Mixed Race Studies

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory [Review: Zack]

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 11, Issue 2 (2010)
pages 269-270
DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2010.481885

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory
Tavia Nyong’o
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Pp. 230. ISBNs 978 0 8166 5612 7 and 978 0 8166 5613 4

If The Amalgamation Waltz were not a 230-page book, published by a university press, complete with scholarly apparatus, readers might think that Alan Sokal was at it again, this time with the bad taste to caricature postmodern treatments of mixed race—as though mixed race did not already have a history of tragedy in fiction and biography. But alas, Tavia Nyong’o’s jargon-ridden exercise in “mixed-race theory” probably is the sincere but feverish reworking of a doctoral dissertation written under great stress, which it purports to be. Most readers, after reviving from the stupor induced by grappling with the first half of the introduction, would probably simply recycle the book unread and have done with it. But, I am heartened by the fact that mixed race has become a sufficiently respectable intellectual topic to support publication of even such a failed effort.

Nyong’o’s major theme appears to be that the idea of racial miscegenation enables certain errors in the mass political memory (which is something like a Jungian collective unconscious, only structured by anxiety). The idea of racial miscegenation leads to a “miscegenation of time.” When time is miscegenated, temporal order gets disorganized, so that what people imagine as A preceding B is in reality a case of B preceding A. Thus, the idea of mixed race is imagined to come after the idea of pure race. But in reality, the idea of mixed race comes first and the idea of pure race is constructed as a defense against the nightmarish chaos and danger evoked by the idea of mixed race. However, to put it this way might be too literal, because Nyongo writes, “My method employs the archive as a practice of ‘countermemory’ but without the pretense of using it to build a complete or coherent historical narrative” (p. 7). Indeed, such a narrative is not possible insofar as the “spurious issue” of mixed race/hybridity/amalgamation is not a thing but a performance that defers solution of racial problems into some future in which it (m-r/h/a) will transcend race.

Although Nyongo begins The Amalgamation Waltz by castigating Americans for the assumption that that the history of race in the U.S. offers the final meanings of race words, the four chapters of the book are largely restricted to American history. Chapter one, “The Mirror of Liberty,” is about representations of Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race patriot or insurgent who was killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre on 5 March 1770. Nyong’o weaves Attucks’s role as a symbol of unresolved racial injustice in colonial times with reflection on a book in the Wellcome Library in London that is falsely described as bound in the “Tanned Skin of the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence.” Nyong’o notes that some books were in fact bound in human skin, a practice called “anthropodermic bibliopegy” (p. 37). Chapter two, “In Night’s Eye,” begins with a nineteenth-century story about a traveler in a coach at night, who informs his companions that the idea of amalgamation is used by anti-abolitionists to frighten and shock abolitionists. This notion of moral panic, based on imagery of sexual disorder, is further developed throughout the chapter, and Nyong’o makes a lucid case that such imagery was used by both sides of the slavery…

Read or purchase the review here.

‘Breed out the Colour’ or the Importance of Being White

Australian Historical Studies
Volume 33, Issue 120 (2002)
pages 286-302
DOI: 10.1080/10314610208596220

Russell McGregor, Associate Professor of History
James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

This article examines inter-war proposals to ‘breed out the colour’ of Aborigines of mixed descent. Positioning these proposals in the context of contemporary Australian nationalism, scientific discourses and administrative practice, the article concludes with a discussion of their alleged genocidal intent.

In Australia between the wars, ‘breeding out the colour’ was propounded as a solution to the ‘half-caste problem’. It was a perverse proposition. The supposed problems deriving from miscegenation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians would be remedied by instituting still more comprehensive regimes of miscegenation. But now miscegenation would be managed. And the perversity of absorption did not end there. It was a nationalist project, aspiring to keep Australia white; but it flew in the face of commonly understood notions of White Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. Absorption was intensely racist but at the same time defied prevalent racist assumptions of ‘hybrid inferiority’ and demands for the segregation of ‘half-castes’. It was in certain respects a eugenist strategy, but in others dashed with eugenic principles, Absorption held a component of humanitarian welfarism; it also evinced a profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions, a disdain that could extend to the attempted eradication of all vestiges of Aboriginality. This aticle explores these multiple and conflicting imensions of schemes to ‘breed out the colour’ in the Inter-war years.

