Mixed Race Studies

A British Ireland, or the limits of race and hybridity in Maria Edgeworth’s novels

Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
2009-09-21
73 pages

Kimberly Philomen Clarke

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English

Ireland was united with Wales, Scotland, and England in 1801. However, separated by distance, religion, British prejudice, and Ireland’s colonial status, Ireland was excluded from identifying with the British. Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth actively works against this image of Irish subjection as she displaces Irish colonial otherness on to Creole, West Indian, and Africanist character associated with black imagery. Instead of making Ireland a metaphor for Anglo-colonial relations, Edgeworth positions the Creole and black characters as a colonial figures who cannot satisfactorily become British.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
  • HYBRIDITY AND EXTERNAL DIFFERENCES IN BRITAIN: THE MONSTEROUS HYBRIDISM OF THE EAST AND WEST
  • RACIAL HYBRIDITY AND INTERNAL DIFFERENCES
  • MARIA EDGEWORTH’S APPROACH TO IRISH IDENTITY AND BRITISH HYBRIDITY
  • MULTIPLICITY IN THE ABSENTEE, ORMOND, AND ENNUI
  • LIMITATIONS OF EDGEWORTH’S BRITISH HYBRIDITY
• CHAPTER TWO
  • RACIAL AND AFRICANIST ATTITUDES TOWARD THE IRISH
  • AFRICANISM AND IRISH LITERARY BLACKNESS IN EDGEWORTH’S ENNUI
  • BELINDA AND THE EXCLUSION OF BLACK HYBRIDITY
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Hybridity, a blending or cross-breeding of cultures, elements or race, defines the twenty-first century, and not simply through hybrid technology in the types of cars we drive. Most notably, in November 2008, the United States elected its first biracial president who has become a conspicuous symbol of America’s growing multicultural and multiracial society. This prevalence of racial and cultural hybridity in Western society symbolizes a desire for this diversity even while it catalyzes existing fears of such multiracial mingling. These are not new fears, nor are they present only in American society. This uneasy relationship with racial hybridity appears in the nineteenth-century literature of Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth in her exploration and analysis of whiteness and Irish cultural and racial identity in Britain.

The similarities between twenty-first century and nineteenth-century attitudes about hybridity elucidate Edgeworth’s racial politics and the continued relevancy of racial identity – both its fixity and fluidity – in the construction of a national identity. Her novels reflect her desire to legitimize and resolve her Anglo-Irish identity (her loyalty to England and her emotional ties to Ireland) as well as her struggle to define British racial and cultural makeup at a time when Britain’s literary voice and national complexion became more diverse from within and from influences beyond its own borders.

My understanding of Edgeworth’s novels and her approach to race in Britain has been influenced by my understanding of the relationship between the Irish-American and African-American communities in the United States in the nineteenth century. As Noel Ignatiev explains in his 1995 How the Irish Became White, Irish immigrants and African-Americans were grouped together as part of America’s working and poverty classes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they competed against each other for employment and fought the political system and each other in order to gain citizenship and acceptance in the States. Edgeworth depicts the relationship between the Irish and Afro-Caribbean community in a similar way, even if it existed on smaller scale in Britain. Historically, these groups were seen as racial outsiders who threatened hegemonic white identity in America and Great Britain. While the popularity of such modern-day figures as Tiger Woods or Barack Obama show Western society’s willingness to embrace multiracial identity, Edgeworth’s attempts to integrate Ireland into Great Britain’s social, religious, and racial consciousness reveal nineteenth-century efforts and shortcomings in tackling issues of racial hybridity that existed two centuries ago and still survive today.

Being Irish in nineteenth-century Britain was an othered cultural and racial identity that destabilized the illusion of British whiteness. The negative stereotypes of poverty-stricken, uneducated, rebellious Irish Catholic outsiders conjured fears that an Irish presence would muddy the image of pure-blooded whiteness. Despite her gestures in embracing the singularity of Irish culture as part of Britain’s diverse society, Edgeworth exhibits her ambivalence toward hybridity by limiting Irish identity and implicitly policing British racial identity…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Afua Hirsch: Our parents left Africa – now we are coming home

The Guardian
2012-08-25

Afua Hirsch, West Africa Correspondent

As a child in London, Afua Hirsch was embarrassed by her African roots. Then, in February, she became a ‘returnee’, choosing to live in her parents’ birthplace, Ghana. Her story is echoed across the continent: attracted by economic opportunity and a new sense of optimism, the African diaspora is starting to come back.

