Martha S. Jones is a historian and storyteller whose work explores the past and the present of race and identity. Her creative work has been published by the Michigan Quarterly Review and Medium and produced in conjunction with the John Cage Trust, Slought Foundation, and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.
Through prose and performance, Martha S. Jones examines the cruel, curious, and comical dimensions of the mixed-race experience. With the pathos of the tragic mulatto in mind, she gets beyond simple renderings of the one-drop rule by exploring family history, her ambiguous appearance, and shifting ideas about racial categories. If race is a social construction it is also a lie, one that Jones exposes through reflections on everyday scenes of race-making. Her work is for those for who checking boxes elicits a shudder, while also speaking to anyone who finds themselves in-between and misunderstood by the sociological categories that organize our world.
Watch the video in the Viewing Room.
© Martha Jones 2017.