Mixed Race Studies

Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule

Ohio State University Press
May 2010
161 pages
6×9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8142-1126-7
CD ISBN: 978-0-8142-9224-2

Shuchi Kapila, Associate Professor of English
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Even though Edward Said’s Orientalism inspired several generations of scholars to study the English novel’s close involvement with colonialism, they have not considered how English novels themselves were radically altered by colonialism. In Educating Seeta, Shuchi Kapila argues that the paradoxes of indirect rule in British India were negotiated in “family romances” which encoded political struggle in the language of domestic and familial civility. A mixture of domestic ideology and liberal politics, these are Anglo-Indian romances, written by British colonials who lived in India during a period of indirect colonial rule. Instead of providing neat conclusions and smooth narratives, they become a record of the limits of liberal colonialism. They thus offer an important supplement to Victorian novels, extend the study of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and offer a new perspective on colonial culture. Kapila demonstrates that popular writing about India and, by implication, other colonies is an important supplement to the high Victorian novel and indispensable to our understanding of nineteenth-century English literature and culture. Her nuanced study of British writing about indirect rule in India will reshape our understanding of Victorian domestic ideologies, class formation, and gender politics.

Read the introduction here.

…Educating Seeta makes the case that representations of such interracial relationships in the tropes of domestic fiction create a fantasy of liberal colonial rule in nineteenth-century British India. British colonials in India were preoccupied with appearing as a benevolent, civilizing power to their British and colonial subjects. They produced a vast archive of writing, which includes memoirs, official and private correspondence, and histories, in which they confronted their anxieties about their motives for colonial rule. I expand the definition of “family romance” to include not only interracial love between an English man and an Indian woman, but also political conflict represented as domestic drama featuring Indian women who appear in many roles: as widowed queens who act like recalcitrant daughters; as wives who bring domestic felicity but also usurp the English household; as heroic and rebellious natives; and as compliant and educable subjects. I argue that these seemingly disparate representations of Indian women all have the structure of a family romance, a romance that portrays the permutations of interracial domesticity as a political allegory of indirect colonial rule. This Anglo-Indian family romance—as I will call it here—thus becomes a particularly appropriate literary narrative that enables British writers to justify colonial rule as positive, educative, and benevolent. Two concepts, thus, become central to this study: first, that domestic fiction provides the tropes in which liberal British fantasies about India are represented, and second, that the presence of Indian women signals sites of crises in these fantasies…

…The death of the Indian woman in many of these romances, signaling that interracial love is not socially viable, is an instance of such narrative failure. For instance, in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, Zora dies early, setting the English hero, Jim Douglas, free to love an Englishwoman. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, for instance in the Orientalist idealization of the Indian woman in Maud Diver’s Lilamani, in which interracial marriage between Neville Sinclair and Lilamani heralds a new understanding between cultures with the ultimate goal of “civilizing” other cultures into European ways of life. Even Kipling, that canonized recorder of Anglo-Indian life, was unable to give us a full-length study of an interracial relationship. In most of his short stories, such relationships are unconsummated and end tragically.  Anglo-Indian romancers also seem reluctant to represent mixedrace children. When they do enter the picture, they are depicted with the same fear and horror that greeted miscegenation among white and black populations in nineteenth-century America. Despite these narrative failures, however, Anglo-Indian romancers do make a foray into imagining mixed households and interracial marriages. They execute a variety of formal explorations, which often surprise readers into confronting unorthodox outcomes about the possibilities of mixed race sociality…

…Until the recent wave of colonial cultural studies, most historians ignored interracial romances between European colonizers and native women as a marginal and colorful byproduct of colonialism that did not teach us much about colonial society. One reason for this neglect could be that interracial love, and its corollary, the possibility of miscegenation, while it has always existed in colonial societies, has also been proscribed in official ideologies of most such societies. In the case of colonial India particularly, the absence of discussion about interracial relationships could be because such relationships were visible largely in the last two decades of the eighteenth century…

…A second kind of nineteenth-century interracial romance is usually in the high Orientalist mode and does not dwell on either the contribution of the Indian companions to the creation of a syncretic upper-class culture, the role of such alliances in the acquisition and management of political power, or the process by which they were justified in private and political circles. Such exercises in Orientalist fiction include Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: an Indian Tale (1811), Maud Diver’s Lilamani (1911), and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1872). The women in these novels, melancholy, “idealized,” exotic beauties who represent not only the glories of Hindu culture but also its repressive aspects, are rescued by Englishmen. The attempt to match two glorious civilizations flounders when the inevitable racial differences are confronted. Maud Diver’s trilogy, of which Lilamani is the first part, is unusual in taking the story through many generations. Most such interracial stories come to an unhappy end before their authors confront the question of mixed
children…