When I was a teenager, my mother overheard me telling my peers that I was Jamaican, a clearly absurd statement from a half-Ghanaian, half-English girl whose first name is one of the most common in a major African language.

My mother, born and raised in Ghana, was mortified. Although in part I was living out the now well-documented struggle of mixed race youngsters to grasp their identity, mainly I was just embarrassed. It wasn’t cool to be African in those days and in my ignorant teenage way, I was acting out a much bigger crisis of confidence, one that had been swallowing Africans and spitting them out as permanent economic migrants in Europe and America ever since the end of colonialism…

…For my mother, that was the wake-up call she needed to organise our first trip to the west African land of her birth, an essential re-education in our roots. In 1995, we visited the Ghanaian capital, Accra, for the first time. I remember the usual things that people comment on when visiting equatorial African nations for the first time – the assault of hot air when stepping off the plane, which I confused with engine heat, the smell of spice and smoked fish on the air, and – most significantly for me – the fact that everyone was black. It sounds obvious but I had never really seen officials in uniform – immigration authorities, police, customs officers – with black skin. I don’t think I had realised that there was a world in which black people could be in charge…

Read the entire article here.

“Slave genes” myth must die

Salon
2012-07-24

Amy Bass, Associate Professor of History
The College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, New York

Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science

In 1988, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder (in)famously stated that the prowess of African-American football players could be traced to slavery, saying “the black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way … [They] jump higher and run faster.” The reaction to such obviously racist remarks was fast and furious: Amid the uproar, CBS Sports fired him. So when Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson predicted this month that African-American and West Indian track athletes would dominate the London Olympics because of the genes of their slave ancestors, I paid little attention, thinking there was no way this could become a viable conversation yet again. “All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it’s impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn’t left an imprint through the generations,” Johnson told the Daily Mail. “Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me—I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.”

As a historian, what I find to be stunning about what he said is the claim that the supremacy of black athletes in track had never “been discussed openly before.” Actually, with his words, Johnson plunged himself into a century-old debate that seems to rear its (rather ugly) head every four years, just in time for the opening of sport’s largest global stage. Johnson supported his theory with the example of the men’s 100m final at the Beijing Olympics: Three of the eight finalists came from Jamaica, including record-breaking winner Usain Bolt, and two from Trinidad; African-Americans Walter Dix and Doc Patton and Dutch sprinter Churandy Martina, who hails from Curacao, rounded out the line.

But racial assumptions don’t work as easily as simply noting that four years ago all eight finalists in the quest to be “world’s fastest man” likely had ancestors who were slaves, because race is, well, never simple, but rather works as an amoebic identity formation that changes throughout history. It’s a social construction deeply entangled with definitions of class, gender, sexuality and so on…

…Such scientists first engaged in racialized theories of athletic aptitude in the 1930s, during the large-scale breakthrough of African-Americans in track and field:  following DeHart Hubbard’s gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 1924; the success stories of Ed Gordon, Eddie Tolan and Ralph Metcalfe; and, of course, Jesse Owens’ legendary performance at the Berlin Games in 1936. Although the number of African-American track champions would greatly decline in subsequent decades, the belief in some sort of quantifiable connection between race and physical ability would not wane, with scientists creating comparative analyses between “white” and “black” calf muscles, bone densities, heel lengths and so on. “Is there some difference between Negroes and white in proportions of the body,” asked Iowa State physical educator Eleanor Metheny, “which gives the Negro an advantage in certain types of athletic performance?”

While one such study was plagued with what to do about subjects of “mixed parentage,” and Metheny admitted that “Negro” was heterogeneous by its very constitution, few scientists defined “Negro” or “white” beyond skin color, never pausing to wonder how they quantified categories that were subjective to begin with.  These scientists easily translated the racially infused stereotypes of the 19thcentury minstrel stage, in which physical traits such as fat lips, wide-open red mouths and large noses existed alongside the perceived innate ability to dance and sing, to have athletic bodies.  In doing so, these studies – which took place in labs at Harvard, Vanderbilt and Duke – produced some of sport’s most venerable racist convictions: Black athletes are more adept at sprinting, more relaxed, make better running backs than quarterbacks, and jump farther, all of which reduced their athleticism to a solely physical condition with no room for intellectual capacity, training nor discipline.

