Mixed Race Studies

PBS series explores black culture in Latin America

2011-04-18

Jennifer Kay
Associated Press

MIAMI—On a street in a seaside city in Brazil, four men describe themselves to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as black. Flabbergasted, the Harvard scholar insists they compare their skin tones with his.

In a jumble, their forearms form a mocha spectrum. Oh, the men say: We’re all black, but we’re all different colors.

Others in the marketplace describe Gates, who is black and renowned for his African American studies, with a variety of terms for someone of mixed race—more of an indication of his social status as a U.S. college professor than of his skin color.

“Here, my color is in the eye of the beholder,” Gates says, narrating over a scene filmed last year for his new series for PBS, “Black in Latin America.” The first of four episodes filmed in six Caribbean and Latin American countries begins airing Tuesday. A book expanding on Gates’ research for the series is set for publication in July.

Throughout the series, Gates finds himself in conversations about race that don’t really happen in the U.S., where the slavery-era “one-drop” concept—that anyone with even just one drop of black blood was black—is still widely accepted.

The idea for the series stems from a surprising number: Of the roughly 11 million Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 450,000 came to the U.S. By contrast, about 5 million slaves went to Brazil alone, and roughly 700,000 went to Mexico and Peru. And they all brought their music and religion with them…

…New U.S. census figures are revealing how complicated and surprising conversations about race can be. For example, the number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last 10 years, suggesting a shift in how residents of the racially mixed U.S. territory see themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Exploring the Popularization of the Mixed Race American

The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-22

Stanford Scholar Investigates the “Mulatto Millennium” through Literature, Theatre, Art, & Pop Culture

The United States has its first mixed race president, a man with a black African father and white American mother. Actress Halle Barry, golfer Tiger Woods, rocker Lenny Kravitz and singer Alicia Keyes—all people acknowledging a blended racial heritage—are household names. Since the 2000 U.S Census granted the MOOM (mark one or more) racial option, mixed race advocacy groups have gained political visibility and influence. Are there proportionally more mixed race Americans today then say twenty years ago? Or has something changed about how Americans see mixed race, thereby contributing to the increased prominence of the mixed race American in our country’s landscape?

In considering those questions, Stanford University English professor Michele Elam analyzed why and with what effect those identified (and identifying) as mixed race in the U.S. have gained such tremendous cultural cachet in the last decade.

Looking beyond the usual explanations for the increased visibility of mixed race people, such as immigration trends and the 1967 Supreme Court Loving Decision lifting bans on interracial marriage, Elam is interested in how contemporary literature, theatre, art and popular culture are re-shaping the way we perceive and understand mixed race in the new millennium. The creative works she examines in The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, released by Stanford University Press in March, include comic strips, novels, art exhibitions, websites, theater, and even Comedy Central late night TV…

…“I started noticing more the popularization of certain kinds of images of mixed race people in media,” a popularity that extended into education curricula, from children’s books on how to raise a mixed race kindergartener through to college courses in “mixed race studies” Elam explained when discussing what inspired her to research mixed race in America. “I also noticed there wasn’t a lot of conversation about what impact these cultural works are having on our society, I would like to see more attention to literature, performance and art that is using the debates about mixed race to think more carefully about race’s saliency in the new millennium.”…

…Artists and Writers Help to Define what it means to be Biracial

To get a sense of Elam’s wide-ranging scholarship, start by looking at the cartoon displayed on the outside of her office door. It’s a copy of one of The Boondocks cartoons created by social satirist Aaron McGruder containing a pointed message about the issues biracial people encounter. In the comic, mixed race pre-teen Jazmine sits alone in a grassy field, lamenting that she feels so different from everyone else, even though her parents assure her that her blended background makes her special. Then the strip’s realist, Huey, appears and bluntly declares: “You’re black. Get over it.”

Elam said the strip sparked anger among some mixed race advocacy group members who were upset because the Huey character so flatly dismissed Jazmine’s desire to be biracial.  “That’s why I put it out there, somewhat as a provocation and also kind of as an illustration of the pop cultural engagements with mixed race that I think are interesting,” Elam said.

