Mixed Race Studies

On being mixed-race

New Statesman
2011-04-07

Samira Shackle

I grew up thinking of myself as equally English and Pakistani, writes Samira Shackle. Was I wrong?

When I meet people for the first time, it’s not unusual for them to ask, “Where are you from?” If I reply, “London,” they say, “Oh, no, where are you from from,” or, “Where are you actually from?” It’s a polite way of seeking an explanation for my colour. Most of the time, I don’t find it offensive—I am half Pakistani and half English and look racially ambiguous.

If you are mixed-race (as one in ten British children now is), you don’t slot neatly into racial or national categories. The conversation above tends to continue, “Do you go back home often?”—which feels strange, as until now I have visited Pakistan only as a baby and “home” is Queen’s Park in north London. Having one English parent makes you as much English as anything else—arguably more English than not, if you live here—yet most people’s default position is to define you by your difference.

It isn’t necessarily a bad thing to show interest in someone’s background. It becomes corrosive only when it is tied to a non-inclusive sense of Englishness that is hostile to “the other” and suggests that, because you have a mixed heritage, you cannot share ownership of the place where you live…

Read the entire article here.

“As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed”: Winnifred Eaton’s Revision of North American Identity

MELUS
Volume 32, Number 2 (Summer 2007)
pages 31-53

Karen E. H. Skinazi, Instructor of English
University of Alberta

At the tum of the twentieth century, Quebec-born Winnifred Eaton, a Chinese British woman who used the pseudonym “Onoto Watanna,” was writing romances in New York, experimenting with the popular genre of Japonisme—the craze for all things Japanese. As Eaton advanced in her career, however, she became disgruntled with her writing, observable both by virtue of her shift in focus and in reading the words of her alter ego, Nora, in her autobiographical novel. Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915). Nora frowns on her own success, “founded upon a cheap and popular device,” and declares, “Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage!” (153-54). As Me reveals, Eaton had a new project, one that was her true birthright. Without specifically identifying her own Chinese heritage, or retuming to her fabricated Japanese identity, she nonetheless created clearly non-white Canadian characters in Me and its spin-off, Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), auto/biographical tales of American immigration and adventure. In doing so, Eaton extended and revised the Canadian American rhetoric—and literature—that focused on the white, Anglo-Saxon bond or “brotherhood” between Canadians and Americans.

Eaton was not a political novelist, and her characters face neither head taxes nor Chinese Exclusion Acts when they cross the Canadian-American border. Yet Eaton made an important innovation in Canadian American immigrant literature by revealing the experience of immigrating as a double outsider: as a racialized figure, and a Canadian. Some critics, knowing Eaton’s background, wonder at the seeming “whiteness” of the characters of Me and Marion. In her study of Eurasian writers, Carol Spaulding, for example, notes: “The . . . narratives [apart from Diary of Delia] written in the first person are Eaton’s autobiography. Me, and her sister’s biography, Marion. All of these are white narrators” (198). Similarly, Dominika Ferens, in her excellent account of the two well-known Eaton sisters, Winnifred and Edith, says Marion, written by both Winnifred Eaton and her sister Sara. Bosse, is “a novel that paradoxically has an all white cast, although we know now that the title character was based on Winnifred’s older sister [Sara]” (141). As Ferens also points out, however, the protagonist of Marion is clearly marginalized because she is not white; both Eaton and Sara/Marion “performed the exotic difference that mainstream society inscribed on their bodies, but they tried to maintain a distance between the role and their sense of self—a distance that allowed them to always keep in sight and occasionally parody the sexist/orientalist frame within which they posed” (142)…

Read the entire article here.

“A Half Caste” and Other Writings

University of Illinois Press
2003
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07094-5

Onoto Watanna (1875-1954)

Edited by:

Linda Trinh Moser, Professor of English
Missouri State University

Elizabeth Rooney

Previously uncollected short stories and essays by the first fiction writer of Chinese ancestry to be published in the U.S.

