Mixed Race Studies

Then I Was Black: South African Political Identities in Transition

Yale University Press
2000-06-19
304 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 9780300080131

Courtney Jung, Associate Professor of Political Science
The New School

Do race and ethnicity present a danger to the consolidation of effective democratic government? Can liberal constitutionalism provide a stable basis for governance of a polity historically erected on racial and ethnic division? In this book Courtney Jung argues that when ethnic and racial identities are politically fluid and heterogeneous, as she finds they are in South Africa, ethnic and racial politics will not undermine the peaceful and democratic potential of the government.

Jung examines three important cases of politicized racial and ethnic identity in South Africa: Zulu, Afrikaner, and Coloured. Working from extensive field research and interviews, she develops a model to explain shifts in the political salience, goals, and boundaries of these groups between 1980 and 1995. Jung challenges the common assumption that cultural identities overdetermine political possibility, pointing out that individual members fail for the most part to internalize the political agenda of “their own” ethnic group. Group engagement with the state is also conditioned by contextual factors, not determined by its constitution in ethnic or racial terms. South Africa is no more divided than most other societies, she concludes, and no less likely to consolidate democracy as a result of its politicized cleavages of race and ethnicity.

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

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

Michele René Ruiters

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents

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

Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology

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

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

…Who is ‘Coloured’?

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

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

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

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

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

Purchase the dissertation here.

Mark Tawin’s Mississippi: Race, 1800-1850

Mark Twain’s Mississippi
Project Partners: Northern Illinois University Libraries, The Newberry Library, The St. Louis Mercantile Library, Tulane University Libraries and  University of California, Berkeley
Made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services
2005

Peter J. Kastor, Associate Professor of History and American Culture Studies Program
Washington Unviversity in St. Louis

The changes in the Mississippi Valley from 1800-1850 represented a condensed version of the broader changes that would occur throughout North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Not only did the last vestiges of Indian power collapse in the faced of white supremacy, but the fluid and complex relationships that had marked life for so long gave way to an increasingly simplistic racial hierarchy.

All of the factors at work in the Mississippi Valley—demography, commerce, diplomacy, and culture—came together to reshape these racial relationships. For example, the Europeans who vied for control of the Mississippi in 1800 may have each sought racial control, but they lacked the diplomatic power to do so. Meanwhile, the relative scarcity of white settlers made the Europeans dependent on Indians for trade. Indians welcomed this state of affairs, since the needs of Europeans for diplomatic allies or for trading partners often placed Indians in advantageous situations. Nothing exemplified this state of affairs better than the large population of mixed-race peoples who occupied the Mississippi Valley. In addition to the Métis in the mid and upper Mississippi Valley, the lower Mississippi Valley was home to a large population with African and European ancestry. That mixed-race population formed the majority of the free people of color in New Orleans, the largest and most prosperous free black community anywhere in North America. These mixed-race populations all secured their goals by exploiting the economic and diplomatic realities that continued to shape life on the Mississippi…

Read the entire essay here.

Without Impediment: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Colonial Mexico

The Americas
Volume 67, Number 4 (April 2011)
E-ISSN: 1533-6247; Print ISSN: 0003-1615

Jake Federick, Assistant Professor of History
Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin

On April 18, 1773, in the town of Teziutlán in the eastern mountains of Mexico, Captain don Raphael Padres participated in the baptism of his godson in the local church. He stood watching as Father Francisco Flandes leaned over the baptismal font to daub oil on the head of Joseph Philipe. As the priest performed the sacrament, reciting the script of baptism, the boy’s parents, don Cristóbal Hernández and doña Isabel Pérez, followed along. After anointing the child, Father Flandes turned to the militia captain to inform him of his responsibilities as godfather, explaining the spiritual kinship that Padres now had with the boy. After the rite was completed, the priest recorded his actions in the church’s book of baptisms. He noted the boy’s age and that he had been legitimately born the previous day. He also listed the names of the boy, his parents, the godfather, and the godfather’s wife, doña Josepha Fernández. The priest also pointed out that all the adults were españoles (of pure Spanish ancestry).

