Mixed Race Studies

Being Amerasian in South Korea: Purebloodness, Multiculturalism, and Living Alongside the U.S. Military Empire

The Ohio State University
June 2012
96 pages

Yuri W. Doolan

Honors Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors Research Distinction in History in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

This thesis focuses on the history of U.S. neo-colonialism in South Korea through the lens of mixed race Amerasians—a population generally regarded and understood to have been produced through the liaisons between South Korean camptown women and American military personnel. In this project, I discuss the historical and contemporary status and identity of mixed race individuals in South Korea as the country’s national ideology evolved from an embrace of purebloodedness to multiculturalism. My analysis is chronologically framed around intercountry adoption policies in the years immediately following the Korean War (formed to excise the presence of mixed race GI babies from South Korea) and state-sponsored multicultural policy initiatives beginning in 2005. I research the production of Amerasian subjectivity and identity in South Korea over the past six decades through an analysis of pureblooded constructions of Koreanness, U.S. militarism and camptowns, androcentric Nationality and Family Laws, contemporary multicultural policy formations, and the popular culture and lived experiences of Amerasians in South Korea.

I also offer a comparative analysis of a new mixed race group in South Korea called Kosian (Korean/Asian). I critique multiculturalism in South Korea, which targets this emerging Kosian demographic, arguing that multicultural policy is primarily one of assimilation rather than a recognition of cultural and racial differences. I suggest that the marginal status of mixed race Amerasians has not changed much since the Korean War and is linked to South Korea’s persistent status as a neo-colony of the United States—a history of national shame and subjugation that Amerasians have come to symbolize. Primary sources for this study include legal and government documents, popular media representations, interviews with pureblooded Koreans, as well as oral histories of Amerasians that I conducted in South Korea during the summer of 2011.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• A Note on Terminology
• Chapter One
  • Introduction
  • Pureblooded Constructions of Race
  • The G.I. Baby and Camptowns
  • Intercountry Adoption
  • Gendered Citizenship and Korean Family Law
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two
  • Introduction
  • A “Multicultural” Era
  • White Privilege in Contemporary South Korean Society
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Race, Religion, and Law in Colonial India. Trials of an Interracial Family [Review]

Reviews in History: Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history
October 2012

Peter Robb, Research Professor of the History of India
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Race, Religion, and Law in Colonial India. Trials of an Interracial Family, Chandra Mallampalli, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, ISBN: 9781107012615; 286pp.

This book uses the story of one family and its legal battles to uncover relationships between religion, race, gender, identity, and personal law in south India in the first half of the 19th century. Matthew Abrahams was an Indian Roman Catholic of lowly background but increasing wealth. He married an Anglo-Portuguese woman, Charlotte Fox, and adopted what was regarded as a largely ‘East Indian’ (or Anglo-Indian) lifestyle. His money was made from the abkari (liquor) contract, trading in arms and money lending in Bellary and also Kurnool after the annexation of 1839. One of his sons, Charles, was sent to Cambridge University to study for the law. After Matthew’s death, intestate, in 1842, his younger brother, Francis, continued to manage and develop the business. Starting in 1854, suits were brought against Francis by Charlotte and her sons, for possession of Matthew’s estate. They progressed from the Bellary District Court, on appeal to the Sadr Adalat in Madras, and then to the Privy Council in London.

The main point at issue was whether or not Matthew and Francis had operated on a joint family basis, as partners, or as master and servant. It suited Francis’s case to claim that the Abrahams were a joint family, in line with supposed Hindu custom, but also with the alleged practice of many Indian converts to Christianity. It suited Charlotte to insist that Francis had been a mere employee with no rights in his brother’s estate, which therefore ought to devolve according to ‘Christian’ principles. The District Court agreed with Charlotte; the appellant court found for Francis; and the Privy Council cut through both arguments, arguing that personal law ought to follow not inherited traditions but the lifestyle. This final judgment (of 1863) favoured Charlotte on the point of inheritance. But it also supported Francis’s rights as an active partner in business, entitled to rewards at very much the level Francis had offered to accept before the litigation began.

The story is used to advance several themes. The first concerns the conditions of life in the towns and military cantonments of a southern dry zone during a period of transition, from around 1812 to the 1850s. The second covers questions of family life, custom, and identity, particularly among liminal peoples such as the Abrahams, comprising as they did ‘Hindu’ Christians and mixed-race Protestant ‘East Indians’. (A chapter on Charles in Cambridge provides an intriguing but inconclusive footnote to this story.) Finally there are the legal and policy changes in the run-up to the establishment of the Indian High Courts in 1862, and in particular the development of a personal law according to religion – and hence the re-invention or formation of ‘communities’ in British India.

