recalled seeing an orange fireball shoot from the graveyard and up into the air across the fields. This was a natural phenomenon that occurs due to gases building up inside the grave. Of course as a child, he thought this was a spirit or a ghost!

Now the hard one....

Hajichi (Okinawan Tattoos)

Perhaps nothing is more absent (ghost like) than the tradition of Hajichi. I've never seen anyone with the traditional tattoos myself but the topic kept coming up when I would ask what the Issei cane field workers in Hawaii used to wear. Of the seven community members I interviewed, all of them recalled that either their own grandmothers had these tattoos or that they remembered a friend's mother or grandmother having the tattoos.  There are very few images of the tattoos. One woman, Millie Uchima (see interview below), gave me a reproduction of a photograph of her grandmother in a nursing home back in the 1980s and I could make out the designs on her hand. Most of the time, folks just ended up drawing a picture of what they remember the designs looking like. There are images in Okinawa (which I learned about later and which are not in English) but I didn't have access to those when I was making these paintings so I resorted to using my own hands to model the Okinawan tattoo designs.  A reporter from the Okinawa Times, Akiko Kakazu who wrote about my work, told me that there was an exhibit on Hajichi and a related publication in 2008 in the Naha City History Museum.  


Here is the story of Hajichi as told to me by Mrs. Midred T. Uchima of Hui Okinawa. Mrs. Uchima grew up in the Peepekeo community:

July 6, 2010 interview with Mildred “Millie” T Uchima (President of Hui Okinawa Hilo Hawaii) and Margaret Torigoe

Okinawan Tattoos

Mrs. Uchima gave me some photographs of the tattoos and a hand written history and personal story of the tattoos, which Margaret Torigoe later typed up for me and sent via e-mail:

Tattoo in Okinawa

A Personal Story by Millie T. Nakasone Uchima

            For many centuries Okinawa women had the back of their hands tattooed.  Like many ancient traditions, tattooing is no longer practiced in Okinawa.

            My mother, Toku Miyahira Naksone, had tattoos on her hands – I never thought they were ugly – in fact, the hands always looked beautiful to me.  She had circles and squares and lines on both her hands.  She told me that as a young girl, it was considered fashionable and beautiful to have tattooed hands.  Since she was poor, she could not use the best ink from China.  She and her friends used the cheap, inexpensive ink and tattooed each other.  It was extremely painful, but she was proud of her beautiful hands.

OKINAWA TATTOO

            The Okinawan practice of tattooing may have been introduced through contacts with other countries, i.e. India, China and Japan.

            For many centuries, Okinawan women had the backs of their hands tattooed.  Like many ancient traditions, tattooing is no longer practiced in Okinawa.

            At one time it was considered fashionable to have tattooing done on the hands.  It was a fad.  All the girls had it done.  Many young girls tattooed their hands so that they would not be kidnapped by Japanese pirates and sold as prostitutes.  They also knew the Japanese hated tattooed women.

            A legend tells of a beautiful Okinawan princess held captive by a powerful Japanese lord.  He refused to let her return to Okinawa.  Therefore, her servants devised a plan to have her hands tattooed.  When the lord saw the princess’ tattooed hands, he was horrified and immediately sent her back to Shuri Castle.

            The ladies of the court imitated the princess and had their hands tattooed.  They believed that tattoos protected them from evil while others tattooed designs to reflect their social status. 

            Ladies from very rich families used the best sumi (ink) from China.  It was customary for young girls between ages of 17 & 23 to have their hands tattooed before marriage.  Tattooing in Okinawa signified a girl’s transition from adolescence to adulthood.  A big celebration was held at this time.  When the girl turned 37, the design was enlarged and darkened.  When the first grandchild was born, the procedure was repeated, with more designs being added.  When the woman died, her tattoo was considered her “passport” to the “other side” where she would display her tattoos as identification to her ancestral family.

            Today tattooing is forbidden by law and rarely will you see a woman with tattoos on her hand.  If she is alive, she will have to be someone’s great, great grandmother since many ladies who had tattoos on their hands have already joined their ancestors.

Millie Uchima

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Mrs. Uchima said that if you were rich, you would have dark black tattoos made with ink from China (sumi ink). Most people, however, had to use homemade ink and it was purplish blue (indigo). The women would get tattoos between the ages 17-23 [before marriage]. According to “Tattoos: A Woman’s Story” by Doreen Yamashiro, “If a woman refused or protested the painful procedure, she was threatened with exile to Taiwan or another country.” Mrs. Uchima recalls that in Okinawa, they would create pigment from the “tinsagunu” flower (balsam flower). They would mash it up. They would use the red, purple, or pink flowers to create nail polish and the purple flowers for tattoos.