“What did it mean to be a ‘half caste’ in early twentieth-century North America? Winnifred Eaton lived that experience and, as Onoto Watanna, she wrote about it. This collection of her short works—some newly discovered, others long awaited by scholars–ranges from breathless magazine romance to story melodrama and provides a riveting introduction to a unique literary personality.”—Diana Birchall, author of Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton Onoto Watanna (1875-1954) was born Winnifred Eaton, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother. The first novelist of Chinese descent to be published in the United States, she “became” Japanese to escape Americans’ scorn of the Chinese and to capitalize on their fascination with things Japanese. The earliest essay here, “A Half Caste,” appeared in 1898, a year before Miss Numé: A Japanese-American Romance, the first of her best-selling novels. The last story, “Elspeth,” appeared in 1923. Of Watanna’s numerous shorter works, this volume includes nineteen—thirteen stories and six essays—intended to show the scope and versatility of her writing. While some of Watanna’s fictional characters will remind today’s readers of the delicate but tragic Madame Butterfly, others foreshadow such types as the trickster in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (a novel in which Onoto Watanna makes a cameo appearance). Watanna’s characters are always capable, clever, and inventive—molded in the author’s own image.

A study of the intelligence of Anglo-Chinese children

Eugenics Review
Volume 30, Number 2 (July 1938)
pages 109-119

P. C. Hu
Department of Psychology
University College, London

I. OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY

The present investigation was carried out with the object of determining the general intellectual level of Anglo-Chinese children, and of dscovering what differences, if any, exist between their general standard of intelligence as compared with that of English children, selected from
the same social environment. With this object in view the East End of London and Liverpool were chosen as the most suitable districts in which to carry out the main portion of the research. Anglo-Chinese communities have existed in these districts for nearly a century, and small groups of half-caste children are here easily accessible to the investigator. To obtain precise information about the population, and particularly about the numbers of half-caste children residing in these areas, is by no means easy. In London they are scattered over many different schools, and accordingly the simplest plan seemed to be to choose the chief examinees from the Chung Hwa Club* for Anglo-Chinese children, and to test them in the club itself. The children attending this club must be of Chinese parentage; otherwise, no special qualification is necessary and no fee is paid, the members therefore forming a group typical of the total Anglo-Chinese population. In Liverpool the half-caste children are nearly all grouped together in the three schools; these therefore were tested in the school itself.

In both London and Liverpool the children of mixed parentage form only a small minority; and it would be useless to compare them with a paired control group containing an equally small number of English children. We need, if possible, to compare the average intelligence of both communities estimated as a whole. The method here adopted was to test the entire number of English children at the five London schools which the majority of the Anglo-Chinese children were attending. In Liverpool, to obtain sufficient numbers the English children were tested at five schools: three of the schools were attended by Anglo-Chinese, the other two by English children only, but the social status and economic conditions were much the same as those of the half-castes…

Read the entire article here.

Multicultural Artist and Educator to Speak at UVU

Utah Valley University
Orem, Utah
2011-03-24

Jim Rayburn

Louie Gong, a nationally-recognized artist and mixed-heritage advocate, will speak at Utah Valley University on March 31 at 2 p.m. at the Sorensen Student Center, room 206A.

Gong—of Nooksack, Squamish, Chinese, French and Scottish descent—is known best for his custom-designed Vans and Converse shoes and is a national leader in the discourse about mixed-race identity. He is a self-taught artist whose mash-up of traditional and pop culture influences is resonating with people all over the world. His Coast Salish-style artwork is especially popular with skateboarders…

…His remarks on March 31 will be centered on the realities of modern society while maintaining one’s cultural heritage…

Read the entire press release here.

Racial/Ethnic Identities and Related Attributed Experiences of Multiracial Japanese European Americans

Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development
Volume 32 (October 2004)
pages 206-221

Karen L. Suyemoto, Associate Professor of Psychology and Asian American Studies
University of Massachusetts, Boston

Surveys from 50 multiracial Japanese European Americans supported the endorsement of multiple simultaneous racial/ethnic identities and a differentiated multiracial identity. Experiences associated with being multiracial included feeling different, sensitivity to cultural cues, appreciation of different viewpoints, acceptance of  difference, and disliking exclusion. Implications for research and therapy are discussed.

In the 2000 U.S. census, 6.8 million people (2.4%) actively endorsed two racial categories (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001). This is likely an underreporting of the multiracial population, given that many racial/ethnic minority group organizations lobbied againstendorsing multiple races because of the lack of clarity regarding how the census data would be used regarding allocating resources or creating policy related to racial and ethnic groups. In 1990, 5% of the respondents to the U.S. census reported mixed ancestry (Waters, 2000). Sociologists already estimate that up to 90% of Black Americans have White ancestors (Wehrley, 1996), the majority of Latinos/as and American Indians are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage (Amaro & Zambrana, 2000; Fernandez, 1992; Mihesuah, 1996), and interracial marriage is becoming the numerical norm for some racial/ethnic minority groups such as American Indians and Japanese American women (Jaimes, 1995; Kitano, Fujino, & Sato 1998).