Two years later, on July 4, 1775, Captain Padres once again stood at the baptismal font in the Teziutlán church. The priest presiding over the rite this time was Pedro Francisco Gómez, and the child was five-day-old Mariana Paula. She too was legitimate, the child of Manuel Castillo and Antonia Vásquez. According to the book of baptisms, Manuel and Antonia were de razón (an abbreviation of gente de razón), which meant literally that they had the power of reason but in the eighteenth century the term was used to describe non-natives. Padres was described only as being from the local parish; no racial information was recorded. On this occasion, for some reason, the priest did not feel that it was necessary to note a casta (racial category) for young Mariana or her parents…

Read or purchase the article here.

Afro-Saxon psychosis or cultural schizophrenia in African-Caribbeans?

The Psychiatrist
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2000)
pages 96-97
DOI: 10.1192/pb.24.3.96

Hari D. Maharajh, Psychiatric Hospital Director
St Ann’s Hospital, Trinidad, West Indies

“Everybody in Miguel Street said that Man-man was mad, and so they left him alone, but I am not sure now that he was mad and I can think of many people much madder than Man-man was… That again was another mystery about Man-man. His accent, if you shut your eyes while he spoke, you would believe an Englishman—a good class Englishman who wasn’t particular about grammar—was talking to you.” (Naipaul, 1959)

The experience of both the psychiatrist and population is of critical importance in the description of indigenous phenomena. This becomes even more relevant when both the researcher and the tested population are influenced by diverse cultures. In the paper entitled ‘Roast breadfruit psychosis’ (Hickling & Hutchinson, 1999), the authors have extrapolated a cultural concept enshrined in Caribbean humour and pathos into a diseased state. We wish to demonstrate the widespread use of a host of metaphors within the Caribbean and other communities illustrating the concept of cultural marginalisation. This is reflected in the song, prose, poetry and art of the region.

The effect of social and cultural factors in the aetiology, course and outcome of mental illness appears to be an area of renewed interest in British psychiatry. While British psychiatrists have abandoned the fading image of the visiting messianic doctor, the island-hopping academic and the colourful description of culture-bound syndromes in exotic and distant lands, it appears as though there is today a reversal of role.

More recently, new African-Caribbean psychiatrists in Britain seem content to invent syndromes exhibiting mimicry, defying nosology, logic and rational thought and devoid of scholarly description.

The ‘Black-White man’ has never been an issue of the ‘windrush’ of 300 000 West Indians who migrated to Britain between 1951-1961. Nevertheless, politicians, poets, writers and calypsonians have adequately described the phenomenon of ‘Black people who think themselves White’ in the Caribbean. These social commentators did not consider acculturation and assimilation into a new culture as negative factors but as processes of social ascendancy and respectability. This transition was actively pursued voluntarily en masse; in fact, the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett described the exodus from her island as follows:

“By de hundred, by de t’ousan From country and from town By de ship-load, by de plane-load Jamaica is Englan boun.” (Ferguson, 1999)

Following independent status from Britain in 1962, a Trinidadian academic, Lloyd Best introduced into the Caribbean literature the term ‘Afro-Saxon’. It was not intended to be a pejorative term, but a descriptive analysis of the ruling class then, that had adopted, absorbed and internalised the values of the White colonial masters. This, he pointed out was a natural phenomenon, since post-colonialisation, the ruling elites pursued the norms of respectability of the White man and aspired to it for acceptance and survival (Best, 1965). Similarly, Samuel Selvon’s (1956) novel The Lonely Londoners captured the feelings and aspirations of West Indian immigrants in Britain.

