A True History Full of Romance: Mixed Marriages and Ethnic Identity in Dutch Art, News Media, and Popular Culture (1883-1955)

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Communications/Media Studies, Europe, History, Media Archive, Monographs on 2013-12-31 17:21Z by Steven

A True History Full of Romance: Mixed Marriages and Ethnic Identity in Dutch Art, News Media, and Popular Culture (1883-1955)

Amsterdam University Press
2012-04-02
184 pages
Soft Cover ISBN: 9789089644251

Marga Altena, Historian of Visual Culture

This important study about ethnically mixed marriages in the Netherlands of the 1883-1955 period offers a compelling overview on the nature and experience of ethnicity from a wide range of scholarly perspectives.

Drawing from exhaustive research in the Netherlands, Europe and the Americas, Altena offers illuminating new insights into mixed-marriage families as they were depicted in the arts and in news media; and how the families themselves in turn reacted to, and influenced those images. The author focuses on well-documented individuals and shows how they gained a coherent voice in Dutch culture. Altena attributes to them conscious agency in their own self-presentation, rather than just viewing them as victims of racial prejudice.

A timely contribution to the debate surrounding ethnicity and integration in Dutch society, this work demonstrates how that process was mediated by the various agencies, while placing special emphasis on the marginal groups within central news media as crucial in the opinion making.

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The Creolisation of London Kinship: Mixed African-Caribbean and White British Extended Families, 1950-2003

Posted in Anthropology, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2011-03-18 04:44Z by Steven

The Creolisation of London Kinship: Mixed African-Caribbean and White British Extended Families, 1950-2003

Amsterdam University Press
November 2010
282 pages
paperback ISBN: 978 90 8964 235 6

Elaine Bauer, Fellow at the Young Foundation; Associate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London

In the last 50 years, the United Kingdom has witnessed a growing proportion of mixed African-Caribbean and white British families. With rich new primary evidence of mixed-race in the capital city, The Creolisation of London Kinship thoughtfully explores this population. Making an indelible contribution to both kinship research and wider social debates, the book emphasises a long-term evolution of family relationships across generations. Individuals are followed through changing social and historical contexts, seeking to understand in how far many of these transformations may be interpreted as creolisation. Examined, too, are strategies and innovations in relationship construction, the social constraints put upon them, the special significance of women and children in kinship work and the importance of non-biological as well as biological notions of family relatedness.

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