Mixed Race Studies

“You are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 38, Number 2 (April 2003)
pages 125-145
DOI: 10.1177/00219894030382008

Loretta Mijares

The term “Anglo-Indian”, emerging as early as 1806, originally referred to the British in India. In India today, however, the term is universally understood to refer to the mixed-race descendants of British-Indian liaisons. In between these two historical markers lies a complex history of changing notions of racial mixture and affiliations with colonial power. At the same time, the “half-caste” has been a perennial figure in colonial fiction, and continues to appear regularly in contemporary Indian writing in English. Discussion of the literary figure of the half-caste, however, has taken place (if at all) by and large in the absence of any acknowledgement of the history of this community. A literary analysis of the “half-caste” attentive to this history offers valuable lessons about the usefulness and limitations of such theoretical notions as “hybridity” by calling attention to the shifting historical valences of literal experiences of hybridity. As a case-study in such an approach, this essay examines the role of racial mixture in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with due attention to the Anglo-Indian community in India. This reveals how racial mixture in the literary imagination often becomes a metaphor for something else, and in this process of metaphorization is alienated from the history from which it originates. This process has parallels in literary theory: theoretical abstractions such as hybridity have become rarefied and need to be reconnected to their geographical and historical contexts if they are to retain any efficacy in explaining the processes of identity construction they claim to describe.

In India, the mixed-race population was known as “Eurasian”, with “half-caste” as a derogatory term. By the late nineteenth century, however. “Eurasian” had likewise accumulated a pejorative connotation…

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A Case of Identity: Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians

Ethnohistory
Volume 48, Number 3 (Summer 2001)
pages 473-494
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-48-3-473

Dave D. Davis
University of Southern Maine

Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and historians have regarded the Houma Indians of southern Louisiana as the descendants of the Houma Indians encountered along the Mississippi River by French explorers and settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oral history of the contemporary Houma traces the group’s origin to Native Americans of the Houma and other tribes who moved into the bayou country of southeastern Louisiana during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. However, anthropologists and historians from the Bureau of Indian Affairs have concluded that there is no documentary evidence of any cultural or genealogical link between the modern Houma and the Houma of the French colonial period. Available documentary sources indicate that the modern Houma originated in the nineteenth century as a multiethnic group that included Europeans, African Americans, and some Native Americans, none of whom are known to have been Houmas. The genesis of the modern group’s identity as Houma Indians can be understood as a response to legally sanctioned racial classifications and race discrimination in Louisiana from the late nineteenth century on.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mix-d: Museum: Timeline

Mix-d: Museum
Mix-d:
2012-06-30

This work-in-progress Timeline draws on material from a British Academy project conducted by Dr. Chamion Caballero (Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University) and Dr. Peter Aspinall (University of Kent) which explored the presence of mixed race people, couples and families in the early 20th century, particularly in the period 1920-1950, a time when racial mixing and mixedness tended to be viewed very negatively by British authorities.

The project sourced a range of archival material from national and local archives. It included official documents, autobiographical recordings and photo and film material to understand how social perceptions of racial mixing and mixedness emerged and the effect they had on the lives of mixed race people, couples and families themselves, as well as their place in shaping contemporary ideas and experiences.

The project’s findings indicated that while mixed race people, couples and families certainly experienced prejudice and hostility in this ‘era of moral condemnation’, they were not inherently ‘tragic’, ‘marginal’ or ‘doomed’, but simply another part of the longstanding diversity and difference that is a feature of British life.

The findings from the research formed the foundation of the three part BBC2 series ‘Mixed Britannia’ presented by George Alagiah and was also the subject of an article in The Guardian.

View the Timeline here.

The Shadow of the Octoroon in T. E. Brown’s Christmas Rose

Victorian Poetry
Volume 38, Number 2, Summer 2000
pages 289-298
DOI: 10.1353/vp.2000.0023

