Mixed Race Studies

Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of ‘Mixed Race’

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 35, Issue 1 (January 2009)
pages 115 – 132
DOI: 10.1080/13691830802489275

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

The celebration of ‘mixed race’ as the model ‘transgressive’ (post-)identity obfuscates the ambivalence at the root of this construct.  Far from ‘abolishing’ race or throwing it into crisis, ‘mixed-race’ bodies and minds continue to be evaluated as disparate, unwholesome and non-belonging, and appear to invite dissective reading practices such as stares, intrusive questions and comments which are commonly treated as a ‘normal reaction to abnormal bodies’. In this article I examine semi-structured interviews with 22 people of Thai and non-Thai parentage in Britain and Germany.  Drawing on Fanon’s existential phenomenology, I theorise interviewees’ everyday confrontations with intrusive reading practices of their bodies, origins, loyalties and families.  The persistence of pathologising discourses and practices on ‘mixed race’ renders celebratory notions of ‘hybrid border-crossers’ problematic.  Rather than a pre-social property of particular bodies which trigger intrusive labelling attempts, ‘ambiguous phenotype’ is socially produced in biologistic race discourses and violent reading practices. ‘Mixed race’ should be more aptly theorised as a dissective racialising technology which mobilises essentialised forms of knowledge and entitles some to gaze at and define others.   It is constituted in power relations which are socially produced and, hence, also open to contestation and change.

Read or purchase the article here.

“Who Am I? Mental Health & Dual Heritage” Conference Report

At GMCVO, ST. THOMAS CENTRE
Ardwick Green North, Manchester, M12 6FZ
This event was held on 2009-06-10, from 08:00Z to 13:00Z

Programme:

Half-caste  is a term used to describe people of mixed race or ethnicity. Caste comes from the Latin castus, meaning pure, and the derivative Portuguese and Spanish casta, meaning race. The term originates from the Indian caste system, where a person of ‘lesser’ or half-caste would be deemed to be of a ‘lower class’. While the origins of the term are derogatory, its usage has evolved to give it the more objective meaning described above.

Half caste is a term used in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking parts of the world. An example is a child of black African and white European parentage. The term mulatto (from Spanish “Mulato”) has also been used for this particular mixture. Both terms are considered impolite and potentially offensive in the U.S., as the words have been used pejoratively in the past to ostracize and isolate the offspring of such unions. For example, “children of the plantation” (the children of African-American slaves and their European-American masters in the U.S. Southern states) were not accepted as heirs, and in most cases, the relationship was never acknowledged, and “half-caste” conveyed the deliberate exclusion. The term ‘half caste’ was once commonly used in the U.K. and remains in occasional use today.

Wikipedia

Mixed-up kids? Race, identity and social order

Russell House Publishing
December 2008
184 pages
ISBN: 9781905541386

Tina G. Patel
University of Salford

Transracial adoptees, children of mixed parentage, children of settled immigrant families… more and more children are growing up in mixed-race families and social environments. And there is increasing variety within this mixed-ness. Yet services for them have been bogged down by restrictive policy and practice guidelines based on:

Mixed-up Kids? argues for better and more informed ways of thinking about how racial identity is flexible, diverse, and possesses a multiple status; and how such thinking will progressively lead to an improvement in the child, family and community support services which seek to assist some of the most vulnerable and marginalised members of society, namely black minority ethnic and mixed race children.

As the book presents the narratives of six adults who had been transracially adopted as children, it is of special interest to anyone working in the field of adoption and fostering. It will also be of compelling interest to academics, researchers and students in the social sciences, especially sociology, social work and family/community studies; and of direct practical value to child, family and community support workers. It can serve both as a handbook on which to base policy and practice, and as a tool for considering key issues in the area.

Mixed Heritage Children and Young People: Issues and Ways Forward was a conference held in London, England on 2009-04-29 and hosted by the Ethnic Minority Achievement Service Cambridge Education @ Islington.

Featured speakers:

Leon Tikly, Professor
University of  Bristol

Bradley Lincoln
Multiple Heritage Project, Manchester

Featured Presentations:

Making Mixed Race Children Visible in the Education System

Jane Daffé, Senior EMA Consultant
Nottingham City, LA

Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing: A study of ‘Mixed Experiences’
…‘In junior school I remember feeling very popular. I had a large group of friends and we had all been brought up in the same area although our parents may have been from elsewhere. I went to the same high school as a lot of the girls in this group but they all spilt up and joined different groups that already existed within the school e.g. the Jewish girls joined a group of Jewish girls, the black girls joined a group of black girls etc. I wasn’t a ‘member’ of any of these groups and I didn’t want to be’
Dinah Morley

‘I had an attitude like I don’t know what to do I’ll just get on with things…I kind of changed my attitude like I was just saying well I can only be me …and it made things easier in a way’…

Improving the Educational Environment for Mixed Race Children
Professor Leon Tikly
University of Brsitol

Mix-d: uk: A Look at Mixed-Race Identities

Pelican Press, Manchester, United Kingdom
September 2008
32 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9559505-0-6

Bradley Lincoln, Editor & Designer

Richard Milnes, Photographer

Mix-d: uk is a publication looking at mixed race identities from the Multiple Heritage Project [now mix-d] and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust. It celebrates the UK’s diverse Multiple Heritage population through portraits of people of mixed background. This beautiful book is a positive representation of this growing population with personal quotes reflecting the multiple heritage experience.

You may order the book here.

`Caucasian and Thai make a good mix’

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 12, Number 1 (February 2009)
pages 59-78
DOI: 10.1177/1367549408098705

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

This article examines the current celebration of Eur/Asianness in the media and popular culture. It traces representations of the `mixed race’ body, from colonial discourses of degeneracy and monstrosity to capitalist discourses of commercialized exoticism and `beauty’.  It then examines how people of Thai and non-Thai parentage interviewed in Britain and Germany in 2001 and 2002 negotiated gendered and racialized readings of their bodies. Narratives of multi-racialized embodiment brim with racism, as the `valuable’ or `pathological’, `good’ or `bad mixes’, of unlike body parts grafted onto each other. This necessitates a critical re-evaluation of `hybridity’ debates, which treat biological racism as a past phenomenon that can be metaphorized for cultural processes of identification.

Read or purchase the article here.

mix-d: (pronounced “mixed”) Describes a position of pride and place where one can bring all sides of their cultural identity together and express an identity which is similar to but not specifically like either. By dropping the term race we make a step forward and begin to talk about a fully lived experience rather than constantly referring to an outdated social construct which keeps us trapped in the past.

Bradley Lincoln, The Multiple Heritage Project

From the University of Kent: ‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study

A major new study, jointly undertaken by Peter Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Kent, and Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow at London South Bank University, will investigate who was considered to be mixed race in Britain between 1920 and 1950, and how this population was perceived and treated by officialdom, the media and wider society.

Titled The Era of Moral Condemnation: mixed race people in Britain 1920 – 1950, the study will use first-hand accounts, autobiographical recordings and a range of archival material to understand how these perceptions emerged and the impact they may have had on the conceptualisation of mixed race people in Britain today….

‘In certain circumstances, race mixing is known to be bad. Further knowledge of its biological effects is needed in order to make it possible to frame a practical eugenic policy.  Meanwhile, since the process of race mixture cannot be reversed, great caution is advocated.’

Records of the Eugenics Society, 1934