Her examination extends to other artwork, including Baby Halfie, the unique doll sitting on her office desk that she says no child would ever love.

The toy’s look is arresting, a mahogany-hued baby head atop a pudgy, nude, white-skinned infant body.  The plaything was part of an exhibition by African-American assemblage artist Lezley Saar that is now visible on Saar’s web site mulattonation.com.

“Baby Halfie’s arms are raised high as if asking to be lifted up for parental comfort and affirmation, but I suspect no parents will embrace it, let alone purchase it for their tots in hopes of inspiring proud mixed race identification or development empowerment—and that is no doubt precisely the point,” Elam writes in The Souls of Mixed Folks. “The doll is not an effort to capture how a person of mixed black and white descent might actually appear in the flesh. Its creative affront provides a vivid example of the alternative progressive directions for mixed race art and activism in the post-civil rights era that are at the center of this book.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Missing Box: Multiracial Student Identity Development at a Predominately White Institution

University of Nebraska, Lincoln
May 2011
153 pages

Ashley Michelle Loudd

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts

The purpose of this study was to add to the growing body of research aimed at deciphering the unique identity development experiences of multiracial college students. In doing so, this particular study sought to explore the process for self-identified multiracial students attending a Mid-western predominately white institution. Personal interviews and a focus group were utilized to delve into the students’ stories, and the participants’ pathways through negotiating their racial identities were linked with Renn’s (2004) ecological identity development patterns. The result was an in-depth and critical understanding of how a predominately white institution places multiracial students in an unsupportive environment, where they are often forced into racial identities that they might not have otherwise chosen for themselves.

This study explored how five self-identified multiracial students’ experiences attending a predominately white institution led to Renn’s (2004) ecological patterns of multiracial identity development through the completion of five interviews and one focus group. The following sub-themes emerged from the analysis of the participants’ connection to Renn’s (2004) five ecological patterns of multiracial identity development: “I think diversity is important,” “I am proud of my heritage,” “I’ll switch back and forth between my identities,” “Identifying as ‘x’ and ‘y’ – that’s key,” “Why can’t you be both,” “I classify for ease, but this is who I really am,” “People like me only happen in America,” “I’m racially ambiguous,” “Too Black to be White, too White to be Black,” and “The amount of non-White people is very low.” The results from this qualitative study indicated that the process of identity development for multiracial students attending a predominately white institution is highly influenced by the environment, leaving them little agency in determining how they racially identify and forcing them to enter situational modes of identity. Implications for multiracial student identity development, as well as, student affairs practitioners are provided. Additionally, recommendations for future research are reviewed.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction
  • Context
  • Purpose Statement
  • Significance of Study
  • Research Questions
  • Research Design
  • Definition of Terms
  • Delimitations
  • Limitations
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2 – Literature Review
  • Introduction
  • The Culture of Predominately White Institutions
  • The Student of Color Experience at Predominately White Institutions
  • Racial Identity Development Models
    • Helms’s People of Color and White Racial Identity Models
    • Cross’s Model of Black Identity Development
    • Ferdman and Gallegos’s Model of Latino Identity Development
    • Kim’s Asian American Identity Development Model
  • Theoretical Approaches Exploring the Multiracial Experience of Identity Development
    • The Problem Approach
    • The Equivalent Approach
    • The Variant Approach
  • Foundational Theories and Models of Multiracial Identity Development
    • Integrated Identity
    • Multiracial Identity
    • Positive Alterity
  • Summary of the Literature
  • Theoretical Framework
    • Student holds a monoracial identity
    • Student holds multiple monoracial identities, shifting according to situation
    • Student holds a multiracial identity
    • Student holds an extraracial identity by deconstructing race or opting out of identification by U.S. racial categories
    • Student holds a situational identity, identifying differently in different contexts
  • Looking Ahead
• Chapter 3 – Methodology
  • Introduction
  • Study Rationale
  • Research Questions
  • Methodology Rationale
  • Epistemology and Theoretical Perspective
  • Participants
  • Research Site
  • Data Collection
    • Interviews
    • Focus Group
  • Data Analysis
  • Validation Techniques
  • Researcher Bias and Assumptions
  • Limitations
  • Strengths
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4 – Findings
  • Introduction
  • Introduction to the Participants
  • Overview of Emergent Themes and Sub-themes
    • Theme 1: Monoracial Identity
      • “I think diversity is important.”
      • “I am proud of my heritage.”
      • Ecological Analysis
    • Theme 2: Multiple Monoracial Identities, Shifting According to Situation
      • “I’ll switch back and forth between my identities.”
      • “Identifying with ‘x’ and ‘y’ – that’s key.”
      • Ecological Analysis
    • Theme 3: Multiracial Identity
      • “Why can’t you be both?”
      • “I classify for ease, but this is who I really am.”
      • Ecological Analysis
    • Theme 4: Extraracial Identity
      • “People like me only happen in America.”
      • “I’m racially ambiguous.”
      • Ecological Analysis
    • Theme 5: Situational Identity, Identifying Differently in Different Contexts
      • “Too Black to be White, too White to be Black.”
      • “The amount of non-White people is very low.”
      • Ecological Analysis
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5 – Discussion
  • Introduction
  • Summary of Findings and Link to Theoretical Perspective
    • Research Sub-question 1
    • Research Sub-question 2
    • Research Sub-question 3
    • Overall Implications
  • Implications of the Current Study for Student Affairs Practitioners
  • Recommendations for Future Research
  • Conclusion
• References
• Appendices