…The book is divided into two parts consisting of two chapters, each of which begins with a historical introduction to the context of interracial romances. The first part includes two chapters: the first studies the epistolary record of an interracial romance between an Englishman, William Linneaus Gardner, and his aristocratic Muslim wife, Mah Munzalool nissa Begum; the second chapter focuses on Bithia Mary Croker’s early twentieth-century romances, which represent interracial relationships at a time when official proscriptions against them were really strong. Both chapters explore British representations of mixed domesticity; the construction of class, racial, and national identity in the mixed household; and the place of the Indian woman in this literary-political domain. By focusing on the mixed household as either a place of intense social negotiation or of a gothic, traumatic discovery, I show that interracial domesticity is a nodal point for the cultural and political negotiations of Britain’s Indian experience. Mixed households contest the values of English domesticity and reconfigure interracial relationships away from the predictable tropes of rescue and discovery to an exploration of how class and social power were acquired by colonial elites…

Jackie Kay’s Representation of ‘The Broons’: Scotland’s Happy Family

eSharp
Special Issue: Spinning Scotland: Exploring Literary and Cultural Perspectives (2009)
pages 109-143
ISSN: 1742-4542

Mª del Coral Calvo Maturana
Universidad de Granada

This paper focuses on the contemporary Scottish poet Jackie Kay and the comic strip ‘The Broons’ by studying Jackie Kay’s representation of this family in contrast to its characterisation in the comic strip. This study presents a brief introduction to Jackie Kay and ‘The Broons’ and pays attention to Kay’s referential portrayal of this Scottish family in five of her poems: ‘Maw Broon Visits a Therapist’ (2006a, p.46-47), ‘Paw Broon on the Starr Report’ (2006a, p.57), ‘The Broon’s Bairn’s Black’ (2006a, p.61), ‘There’s Trouble for Maw Broon’ (2005, p.13-14) and ‘Maw Broon goes for colonic irrigation’ (unpublished). Each of the poems will be approached stylistically by using the advantages offered by corpus linguistics methodology; in particular, the program Wordsmith Tools 3.0. (Scott 1999) will help to show the collocation of certain words through concordances…

Read the entire article here.

The Poet as Cultural Dentist: Ethnicity in the Poetry of Jackie Kay

Theory and Practice in English Studies 4 (2005)
Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies.
Brno: Masarykova Univerzita
pages 63-67

Pavlína Hácová, Philosophical Faculty
Palacky University, Olomouc

The acclaimed British poet Jackie Kay (born 1961) belongs to the colourful mainstream of recent British poetry. The paper aims to survey the ethnic imagery and consciousness Kay explores in her poems, predominantly with the images of dentistry. Special attention will be paid to the images of cultural significance. A few sample poems will be discussed to demostrate the constant search for identity (inclusion vs. exclusion, assimilation vs. marginalization) and cultural heritage.

…Kay keeps clear-cut the distinction between white and black. In the poem “Pride”, the exploration of identity that is based on the imagery of teeth, leads to concern with nationality. Kay is proud of her mixed Scottish and Nigerian background. She links her African descent to her Scottish nationality as she compares Scottish clans to African tribes – both sharing the pride of their respective cultures:

His [the stranger’s] face had a look
I’ve seen on a MacLachlan, a MacDonnell, a MacLeod,
the most startling thing, pride. (Kay 1998: “Pride”, lines 51-53)

However, Kay does not see the identity of the characters as either black or white. She has stated in an interview: “I consider myself a Scottish writer, in the sense that I am, and I consider myself a black writer, in the sense that I am, and a woman writer, in the sense that I am” (Severin 2002)…

Read the entire paper here.

Harry Chang: A Seminal Theorist of Racial Justice

Monthly Review
January 2007

Bob Wing

It is little known that a shy Korean immigrant named Harry Chang made vital contributions to the theory and practice of racial justice in the United States. In his most fruitful period, the 1970s, his work shaped the thinking and political work of numerous movement organizations, mostly led by people of color. Although he died prematurely in 1979, his work helped lay the foundations of two of the most progressive and influential theories of racism: the theory of racial formation and critical race theory.

To one degree or another, Harry may be credited with a number of ideas that were highly controversial in the 1970s but which in recent years have become much more accepted. His starting point was to highlight the centrality of the “one drop” rule that determines race in the United States (only). By analyzing this rule, he showed that racial categories are socio-historical categories, not genetic or genealogical, and that they are qualitatively distinct from class, ethnicity, or nation/nationality categories. Harry coined the term racial formation to underscore the necessity of analyzing racism as a historical process that encompasses the origins of racism, how and why it has changed over time, and the process of eliminating it in a given historical context. He also argued for the centrality of law to racial formation and the inseparability and mutual determination of racial and class formation. Clarifying the distinctiveness of racism also laid the basis for analyzing the intersection of race and nationality…

…Harry’s experience as an immigrant, his study of Cuba, and his analysis of racial categories highlighted the peculiarity of the dialectic of U.S. racial categories: the so-called hypodescent rule by which anyone who appeared to have a single drop of “black blood” was considered black. He commented on how U.S. racism often viciously divided immigrant siblings from Latin America and the Caribbean into black and white. Such anti-human racial categories, Harry recognized, are peculiar to the United States alone.

