Mixed Race Studies

An African American’s Perspective on the Korean Wave

The Chosunilbo
Seoul, Korea
2013-07-09

Emanuel Pastreich, Associate Professor
Humanitas College, Kyunghee University

I received an unexpected email in February 2013, from a young woman who was studying public health at Harvard University. Mariesa Lee Ricks explained that her mother was Korean and that she had a great interest in Korean culture. Mariesa said that she hoped to find out how K-Pop and Korean social media can play a role in bringing positive messages to youth around the world.

Mariesa added that she hopes to visit Korea to carry out research. I wrote back to her telling her that I would be in Boston soon for a business trip and we agreed to meet up while I was there.

I did not recognize her at first. I was taken aback for a split second when she introduced herself because she turned out to be African American, and I had imagined a half-Korean, half-Caucasian woman who looked like my daughter Rachel. I was impressed that Mariesa did not display the slightest sense of discomfort or uncertainty in the few seconds that it took me to get over my embarrassment. She was clearly an extremely mature and composed woman with a strong sense of herself…

…That vision is linked to the critical role Mariesa’s Korean and African heritage has played in her cultural and intellectual development. Her Korean heritage was essential when she grew up in Atlanta. Her grandmother and mother maintained close ties with Korean culture and the Korean community, which was made easier by the burgeoning Korean population in the part of the city where they lived.

“My father’s family had a limited understanding of Korean culture, but fortunately my mother and grandmother were eager to introduce their culture, whether through funny stories from their childhood in Korea or through cooking kimchi jjigae (spicy Korean stew), for everyone, or teaching some Korean phrases,” she said. “So I developed an appetite to try new things and to explore new combinations of culture. That is the appeal of the Korean Wave for me.”

“Thanks in large part to my Korean heritage, I have developed an intense desire to honor my parents and family — a trait that has spurred me to be extremely aware of how my decisions and actions impact others,” she said. “At the same time, American values of individuality have allowed me to feel comfortable takings risks and exploring my own interests.”…

Read the entire article here.

Q&A with artist and author Laura Kina

Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb
2013-07-11

Deborah Kalb

Laura Kina, the Vincent de Paul associate professor of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University, is the co-editor of the new book War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art and the co-curator of an accompanying art exhibit. She lives in Chicago.

Q: How did you select these particular authors and artists to include in the book?

A: I’m a visual artist, a painter, and much of my work has been about Asian American and mixed race identity and history. As a result, I’m tapped into a network of artists, scholars, and activists working on similar topics. My co-editor Wei Ming Dariotis and I also teach classes on mixed race and Asian American studies so we were also both seeking out work by relevant artists and authors to share with our students.

This is actually how we met. She was using my art in her classes at San Francisco State University and I was using her articles on “hapa” mixed Asian American identity in my classes at DePaul University.

The kernel for our book and the related traveling exhibition happened organically over several years of research and teaching and involvement with community multiracial organizations such as MAVIN in Seattle and iPride and Hapa Issues Forum in San Francisco and then later working together with my colleague Camilla Fojas to found the Critical Mixed Race Studies biennial conference at DePaul University in Chicago…

Read the entire interview here.

Quiting India: the Anglo-Indian Culture of Migration

sites: a Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Volume 4, Number 2 (2007)
pages 32-56
DOI: 10.11157/sites-vol4iss2id73

Robyn Andrews, Lecturer, Social Anthropology Programme
Massey University

In my work with the Anglo-Indians in Calcutta I was reminded of Caplan’s (1995) comment that Anglo-Indians had a ‘culture of emigration’, as I observed a steady stream of Anglo-Indians leaving India. Even though destination opportunities are being eroded, the Anglo-Indians I spoke with regularly referred to relatives living abroad, and in the main wanted to emulate this pattern of migration.

In this paper I draw particularly on case study material collected in India and Australia over the past five years. I explore the nexus between Anglo-Indian identity, which they often regarded as more Western than Indian, and their migration patterns. Concentrating on their reasons for leaving, I contribute to the ‘culture of migration’ literature through this analysis of the migration culture of an ethnic group which exhibits variations on the set of reasonably distinct characteristics associated with groups having a ‘culture of migration’.