For all its myriad inspirations and aspirations, ‘breeding out the colour’ was above all just that: a stratagem to erase ‘colour’, to bleach Australia white through programs of regulated reproduction. So committed were its proponents to the process of whitening that one could imagine that they took whiteness as an end in itself, a taken-for-granted good. Perhaps they did. Whiteness was a potent signifier: of virtue, of racial superiority, above all in this context, of national membership. Breeding the colour out of persons of Aboriginal descent was equally a process of breeding them into the community of the nation. Inter-war programs of biological absorption should be understood, I argue, in the…

Read or purchase the article here.

New Book Explores Georgetown Inside and Out

Georgetown Alumni Online
Georgetown University
2010-11-2010

Historian R. Emmett Curran discusses his recently published book, a three-volume history of Georgetown that uncovers little known facts about the university.

True or false?

1. In Georgetown’s first decade of existence, nearly 20 percent of its students came from outside the United States.

2. Georgetown was not actually founded in 1789.

A History of Georgetown University: The Complete Three-Volume Set, 1789-1989, released this month, sheds new light on these and other little known facts about Georgetown, as well as offers a broad perspective on the university’s identity and place in American culture.

Here, author R. Emmett Curran, a historian and member of the Georgetown community for more than three decades, talks about the book’s evolution and surprising discoveries he made during its research. Copies of the three-volume set are available in the Georgetown University bookstore.

(The answer to both of the above questions is “true.”)…

…Q: What is your favorite story from Georgetown’s past that people might not have heard?

Curran: The manner by which Patrick Healy became president of Georgetown is a good story. In 1870 the Jesuits were struggling to come up with a suitable candidate for the presidency of Georgetown. After Rome rejected the first slate of candidates that the Jesuits in the United States sent them, Jesuit officials in the Maryland Province (then encompassing most of the eastern United States) sent a new slate that listed Patrick Healy as the preferred candidate.

“Clearly Healy is the best qualified,” the regional superior stated, “despite the difficulty that perhaps can be brought up about him.” That ambiguous reference concerned either Healy’s illegitimate background (as the son of parents [Irish planter and mixed-race slave] who, by Georgia law, could not marry) or his biracial identity.

Rome ended up choosing no one on the list and reappointed John Early, who had earlier held the office. When Early’s latest term came to an end in 1873, the regional superior proposed an interesting deal. He suggested to the superior general in Rome that John Bapst, then president of Boston College, be made president of Georgetown and Patrick Healy replace Bapst in Boston. That suggests that the “difficulty” had actually been Healy’s biracial background and so-called slave status. The regional superior was calculating that mixed race would not have the potential for problems in New England (where Patrick Healy’s two brothers had important positions among the clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston) that it might well pose in Washington.

Before Rome could respond, John Early died suddenly in May 1873. The regional superior immediately appointed Healy as acting rector, and the following day the directors of the university chose him as president. Rome, obviously unhappy about developments, took more than a year to confirm his appointment as rector.

Read the entire article here.

Note from Steven F. Riley: For more information on the Healy brothers, read James M. O’Toole’s book, Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920.

Mixed Britannia – marrying an alien

BBC Two
2011-10-02

George Alagiah, Host

Nearly 100 years ago, Chinese seaman Stanley Ah Foo arrived in Liverpool to start a new life. He soon fell in love—but laws at the time meant that his English bride, Emily, was only able to marry if she gave up her British nationality and became a so-called alien herself.

In Mixed Britannia—a new three-part series for BBC 2—George Alagiah explores the often untold stories of Britain’s mixed-race communities. He met Stanley and Emily Ah Foo’s daughters, Doreen and Lynne, who told the remarkable story of how their parents met, and the restrictions placed upon them.