In fact, he argued, these categories themselves harbor a chauvinistic logic: “Inherent in the notion of ‘White’ is the requirement of genetic ‘purity’ while the notion of ‘Black’ harbors the assumption of genetic ‘contamination.’ One of the peculiarities of the racist psyche in the U.S. is that its sense of a ‘drop of African blood’ is unbelievably acute but it is practically blind to ‘a drop of European blood.’” “White” and “black” are not the least bit neutral; they contained the chauvinistic logic of pure versus contaminated, clean versus dirty, and pure breed versus mongrel. Racial categories, in other words, are not determined by natural science or genealogy, and were certainly not an attempt at neutral physical description. “Racial categories are not biological categories, but social-relational categories that fetishize genetic diversity.” The logic of racial categories is itself racist…

Read the entire article here.

Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

Atlantic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 97 – 110
DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499

Isabel Soto

This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Enstudios Norteamericanos, Alcalá de Henares (Spain), 28–31 October 2004.

This essay argues that while Langston Hughes‘s short story “Red-Headed Baby” (from The Ways of White Folks) may initially seem to depart from the Hughes repertoire (through its dizzying modernist style, for one), it ultimately endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and imaginative appropriation of alterity. I also seek to historicize Hughes’s text, inscribing it within a modernist practice, studies of which have traditionally promoted the Euro-American paradigm of a dehistoricized “modernist construction of authorship through displacement” (Cora Kaplan). Few writers of the first third of the twentieth century have undertaken travel—figurative and literal—as intensely as Hughes has. His work is anchored in representations of displacement and “Red-Headed Baby” is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on modes of inquiry that promote displacement as central to an understanding of cultural practice. I draw substantially on Paul Gilroy‘s black Atlantic model and formulations of diaspora—not least because his influential work barely mentions Hughes, that most diasporic of modernist writers. I will argue that travel was aesthetically enabling for Hughes, enhancing what elsewhere I have termed his poetics of reciprocity or mutuality. Finally, Duboisian double consciousness also contributes to my discussion, which proposes a dialogic relationship between The Souls of Black Folks and The Ways of White Folks.

Read or purchase the article here.

Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review)

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 35, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
E-ISSN: 1946-3170 Print ISSN: 0163-755X
DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0078

David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor of English
University of St. Thomas

Passing narratives have long been a fixture of American literature. For African American authors, plots of racial mobility have been used to expose the permeability of racial boundaries and to reveal the irrationality of racial categorization, while for many white authors, passing narratives have expressed fears of racial contamination as well as voyeuristic fantasies of blackness. Our interest in stories of passing, whether fictional or autobiographical, has not waned, and the popularity of recent memoirs, novels, and films depicting passing and mixed raciality attests to this fact. Baz Dreisinger‘s study, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (2008), capitalizes on the enduring curiosity surrounding the transgression of racial boundaries. While passing has mostly been thought of as a black-to-white affair, Dreisinger focuses on those crossing the color line in the direction of white-to-black. Her investigation of white-to-black passing provides a compelling perspective on past and current perceptions of race in American culture.

Dreisinger sets the parameters of her study by positing white-to-black passing as a commonality rather than an anomaly. She distinguishes between black and white passing, explaining that white passing is about neither deception nor survival. White passing is not even exactly about successfully becoming black. For Dreisinger, white-to-black passing is about those “moments of slippage in which whites perceive themselves, or are perceived by others as losing their whiteness and ‘acquiring’ blackness”…

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“Des couleurs primitives”: Miscegenation and French Painting of Algeria

Visual Resources
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2008)
pages 273 – 298
DOI: 10.1080/01973760802284638

Peter Benson Miller, Art Historian
Rome Art Program

The Romantic concept of “local color” refers to a site of painterly experimentation, the application of pigment in the chromatic construction of a picture. The term also identifies a detail authenticating an exotic subject considered typical of a particular region. This article zeroes in on the convergence of these two aspects of local color, interrogating the dialogue between subject and technique in the representation of North Africans. In their paintings from the late 1840s depicting “primitive” racial types from the Maghrib, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856) shifted to a color system that emphasized contrasts of distinct zones of color derived from an ethnological spectrum over smooth transitions and harmonies between hues. Unpacking the coordinates, including the trope of the mixed-blood, and the unstable classificatory schemas of physical anthropology suggests that these painters’ unconventional colorism and formal daring indexed the pervasive anxiety that miscegenation would lead to racial chaos. 