Max Keith Sutton

In Impossible Purities, Jennifer Brody writes that the multiracial “woman of color” in Victorian literature “both conceals and reveals conflicting ideas of difference.” The light skin of an octoroon, for example, conceals the African heritage that constituted a legal difference from other light-skinned people in the United States (though not in Britain), disqualifying her from marriage with a man officially defined as white. In Dion Boucicault’s melodrama of 1859, The Octoroon, this official distinction gives the heroine a sense of moral difference as well: “I’m an unclean thing,” she tells her Caucasian suitor, equating uncleanness with the difference defined by law. Conceiving of her identity as the state of Louisiana defined it for her, the woman tries to erase it through suicide, becoming one in the series of “tragic octoroons” appearing “in at least a dozen works between 1836 and 1861” and in more that followed. Significant in their own right, these figures also may provide a frame of reference for other heroines who share the octoroon’s sense of being different and therefore unfit for life in the society around them. In T. E. Brown’s narrative poem, Christmas Rose (1873), a sense of sexual difference from women who fall in love and marry as a matter of course burdens the title character, who only expresses erotic feeling when she runs out to the shore and bares her bosom to the storm. In her alienation she resembles Boucicault’s Zoe, although she has no tragic passion for any man and no knowledge of her origins beyond the story of how a brave African gave his life to save her as an infant when a ship sank in a storm off the coast of the Isle of Man. Like the octoroon, Rose sees death as the only escape from the burden of being different.

By linking Rose with the black man who preserves her life, the poem introduces the theme of difference that she will embody and suggests a way of viewing her that eludes the Manx yarnspinner, Tom Baynes. He sees her as bewitched or as an alien spirit, “sent / Into the world to be different.” Expecting the sailors in the forecastle to accept supernatural explanations, he realizes nonetheless that folklore alone cannot explain her: “say what you will, / The Christmas Rose was a puzzle still” (ll. 1833-34). In the end he admits that no one ever knew “who or what” she was—a unique human person or some strange spirit (a “what,” unless the word refers only to her condition by birth). As her advocate, Tom Baynes may want her to remain a puzzle in order to counter his shipmates’ readiness to see her as just another femme fatale, cruelly arousing and thwarting masculine desires. Since his range of reading is limited, folklore rather than some literary prototype provides his chief frame of reference for picturing the heroine. Knowing Don Quixote, for example, only from what others have told him, he describes it for his shipmates but makes no mention of the fair Marcela, who, like Rose, prefers outdoor freedom to marriage and by rejecting a lovesick suitor gets blamed for his death (Part I, chaps. xii-xiv). Tragic octoroons in plays and novels of the time lie outside Tom’s experience: he knows a good deal more about ghosts and fairies. But the poem itself (written by an Oxford-educated schoolmaster) suggests analogues that the narrator could never imagine, one of them being the alienated figure of the woman of mixed race. Although Rose never associates race with her predicament, the theme appears at the outset of this story of a girl who comes to resemble the tragic octoroon in her beauty and sexual desirability, her problematic identity, and her sense of being unfit for this world..

How William Faulkner Tackled Race — and Freed the South From Itself

The New York Times
2012-06-28

John Jeremiah Sullivan

A poll of well over a hundred writers and critics, taken a few years back by Oxford American magazine, named William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” the “greatest Southern novel ever written,” by a decisive margin — and the poll was conducted while looking back on a century in which a disproportionate number of the best American books were Southern — so to say that this novel requires no introduction is just to speak plainly.

Of course, it’s the kind of book a person would put first in a poll like that. You can feel reasonably confident, in voting for it, that nobody quite fathoms it enough to question its achievement. Self-consciously ambitious and structurally complex (unintelligible, a subset of not unsophisticated readers has always maintained), “Absalom, Absalom!” partakes of what the critic Irving Howe called “a fearful impressiveness,” the sort that “comes when a writer has driven his vision to an extreme.” It may represent the closest American literature came to producing an analog for “Ulysses,” which influenced it deeply — each in its way is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man trying to awaken from history — and like “Ulysses,” it lives as a book more praised than read, or more esteemed than enjoyed.

But good writers don’t look for impressedness in their readers — it’s at best another layer of distortion — and “greatness” can leave a book isolated in much the way it can a human being. (Surely a reason so many have turned away from “Ulysses” over the last near-hundred years is that they can’t read it without a suffocating sense of each word’s cultural importance and their duty to respond, a shame in that case, given how often Joyce was trying to be amusing.) A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time. A legitimate question to ask is, What happens with “Absalom, Absalom!” if we set aside its laurels and apply those things instead? What has Faulkner left us?