Read the entire article here.

Anglo-Indians: Is their culture dying out?

BBC News Magazine
2013-01-03

Kris Griffiths

A product of the British Empire, with a mixture of Western and Indian names, customs and complexions, 2,000 Anglo-Indians are to attend a reunion in Calcutta. But their communities in both the UK and the subcontinent are disappearing, writes Anglo-Indian Kris Griffiths.

Southall in west London is home to Britain’s first pub accepting rupees, railway station signs in English and Punjabi, and main thoroughfares alive all year with street food stalls, colourful saris and Bhangra music.

It’s my hometown, where I spent my first 20 years among the country’s most concentrated population of Indians, but as one of the minority 10% white British inhabitants. Indeed, I was the only white person on my avenue in the years before I left.

My mother is Anglo-Indian, raised in Jamshedpur, near Calcutta, before moving eventually to London’s own “Little India”. After she married a Welshman, I and my siblings were born fair with blue eyes.

We are symptomatic of the biggest problem facing the global Anglo-Indian community – it is dying out. In the UK and the Commonwealth, it is losing its “Indianness”, while back home in India its “Anglo” element is fading…

…The definition of Anglo-Indian has become looser in recent decades. It can now denote any mixed British-Indian parentage, but for many its primary meaning refers to people of longstanding mixed lineage, dating back up to 300 years into the subcontinent’s colonial past.

In the 18th Century, the British East India Company followed previous Dutch and Portuguese settlers in encouraging employees to marry native women and plant roots. The company would even pay a sum for every child born of these cross-cultural unions.

By the late 19th Century, however, after the Suez Canal’s construction had made the long journey shorter, British women were arriving in greater numbers, mixed marriages dwindled and their offspring came to be stigmatised by many Indians as “Kutcha-Butcha” (half-baked bread).

When the British finally departed in 1947 they left behind a Westernised mixed-race subpopulation about 300,000-strong who weren’t necessarily glad to see them leave…

Read the entire article here.

Winners of 1st Korea Multicultural Youth Awards

The Korea Times
2012-12-12

Jun Ji-hye

Habitus, a student volunteer group at Yongmoon High School in Seoul, has worked for vulnerable members of society such as the disabled, senior citizens and multiracial children.

Among their good works, running the study room for elementary school students from multiracial families ought to be highly commended.

Seven students who are in the second grade of the school are in the group. They set themselves up as mentors for such young children and have guided their study from Monday to Friday for a year.

They also became company for them to talk together with, thus giving them the needed emotional support.

“It takes 20 minutes for them to get to the study room from the school. After doing the volunteer work for an hour, they have to go back to school to do their own study till 11 p.m. But they always do such works with a glad heart,” said Choi Nak-won, a guidance teacher of the group.

Choi said, “Seven students have been enthusiastic about understanding multiracial families and always warm-heartedly treating young students from such families. I believe this will help them grow up as leading figures in the future society.”…

Read the entire article here.

Capturing the Spirit World on Film: Albert Chong’s artistic recipe blends Jamaica, Catholicism, Santeria and America in an eclectic artistic stew

The Los Angeles Times
1993-10-10

Leah Ollman

When photographer and installation artist Albert Chong was about 6 years old, his parents bought a new house in Kingston, Jamaica.

Chong’s father invited a Catholic priest to bless the house by sprinkling holy water throughout. A few days later, his father brought in another priest, this time a black Obeahman, or shaman, who sacrificed two roosters and scattered their blood not far from where the holy water had just dried.

“My father thought he should cover all his bases,” Chong recalls, laughing. “We were Catholics, really. But when things would start getting really bad and you’d see forces that were being worked against you that the regular, established Catholic religion couldn’t help you with—you couldn’t go to your local priest and say, hey, somebody has worked some wicked magic on me. Yet it’s a real thing.”

Like his father, Chong has a lot of bases to cover. His life gives new meaning to the overused term multicultural. Half-Chinese, half-Jamaican Chong was raised Catholic but has followed Rastafarianism, the Ethiopian-inspired political/religious movement, and Santeria, the syncretic religion forged by African slaves living under Christian domination in the Caribbean. He is married to Frances Charteris, an artist from England, and their two children, Ayinde and Chinwe, are, he says with pride and just a touch of resignation, very American…

Read the entire article here.

Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943

University of California Press
2013-07-07
352 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780520276260
Paperback ISBN: 9780520276277
Ebook ISBN: 9780520957008

Emma Jinhua Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations and Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown. How did interracial families negotiate their identities within these societies when mixed-race marriage was taboo and “Eurasian” often a derisive term?

In Eurasian, Emma Jinhua Teng compares Chinese-Western mixed-race families in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, examining both the range of ideas that shaped the formation of Eurasian identities in these diverse contexts and the claims set forth by individual Eurasians concerning their own identities. Teng argues that Eurasians were not universally marginalized during this era, as is often asserted. Rather, Eurasians often found themselves facing contradictions between exclusionary and inclusive ideologies of race and nationality, and between overt racism and more subtle forms of prejudice that were counterbalanced by partial acceptance and privilege.

By tracing the stories of mixed and transnational families during an earlier era of globalization, Eurasian also demonstrates to students, faculty, scholars, and researchers how changes in interracial ideology have allowed the descendants of some of these families to reclaim their dual heritage with pride.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• A Note on Romanization
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• Introduction
• Part One
  • 1. A Canton Mandarin Weds a Connecticut Yankee: Chinese-Western Intermarriage Becomes a “Problem”
  • 2. Mae Watkins Becomes a “Real Chinese Wife”: Marital Expatriation, Migration, and Transracial Hybridity
• Part Two
  • 3. “A Problem for Which There Is No Solution”: The New Hybrid Brood and the Specter of Degeneration in New York’s Chinatown
  • 4. “Productive of Good to Both Sides”: The Eurasian as Solution in Chinese Utopian Visions of Racial Harmony
  • 5. Reversing the Sociological Lens: Putting Sino-American “Mixed Bloods” on the Miscegenation Map
• Part Three
  • 6. The “Peculiar Cast”: Navigating the American Color Line in the Era of Chinese Exclusion
  • 7. On Not Looking Chinese: Chineseness as Consent or Descent?
  • 8. “No Gulf between a Chan and a Smith amongst Us”: Charles Graham Anderson’s Manifesto for Eurasian Unity in Interwar Hong Kong
• Coda: Elsie Jane Comes Home to Rest
• Epilogue
• Chinese Character Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Naked Bodies, Bodies of History

Hyphen Magazine: Asian America Unabridged
2013-06-27

Jenny Lee

“She mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words…From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free.  She swallows once more.”

So begins the story of the halting diseuse, or female storyteller, of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-defying text Dictée, first published just over three decades ago in 1982. Organized in nine parts named after the Greek Muses, Dictée has been described in mythic terms – a Korean Odyssey, a rewriting of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a theatrical ritual, a shamanistic exorcism.  Above all, however, Cha’s work interrogates history, refracting the history of Korea in the twentieth century through the themes of exile, the displacement of colonized bodies, and the lost – and resurrected – bodies and voices of women…

…I must have had Dictée on the brain, because I thought of Cha’s work again a few weeks ago when I dropped by the DePaul Art Museum to see the exhibit War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, curated by DePaul and San Francisco State University professors  Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis. The exhibit is part of a larger project that features visual media produced by nineteen artists who hail from the rapidly expanding community of 2.6 million Americans (and counting) who identify as Asian American plus one or more ethno-racial groups. While the exhibit blurb explains that the show “examines the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States,” this actually doesn’t do justice to its ambitious range, which not only investigates the historical origins of these identities (U.S. wars in Asia, colonialism, transnational adoption, the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia outlawing laws against interracial marriage) but breaks down insidious present-day theories about “post-racialness,” while also featuring work by a younger generation of artists who seem to stay out of the conversation completely.  