The first episode of Mixed Britannia will be broadcast on BBC 2 at 20:00Z (21:00 BST) on Thursday, 2011-10-06.

View the video clip here (00:02:11).

The Born Identity

Arise Magazine
Issue 12
2011-09-28

Sarah Bentley

Photography by Liz Johnson-Artur

Thirty-six year-old Egor Belov has just told a childhood anecdote about scrubbing his face until it drew blood. He’d been playing in the snow and wanted pink cheeks like his friends. His dark complexion was never going to turn his desired shade but as a six-year-old living in a home otherwise occupied by white children, he struggled to understand why. The gathering of St Petersburg-based Afro-Russians (the collective name given to Russian nationals of mixed African and Russian parentage) with whom Belov shares this tale all smile knowingly and begin to offer up their own stories.
 
Some tales, including lovers who were shocked that black skin is lighter on different parts of the body, are humorous. But others, such as how school years were marred by bullying, fights and adolescent paranoia, are indicative of the challenges of the Afro-Russian experience. A candid confession from Marie Madlene, a striking 44-year-old with a blonde afro (pictured below), gets a raucous laugh: “I’m so used to being stared at that when I travel to more diverse countries, I miss the attention.”

Although the group has previously only met online through the ‘black-Russian-Ukranian-Belorussian-Kazakh’ page on Kontakt (Russia’s answer to Facebook), its members have developed instant camaraderie. After all, they are all mixed-race people living in a country that, despite its obvious multiculturalism (almost 180 ethnicities live in Russia), has one of the highest race-hate crime rates in the world. There are around 150 active far-right groups, many with ideologies of racial intolerance…

Read the entire article here.

The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood

Hachette Book Group
2001
368 pages
5-1/2″ x 8-1/4″
Paperback ISBN:9780316284615

Kien Nguyen

A story of hope, a story of survival, and an incredible journey of escape, ‘The Unwanted’ is the only memoir by an Amerasian who stayed behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and who is now living in America.

MixedRaceStudies.org Reaches 3,000 Posts

2011-10-03

Steven F. Riley

MixedRaceStudies.org, called by a preeminent scholar, “the most comprehensive and objective clearinghouse for scholarly publications related to critical mixed-race theory,” and the recipient of other praise has reached its 3,000th post!

Created in May 2009 by Steven F. Riley, this free online resource consists of links to:

• almost 1,600 articles
• almost 600 books
• 500 dissertations, papers/presentations, reports, audio/video, statements, course offerings, and research requests
• 200 events
• over 100 quotes/excerpts
• almost 50 terms and definitions

Special thanks to the following people and organizations for their generous guidance, assistance and moral support over the past 2½ years:

• Dr. Victoria Bynum
• Dr. Gregory Carter
• Julia Cates (support for nearly 25 years actually!)
• Brian Chinhema
• Fanshen Cox
• Bonnie M. Davis
• Heidi W. Durrow
• Dr. Marcia Alesan Dawkins
• Dr. Michele Elam
• W. Ralph Eubanks
• Bullfrog Films
• Dr. G. Reginald Daniel
• Phil Wilkes Fixico
• Dr. Sue-Je Gage
• Inanna Publications
• Dr. Nikki Khanna
• Dr. Laura Kina
• Bradley Lincoln
• Mixed Chicks Chat
• Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival
• Nicole Asong Nfonoyim
• Mike “The Sports Brain” Peden
• Penguin Press
• Glenn Robinson
• Dr. Ulli K. Ryder
• Dr. Rainier Spencer

The Mystery of Capital: Eurasian Entrepreneurs’ Socio-Cultural Strategies for Commercial Success in Early 20th-Century Hong Kong

Asian Studies Review
Volume 34, Issue 4, 2010
pages 467-487
DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2010.527919