List of Tables

• Table 1: Participant Demographic Information
• Table 2: Qualitative Research Validation Techniques
• Table 3: Research Themes and Sub-themes

List of Appendices

• Appendix A: Informed Consent Form
• Appendix B: Recruitment E-mail to Potential Participants
• Appendix C: Reminder E-mail to Participants
• Appendix D: Participant Demographic Sheet
• Appendix E: Semi-Structured Interview Protocol
• Appendix F: Un-Structured Focus Group Protocol
• Appendix G: Transcriptionist Confidentiality Agreement
• Appendix H: Example of Coded Participant Transcript

Read the entire thesis here.

Truthdig Radio with Marcia Dawkins

Truthdig Radio
KPFK 90.7 FM (Los Angeles); 98.7 FM (Santa Barbara); 99.5 FM (China Lake); 93.7 North San Diego
Wednesday, 2011-04-20, 21:00Z (14:00 PDT, 17:00 EDT)

Kasia Anderson, Host and Associate Editor

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dr. Dawkins discusses mixed race identities, press (including the 2011-04-18 CNN article, “Neither black nor white: Three multiracial generations, one family” by Thom Patterson) and the census.

List to the interview here (Ends at 00:10:57).

Qualitative Interviews of Racial Fluctuations: The “How” of Latina/o-White Hybrid Identity

Communication Theory
Volume 21, Issue 2 (May 2011)
pages 197–216
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01382.x

Shane T. Moreman, Associate Professor of Communications
California State University, Fresno

Using qualitiative interviewing, this article exposes the performative moments of the Latina/o-White hybrid social actor (i.e., individuals born of one White parent and one Latina/o parent). This study draws on performance studies theories and concepts to demonstrate how these individuals work within and outside the limitations of today’s U.S. discourse on race and ethnicity. Finding four major themes (i.e., ritual disciplines, body as text, language as text, and institutes of identity), this article provides the tensions of the participants’ mixed positionality yet also points to the imaginative possibilities that can come through communicating such an identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Problems with Plaçage: Historical Imagination and Femmes de couleurs libres in Colonial and Antebellum New Orleans

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research
Coastal Carolina University
Issue 3 (Winter 2009)

Philip Whalen, Associate Professor of History
Coastal Carolina University

This essay compares two approaches to understanding the condition of free women of color who struggled to maximize their autonomy and sustain social relations within the repressive environment of colonial and antebellum New Orleans. While recent scholarship squarely addresses how free women of color constructed and sustained a viable Creole heritage, it must reckon with a tradition of primary sources written by moralists, and itinerant observers—ranging from Fanny Trollope and Gustave de Beaumont to Amos Stoddard and Grace King—whose analysis of the daily lives of Creole women was suspect in that it drew disproportionate attentions to the sexual activities of free women of color with white men.