There is much of interest under the first two themes, many details being revealed in the trial papers. Several chapters are devoted to the growing wealth and status of the Abrahams. Bellary, ceded to the Company by Hyderabad in 1800 under the subsidiary alliance, is painted as a frontier place, dominated by the Company’s army and a host of camp followers. A very good impression is conveyed of the intermixture of races and communities. Bellary was clearly changing and offered opportunities to the resourceful, such as Matthew Abrahams. The Rev. John Hands of the non-denominational LMS, who converted Matthew to Protestantism, and who was later known for his translation of the Bible into Kannada, arrived in Bellary in 1810, before the change in the charter that permitted missionaries in Company territories (1813). On his arrival, Hands reported, the settlement already had seven native schools with 300 children.In this milieu, Matthew and then Francis shrugged off any links to an ‘untouchable’ paraiyar ancestry and became dora (big man). Their patterns of marriage and association show, it is suggested, somewhat obscurely, ‘how lower orders of society within an economic dry zone were uniquely suited for various forms and degrees of mixture’ (p. 26). More obviously, the circumstances seem to have provided for upward mobility…

Read the entire review here.

Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family

Cambridge University Press
November 2011
286 pages
6 b/w illus. 3 maps
228 x 152 mm; 0.51kg
Hardback ISBN: 9781107012615
Adobe eBook ISBN: 9781139181242
Mobipocket eBook: ISBN:9781139184861

Chandra Mallampalli, Associate Professor of History
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California

How did British rule in India transform persons from lower social classes? Could Indians from such classes rise in the world by marrying Europeans and embracing their religion and customs? This book explores such questions by examining the intriguing story of an interracial family who lived in southern India in the mid-nineteenth century. The family, which consisted of two untouchable brothers, both of whom married Eurasian women, became wealthy as distillers in the local community. When one brother died, a dispute arose between his wife and brother over family assets, which resulted in a landmark court case, Abraham v. Abraham. It is this case which is at the center of this book, and which Chandra Mallampalli uses to examine the lives of those involved and, by extension, of those – 271 witnesses in all – who testified. In its multilayered approach, the book sheds light not only on interracial marriage, class, religious allegiance, and gender, but also on the British encounter with Indian society. It shows that far from being products of a “civilizing mission” who embraced the ways of Englishmen, the Abrahams were ultimately – when faced with the strictures of the colonial legal system – obliged to contend with hierarchy and racial difference.

Features

• A singular court case from the nineteenth century is at the heart of this intriguing book on race and hierarchy in colonial India
• A rich and engaging multi-layered approach which interrogates legal documents and interviews with witnesses to unveil social history of the period
• For students and scholars of colonial India, and legal and social historians

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Remembering family
• 2. Embodying ‘Dora-hood’: the brothers and their business
• 3. A crisis of trust: sedition and the sale of arms in Kurnool
• 4. Letters from Cambridge
• 5. The path to litigation
• 6. Litigating gender and race: Charlotte sues at Bellary
• 7. Francis appeals: the case for continuity
• 8. Choice, identity, and law: the decision of London’s Privy Council.

Drawn in Bloodlines: Blood, Pollution, Identity, and Vampires in Japanese Society

