Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Posted in Articles, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2012-04-12 19:28Z by Steven

Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Gender & History
Volume 15, Issue 3, November 2003
pages 487–506
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00317.x

Rhonda Frederick, Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies Program
Boston College

Mary Seacole’s autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author’s Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth-century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole’s book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically-located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica’s Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole’s rhetorical manoeuvres.

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‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Posted in Africa, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom, Women on 2011-10-07 02:35Z by Steven

‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Gender & History
Volume 21, Issue 3 (November 2009)
pages 628–646
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01567.x

Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Based on archival research in Ghana and Britain, this article documents the sustained but failed attempts of working-class West African seamen to repatriate to the colonies with their European wives during the interwar years. Colonial authorities crafted policies to prevent these couples from making British West Africa home because they feared that the presence of European women living ‘in native fashion’ with their African husbands would destabilise colonial race relations. After discussing the origins of this policy in the context of the 1919 race riots that swept Britain’s port cities, the article draws on the case of a West African man married to a German woman to illuminate how concerns about race, sex, gender, nationality and class informed the politics of repatriation to British West Africa during the interwar years.

[Excerpted from the chapter of the same name in the anthology, Homes and Homecomings: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return]

As the First World War came to a close, ‘black’ men from Britain’s overseas colonies and their white wives and lovers came to embody the fears and anxieties that gripped Britain’s economically depressed port cities. Black men were accused of taking jobs from white British men and stealing ‘their’ women. White women who partnered with black men were cast as depraved and immoral traitors, who selfishly prioritised their own sexual and material desires above the good of the nation. Working-class inter-racial couples became targets of abuse on the increasingly tense streets of Britain’s port cities and, when a series of violent race riots swept through the ports in the summer of 1919. they were largely blamed for their outbreak.  White mobs, ranging in size from a few hundred to several thousand, indiscriminately attacked black men, harassed and assaulted their white partners, and destroyed the multiracial settlements they called home. In the wake of the riots, some of these couples attempted to leave their hostile environs for the British colonies, especially in West Africa and the West Indies, where many of the men in question came from. Their desire to take up residency overseas, however, led lo the immediate implementation of a policy which I call the ‘policy of prevention’, designed to keep European women married to working-class black men out of the colonies. This was especially the case for British West Africa and marked an important shift from the prewar period, when colonial social conventions and their attendant racial taboos were the primary mechanisms that, at the very least, kept European women and black men from openly liaising with one another. During the interwar period, state power was also used to ensure that the West African colonies were kept free of such couples.

While the origins of the policy of prevention are to be found in the immediate aftermath of the 1919 race riots, it continued to guide colonial authorities’ decision-making processes throughout the interwar years. By and large, it was West African men who were domiciled in Britain and married to white British women that sought in the decision-making processes of colonial authorities. It also demonstrates that in contrast to settler colonial regimes, in places like Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, the administered colonies of British West Africa stopped short of implementing the most draconian forms of sexual segregation through the use of anti-miscegenation laws and barbaric extralegal measures such as lynching. Rather, to keep the colonies free of all but a handful of wealthy inter-racial couples, colonial authorities used a combination of strategies, including denying passports to the white wives of working-class African men, refusing to pay the cost of their passage to West Africa, and classifying them as ‘undesirable immigrants’ under the provisions of the colonies’ Immigration Restriction Ordinance. While not the focus of this chapter, these strategics were complemented by earlier but comparatively less vigilant efforts on the part of colonial administrators to bring an end to the far more frequent occurrence of sexual relationships between European colonial officers and African women through the use of official anti-concubinage circulars during the early twentieth century.’ This in turn helps to underscore the importance of paying attention to the spectrum of colonial anxieties that accompanied the gendered, racial and spatial configurations of mixed race couples, as well as the forms (illicit, casual, marital) their relationships took. Indeed, if we are to use panic and bureaucratic strong-arming as yardsticks, preventing European officers from cohabiting with African women was a far less pressing issue than keeping lawfully married working-class black men and white women out of the colonies.