In Louisiana the highest position that can be held by a free woman of color is that of a prostitute… She raises herself by prostituting herself to the white man.
—Gustav de Beaumont, Marie (1835)

Free women of color, or filles de couleurs, occupied a unique and precarious social position in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Louisiana. Legally defined as being of no more than ¼ African ancestry but commonly identified as belonging to a class of free persons exhibiting some degree of color (Garrigus, 1988, p. vii and Berlin, 1998), they rejected identification with black slaves and free whites in order to construct distinct identities for themselves in a racially oppressive and sexually exploitive environment (Gould, 1996, p. 193). The strategies they employed to advance and protect their interests illustrate how they tackled the circumstances and conditions that defined their struggle. These ranged from taking advantage of their slim but not inconsequential legal rights, to educating themselves, to holding and transmitting property, to developing exclusive community networks, to cornering various market activities, and engaging in a variety of legal and extra-legal personal unions.

From the first introduction of slaves to the early twentieth century, Louisiana’s efforts to legally establish a hierarchy of racial identification—especially where Creoles and “mixed bloods” were concerned—were bedeviled by competing identity claims, a disorderly population (Spear, 1999, p. 155), and an environment in which “antimiscegenation measures were flagrantly disregarded” (Lachance, 1994, p. 214). In fact, Doris Garraway notes, “the class of free people of color was quite diverse in gender, color, and circumstance. Referred to variously… the free people of color included former slaves and the descendants of all skin tones” (2005, p. 211). It should also be remembered that early nineteenth-century accounts described white creoles in terms of ethnicity and heritage rather than skin color. Amos Stoddard, for example, described the “Creoles, or native inhabitants” in his Sketches Historical and Descriptive of Louisiana as partly the descendants of the French Canadians and partly of those who migrated “intermixed with some natives of France, Spain, Germany, and the United States, and in many instances the Aborigines” (1973, p. 323). Despite contradictory evidence provided in the narratives of novelists, historians, moralists, and other chroniclers of life in New Orleans who frequently observed that Creole women resembled “the women of Cadiz and Naples and Marseilles; with a self possession, ease, and elegance which the Americans seldom possess” (King, 1920, p. 273), considerations of ethnicity, lineage or linguistic (especially French, German, Caribbean) identity rarely, in the final analysis, inhibited them from using the preferred racial schemas to taxonomize Louisiana’s gens de couleurs. The gens de couleurs, wrote Grace King:

were a class apart, separated from and superior to the negroes, ennobled, were it by only one drop of white blood in their veins…. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleurs. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely guarded distinctions; mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, griffes, each term meaning one more generation’s elevation, one degree’s further transfiguration in the standard of racial perfection; white blood. (1920, p. 333)

This inferior racial identity projected onto gens de couleurs was compounded by moral and social prejudices. Assumptions hardened into received opinion—easily detected in contemporary literature, memoirs, and histories—as racial prejudices were translated into laws designed to increase the legal distinctions between different racial groups were legislated when Louisiana became part of the Unites States (including the reestablishment, by the Louisiana Legislature of the French Code Noir of 1724 as the Black Code in 1806), and New Orleans Creoles evolved into a separate and more self-conscious ethnic caste with fewer exogamous marriages by the mid nineteenth century (Spear, 1999, pp. 101-153 and Lachance, 1994, p. 213, p. 229 and pp. 233-35)…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women

Sister Vision Press
May 1994
389 pages
8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
Paperback ISBN: 092081395X; ISBN 13: 9780920813959
This book is out of print.