University of Texas, Austin
May 2012
117 pages

Benjamin Paul Miller

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

This thesis is an examination of the evolution of blood ideology, which is to say the use of blood as an organizing metaphor, in Japanese society. I begin with the development of blood as a substance of significant in the eighth century and trace its development into a metaphor for lineage in the Tokugawa period. I discuss in detail blood’s conceptual and rhetorical utility throughout the post-Restoration period, first examining its role in establishing a national subjectivity in reference to both the native intellectual tradition of the National Learning and the foreign hegemony of race. I then discuss the rationalization of popular and national bloodlines under the auspices of the popular eugenics movement, and the National Eugenics Bill. Then, I discuss the racialization this conception of blood inflicted on the Tokugawa era Outcastes, and its persistent consequences. Through the incongruity of the Outcastes ability to “pass” despite popular expectations that their blood pollution was visibly demonstrative, I introduce the notion of blood anxiety. Next, I address the conceptual and rhetorical role blood played in articulating Japan’s empire and imperial ambitions, focusing on the Theory of Common Descent and the Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus report. I follow this discussion with a detailed examination of the postwar reconceptualization of national subjectivity, which demands native bloodlines and orthodox cultural expressions, and which effectively de-legitimized minority populations. As illustration of this point, I describe the impact of this new subjectivity on both the Zainichi and the Nikkeijin in lengthy case studies. Finally, I conclude this examination with a consideration of blood ideology’s representation in popular culture. I argue that the subgenre of vampire media allegorizes many of the assumptions and anxieties surrounding blood that have developed since the Restoration, and demonstrates the imprint of blood ideology on contemporary society.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Introduction
  • Blood Matters
  • Thesis Organization
• Chapter One: The Development of Blood as an Organizing Metaphor
  • The Blood Bowl Sutra and the Feminization of Blood Pollution
  • Sōtō Zen and the Dissemination of Blood Determinism
  • Lineage and a New Vocabulary
• Chapter Two: Bloodlines in Modern Japanese Society
  • A State Without a Nation
  • The Formulation of the Family-State
  • Civil Code and Constitution
  • Eugenics and the Rationalization of Bloodlines
    • Race, Science, and the Introduction of Eugenic Thought
    • Popular Eugenics
    • State Eugenics
  • From Outcastes to Burakumin
    • Outcastness as Pollution
    • The Racialization of the Outcastes
    • Infiltration and Blood Anxiety
• Chapter Three: The Empire
  • Blood-Kinship and Overseas Expansion
  • Imperial Manifesto
• Chapter Four – Postwar Reconceptualization and the De-legitimization of Minority Populations
  • The Aesthetics of Ethnic Homogeneity
  • Blood and Culture
  • Zainichi
    • Colonial Koreans and Their Subjective Shift
    • Hereditary Foreigners
  • The Nikkeijin
    • Immigration and the Racially Homogenous State
    • The Sakoku-Kaikoku Debate
    • 1990 Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act
    • Culture Clash
• Chapter Five – Blood Ideology in the Popular Media
  • The Vampire Boom
  • The Vampire as Blood Allegory
• Bibliography
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

“A Problem for Which There Is No Solution”: Eurasians and the Specter of Degeneration in New York’s Chinatown

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 15, Number 3, October 2012
pages 271-298
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2012.0022

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

In 1898, journalist Louis J. Beck offered the reading public what he saw as a valuable case study in “heredity and racial traits and tendencies.” This case study was none other than the infamous “half-breed” criminal George Washington Appo (1856–1930), whose name was virtually a household word for New Yorkers of the time. Born to an Irish mother and the “Chinese devil man” Quimbo Appo, a notorious criminal in his own right, George Appo was a preeminent celebrity criminal of the 1890s. A notorious pickpocket and “green-goods man,” George was catapulted to national fame after appearing as a star witness in the dramatic Lexow Committee investigation that brought down New York’s Tammany Hall. Taking sensationalism to a new level, the “king of confidence men,” as the Boston Globe called him, had even appeared on the stage, playing himself in George Lederer’s theatrical melodrama In the Tenderloin to national acclaim. To cap it all off, the World voted Appo among “The People Who Made the History of 1894.”

But Beck was not much interested in the details of New York police corruption, nor in the new low point to which American theater had sunk: his true concern was the Chinese Question. Beck was the author of New York’s Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of Its People and Places, published by the Bohemia Publishing Company in 1898. Part tourist guidebook, part amateur ethnography, part muckraking exposé, this amply illustrated volume was the first full-length book on New York’s Chinese Quarter, and would in time become a frequently quoted source for Chinatown history. Beck promised his audience that his book would shed light on the vexed Chinese Question by presenting the city’s Chinese residents through the unbiased lens of the reporter. At the heart of the Chinese Question was this—could the Chinese in time become assimilated, and patriotic, American citizens, or did their “racial traits” render this impossible, warranting their exclusion from the nation? Beck offered George Appo’s biography as food for thought:

George Appo was born in New York City, July 4, 1858 [sic], and is therefore an American citizen, and should be a patriotic one, but he is not. His father was a full-blooded Chinaman and his mother an Irishwoman. He was an exceedingly bright child, beautiful to look upon, sharp-witted and quick of comprehension. For ten years he was the pet of the neighborhood where his parents dwelt. . . . At the age of ten he became a pickpocket.

Beck’s decision to dedicate an entire chapter to the celebrity criminal stemmed from his conviction that this “noted Chinese character” was “well worth investigating,” not only for the light his story shed on the operation of the green-goods business, but, more important, “because he is the first one of the new hybrid brood” to gain public attention. As such, Beck argued, “The question which naturally presents itself to the thinker is: ‘What part will the rest of his tribe take in our national development?’”