Selvon, a Trinidadian of mixed Indian and Scottish parentage arrived in London in 1950. Creating from his own experience, he captured in narrative form, the atmosphere of West Indians in London. In his novel, which is part comic, part tragic, Selvon sought “to evoke the bittersweet existence of a rootless community that is both excited and terrified by its new life and the leaving behind of the old” (Ferguson, 1999). Through a number of characters, he most vividly described differing responses to the experience of migration. Such feelings would be expected of any migrant group into a new environment regardless of their colour, race or culture. Disturbed racial identification is, therefore, a natural phenomenon of any colonised or migrant people. It is non-specific and no ethnic group should be singled out.

Read the entire article here.

Diversity Dialogues lecture opens forum on ethnic identity

Spartan Daily
News@SJSU
San José State University
2011-03-06

Francisco Rendon

So … what are you?”

Although a common question facing persons of mixed ethnic heritage, it often characterizes society’s attempt to label them, and these persons‘ struggle to fit into one culture.

This question, as well as other issues concerning mixed heritage persons, such as ethnicity boxes on tests, were discussed and analyzed in discussion groups Thursday in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library.

The event was part of SJSU’s Diversity Dialogue Series, sponsored by the Office of Equal Opportunity, said Program Developer Marina Corrales.

“(These events) are about sharing our experiences and background,” Corrales said. “We use diversity as an educational tool for faculty, students and staff.”

Corrales said she was satisfied with the attendance, which held about 60 people…

…The event began with an introduction from Spano, who defined “mixed-heritage” as “people who self-identify as belonging to two or more races.

Participants then viewed a brief video featuring interviews and a speech from Kip Fulbeck, an art professor at UC Santa Barbara.

The video included a feature on Fulbeck’s book depicting persons of mixed Asian-American descent, and a discussion of the phrase “Hapa,” a term used for persons mixed with Asian or Pacific Islander heritage…

The Mysterious Portraitist Joshua Johnson

Archives of American Art Journal
Volume 36, Number 2 (1996)
pages 2-7

Jennifer Bryan

Robert Torchia

The Maryland Historical Society’s Department of Manuscripts recently received three volumes of Baltimore County court chattel records—registers of personal property transactions such as mortgages, deeds of gift, powers of attorney, bills of sale, and releases of slaves from bondage. The earliest of the three volumes contains the bill of sale and the manumission record of America’s first-known black artist, the mysterious portraitist Joshua Johnson, who was active from 1790 to 1825. These extremely significant documents have survived through pure chance. According to the donor, M. Peter Moser. when the Baltimore City courthouse underwent renovation in 1954, many original documents were slated for destruction. His father. Judge Herman M. Moser, saw the discarded chattel records being thrown into bins and asked if he could have a few of the books, coincidentally saving the volume containing Johnson’s sale and manumission records.

Johnson’s existence was unknown until 1939, when Baltimore genealogist and an historian J. Hall Pleasants attributed thirteen paintings to him and attempted to reconstruct his career on the basis of fragmentary and often contradictory information. Pleasants characterized Johnson as a “nebulous figure” and he has remained so over the last fifty-eight years, despite numerous exhibitions and articles devoted to him. Only one of Johnson’s paintings bears his signature, Sarah Ogden Gustin (ca.  1805, National Gallery of Art, Washington. D.C.), and only one is documented in papers left by a patron, the well-known Rebecca Myring Everett and Her Children (1818, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore). His life dates are unknown, and historians argue over whether his name was spelled Johnson or Johnston.

Even Johnson’s race has been a subject of contention. The idea that the artist was black was challenged when prices for his paintings escalated on the an market during the early 1970s. The authors of a history of African-American artists cast stronger doubts when they noted the highly circumstantial and speculative nature of the “evidence.”* Pleasants had collected four different accounts from the descendants of old Baltimore families who owned portraits by Johnson in which the artist was variously described as a slave, a slave trained as a blacksmith, a black servant afflicted with consumption, and an immigrant from the West Indies. In the federal censuses for Baltimore of 1790 and 1800, a Joshua Johnson is listed as a free white head of household. In the most comprehensive survey of Johnson’s life to date, Carolyn J. Weekley discovered an additional family tradition that held that Johnson was black and one that identified him as a “red man.” Until now, the sole documentary evidence that Joshua Johnson was indeed black was the Baltimore City Directory of 1817-1818, in which he is listed among “Free Householders of Colour.”