A prose of exceptional vividness, for one thing. The same few passages, in the very first pages, remind me of this — they’re markings on an entryway — sudden bursts of bristly adjective clusters. The September afternoon on which the book opens in a “dim hot airless” room is described as “long still hot weary dead.” If you’ve ever taken a creative-writing workshop, you’ve been warned never to do this, pile up adjectives, interpose descriptive terms between the reader’s imagination and the scene. But here something’s different. Faulkner’s choices are so precise, and his juxtaposition of the words so careful in conditioning our sense reception, that he doesn’t so much solve as overpower the problem. The sparrows flying into the window trellis beat their wings with a sound that’s “dry vivid dusty,” each syllable a note in a chord he’s forming. The Civil War ghosts that haunt the room are “garrulous outraged baffled.”…

…No book that tries to dissect the South’s psyche like that can overlook its founding obsession: miscegenation. There we reach the novel’s deepest concern, the fixed point around which the storm of its language revolves. After Sutpen ran off to Haiti as a young man — it emerges that a humiliating boyhood experience, of hearing a black slave tell him to use the back door of a big house (he wasn’t good enough for the front), had produced a shock that propelled him to flee — he married a girl there and fathered a son with her. Soon, however, he discovered that she had black blood, and that his son was therefore mixed, so he renounced them both. He sailed back to the South to become a planter. A plausible thing for a white Southern male to have done in the early 19th century. But what Faulkner doesn’t forget, and doesn’t want us to, is the radical amorality of the breach. On the basis of pure social abstraction, Sutpen has spurned his own child, his first son.

He remarries in Mississippi, with Miss Rosa’s older sister. They have two children, a boy and a girl. Now Sutpen has land, a mansion and progeny. He is almost there, almost a baron. We’re not absurd to think of Gatsby here; one of the most perceptive recent statements on “Absalom, Absalom!” was made by the scholar Fred C. Hobson in 2003, a simple-seeming statement and somehow one of the strangest things a person could say about the book, that it is “a novel about the American dream.”

As in any good book of that type, the past hunts Sutpen and finds him: His son, Henry, goes off to the fledgling University of Mississippi, where he befriends another man, Charles Bon. On a holiday visit to Sutpen’s Hundred, Bon meets Henry’s sister, Judith, and falls in love with her — or makes up his mind to possess her. What Henry and Judith don’t know is that Bon is Sutpen’s abandoned Haitian son, come to Mississippi via New Orleans, evidently in a sort of half-conscious, all but sleepwalking quest to find his father. Charles Bon is thus both half-black and Judith’s half-brother…

Read the entire essay here.

Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper

American Literature
Volume 75, Number 4, December 2003
pages 813-841

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of English
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Conceived in slavery, gestated in racialist science, and bred in Jim Crow segregation, the U.S. race system calcified into a visual epistemology of racial difference based largely on skin color. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this visual schema of biological difference, despite fluctuation within racial categories—even within whiteness itself—was generally reduced to just white and nonwhite. This illusion of racial dichotomy sometimes allowed very light-skinned African Americans to choose between a black or a white identity. “The position of the pale [black] individual,” wrote African American psychiatrist Charles Gibson in 1931, “is analogous to that of a traveler who has come to a forked road. One branch of the fork is remaining Negro; the other is ‘passing for white.'” In Gibson’s schema, light-skinned African Americans could choose to retain their black identity and risk reverse discrimination within the darker-skinned community, or they could pass as white through an identity of deception, trading the ties of their African American family and friends for economic opportunity, a choice often conceptualized as crass materialism. Recent scholarship on passing for white has complicated Gibson’s simple binary of individual choice by recognizing racial passing as an aggressive political challenge to the ideological construct of race. As a form of performative trespass, many have argued, passing exposes race as a performative identity category, like gender and class. Recognizing this dimension of racial identity does not reduce the cultural and psychological significance of race; rather, it attempts to separate race from biology and the fallacious hierarchy of innate difference that has been used historically to justify systemic inequity and violence.

Despite its impetus, however, recent critical work on race often illustrates the degree to which the one-drop rule still has a toehold on American racial consciousness. “One drop” of “black blood” continues to imply a responsibility to blackness that academic deconstructions of race have not significantly altered. One goal of my essay is to investigate how continuing misconceptions about race as a biological imperative influence our readings of novels about racial passing, despite our acknowledgment that race is performative. The cause I identify here is twofold. First, the ideology of racial uplift and the tenacious persistence of the one-drop rule converge to influence our perceptions of race and our reading of passing novels. Racial uplift, with its debt of responsibility, has become a significant part of our racial ideology: if one’s family is African American, if one has any “drop” of black blood, then one has a responsibility to the race and should proclaim oneself black. That is, no matter how “white” one’s skin, we assume that passers are black and censure their attempts to live outside the bounds of that identity. This assumption evinces the tenacity of—and simultaneously reinforces—the one-drop rule.

