“You are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-07-01 17:01Z by Steven

“You are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 38, Number 2 (April 2003)
pages 125-145
DOI: 10.1177/00219894030382008

Loretta Mijares

The term “Anglo-Indian”, emerging as early as 1806, originally referred to the British in India. In India today, however, the term is universally understood to refer to the mixed-race descendants of British-Indian liaisons. In between these two historical markers lies a complex history of changing notions of racial mixture and affiliations with colonial power. At the same time, the “half-caste” has been a perennial figure in colonial fiction, and continues to appear regularly in contemporary Indian writing in English. Discussion of the literary figure of the half-caste, however, has taken place (if at all) by and large in the absence of any acknowledgement of the history of this community. A literary analysis of the “half-caste” attentive to this history offers valuable lessons about the usefulness and limitations of such theoretical notions as “hybridity” by calling attention to the shifting historical valences of literal experiences of hybridity. As a case-study in such an approach, this essay examines the role of racial mixture in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with due attention to the Anglo-Indian community in India. This reveals how racial mixture in the literary imagination often becomes a metaphor for something else, and in this process of metaphorization is alienated from the history from which it originates. This process has parallels in literary theory: theoretical abstractions such as hybridity have become rarefied and need to be reconnected to their geographical and historical contexts if they are to retain any efficacy in explaining the processes of identity construction they claim to describe.

In India, the mixed-race population was known as “Eurasian”, with “half-caste” as a derogatory term. By the late nineteenth century, however. “Eurasian” had likewise accumulated a pejorative connotation…

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Distancing the Proximate Other: Hybridity and Maud Diver’s Candles in the Wind

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2010-05-09 04:15Z by Steven

Distancing the Proximate Other: Hybridity and Maud Diver’s Candles in the Wind

Twentieth Century Literature
Volume 50, Number 2 (Summer, 2004)
pages 107-140

Loretta M. Mijares

The half-caste out here falls between two stools, that’s the truth.
—Maud Diver, Candles in the Wind

Miscegenation has long been recognized as one of the recurrent tropes of colonial discourse, and recent work has convincingly demonstrated that it was often enlisted in efforts to justify more authoritarian colonial rule. Critics such as Nancy Paxton and Jenny Sharpe have drawn attention to the ubiquitous theme of interracial romance and marriage in domestic fiction written by the British in India, a body of literature previously relegated to the genre of romance and dismissed as what Margaret Stieg calls “sub-literature” (3). While critics have begun to recognize that the focus of this large body of fiction on domestic arrangements expresses anxiety about interracial liaisons and miscegenation, few pay adequate attention either to the historical reality of the Eurasian community in existence during the periods they analyze or to the Eurasian characters in these works of fiction and their particular ideological function. The tendency of literary critics discussing miscegenation to categorize Eurasians and “natives” as equal threats in the domestic sphere is itself evidence of the success of this body of fiction’s strategic response to historical Eurasians: the disconcertingly familiar Eurasian is converted in fiction from proximate other to distant other, thereby relocating the anxiety generated by both the uncanniness of the Eurasian and the material threat this population posed to smooth colonial rule…

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