Edited by

Carol Camper

Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women is a stunning and long awaited collection of some of the most poignant writing by more than forty women of mixed racial heritage.  Together they explore the concept of a mixed race identity, the fervour of belonging, the harsh reality of not belonging—of grappling in two or more worlds and the final journey home.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Carol Camper Into the Mix
• Edge to the Middle … location, identity, paradox
  • Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar Ms. Edge Innate
  • A. Nicole Bandy Sorry, Our Translator’s Out Sick Today
  • Culture Is Not Static
  • Lisa Jensen “journal entry 25/10/92″
  • Elehna de Sousa Untitled
  • Nadra Qadeer Spider Woman
  • Deanne Achong Untitled
  • Michele Chai Don’t
  • Naomi Zack My Racial Self Over Time
  • Mercedes Baines Mulatto Woman a honey beige wrapper
  • Mixed Race Women’s Group—Dialogue One
  • Michele Paulse Commingled
  • Lara Doan Untitled
  • Lisa Suhair Majaj Boundaries, Borders, Horizons
• But You Don’t Look Like a… faces, body, hair
  • Lisa Jensen (one more time now.)
  • Ijosé Two Halves—One Whole (Part I)
  • Two Halves—One Whole (Part two)
  • Ngaire Blankenberg Untitled
  • Blue
  • Joanne Arnott Mutt’s Memoir
  • Lois Robertson-Douglass No Nation Gal
  • Marilyn Elain Carmen The Issue of Skin Colour
  • Claire Huang Kinsley Questions People Have Asked Me
  • Questions I Have Asked Myself
  • Gitanjali Saxena Second Generation; Once Removed
• My Name is Peaches… obiectification.exoticizaiton
  • Mercedes Baines Bus Fucking
  • Where Are You From? A broken record
  • Michele Chai Resistance 153
  • S.R.W. What is a “Sister”?
  • Barbara Malanka Noblewomen In Exile
  • Stephanie Martin Is true what dem seh bout colrd pussy?
  • Michelle La Flamme Yo White Boy
  • Carol Camper Genetic Appropriation
  • Family Album
• Some More Stories
  • Annharte Emilia I Should a Said Something Political
  • Victoria Gonzalez Nicaragua, Desde Siempre: War fragments from a woman’s pen
  • Marilyn Dumont The Halfbreed Parade
  • The Red & White
  • S.R.W. For My Sister Rosemary: Just Like Mine
  • Claiming Identity: Mixed Race Black Women Speak
  • Joanne Arnott Song About
  • kim mosa mcneilly don’t mix me up
• The Unmasking… betrayals, hard truths
  • Lorraine Mention Journal Entry: Thoughts on My “Mother”
  • Letter to a Friend
  • Nadra Qadeer To a Traveller
  • Nila Gupta Falling from the Sky
  • Rage is my sister
  • Jaimi Carter Are You Writing a Book?
  • Nona Saunders Mother Milk
  • Children’s Games
  • Pussy Willows and Pink
  • S.R.W. Untitled
  • That Just Isn’t Right
  • Michi Chase One
  • Karen Stanley Warnings (Suspense Version)
  • Joanne Arnott Little On The Brown Side
  • Speak Out, For Example
  • Anonymous White Mother, Black Daughter
  • Mixed Race Women’s Group—Dialogue Two
  • Heather Green This Piece Done, I Shall Be Renamed
  • Myriam Chancy Je suis un Nègre
  • Yolanda Retter Quincentennial Blues
• Are We Home Yet?… return to self and cultures
  • Diana Abu-Jaber Tbe Honeymooners
  • Nona Saunders Tapestry I
  • Tapestry II Carole Gray Heritage
  • Bernardine Evaristo Letters from London
  • Ngaire Blankenberg Halifax
  • Kukumo Rocks Route to My Roots
  • Pam Bailey Naming and Claiming Multicultural Identity
  • Maxine Hayman Shortbread and Oolichan Grease
  • Seni Seneviratne Cinnamon Roots
  • Shanti Thakur Domino: Filming the Stories of Interracial People
  • Nila Gupta The Garden of My (Be)Longing 350
  • Gitanjali Saxena Gitanjali’s Bio
  • Kathy Ann March Like Koya
  • Faith Adiele Learning to Eat
  • The Multicultural Self
  • Remembering Anticipating Africa
• Contributors’ Notes