In spite of these trends, the psychological literature on racial/ethnic identity continues to predominantly reflect the monoracial experience both in the individuals who participate in research and in the theories/models that are constructed. Two of the most problematic aspects of monoracial racial/ethnic identity models for multiracial people are the assumptions that there will be a single reference group in the identity development process and a single “achieved identity” (Kerwin & Ponterotto, 1995; Root, 1990). The pressure to choose only one identity and the social message that having multiple identities is problematic have been continually identified as difficult for multiracial individuals (Gibbs & Hines, 1992; Hall, 1992; Root, 1990, 1997).

Hall (1992) reported that 10 of her 30 Black Japanese interviewees chose the “other” category rather than a single identification as only Japanese or only Black. The comments made by the individuals whom she interviewed indicated that choosing only one monoracial identity was frustrating and limiting. Gibbs and Hines’s (1992) interviews with 12 multiracial adolescents and their 10 families also described conflicts about having to choose only one identity or heritage. C. W. Stephan and Stephan (1989) conducted the only quantitative study that explicitly explored multiple ethnic identities. Their survey of students with multiethnic backgrounds (not all multiracial as usually defined in the United States; e.g., Japanese Chinese students were included) found that 73% of Japanese multiethnic participants listed a multiple identity on at least one of the five situationally specific ethnic identity questions (e.g., “When you are with your closest friends, which ethnic group do you feel you belong to?”). In their second study with Hispanic multiethnic students, 44% of the students listed a multiple identity on at least one measure. In spite of these studies identifying difficulties with a single, monoracial identification, I do not know of any published research that explicitly investigates the extent to which multiracial individuals actually do identify in multiple ways.

Another major difficulty with applying monoracial racial/ethnic identity models to the multiracial experience is that they do not include the possibility of a multiracial identity. However, many authors have suggested that a multiracial identity could itself be either the identity or an identity claimed by multiracial individuals (Collins, 2000; Kich, 1992; Root, 1990). Developing a multiracial identity may contribute to resolving problems of belonging, exclusion, and negotiating multiple reference groups that are discussed in the critiques of monoracial racial/ethnic identity models’ applicability to multiracial individuals (Collins, 2000; Kich, 1992; Root, 1990)…

Read the entire article here.

The Anglo-Indians: Aspirations for Whiteness and the Dilemma of Identity

Counterpoints
The Flinders University Online Journal of Interdisciplinary Conference Papers
Volume 3, Number 1 (September 2003)
Flinders University of South Australia

Sheila Pais James
Department of Sociology
Flinders University of S.A.

The Anglo-Indian, as a distinct ethnic identity, was the product of the racialised social hierarchies of British India. Set off from the Indian majority by their claims to British heritage, they were, because of their mixed ancestry, never accorded full status as British. At the end of British rule, their anomalous status was confirmed in certain protections, including employment quotas, enshrined in the Indian constitution. Despite this, the Anglo-Indian community in India declined in the decades after Independence as many chose to leave. Climate, proximity, and its British roots meant that Australia was considered a desirable destination by many. In particular, this paper focuses on the relevance of the study of whiteness in relation to the study of the Anglo-Indians as an ethnic and racial minority. It traces the aspirations for whiteness among these diasporic people in their quest for identity. It explores the dimensions in the constructions of identity and the possibility of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians as transcolonial migrants in a multicultural Australian society.

…The discourse on whiteness as a theoretical notion that attempts to uncover the authority of the invisible is very promising. Studying whiteness delves into the silence or invisibility (Frankenberg, 1993; Dyer, 1997) about whiteness which lets everyone continue to harbour prejudices and misconceptions. This silence, when penetrated, opens channels for the understanding of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians and the identity choices they make vis-à-vis the skin colour of others in similar situations.

By the 19th century, the British separated themselves from the coloured people but accepted fairer (and often wealthier) people of dual heritage as ‘Anglo-Indian’ . Darker (and usually poorer) people were given the name ‘Eurasian’ . Anglo-Indians were of British descent and British subjects; some even claimed to be British to escape prejudice. The British did not however accept such identification. They did not see Anglo-Indians as kinsmen, socially viewing them as ‘half-caste’ members who were morally and intellectually inferior to the sons and daughters of Britain (Varma 1979). The Anglo-Indians tried to counter this by trying to be more like the British. Their campaign to be called ‘Anglo-Indians’ was aimed at establishing a closer link with the British Raj (rule) in contrast to the general term ‘Eurasian’ (Bose, 1979).