She remembers that they would get the tattoos a little at a time – when you were engaged, then when you were married, then when you had children, and then grandchildren. Yamashiro’s essay confirms that the tattooing would traditionally happen two additional times, “When she turned 37, the design was enlarged and darkened, and when her first grandchild was born, the procedure was repeated – with more designs added.” The first tattoos would be on the base of the fingers and then on the back of the hand and eventually the wrist. The geometric shape on the back of the hand was usually a large circle. You would also see diamond shapes or other shapes inspired from kasuri designs. The fingers might be completely tattooed. 

I asked why the rich families were sending their daughters to Hawaii to work manual labor. She said there was a famine in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and that there were no jobs and that this impacted even the rich families so that this why they would take the risk to send their daughters off to Hawaii.
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One of the 6th Annual Obake Night event organizers noted that the events on October 29 and 30, 2010, “will be dedicated to the souls and spirits of women who have been and continue to be violated in wars, whether wars between countries or wars between one human and another as in violence in our families.”  They all felt strongly that the tattoo image featured in my painting reminded them of their history both in terms of things that were nostalgic but also frightening and in terms of things you just never ever talked about.


- Laura Kina

Sept 10th Laura Kina "Sugar" opening reception pictures

Snaps from the opening reception of my show "Sugar" at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago on Sept 10, 2010. The show is up through Oct 28th.

Press for "Laura Kina: Sugar"

Kakazu, Akiko. "Portrait of Immigrant Brides: Okinawan Kina-san's Oil Painting Exhibition" Okinawa Times. 6, September, 2010.

"Portrait of Immigrant Brides: Okinawan Kina-san's Oil Painting Exhibition"
Okinawa Times
Sept 6, 2010

The article above was originally published in Japanese. The English translation below is courtesy of Miho Matsugu, DePaul University Assistant Professor Department of Modern Languages, Japanese Studies Program

Portrait of Immigrant Brides: Okinawan Kina-san’s Oil Painting Exhibition
September 6, 2010
Akiko Kakazu - The Okinawa Times Overseas reporter

Oil painting exhibition “Sugar,” opening on September 10th at Women Made Gallery in Chicago, IL, focuses on immigrants from Okinawa to the sugar cane fields of Hawai’i from 1900 to 1959.

The artist is fourth-generation Okinawan Ms. Laura Kina, who uses a pop art sensitivity to portray immigrant brides wearing work clothes in the fields, hands decorated with hajichi (Okinawan tattoos), beautiful figures doing extremely hard labor in stretches of burning fields and flooding creeks.

Displayed are ten works based on Ms. Kina’s memories of her father George Kina, 66, who was born on Hawai’i as a third-generation Okinawan, and her grand parents, as well as what she learned from elders on the Big Island and photos.

Ms. Kina, born to an Okinawan father and a Basque Spanish American mother, grew up in a Norwegian immigrant community in Washington State, and studied art in undergraduate and graduate programs in Chicago.

She is currently teaching courses such as “Asian American Art and Culture” and “Art and Identity of Mixed Race” at DePaul University in Chicago. Her research and art work also focuses on consistent themes such as “Fluidity in Cultural Differences.”

Ms. Kina has made works in her pursuit of portraying Asian American history and people of mixed race. On her current exhibition, Ms. Kina says, “I was moved by the fact that immigrant brides made their work clothes out of the kasuri fabrics they brought and continued to wear, remaking them repeatedly,” throwing a new perspective on this historical chapter.

More "Laura Kina: Sugar" press...
Corrao, Tom. "'Sugar' an Art Exhibition by Uchinanchu Artist Laura Kina" Okinawaolgoy Blog: Life Adventures and Stories of an Okinawa Otaku. 7 September, 2010.
http://chicagookinawakenjinkai.blogspot.com/

"Sugar" ZEEK: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. 1, Sept. 2010.

"Sugar" featured in ZEEK

Rodriguez, Camelia. "Laura Kina: Sugar" Audrey: The Asian American Women's Lifestyle Magazine. Vol. 8. No. 3. Fall 2010: 15

"Laura Kina: Sugar"
Audrey Magazine: The Asian American Women's Lifestyle Magazine
Fall 2010 p. 15