Ten Questions, with Adebe DeRango-Adem

Open Book Toronto
2011-03-25

Adebe DeRango-Adem talks to Open Book about the anthology she co-edited with Andrea Thompson, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications). The goal for this exciting anthology was not to nail down what identity means, but rather to open discussion and interrogate the diverse experiences of mixed-race identity and identification.
 
Open Book:
 
Tell us about the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out.

Adebe DeRango-Adem:
 
Other Tongues was born from a combination of necessity and a desire to see a new and refreshing literature that could be at the forefront of mixed-race discourse and women’s studies. We are very proud of the finished product and anticipate that it will make many waves in literary and academic communities across the continent!
 
OB:
 
What inspired you to put together this anthology?

ADA:
 
The idea behind this anthology of writing by and about mixed-race women in North America was planted in our minds when we each came across Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), edited by Carol Camper. While we picked up this groundbreaking book at different times in our lives, the anthology had a lasting impact on both of us, an impact that would set the stage for the collaboration that became Other Tongues. We are thrilled to have had Carol Camper contribute to our anthology and continue to be inspired by the women who have responded so warmly to this book. What inspired me personally is, as many interracial women may share experientially, a feeling that my interracial history is a ripe place for critical analysis.
 
OB:
 
The subtitle, Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, suggests that identity is a significant theme for Other Tongues. What are some of the ways that your contributors approach issues of identity?
 
ADA:
 
In seeking work for this book, we asked our prospective contributors to share their own individual experiences and tell their unique stories in relation to the way(s) in which they identified themselves. This process led to the excavation of perspectives of women from diverse backgrounds, ideologies, racial mixes, ages, social classes, sexual orientations and geographical locations. This collection has become a snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century.

Yet, Andrea and I made it clear that our agenda was not to define what or how mixed-race identity means, but to open up dialogue. Talking about identity is as dangerous as it is reifying and necessary; as contestable as it is a question of commitment. Authenticity is as much about finding oneself as it is a concept shaped by social norms. In addressing these questions, we asked the women who submitted work to be considered to make a distinction between issues of race and those of cultural identity. In Other Tongues, there are multiple visions and understandings of authenticity/identity, as exemplified by the various sections we have. Where this book treats interracial identities uniquely is in our conscious effort to link creativity to identification; recognizing our potential for creativity as a source of value for writing who we are…

Read the entire interview here.

Being and Belonging: Space and Identity in Cape Town

Anthropology and Humanism
Volume 28, Issue 1 (June 2003)
pages 61–84
DOI: 10.1525/ahu.2003.28.1.61

Shannon M. Jackson, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Missouri, Kansas City

The post-apartheid transition has led to changes in the shape and meaning of urban space in South Africa. Cape Town is being described as a postmodern city where planning strategies and new development have begun to fragment and privatize space to the point of de-territorializing it. This has contributed to the effort by a local group, referred to as “Coloureds,” to reterritorialize Cape Town, to reinscribe history and meaning back into the urban landscape. In the process of reterritorializing the city, Coloureds are negotiating their own identities but are doing so in ways that both challenge racial boundaries and assert them. This article will explore the nature and history of the urban space being reclaimed as well as the way in which the meaning it inspires contributes to the contradictory and ambiguous quality of the boundaries of Coloured identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Elite (re-)constructions of coloured identities in a post-apartheid South Africa: Assimilations and bounded transgressions

Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
2006
328 pages
AAT 3249339

Michele René Ruiters

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Political Science

This thesis engages with issues of identity, diversity and democracy through a study of the reconstruction of colouredness, a marginal identity, in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that coloured elites reconstruct their apartheid-designated racialized identities in order to create new identities that reflect their own and their communities’ experiences and needs. This reconstruction process often results in a reification of past expressions of each identity, which needs to be negotiated in a contemporary era. Ultimately, self-definition creates agency and therefore a stronger citizen who participates more effectively within their polity and thus strengthens democratic practices. I argue that diversity enhances democracy only if a politics of recognition is practiced.