Under these circumstances, it was not easy for Anglo-Indians to develop a clear conception of their own identity. Europeans tended to think of them as Indians with some European blood; Indians thought of them as Europeans with some Indian blood. On both the cultural and social level they were alien to many other Indians, though kin to them on the biological level. Many of the prejudices of the British were adopted by the Anglo-Indians towards the Indian people of dark complexion, thus creating rejection of the Anglo-Indians both by the British and other Indian communities. The prejudices against them, real or imagined, or the prejudices that they themselves had against other Indians were an obstacle to both group and individual identity (Gist, 1972, Gist and Wright, 1973)…

Read the entire paper here.

Cimmerii or Eurasians and Their Future

Simon Wallenburg Press
2007 (Originally Published in 1929)
English
84 pages
ISBN: 1843560135
ISBN-13: 9781843560135

Cedric Dover

A belief in Eugenics was widespread in the early half of the last centenary and amongst its prominent believers were George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. This iniquitous social philosophy supposed that Northern Europeans were superior in civilization to such races as Indians. Anglo Indians who were of mixed blood were considered, even more inferior since they inherited the worst characteristics of both races. Anglo Indians came under attack from government scientists who wrote papers on Eugenics and used the Anglo Indians as examples how the human race could be degraded by intermarriage. Cedric Dover’s book Cimmerii was written as defence against this racist attack on India’s Anglo Indians. A remarkable pioneering book written before the Second World War, it thoroughly disproved the eugenics theory by recounting the achievements of the Anglo Indian race. It is a shame this brilliant book did to find its way to Europe after it was published, as it would have contributed in discrediting the pseudo science of eugenics. The belief in Eugenics led to the killing, institutionalising and outright genocide of races perceived as inferior or undesirable. The book would have defended the Jews who like the Anglo Indians were deemed a threat to racial purity. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, many ideas about “racial hygiene” were publicly renounced by politicians and members of the scientific community. But the work of Cedric Dover will forever stand out, as the work of one brave man who stood up and defended his small Anglo Indian community in a little book, and in doing so, struck the first blow against an evil that was to sweep through Europe a decade later. Cimmerii? Or Eurasians and Their Future by Cedric Dover is the fourth book in the Anglo Indian Heritage series. The Others are: Herbert Alick Stark ‘Hostages To India Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo Indian Community These are the Anglo Indians by Reginald Maher. The books are called the Anglo Indian Heritage books as they chronicle the rich and colourful history of the Anglo Indian Community. This small community has had outstanding achievements at every level of society for hundreds of years but that record of achievement has been hidden, passed over or co-opted as British and Indian History. These Books are an attempt to fairly represent the history of the community by works by Anglo Indians themselves.

So… What Are You, Anyway?

Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association
Harvard University
2011-03-25 through 2011-03-26

The Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association will host its third annual conference on mixed-race politics and identity issues, “So…What Are You, Anyway?” (SWAYA) on Friday, March 25 and Saturday, March 26, 2011 on the Harvard University campus. The event is open to the public and will feature an array of exciting guest lecturers who will speak on issues involving multiracial identity.

The conference will include lectures given by the Dean of Harvard College and other Harvard College professors, as well as student panels and discussion groups. Last year, the event drew over one hundred students and other guests from colleges and cities around the Boston area.

SWAYA will culminate in a special gala dinner* in honor of the 2010 recipient of the Cultural Pioneer Award, celebrity mixed-race artist Jeff Chiba Stearns, director of the award-winning documentary “One Big Hapa Family”. An international spokesperson on mixed-race identity, Stearns’ short films exploring multiethnic issues have been screened in hundreds of film festivals around the world and have garnered over 33 awards.

For more information, click here.