Victor Zheng
The University of Hong Kong

Siu-Lun Wong
The University of Hong Kong

Unlike economic capital, which is visible and easy to calculate, social capital is intangible and difficult to assess. Although both types of capital are crucial in determining social relations and social behaviour, little solid research has been done on the latter. This paper attempts to use the rags-to-riches story of Sir Robert Ho Tung, a first-generation Hong Kong Eurasian entrepreneur who commenced life without traditional social/cultural capital as the illegitimate son of a Chinese woman and a Dutchman, to illustrate the processes involved in cultivating and accumulating social capital. With special reference to economic development in early colonial Hong Kong and major social transformations in the Chinese mainland, this paper also demonstrates how a group of so-called social/racial “half-caste bastards” (Eurasians) were able to form their own social networks of mutual help and protection. It also considers how they worked to consolidate, mobilise, aggrandise and transmit their social capital. In conclusion, it is argued that Eurasians in early twentieth-century Hong Kong constructed their personal networks like a web, with different interconnecting layers that functioned at different socio-economic-political levels to serve different purposes.

Read the entire article here.

Eurasian/Amerasian perspectives: Kim Lefèvre’s Métisse Blanche (White Métisse) and Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted

Asian Studies Review
Volume 29, Issue 2 (2005)
pages 107-122
DOI: 10.1080/10357820500221162

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Associate Professor of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne

This article examines the articulation of Kim Lefèvre’s and Kien Nguyen’s difficult and traumatic childhoods in wartime Vietnam through their respective works Métisse blanche, first published in France in 1989, and The Unwanted, first published in the United States in 2001. Both Lefèvre and Nguyen had Vietnamese mothers and Western fathers—Lefevre’s was French. Nguyen’s was American. Their experiences are separated by a gap of thirty years, but their accounts reveal significant commonalities as well as differences. Their personal stories reflect those of the many children born of Vietnamese and European or American parents who were caught up in the maelstrom of colonialism, war, social prejudice and politics, and suffered rejection from both sides. Lefèvre grew up in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam while Nguyen was a child of the Vietnam War and relates the treatment meted out to so-called “half-breed” children in post-1975 communist Vietnam. Both bore the stigma of their mixed blood against a background of Vietnamese xenophobia and nationalism. Their looks signalled their heritage and were an unavoidable and unwelcome reminder of Vietnam’s fraught interaction with the West.

Eurasian/Amerasian métissage

Métissage as a positive site of cross-cultural mediation and negotiation has only recently been valorised in literary and critical discourse. Interpreted as cultural hybridisation, “cultural creolisation”, “cultural cross-breeding”, or, in Srilata Ravi’s aptly-chosen words “cultural cross-braiding” (Ravi. 2004. p. 300). métissage highlights the enriching effects of cultural pluralisation. The term “cross-braiding” beautifully illustrates the concept of entwined lives and cultures. As Ravi notes in ‘Métis, Métisse and Métissage’, …

Read or purchase the article here.

2010 Census Shows Black Population has Highest Concentration in the South

United States Census Bureau
CB11-CN.185
2011-09-29

People Who Reported as Both Black and White More than Doubled

The U.S. Census Bureau released today a 2010 Census brief, The Black Population: 2010, that shows 14 percent of all people in the United States identified as black, either alone or in combination with one or more other races. In 2010, 55 percent of the black population lived in the South, and 105 Southern counties had a black population of 50 percent or higher.

Of the total U.S. population of 308.7 million on April 1, 2010, 38.9 million people, or 13 percent, identified as black alone. In addition, 3.1 million people, or 1 percent, reported as black in combination with one or more other races. Together, these two groups comprise the black alone-or-in-combination population and totaled 42.0 million.

The black alone-or-in-combination population grew by 15 percent from 2000 to 2010, while the black alone population grew by 12 percent compared with a 9.7 percent growth rate for the total U.S. population.

Black and White Multiple-Race Population More Than Doubled

People who reported their race as both black and white more than doubled from about 785,000 in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2010. This group’s share of the multiple-race black population increased from 45 percent in 2000 to 59 percent in 2010…

Read the entire brief here.