The thesis also examines the possibility of releasing identities from historical baggage in the sense that a new identity could be constructed. I show that ‘new’ identities are constrained by the past and often struggle to free themselves from existing constructions. I argue that this is possible only if elites are willing to let go of past constructions and to be more inclusive in their visions for the future. The state, however, should continue to recognize marginal groups in order to combat the emergence of isolationist and reactionary politics from those groups.

My project examines one community’s search for recognition from a state that has, since 1994, rejoined a larger African community, which is largely unknown to ordinary South Africans. I argue that this process of reconstructing a coloured identity, which certain coloured elites have undertaken, is not a social movement but is a spiritual search for belonging, which provides a social network of similar minded people who wish to redefine their identities. I also contend that the reconstruction of coloured identities has to occur within a new framework in which an African identity is more inclusive and within which attempts have been made to move away from past constructions of identities.

Table of Contents

• II. ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
• III. DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology
  • Who is ‘Coloured’?
  • Why Identity?
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Insider Re-vision of History
  • A National Identity
  • Methodology
  • Chapter Synopses
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Elites, Marginal Identities and the Public Sphere
  • Political identities
  • Marginal Identities
  • Censuses and control
  • Passing
  • ‘Errors’ and ‘Mistakes’
  • The Public Sphere
  • Elites, Institutions and Ideology
  • Citizenship and Belonging
  • ‘New’ constructions of Race-Ethnic Identities
  • Marginal Groups and Agenda-setting
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Colonial Constructions of Coloured Identity
  • Arrival of the Colonists
  • Race at the Cape
  • Social life and gender
  • Slavery at the Cape
  • Impositions and Adoptions
  • Miscegenation and Misfits
  • Imagined Communities
  • ‘I am Coloured’
  • Expressions of ‘coloured’ politics
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Apartheid Opportunities and Constraints
  • Apartheid Apparatus
  • Definitions of ‘Coloured’
  • Social spaces and Political issues
  • Imagined Community Realized
  • Black Politics and State Repression
  • Challenging Identities
  • Language
  • Political Constraints and Opportunities post-1984
  • The End of Apartheid
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5: Emerging Constructions of Coloured Identity – Post-1994
  • The National Question
  • Elites Change Identities
  • New Coloured Identities
  • Brown Identities
  • The December First Movement and Slave Identities
  • KhoiSan Identities
  • Creoles and Africans
  • Way Forward
• Chapter 6: The Politics of Newly Constructed Identities in South Africa
  • What is the African Renaissance?
  • Who is an African?
  • Marginal voices on African identities
  • The State’s Options
  • Existing Options
  • New Identities?
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices: Transcriptions of Three Interviews
• Curriculum Vitae

Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology

In 1994, South Africa entered a new political era. Racialism was outlawed and Black people could take their rightful place in a new democracy. The dominant party, the African National Congress, introduced a new ideological framework that was to guide our relations with each other within the country and to guide South Africa’s relations with the region, continent and world. The overarching ideology was based on an African renaissance which was to favorably reposition Africa in a global system. In this context, identity re-cmcrged as an important category in South Africa, despite the ANC’s call to non-racialism, as people jostled for what they perceived to be scarce resources. Social relations in South Africa have always been defined in terms of difference based on whether people were ‘white’, ‘Black African’, ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’. The term Black African is newly constructed. ‘Black’ or ‘African’ were used in the past to denote people who were of Nguni origin, or in ‘other’ terms, people who were not white or coloured. Black was also used to denote a political identity in the liberation struggle and it included everyone that was not white (see Kuhn 2001:21). I have chosen to use Black African because ‘African’ presently refers to all who live on the continent while ‘Black African’ has the same constricted meaning as ‘African’ did under apartheid rule.