Reflecting on the deep-seated anxieties surrounding the existence of inter-racial unions between black men and white women during the interwar years in Britain, Lucy Bland usefully suggests that, if we are to fully understand the complexity of inter-racial relationships during this period, we must undertake the difficult work of documenting the voices of the ‘women and men who negotiated their personal and sexual relationships in the face of a barrage of both official and cultural hostility’, while paying particularly close attention to ‘their experiences, the impact of prejudice upon them, and their strategies of survival and support’. Foregrounding their experiences in our analysis of the colonial archive provides a more complete view of the various worlds these couples were attempting to negotiate. Laura Tabili has done just this by charting the thwarted struggles of a handful of British and mixed-race British-Somali women to make the British Protectorate of Somaliland their home in the face of the exclusionary practices of colonial authorities who believed that the presence of these women living intimately among ‘native’ populations posed a ‘threat to colonial, racial and gendered hierarchies, and British credibility’. In what follows, I also take up Bland’s mandate and in so doing provide a broader historical context, indeed the precedent for understanding Tabili’s work on British Somaliland, by looking at the history of mixed-race couples who sought to make home in British West Africa during the interwar years.

Riots, repatriation and the policy of prevention

Although black communities and mixed marriages in Britain long predate the First World War. during the war itself increasing numbers of black seamen came to its ports from different parts of the world to fill the labour vacuum in the shipping industry that resulted from the drafting of white British men into the military. The majority of these seamen originated from Britain’s colonies in the West Indies and West Africa, as well as from India, the British Somaliland Protectorate and Aden. While seamen from India, known as tascars, had always made up a significant number of the colonised labour hired on British vessels, the contracts they were hired under greatly restricted their ability to reside in Britain; as a result, settlement rates were highest among seamen from the West Indies. West Africa, Somaliland and Aden. Ethnic settlement patterns differed from port to port; for instance, Liverpool was inhabited’ mostly by West Indians and West Africans, while Cardiff had a higher percentage of men from Aden and Somaliland. At the close of the war, most of these men, along with considerable numbers of demobilised soldiers from Ihe colonies, remained in the country’s seafaring districts. Together, they competed with white British men for an increasingly limited number of maritime jobs.

Economic hardship in the ports, created by the post-war depression and racialiscd job competition within the shipping industry, offers a compelling explanation of the underlying cause of the riots. In Jacqueline Jenkinson’s study of the 1919 riots, she examines a series of smaller riots between January 1919 and the outbreak of major rioting in June and finds that in each of the cases racial violence was a direct result of competition over jobs. Moreover, the initial incidence of racial violence that led to the outbreak of rioting in Liverpool in June was attribuied to tensions between black seamen and white foreign labour, in this case Scandinavians, who were in direct competition with each other for jobs not already taken by white British seamen. Yet it was the notion that black men were consorting with white women that garnered the most attention from the press, local and national authorities, as well as everyday observers. The ‘sex problem’, as one newspaper dubbed it. became a primary explanatory framework for understanding, and in many cases rationalising, the impetus behind the riots. The attention given to the ‘sex problem’ by contemporary observers, including policy makers, suggests that, in addition to job competition, anxieties over race and sex played an important role in the move towards proposing repatriation as an appropriate solution to the social and economic problems deemed responsible for the riots. Indeed, within days of the major outbreak of violence in June, local and national authorities began drawing up plans to repatriate black men to the colonics in an attempt to restore calm and order (and more specifically, racial order) to the port cities. The Colonial Office, however, feared that if the repatriations were handled inappropriately, they would cause instability by returning disgruntled men to the colonies. Disturbances had already broken out in Sierra Leone as early as July 1919 over the ill-treatment of black men in the British ports.” How much more unrest could be expected if the victims of the riots, many of whom had participated in the war effort, were forcibly returned to the colonies?

Anxious about the stability of the West African colonies, the Colonial Office not only insisted that the repatriation scheme be voluntary, it was also equally adamant that the white wives of ‘natives’ should be prevented at all costs from going to West Africa with their husbands. In fact, rioting had barely come lo a stop in June 1919, and the Colonial Office had already decided to refuse repatriation facilities to black men who insisted on returning with their white wives. Given that the men in question had no funds to repatriate themselves, let alone their wives, by refusing to pay passage fees, British authorities effectively made it impossible for black men who desired joint repatriation to return lo the colonies with their white wives. On 30 July 1919, this policy was solidified during a meeting at the Ministry of Labour, which had assumed responsibility for Ihe repatriation scheme. At the special insistence of the Colonial Office, the Ministry of Labour instructed the local committees responsible for facilitating the scheme in the seven main ports (Salford, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, Hull, South Shields and London), not to repatriate black men with their white wives. As one Colonial Office adviser later put it, the ‘white wife problem’ was, as the phrase suggests, particular to white women. This is underscored by the fact that the government agreed to pay the cost of repatriating the few black men, like Joseph Queashie from the Gold Coast, who were married lo black women. It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of West Africans and their white wives who were adversely affected by this policy, but the statistical information available suggests that their numbers were by no means negligible. In a survey conducted by the Liverpool Police shortly after the riots, a total of 188 men from British West Africa were identified as residing in Liverpool. The police, however, suspected that the actual number was much higher and suggested that the lower number reported was the result of ‘an exodus of negroes from the city to inland towns since the question of repatriation arose’ and added that ‘those who have not left are probably in hiding’. As Table 1 indicates, of the 188 West African men identified, twenty-one were married, eighteen of these to white women resident in Liverpool and three to African women who resided in West Africa. Of the eighteen men married lo white women, eleven were willing t0 be repatriated back to West Africa with their white wives.