Second, in focusing almost exclusively on passing as an intentional act of racial identification, scholars have regarded it as primarily a political challenge to the racial status quo. In many novels of passing, however, the characters’ sense of racial identity develops less consciously, in conjunction with (not simply in conscious opposition to) the racially marked socioeconomic and cultural spaces they inhabit. Legally black but corporeally white, these passers are initially unaware that their genetic heritage includes a “drop” of black blood. I call these critically neglected characters unintentional passers. They do not know that in the eyes of the law they are passing. Texts of unintentional passing, and there are many, destabilize notions of biologically constructed racial identity precisely because the passers are unaware that they are transgressing legal boundaries. The discrepancy between legal race categories and racial self-perceptions reveals how race functions in the United States to maintain socioeconomic inequalities by controlling an individual’s sense of identity and her place within family, community, and nation. Our own tendency to conceptualize these fictional characters as…

What DNA Says About Human Ancestry—and Bigotry

The Village Voice
1997-10-28
pages 34-35

Mark Schoofs, Senior Editor
ProPublica

Race and genetics form their own double helix, twisting together through history. The Nazis, as everyone knows, justified the death camps on the grounds that Jews and Gypsies were genetically inferior—but what is less known is that the Nazis took their cue from eugenics legislation passed in the United States. Here, race is defined primarily by skin color. Since that’s a genetic trait, the logic goes, race itself must be genetic, and there must be differences that are more than skin deep.

But that’s not what modern genetics reveals. Quite the contrary, it shows that race is truly skin deep. Indeed, genetics undermines the whole concept that humanity is composed of ”races”—pure and static groups that are significantly different from one another. Genetics has proven otherwise by tracing human ancestry, as it is inscribed on DNA.

Demystifying race may be the most important accomplishment of this research, but it has also solved some of the most intriguing mysteries of human history…

Read the entire article here.

The First Family: A New Glimpse of Michelle Obama’s White Ancestors

The New York Times
2016-06-22

Rachel L. Swarns, Correspondent
New York Times

We knew that the Sunday article about Mrs. Obama’s white ancestors would stir considerable interest so we decided to invite readers to pose questions and make comments. We never imagined that one of those readers would provide us with the first glimpse of two key figures in the first lady’s family tree: The white man who owned Mrs. Obama’s great-great-great grandmother, Melvinia Shields, and his son, who most likely fathered Melvinia’s child.

The photograph of those two men and their relatives, which is believed to have been taken in Georgia sometime around 1884, is being published here for the first time.

The slaveowner was Henry Wells Shields, who inherited Melvinia when his father-in-law died in 1852. DNA testing and research indicate that he and his wife, Christian Patterson Shields, are the first lady’s great-great-great-great grandparents…

Read the entire article here.

Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (review)

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 15, Number 2, June 2012
pages 225-227
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2012.0017

Jennifer Ho, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In her acknowledgements, Leslie Bow admits that she began her research project in order to “explore an omission” (ix)—namely, the underreported stories and history of Asian Americans living in the Jim Crow South. Yet Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South is not merely an attempt to insert Asian Americans into a southern landscape nor is it a catalog of all the areas and arenas in which Asian Americans resided in a segregated south. Instead, Bow’s work articulates a more subtle but no less powerful argument: in thinking of the legacy of southern segregation, racial anomalies—those groups that are neither black nor white—represent a “productive site for understanding the investments that underlie a given system of relations; what is unaccommodated becomes a site of contested interpretation” (4). Partly Colored offers Bow’s interpretation of a selection of these contested sites, predominantly how Asian American subjects become objects of scrutiny and, in Bow’s words, “intermediacy,” but Bow also dedicates a chapter to the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina and their in-between status as neither black nor white. Whether Asian American or American Indian, these racial anomalies of the segregated south are produced through an awareness of their racial difference to both white and black communities. And it is their unique positioning—of being in a state of simultaneous acceptance and abjection—that Bow turns her attention to most forcefully, citing a methodological debt to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, since Bow is interested in how an Africanist presence “shadows the admittedly quirky archive of the minor” (Morrison qtd. in Bow 18)—the minor, in this case, being the narratives formed by and about Asian Americans and other racial anomalies in the segregated south.

