A creolising South Africa? Mixing, hybridity, and creolisation: (re)imagining the South African experience

Posted in Africa, Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, South Africa on 2011-03-10 23:39Z by Steven

A creolising South Africa? Mixing, hybridity, and creolisation: (re)imagining the South African experience

International Social Science Journal
Volume 58, Issue 187 (March 2006)
pages 165–176
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2451.2006.00600.x

Denis-Constant Martin [in French], Senior Research Fellow
Centre for International Research and Studies (CERI) of the National Foundation for Political Science (Paris)

The present state of South Africa’s society is the outcome of protracted processes of contacts and mixing, in the course of which people coming from different cultural areas blended and produced an original culture. More than three centuries of racism and apartheid have bequeathed representations in which South Africa is construed as an addition of different people, each with its own culture and language. Such representations do not take into account the interactions between them that produced what is today a mix that is impossible to disentangle. This article attempts to look at theories of métissage and creolisation that have been devised to analyse societies in South America and the West Indies and check whether they could contribute to producing a better understanding of the history of South Africa. Édouard Glissant’s [(1928-2011)] theories of métissage and creolisation, because they stress processes and relations, because they consider that creolisation is a continuous process, could be relevant to South Africa. However, the example of Brazil shows that re-imagining the past does not suffice to pacify memories of violence and segregation; it remains ineffective if it is not accompanied by economic and social policies aiming at redressing the inequalities inherited from this very past.

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Mulattoes and métis. Attitudes toward miscegenation in the United States and France since the seventeenth century

Posted in Articles, Europe, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-01-19 01:45Z by Steven

Mulattoes and métis. Attitudes toward miscegenation in the United States and France since the seventeenth century

International Social Science Journal
Volume 57, Issue 183
Pages 103 – 112
DOI: 10.1111/j.0020-8701.2005.00534.x

George M. Fredrickson, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History, Emeritus
Stanford University

This essay surveys and compares American and French attitudes toward miscegenation or métissage since the extensive contacts with non-European peoples that began in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century. It develops a typology of possible responses to such race mixture and argues that the English colonies that became the United States quickly developed a highly restrictive attitude toward racial intermarriage, especially between blacks and whites, that has persisted through most of American history and is still influential today. The French in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth century often adhered to concepts of race as innate or biologically determined, but their attitudes toward interracial marriage or concubinage tended to be more pragmatic. In some situations French theorists of race and empire defended and even advocated certain forms of métissage. The difference can be summed up as follows: white Americans have historically pursued the ideal of racial purity with much more intensity and consistency than the French. The difference is best explained with reference to the unique status of African-Americans as a colour-coded pariah group with no real equivalent in metropolitan France.

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