The willingness of 50 per cent of married West Africans to accept repatriation compared to 47 per cent of single West Africans indicates that the authorities were wrong in believing that marriage to white women created ties to the metropole that could not be broken as easily as those of single men. Rather, it was the authorities” policy of prevention that kept these men in Britain because it barred them from returning to the colonies with their wives. Thus, if we are to understand fully the range of different imperatives that shaped the unwillingness of West Africans to be repatriated and ultimately led to the schemes’ widely recognised failure, we must acknowledge that, in addition to unsatisfactory remuneration packages and Ihe desire, indeed the right to remain in Britain, for some West Africans the policy of prevention was also a major factor. A representative from the Local Government Board said as much when he expressed his belief that “the white wife constituted a big difficulty.” The Colonial Office’s refusal to repatriate West Africans with their white wives contrasts sharply with its concession to allow black men from other parts of the British Empire, namely West Indians, to return home with their white wives at the…

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White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom, Women on 2011-10-07 02:29Z by Steven

White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War

Gender & History
Volume 17, Issue 1 (April 2005)
pages 29–61
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2005.00371.x

Lucy Bland, Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology
London Metropolitan University

This article examines miscegenation fears in Britain in the period after World War I, noting three dominant discourses: that miscegenation leads inevitably to violence between white and black men (focusing on the 1919 race riots), that these relationships involve sexual immorality (analysing the 1920 ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’, a case involving a white woman, a Chinese man and drugs and a trial of a white woman for killing her Egyptian husband) and that miscegenation has ‘disastrous’ procreative consequences. It is suggested that miscegenation stood as one British boundary marker, separating the nationally acceptable and the nationally threatening. The parties concerned–the ‘primitive’ man of colour, the white woman of a ‘low type’ and the ‘misfit’ offspring–were each pathologised in terms of their deviant sexuality. Yet interracial relationships did not decrease, quite the contrary. The move in Britain towards a more racially mixed community began in the years after the Great War, when certain white women made choices against the norms of respectable femininity.

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Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2010-11-15 21:46Z by Steven

Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World

Gender & History
Volume 22, Issue 3
(November 2010)
pages 585–602
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2010.01613.x

Brooke N. Newman, John Carter Brown Library Scholar (2010-2011)
University of Oxford

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo-Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth-century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio-sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.

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Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand

Posted in Articles, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Oceania on 2010-09-15 19:54Z by Steven

Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand

Gender & History
Volume 19, Issue 3 (November 2007)
pages 501–518
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00495.x

Barbara Brookes, Professor of History
Otago University, New Zealand

The 1929 New Zealand Committee of Inquiry into the Employment of Māori on Market Gardens affords insight into the ways in which masculine fears of racial degradation through miscegenation—of a ‘hybrid’ Chinese/Māori race—operated within a hierarchy of race, gender and Iwi (tribal) interests. The participation of Māori men in national politics contributed to a new articulation of ‘National Manhood’, in which Māori men and white men combined to express fears about women’s work and sexuality and young women’s potential to undermine a fragile and contested hierarchy of racial purity. Māori women, silenced in the cacophony of voices lamenting their plight, were at the centre of debates between Māori men, Pakeha (white New Zealander) employers, Chinese market gardeners, Anglican and Methodist interests and Pakeha women’s groups. I argue that the Inquiry was about commerce, both in a business and a sexual sense. As a historical episode, it also serves to complicate the picture of New Zealand as a historically bicultural society, made up only of Māori and Pakeha, by signalling the importance of the Chinese in debates about national belonging.

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‘If You Can’t Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop

Posted in Articles, Arts, Europe, Media Archive on 2010-05-11 03:45Z by Steven

‘If You Can’t Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop

Gender & History
Volume 15 Issue 3 (November 2003)
Pages 460 – 486
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x

Fatima El-Tayeb, Assistant Professor of African-American Literature and Culture
University of California, San Diego

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany’s racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro-Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Afro-Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti-racist, explicitly Afro-German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro-German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.

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