It was a question that was on the minds of many journalists, social reformers, travelers, and others as they toured America’s Chinatowns and saw growing numbers of “half-castes” on the streets and in doorways. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, such “mixed” children could be found virtually wherever Chinese immigrants had settled across the country. When pioneering Chinese American journalist Wong Chin Foo reported on the New York Chinese for the Cosmopolitan in 1888, he asserted that there were over a hundred “half-breed” Chinese children in that city alone. Although their absolute numbers were small, their anomalous looks drew attention and aroused curiosity. Observers attached a special significance to these children that went beyond their numbers. For many, they represented the future shape of the Chinese American population, for better or worse. Some regarded these “hybrids” as living specimens that offered a chance to see firsthand the…

Amerasians

Atmo
1998-10-22
52 minutes

Erik Gandini, Director/Producer

In 1988, after the Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act, Vietnamese youngsters who could prove they had been fathered by an American were issued with a ticket for the U.S. and granted six months ”upkeep”.

Overnight, society’s lowest ranks became ”golden children”, able to take a whole family to the U.S. But proving one’s paternity wasn.t a simple matter.

For many, all that was left were physical traits suggesting American parentage and, with luck, an old photo of a father in uniform.

To date, 38,000 offsprings have moved to the U.S., and this documentary by Erik Gandini introduces us to a number of Amerasians, some who have moved, and others who are about to leave Vietnam.

The reality that confronts them in the U.S. can be a challenge. Even if their look is no longer a problem in the melting pot of American society, the culture shock is considerable—language, food, culture—so much is strange to them, and they feel themselves to be neither Vietnamese nor American.

For the first time in their lives, they learn to be proud of themselves as Amerasians.

Festivals

• Vue Sur les Docs, Marseille.
• Golden Gate Film Festival, San Francisco.
• Nordic Panorama Festival.
• Leipzig documentary festival etc.

Awards

• Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 1999,
• Silver Spire, Golden Gate Filmfestival, San Francisco, USA.
• Golden Antenna, best indipendent documentary of the year, Swedish Television, 1998.

Event: Joe Bataan, the Afro-Filipino King of Latin Soul

Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program
National Museum of Natural History
Baird Auditorium
10th & Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530

Friday, 2012-10-19, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

“Latin soul comes straight from the streets of Harlem. It’s a cha-cha backbeat with English lyrics and a pulsating rhythm that makes your feet come alive.”
 — Joe Bataan

Come learn about the power of music to move people—to get us on our feet and across borders of race, geography, class, language, and culture. The intersecting lines of heritage in Joe Bataan’s music and identity offer a unique entry point into the lives and community commitments of the civil rights movement and a deeper understanding of the American experience. Born and raised in Spanish Harlem to a Filipino father and an African American mother, Joe Bataan symbolizes the dynamic intersections between Afro-Asian-Latino histories and cultural forms.
 
Join us for a public discussion featuring Joe Bataan, activist and performer Nobuko Miyamoto, and African American Studies scholar Dr. Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar. With them we revisit the political and cultural ferment and collaboration of the late 1960s and 1970s in New York City when groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party, Asian Americans for Action, and El Comité contributed to dynamic social justice movements, catalyzed largely by young people, which inspired cultural pride, creativity, and activism. Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, author and former member of the Young Lords, will moderate the discussion.

For more information, click here.

China’s Mixed Views on Mixed People

hardboiled: the asian pacific american issues newsmagazine at uc berkeley
Issue 13.3 (March 2010)
page 9

Margaret Zhou

“Little girl, wait! Take picture?” Over the four years I spent in China as a child, I was grabbed and tugged by the arm hundreds of times by strangers who all had the same curious and excited gleam in their eyes. My other foreign friends, who stood out in a sea of black-haired heads with their blonde hair and blue eyes, were also common targets of these harmless attacks. There always seemed to be a difference, though, in how the swift picture-takers treated me in comparison to the other kids. Since I am half-Chinese and half-white, I was the only one among us who looked kind of un-foreign, kind of like them. Sometimes this would render preferential treatment, as the picture-takers would say I was the most exotic looking one; other times, I was deemed not exotic enough to be in their pictures, and instead received confused glances as they turned away. I never knew which one was better or worse.
 