The issue of Johnson’s race has sociological and political ramifications. His gradual rise from anonymity to prominence paralleled the civil rights movement and, more recently, the academic emphasis on multiculturalism. Influenced by this climate, historians have tended to romanticize the artist, often at the expense of historical accuracy. Johnson has progressed from being parenthetically mentioned in a 1954 survey of American art as “a colored artist” who “remained a true primitive” to being the African-American artist par excellence.

The chattel records conclusively prove that Johnson was a mulatto, the son of a white man and a black slave woman owned by a William Wheeler. Sr. On July 15, 1782. the clerk of the Baltimore County court enrolled two documents, the bill of sale and the release from bondage of a slave named Joshua, “now aged upwards of Nineteen Years.” The bill records that on October 6…

Blacks in Mexico: A Forgotten Minority

Time Magazine
2009-09-15

Alexis Okeowo

The first town of freed African slaves in the Americas is not exactly where you would expect to find it—and it isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find either. First, it’s not in the United States. Yanga, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. The second thing that is immediately evident to vistors who reach the town’s rustic central plaza: there are virtually no blacks among the few hundred residents milling around the center of town.

Mirroring Mexico’s history itself, most of Yanga’s Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants. Mexico’s independence from Spain and new focus on building a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race, drove African Mexicans into invisibility as leaders chose not to count them or assess their needs. Now many blacks want to fight back by improving the shoddy education and social services available to them and are petitioning for the constitution to recognize Afro-Mexicans as a separate ethnic group worthy of special consideration.

Read the entire article here.

Golden shadows on a white land: An exploration of the lives of white women who partnered Chinese men and their children in southern Australia, 1855-1915

University of Sydney
November 2006
364 pages

Kate Bagnall

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis explores the experiences of white women who partnered Chinese men and their children in southern Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been based on a wide range of sources, including newspapers, government reports, birth and marriage records, personal reminiscences and family lore, and highlights the contradictory images and representations of Chinese-European couples and their families which exist in those sources. It reveals that in spite of the hostility towards intimate interracial relationships so strongly expressed in discourse, hundreds of white women and Chinese men in colonial Australia came together for reasons of love, companionship, security, sexual fulfilment and the formation of family. They lived, worked and loved in and between two very different communities and cultures, each of which could be disapproving and critical of their crossing of racial boundaries. As part of this exploration of lives across and between cultures, the thesis further considers those families who spent time in Hong Kong and China. The lives of these couples and their Anglo-Chinese families are largely missing from the history of the Chinese in Australia and of migration and colonial race relations more generally. They are historical subjects whose experiences have remained in the shadows and on the margins. This thesis aims to throw light on those shadows, contributing to our knowledge not only of interactions between individual Chinese men and white women, but also of the way mixed race couples and their children interacted with their extended families and communities in Australia and China. This thesis demonstrates that their lives were complex negotiations across race, culture and geography which challenged strict racial and social categorisation.

Introduction: Shadows

Remembering Anglo-Chinese families

During the second half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of white women formed intimate relationships with Chinese men in New South Wales and Victoria. These relationships took place in Sydney, Melbourne and the bush, in towns, mining camps, and on rural properties. Some were fleeting encounters, others enduring and stable, but from both were bomj children whose faces reflected the differing heritage of their parents. These women, their Chinese partners and their Anglo-Chinese children fanned, mined, and ran stores and other businesses. Some were rich and lived in grand homes and owned large amounts of property, some only barely managed to scrape together an existence. Some load long, happy and prosperous lives together, while others faced tragedy, violence and poverty. Until recently, little lias been known about them. They are historical subjects whose lives have remained in the shadows and on the margins.