Framed by an introduction and an afterword, the six substantive chapters of Partly Colored are divided into two parts: Chapters 1 through 3 focus on the ways in which Asian Americans, mestizos, and American Indians distance themselves from African Americans in order to promote their racial identities as more favored and hence less inferior than their black American neighbors. Chapters 4 through 6 look at specific Asian American narratives, created primarily after the contemporary civil rights movement in a post-segregation era, in order to investigate the means by which these Asian American subjects narrate and negotiate their in-between-ness or, in the words of Bow, their “interstitiality.” Indeed, like the term “intermediacy,” “interstitial” is another phrase that Bow uses to theorize her ideas about racial anomalies in segregated southern spaces. Both terms convey the sense of the ambiguous, and in some cases ambivalent, racialized subject—of one who is in-between supposedly fixed racial categories. The former term, “intermediacy,” connotes one who is a stepping-stone on the way to or from a more desired subject position. The latter term, “interstitial,” demonstrates a liminality and porousness that denotes instability and fluctuation. In this sense, both “intermediacy” and “interstitiality” are perfect words to encapsulate the indeterminacy of existing as Asian American amidst a set of racial codes predicated on white supremacy and black oppression; as Bow affirms: “Asian America is a site of multiple ambiguities against which, I would argue, the complexity of black/white relations—often conflated with ‘race relations’—stands out in heightened relief” (225).

In the first three chapters of her work, Bow deftly demonstrates how various communities living in the segregated south—the conjoined twins, Chang and Eng (subjects of Chapter 1), Lumbee Indians (subjects of Chapter 2), and Chinese Americans of the Mississippi Delta (subjects of Chapter 3)—negotiate as intermediate and interstitial bodies within the racially demarcated terrain of the segregated south. Here Bow’s training as a literary critic is in evidence through the skill with which she analyzes the various narratives that these subjects tell about their in-between condition and the ways in which their narratives, in turn, produce a counter-narrative, one that Bow rightly understands as a form of disavowal from African American abjection while…

Passing For What? Racial Masquerade and the Demands of Upward Mobility

Callaloo
Volume 21, Number 2, Spring 1998
pages 381-397
DOI: 10.1353/cal.1998.0108

Phillip Brian Harper, Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature; Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, English
New York University

Ends and Means: The Social-Critical Significance of Racial Passing in the U.S. Context

The preposition “for” in the main title of my essay carries a deliberate dual significance, simultaneously constituting a synonym for “as” and indicating the (provisionally indeterminate) end of the activity I plan to interrogate here. For it has come to my attention over the last few years that racial passing—and the narratives that conventionally bring it to light—serves a function that escapes many students of the practice, by which I mean many of the students I teach. These readers of the racial passing narrative—chiefly enrollees in my African-American literature courses—tend to see it in psychic-orientational terms, as signifying only the protagonist’s disavowal of an identity that proper race pride and healthy self-regard would lead him or her enthusiastically to embrace. It is generally only after a fair amount of cajoling that they can acknowledge the material gain potentially enjoyed by anyone who, while legally designated as black, lives successfully as white for a significant time—that particular masquerade being the one generically conjured by the term “racial passing” in the U.S. context.

And yet there are other modes of racial masquerade than the one in which a light-skinned black “passes for” white; and there are other functions typically served by racial passing per se than the accomplishment of a merely individualist objective. Limited though these general functions may be, their critical utility is not insignificant; which is why, before I consider as what one might pass (the possibilities for which are much more numerous than we might expect, even within the limited field described by the oversimplifying white/black binary that governs U.S. racial culture), I should elaborate clearly to what purpose passing ordinarily works. It is against this generalized societal function that the meanings of some particular instances of racial passing—which I interrogate below—take shape.

I am at a great advantage in undertaking this task of elaboration, in that a substantial part of the work has already been done for me. Indeed, the last several years have brought numerous insightful analyses of the social-expository function typically served by racial passing, which, in the summary offered by Amy Robinson, is to reveal “‘race’ . . . as a construct, an arbitrary principle of classification that produces the ‘racial’ subject in the very act of social categorization.” The possibility of passing’s functioning in this way derives from the specifically visual means by which racial identity is registered in U.S. culture, where, as Robinson puts it, “appearance is assumed to bear a mimetic relation to identity, but in fact does not and can not.” These conditions make it “easy to bypass the rules of representation and claim an identity by virtue of a ‘misleading’ appearance” (250). Thus, Robinson suggests, passing “jeopardizes the very notion of race as a biological essence, foregrounding the social contexts of vision by calling into question the ‘truth’ of the object in question” (241), and thereby “emerges as a challenge to the very notion of the visual as an epistemological guarantee” (250).

While racial passing does do this, however, it is important to remember that this is effectively all that it does, and that it generally does even this relatively little only under certain self-defeating conditions. This latter constraint inheres in the fact that, for an instance of passing to register as a challenge to the logic of racial identification, it must disclose itself as an instance of passing in the first place, which disclosure typically would also constitute the failure of the act. For, as Robinson notes, “the mark of . . . success” for any instance of passing ordinarily consists “precisely in its inconspicuousness” (243)—its inability to be perceived at all, let alone as a threat…