…Initially, though, the apparent prevalence of mixed races in Algeria did not inspire concern. In an influential text published in 1826, the American consul general in Algiers, William Shaler (1778–1833), while ambivalent about miscegenation, praised the hybrid ancestry of the ‘‘Moors’’: ‘‘an amalgamation of the ancient Mauritanians, various invaders, the emigrants from Spain, and the Turks,’’ which created a vigorous blend. Proof of the positive effect of such interbreeding, according to Shaler, was the fact ‘‘that there are few people who surpass them in beauty of configuration; their features are remarkably expressive, and their complexions are hardly darker than those of the inhabitants of the South of Spain.’’ While specialists would later question Shaler’s claims, and continue to debate the viability of mixed races, the impulse to discern origins, filiation and racial identity—whether mixed or pure—through skin color and physiognomy would remain a constant…

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How Mixed-Race Politics Entered the United States: Lydia Maria Child’s ‘Appeal’

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Volume 56, Number 1, 2010 (Nos. 218 O.S.)
pages 71-104
DOI: 10.1353/esq.0.0043

Robert Fanuzzi, Assistant Chair and Associate Professor of English
St. Johns University, Queens, New York

For scholars of the colonial and early national United States, it is difficult if not impossible to retell the story of social egalitarianism and political liberty without recounting the social, political, and legal codes governing the practice of miscegenation. Under both the colonial British regime and the post-Revolutionary political order of the United States, these laws and customs operated hand in hand with the equally determinate laws of slavery and citizenship, helping to decide who was a democratic subject and who was not.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, prohibitions against mixed-race marriages and extramarital unions along with their mixed-race offspring helped to create a new, putatively classless caste system, which equated the dignity of free labor and property holding with a pure British ancestry and the indignity of coercive labor with an African ancestry. In doing so, these laws paved the way for a historic argument for civic equality that rendered the American colonist the genetic bearer of English liberty.  In the new American republic, miscegenation laws functioned even more transparently as citizenship decrees, stipulating the whiteness of politically enfranchised subjects and, often capriciously, the blackness of the enslaved or disenfranchised. The logical outcome of these laws, the “one drop of blood” provision, was a testament to the determination of the privileged caste to maintain an artificially scarce supply of citizens by keeping their legal, economic, and political assets from their mixed-race descendants.

Miscegenation laws and regulations played an equally formative role in the civic culture of the antebellum era, when social prejudice against race mixing helped to police civil relations and to foreclose the scope of civic activism…

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Fading to white, fading away: biracial bodies in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

African American Review
2006-03-22

Michelle Goldberg

However dissimilar individual bodies are, the compelling idea of common, racially indicative bodily characteristics offers a welcome short-cut into the favored forms of solidarity and connection, even if they are effectively denied by divergent patterns in life chances and everyday experiences.—Paul Gilroy, Against Race

the invisible in me is counter to the visible.—Michelle Cliff, “The Black Woman As Mulatto”

Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1986) and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) typify a recent literary uptrend: a dramatic increase in biracial fiction, memoir, and theory, in biracial discourses of passing, invisibility, and identity. Abeng, which received widespread critical acclaim, and Caucasia, the winner of numerous 1998 “Best Book” awards, introduce characters whose mixed race parentage holds true for a growing number of multiracial Americans. Both novels offer biracial characters who resist racial labels while staying especially connected to “blackness.” In Abeng and Caucasia, respectively, the white bodies of Clare Savage and Birdie Lee misrepresent identities that remain ascribed to, yet not confined by, “blackness.”…

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Ambiguity and the Ethics of Reading Race and Lynching in James W. Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” (1912)

Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS)
Volume 10 (2009)
ISSN: 1861-6127

Carmen Dexl
University of Erlangen

James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) discusses the causes, conditions, and implications of passing in a segregated society. The essay argues that the novel’s aesthetics of ambiguity conveys and reflects an ambivalence towards the concept of race. Using theories of Geoffrey Galt Harpham and John Guillory, it elaborates an ethics of reading race and lynching in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

…Being of mixed-race heritage and blurring the black/white binary, the Ex-Colored Man as a passing figure personifies this “category crisis.” As the living proof of the instability—and hence unreliability—of the category race, the Ex-Colored Man is necessarily ambivalent towards the ontology of racial categories. Apart from his intention to remain anonymous, his and all the other characters’ namelessness throughout the novel further denote a “sense of rootlessness” (Andrews xix) in a constantly changing modern society that is paradoxically firmly rooted in exactly these unreliable conceptions of race. His moral dilemma and contradictory attitudes towards himself and society result from being at once an insider and beneficiary as well as an outsider and critical observer of that very social system…

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