In an interview, Dariotis revealed that the title of the exhibit was inspired by her own experience fielding annoying questions about her background (which, incidentally, is Chinese, Greek, Swedish, English, Scottish, German, and Dutch). According to Dariotis, people would inquire whether her parents “met in the war.” “And I always ask myself, ha, I was born in 1969, we were not at war with China in 1969. Where did they get this image?” Dariotis’s story highlights persistent mainstream assumptions about mixed-race (if not mixed-ethnic) Asian Americans of a certain age as either/or – that is, either the product of military personnel and Asian women, or free-love hippies indulging in illegal interracial sex. If Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show offers a critique of the sexualizing of women’s bodies, War Baby/Love Child draws attention to the cultural sexualization of specifically Asian (and mostly female) bodies through the bodies of their mixed-race offspring…

Read the entire article here.

Who Is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide

Lynne Rienner
2003
230 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-58826-337-7

George Yancey, Professor of Sociology
University of North Texas

“By the year 2050, whites will be a numerical racial minority, albeit the largest minority, in the United States.” This statement, asserts George Yancey, while statistically correct, is nonetheless false.

Yancey marshals compelling evidence to show that the definition of who is “white” is changing rapidly, with nonblack minorities accepting the perspectives of the current white majority group and, in turn, being increasingly assimilated. In contrast, African Americans continue to experience high levels of alienation. To understand the racial reality in the United States, Yancey demonstrates, it is essential to discard the traditional white/nonwhite dichotomy and to explore the implications of the changing color of whiteness.

Contents

• Alienation and Race in the United States.
• How To Become White.
• “They Are OK—Just Keep Them Away From Me”: Residential and Marital Segregation Patterns.
• The End of the Rainbow Coalition.
• The Changing Significance of “Latino” and “Asian.”
• The Black/Nonblack Society.

Black/Non-Black Divide and The Anti-Blackness of Non-Black Minorities

Still Furious and Brave: Who’s Afraid of Persistent Blackness?
2013-04-03

Robert Reece
Department of Sociology
Duke University

Last week, an Asian-American fraternity at the University of California Irvine posted a parody of a music video featuring one of their members in blackface. Blackface has become the go-to type of public racism for many types of white people across the political spectrum, and the internet is overflowing with analyses of why it’s racist so I won’t bother with that here. My concern is that an Asian-American fraternity is the culprit this time and what that may mean as we enter an era where our racial boundaries may be shifting as dramatically as the racial demographics.

I’m certainly not surprised that an Asian-American fraternity harbors racial stereotypes, both about themselves and other minorities. White supremacy is partially rule by consent, with subordinate groups believing in their own pathology (I’m looking at you Bill Cosby), but I think this incident, in this moment, deserves much more attention.

Proclamations by demographers about the coming white minority are used by both liberals and conservatives to promise inevitable political change. Liberals discuss how minorities outnumbering whites will signal as intense power shift in politics that will usher in an unprecedented age of progress and liberalism, and conservatives fear that they will lose their country to the brown hoards resting just over the horizon. But sociologist George Yancey, in Who is White?, questions the very demographers claiming that a white minority is certain. Yancey argues that demographers cannot account for shifting racial boundaries when making their predictions. So while their raw numbers may be correct, their racial predictions are probably incorrect because racial categories are always changing…

…This is the phenomenon at play when an Asian American fraternity implicitly approves of an act of anti-black racism. And this isn’t an isolated incident of negative black attitudes. In Racism Without Racists, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva presents survey results showing that Asian American political attitudes, including those regarding stereotypes of blacks, are very similar to those of whites. On some items, Asian Americans even demonstrated stronger anti-black attitudes than whites. In this way, they are following in the footsteps of other formerly marginalized groups who demonized blackness on their way to whiteness.

In The Wages of Whiteness, historian David Roediger chronicles how the newly immigrated Irish of the 19^th century made a strategic decision to pit themselves against blacks despite their acknowledgement of a common oppressor. They essentially built their case for inclusion into whiteness on the back of their anti-black attitudes. Anti-black racism was the glue that bound white ethnics to whiteness, and it may serve a similar purpose as our current racial project progresses. In the case of the Irish, their attitudes eventually manifested in an emulation of whiteness, in committing mob violence against blacks. But in 2013, popular violence against blacks doesn’t come in the form of gruesome beatings in the streets (police brutality notwithstanding); it comes in the form of YouTube videos of fraternity boys in blackface that, just like the mob violence of the 19^th century, goes unpunished by authorities.

Read the entire article here.