During the apartheid era, the state imposed racialized identities onto people and, more often than not, did not take into consideration people’s everyday experiences with their identities. Two processes are occurring simultaneously. The state is reinventing itself as an African nation with an 4 African’ identity that has not been clearly defined to date. Secondly, groups within South Africa are grappling with the process of (re-)naming themselves within this new political milieu. The South African state needs to redefine itself in a post-apartheid, globalizing world and is attempting to do so through the creation of a ‘new’ South African identity that can be shared by all South Africans. The introduction of an overarching ‘African’ identity has created insecurities in South African society and has resulted in people holding on to their apartheid-defined identities. How can South Africanness be created in the light of a fragmented society? Can we use old identities to forge a new identity and can we move beyond race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century? What can the state and groups do to construct identities that depict novel ‘imagined communities’? How docs the state overcome the past to forge a new society based on political ideals of justice, democracy, equality and humanism?…

…Who is ‘Coloured’?

The coloured people were defined as a ‘mixed’ race group that was neither white nor Black. It was constructed as a buffer group between the two racially divided extremes in this country. Some people accepted the imposed apartheid identities while others opposed the state’s denial of their agency to choose their own identities. For this reason coloured identity is very peculiar to the South African context, however, it also provides a snapshot of the experiences of many marginal groups across the world. The Cold Warand the reconfiguration of power relations within the world have provided opportunity spaces for marginal groups to claim a space and identity for themselves. How are marginal identities reconfigured and re-imagined in this globalizing world? How do they define themselves, obtain recognition and negotiate with power? These questions make it imperative that we provide a historical overview of how the state and coloured elites construct coloured identity. Under the colonial and apartheid eras colouredness was an in-between category, supposedly without a culture, without an obvious and authoritative history; and arguably without a political home. Coloured identity in South Africa remains a hotly contested subject in the twenty-first century and will continue to be so as more and more people disrupt imposed racial categorizations (see Erasmus 2001, Wasserman and Jacobs 2003, Hendricks 2000b, Jung 2000, Zegeye 2001a). This work provides a new perspective on coloured identities as they relate to the social, political and economic constraints placed on the identity by larger structural relations.

Colouredness historically dates to social interaction with the first Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s. The local people of the southernmost region of the continent, the Khoi and San, entered into economic and social relationships with the white settlers. When East African, Indonesian and Indian slaves came into the region and the indigenous tribes from the north moved south, a ‘new’ identity evolved through social and political interaction between the various race groups. ‘Miscegenation‘ between the white settlers, the indigenes and the slaves, gave rise to a ‘mixed’ race person. The assumption that coloured identity was born from a combination of different people is problematic because it incorrectly assumes that identities arc primordial and fixed. Identities are not immutable therefore they should be examined temporally to determine how they have addressed and dealt with changing relations within a society.

Coloured identities occupied a space that previously did not exist; one that was deemed to be ‘better than Black African but not quite white. Courtney Jung asserts:

Coloureds by their very existence, inhabited an oppositional space. They existed at the intersections of multiple racial classifications, occupying a residual, clearly non-racial category. Coloureds defied racialization. Under apartheid, those ‘outside’ racial stereotypes were redefined in racial terms, to support the ideological proposition that the world was naturally divided into separate races that belonged apart (2000:168).

Under colonial rule the state created a new racialized identity into which people labeled ‘coloured’ could fit. The apartheid government legislated those identities into formal existence and maintained racial differences until the early 1990s when F. W. de Klerk’s watershed speech unbanned the liberation movements and released Nelson Mandelaafter twenty-seven years in prison. Coloured elites have opened up debates since 1994 on coloured identities and have proposed that communities and individuals re-imagine their identities and frame them in terms they have chosen for themselves: KhoiSan, Creole, slave-descendent, and African being the more common self-chosen identities. Elites who have chosen these identities have begun to debate with the overarching concept of ‘ Africanness’ in an attempt to determine where they fit into the new political, economic and social dispensation…

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