This thesis aims to throw light on those shadows by presenting the first in-depth study of intimate relationships between white women and Chinese men in the southern colonies of Australia, and of the families they formed together. Its particular focus is the colony of New South Wales (NSW), between the gold-rush year’s of the 1850s and the early years of the twentieth century. It explores the experiences of these mixed race families, in both southern Australia and southern China, from a variety of perspectives, examining representation and discourse as well as lived experience, across time and place. Beginning in the southern colonies of Australia in the 1850s, it travels through city and bush, into family homes and through public discourse, to finish in China in the early decades of the twentieth century. This thesis is significant for the contribution it makes in both redressing the neglect of interracial relationships in the history of the Chinese in Australia and in contributing to a reassessment of colonial race relations.

This thesis uses the tension between representation and discourse and lived experience, the discrepancies between ‘prescription and practice’,1 to complicate and extend our understanding of interracial intimate relationships and mixed race families in Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It reveals that in spite of the hostility so strongly expressed in discourse, white women and Chinese men came together for reasons of love, comfort, security, sexual fulfilment and the formation of family. By approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives and through a range of sources (archives, fiction, family lore, the press), it demonstrates that there was no one typical experience of intimate relationships across racial boundaries. The lives of my subjects were as varied as the places they lived and the communities they mixed with, and as individual as their own characters and pasts. Their experiences were particular” and individual and demonstrate personal negotiations of marriages and relationships and their place in families, communities and cultures.

The metaphor of the shadow in the title of this thesis represents two tilings. It suggests the way in which stories of the lives of white women, their Chinese partners and their children are a set of interconnected and intersecting plots which weave and blend and twist together, just as shadows shift and change. The idea of the shadow also suggests something not quite seen, something ephemeral, something that is there but not there, so it also represents the hidden presence of mixed race couples and Anglo-Chinese ancestors within Australian families today and within the history of the Chinese in Australia. As will be discussed further in this Introduction, their experiences have for a long time been hinted at, glossed over, and pushed aside. This thesis is an attempt to follow the traces of their existence and to draw together scraps of evidence to form a clearer picture of their lives.

By foregrounding the experiences of mixed race couples and families within both the white and Chinese communities in Australia and China, this thesis aims to challenge the ideas of difference and the boundaries imagined around the Chinese and white populations of the Australian colonies, ideas which have been carried through from nineteenth-century sources to the secondary literature. By suggesting the significance and frequency of intimate relationships between white women and Chinese men, this study seeks to demonstrate that racial categories were inherently permeable and unstable and that interactions between the white and Chinese populations in Australia’s southern colonies were more complex than has often been assumed…

Read the dissertation here.

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (review)

Theatre Journal
Volume 63, Number 1 (March 2011)
pages 136-138
E-ISSN: 1086-332X; Print ISSN: 0192-2882

Douglas A. Jones Jr.
Stanford University

Although the election of a mixed-race president signaled to many the beginning of the end of the problem of the color line, the discourse of postraciality is “not just the effect of recent pre- and post-millennial effusions”, Tavia Nyong’o notes, but rather “it was already visible, for instance, during the antebellum struggle to abolish slavery”. In his stunning new book The Amalgamation Waltz, Nyong’o compels us to confront the problematics of this particular dialectic—namely, the nascent talk of racial transcendence alongside the entrenchment of white supremacy and racialized slavery. For Nyong’o, this struggle was/is too often waged on the back of the “hybrid child.” The Amalgamation Waltz argues against the biopolitical notion that the keys to a national transcendence of race inhere within mixed-race subjects; instead, he insists, “racial mixing and hybridity are neither problems for, nor solutions to, the long history of ‘race’ and racism, but part of its genealogy”.

The author begins with the contention that hybridity can both sustain and disrupt the pedagogy of the “national Thing,” Slavoj Žižek’s term for an indefinable essence that appears to be present throughout the nation’s way of life, but only exists as long as members of the community continue to believe in it. For Nyong’o, the American national Thing is “a powerful force shaping the nation” that “often accommodates hybridity to an official teleology that is forever reducing the many to the one”…

Read or purchase the review here.