Vivian S. Toy of the New York Times published an article last year relating the experience of her mixed children during their visit to Beijing. Her stories of picture-takers and that continuous question, “What are you?” recalled memories from my childhood. “It had become clear why my children were attracting so much attention. They look Chinese, but not exactly. They look Western, but not quite,” Toy explained.
 
In the same vein, an article titled “Mixed blood people get the best of both worlds” was published on the Shanghai Daily website in September 2009. The article lists the numerous benefits of being mixed in China: mixed people are popular in the fashion and modeling industries because they’re usually taller than most Chinese; they’re perceived by many as “more attractive and more intelligent”; those with an American parent don’t have to study hard in school because they can go to a U.S. university; mixed babies are often used in product advertising; and mixed men are often approached by women for marriage.
 
Patrick Liu, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the history of a mixed family living in Jiangsu Province, is cited in the article as stating that the “attractive and intelligent” stereotype surrounding people of mixed race “reflects both pride in Chinese culture and respect for foreign culture.” The article goes on to state that in a homogenous society like China, where 93% of the population is Han Chinese, “it is intriguing for people to see a different look, especially when the difference is mixed with similarities that are easy to understand” – because, of course, it’s easiest for us to understand people of our own race.
 
So is it true then? Do “mixed blood” people really have the best of both worlds?…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Roots Japan ミックスルーツ・ジャパン: Towards a Japan Model of a Multicultural Society

The Mixed Roots Academic Forum is now in its third year, hosted by Osaka University GLOCOL and planned by Mixed Roots Japan. With the aim of promoting “firsthand social dialogue”, various panel discussions, performances, and short film screenings are organized.

In the absence of a formal academic recognition of the subject of mixed roots studies in Japan, we are especially working hard to connect various academics and the development of young researchers by providing them a venue for presentation. Out participation is not limited to the Kansai region—presenters and acdemics converge from as far as Okinawa, Sendai, and the United States.

We are also collaborating with the bi-annual Hapa Japan Conference organized by Prof. Duncan Williams (formerly at UC Berkley), which will be held at University of Southern California in April 2013.

Please email us for inquiries and RSVPs.

For more information, click here.

“Representing” Anglo-Indians: A Genealogical Study

University of Melbourne
1999
350 pages

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer
School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University, Australia

Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English with Cultural Studies

The ‘mixed-race’ Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community was born of the European colonisation of India some four hundred years ago. This dissertation examines how historians, writers, colonial administrators, social scientists and immigration officials represented Anglo-Indians between 1850 and 1998. Traditionally, Anglo-Indians have sought to correct perceived distortions or misrepresentations of their community by disputing the accuracy of deprecatory stereotypes produced by ‘prejudicial’ writers. While the need to contest disparaging representations is not in dispute here, the present study finds its own point of departure by questioning the possibility of (re)presenting an undistorted Anglo-Indian identity.

The dissertation functions at three levels. First, it examines the construction of Anglo-Indian stereotypes in various discursive practices, offering a critique of the knowledges and images produced within specific literary and non-literary texts. Second, it retrieves the ‘buried’ texts of the Anglo-Indian community, which have been ‘disqualified’ by official discourses. Third, drawing on postcolonialism and poststructuralism, it mounts a practical argument against mimeticism or image analysis by demonstrating how complex discursive and ideological currents mediate stereotypical representations. More specifically, it enumerates the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the production of Anglo-Indian stereotypes, arguing that such figures are historically variable and internally contradictory. Using Foucault’s genealogical method as a starting point, the dissertation examines (mis)representations of Anglo-Indians as they meet and disperse within an interactive network of power/knowledge relations.

This strategy not only accounts for the emergence of pejorative stereotypes, but encourages the articulation of Anglo-Indian identities in their diversity. This contrasts with the impractical compulsion, articulated by Anglo-Indian image critics, to build a homogeneous community.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Contents
• Acknowledegments
• Introduction
• 1 (Mis)representing Anglo-Indian History
• 2 ‘Pangs of Nature and Taints of Blood’: The Anglo-Indian ‘Stereotype’ in Raj Literature
• 3 Sexual Relations, Colonial Governmentality and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 4 Imperial Power and Regimes of Truth: Racial Science and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 5 ‘Poor Relations’: Social Science and ‘The Eurasian Problem’
• 6 Ambivalent Stereotypes: Kipling, Rushdie, Chandra and Sealy
• 7 ‘The Good Australians’: Multiculturalism and the Anglo-Indian Diaspora
• 8 Conclusion: ‘Bringing it All Back Home’
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.