Session 408: Haafu, mixed race studies and multicultural questions in Japan

AAS-ICAS Joint Conference
Association for Asian Studes (AAS)/International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)
2011-03-31 through 2011-04-03
Hawai’i Convention Center
Honolulu, Hawaii

Session Location and Time:
Room 316C
Saturday, 2011-04-02, 07:30-09:30 HAST (Local Time)

Organizer and Chair:

Koichi Iwabuchi
Waseda University, Japan

Discussant:

Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
Shih Hsin University, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

Mixed race studies has developed primarily in Euro-American contexts. It productively draws attention anew to the strategic and creative negotiations/resistance against racialized marginalization by the persons concerned, while being cautious not to reproduce an underlying essentialist conception of race. This panel will examine how the issues regarding “mixed race”—as now most commonly called “haafu”(half)—are articulated in the Japanese context. While racial mixing has long been (mostly negatively) discussed in Japan, with the increase in migration and international marriage, it has recently become more visible and more positively perceived than before. With a brief introduction of the genealogy of the terms such as “konketsu” (mixed blood) and “haafu” that refer to “mixed race” in Japan, this panel will analyze through three different cases (would-be) celebrities’ strategic uses of cultural capital associated with racial mixing for self-empowerment, their reception by the public and the (im)possibilities of deconstructing an exclusive notion of “Japanese-ness”. The panel will discuss how the racialized politics of inclusion/exclusion is distinctively highlighted in Japan, how the postcolonial questions are underscored by the (non-)whiteness of haafu and how studies of haafu/mixed race enhance critical engagement with multicultural questions in Japan. This panel also aims to discuss how comparative studies of mixed race can be developed in East Asian contexts, offering new insights into mixed race studies and advancing a theoretical reconsideration of notions such as race, hybridity and national identity.

Covered Bridgings: Japanese Enka and its Mixed-Blood African American Star

Christine R. Yano, Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Jerome Charles White (“Jero”), 28-year old mixed-blood African American from Pittsburgh, debuted in February 2008 as Japan’s first black singer of enka (nostalgized ballads most popular with older adults; characterized as expressive of the “heart/soul of Japanese”). The raised eyebrows generated by his debut stemmed not only from the fact that a mixed-blood African American male in hip-hop clothing with street dance moves was populating a Japanese music stage, but more specifically, that this was an enka stage. This paper analyzes the discursive negotiations surrounding this mixed-blood figure by the Japanese music industry and public. The racialized justification given for Jero’s legitimacy as an enka singer lies in his Japanese grandmother and her love of enka; indeed, Jero, like many African Americans, is of mixed blood. Jero’s in-betweeness enacts racial, national, cultural, and generational bridgings: simultaneously African American, Japanese, and mixed blood, he sings Japanese songs of an older generation. Indeed, Jero’s tears are painted an ambiguously tinged shade of black mixings. Armed with song, tears, and mixed-blood pedigree, Jero performs national inscriptions of displacement that crucially and ironically position him as nothing less than a prodigal grandson.

Becoming “Haafu”: Japanese Brazilian Female Migrants and Their Racialized Bodies in Japan

Tamaki Watarai
Aichi Prefectural University, Japan

For a discussion about mixed race issues in Japan, I take up Japanese Brazilian female models or those who wish to engage in this profession. Although it’s common to be a mixed race in Brazil, Japanese Brazilian women who come to Japan as return migrants realize that their being “mestiça”, which means mixed race female in Portuguese, now can be valorized as “haafu” in the Japanese printed media. Here I would like to address the following questions: To be successful as “haafu” models, how do Japanese Brazilian women perform, appreciate or contest this racialized image? Are there any differences between being haafu and being mestiça? In the end, what does “haafu” mean to Japanese Brazilians, especially in terms of their transnational lives? By analyzing interviews with the models and modeling agencies and observations of beauty pageants in Brazilian community, I will discuss the complexity and uniqueness of the conception of “haafu”.

Mixed Race Oiran?: A Critical Analysis of Discourses of (Non-) Japaneseness

Sayuri Arai
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Based on a popular manga, and with the twist of a focus on the contemporary world of girls, combined with psychedelic colors, a Japanese film, Sakuran (2007), directed by Mika Ninagawa, depicts the lives of oiran [Japanese prostitutes] in the Edo era (1600-1867). The protagonist, an oiran named Kiyoha, is played by white-Japanese, mixed race actor, Anna Tsuchiya. The casting of Tsuchiya as a “Japanese” oiran was controversial, because by putting a mixed race actor in the role, the film challenges the dominant notion of Japaneseness in Japan. By conceptualizing the theoretical concepts of Japaneseness, whiteness, and haafu [mixed race Japanese people] within a Japanese context, this essay explores the discourses of Japaneseness as they circulate and relate to the mixed race actor cast as an oiran in the film. By analyzing the Internet posts on one of the largest film review websites, this study aims to understand and critique the ways in which discourses of (non-) Japaneseness are narrated contemporarily, as well as explore the ways in which Japanese identities are negotiated and constructed within popular discourses.

For more information, click here.