One notable exception was W. Montague Cobb, Howard University, the first black physical anthropologist in the United States. His extensive work on “the physical anthropology of the American Negro” never referenced slavery directly, but did make several assertions regarding the environmental and physical challenges African-Americans historically faced as a means for survival in the modern world. Yet Cobb, whose most famous subject was Owens himself, refused to simplify the complexities of race, which he insisted could not be a fixed category because of “interbreeding.” Indeed, he concluded, Owens was more “Caucasoid rather than Negroid in type” based on measurements of his foot, heel bone and calves. Jesse Owens, according to Cobb, did not have the body of a “Negro star.”…

Read the entire article here.

Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759–1808

Ohio State University Press
May 2012
289 paes
6×9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8142-1185-4
CD-ROM ISBN: 978-0-8142-9286-0

Lyndon J. Dominique, Assistant Professor of English
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

As the eighteenth century is entirely bereft of narratives written by African women, one might assume that these women had little to no impact on British literature and the national psyche of the period. Yet these kinds of assumptions are belied by the influence of one prominent African woman featured in the period’s literary texts.

Imoinda’s Shade examines the ways in which British writers utilize the most popular African female figure in eighteenth-century fiction and drama to foreground the African woman’s concerns and interests as well as those of a British nation grappling with the problems of slavery and abolition. Imoinda, the fictional phenomenon initially conceived by Aphra Behn and subsequently popularized by Thomas Southerne, has an influence that extends well beyond the Oroonoko novella and drama that established her as a formidable presence during the late Restoration period. This influence is palpably discerned in the characterizations of African women drawn up in novels and dramas written by late-eighteenth-century British writers. Through its examinations of the textual instances from 1759–1808 when Imoinda and her involvement in the Oroonoko marriage plot are being transformed and embellished for politicized ends, Imoinda’s Shade demonstrates how this period’s fictional African women were deliberately constructed by progressive eighteenth-century writers to popularize issues of rape, gynecological rebellion, and miscegenation. Moreover, it shows how these specific African female concerns influence British antislavery, abolitionist, and post-slavery discourse in heretofore unheralded, unusual, and sometimes radical ways.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Indroduction: Imoinda, Marriage, Slavery
• Part One. Imoinda’s Original Shades: African Women in British Antislavery Literature
  • Chapter 1. Altering Oroonoko and Imoinda in Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Drama
  • Chapter 2. Amelioration, African Women, and The Soft, Strategic Voice of Paternal Tyranny in The Grateful Negro
  • Chapter 3. “Between the saints and the rebels”: Imoinda and the Resurrection of the Black African Heroine
• Part Two. Imoinda’s Shade Extends: Abolition and Interracial Marriage in England
  • Chapter 4. Creoles, Closure, and Cubba’s Comedy of Pain: Abolition and the Politics of Homecoming in Eighteenth-Century British Farce
  • Chapter 5. “‘What!’ cried the delighted mulatto, ‘are we going to prosecu massa?’”: Adeline Mowbray’s Distinguished Complexion of Abolition
  • Chapter 6. “An unportioned girl of my complexion can . . . be a dangerous object.” Abolition and the Mulatto Heiress in England
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index

Brown Eyes: A Selection of Creative Expressions by Black and Mixed Race Women

Troubador Publishing
2006
292 pages
5 x 0.6 x 8 inches
ISBN 10: 1905237146; ISBN-13: 978-1905237142

Edited by:

Nicole Moore

Brown Eyes is a rare collection of poetry and autobiographical writing from a diverse group of black and mixed-race women—everyday women expressing themselves in their own unique and readable style. One of the first anthologies of its kind, Brown Eyes offers a fresh and challenging insight into the lives of black and mixed-race women in 21st century Britain.

As well as being an important contribution towards Black British literature, the book celebrates, reflects upon and embraces our diverse female identities and the common-thread that unites all of us living the UK experience.

Some of the contributions explode with energy, others speak with softness, many discuss childhood, motherhood, love, while others deal with loss and historical betrayal. The voices collected in Brown Eyes range from teenage to mature, rural and urban, from mothers and daughters, and countless others, all contributing to this anthology’s diverse creativity.

Dawn of the Different: The Mulatto Zombie in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead

The Journal of Popular Culture
Volume 45, Issue 3 (June 2012)
pages 551–571
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2012.00944.x

Justin Ponder

WHILE ZOMBIE FILMS DO NOT BLATANTLY FOCUS ON miscegenation or mulattos, interracial themes abound in them. In George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Ben, a black man, saves Barbra, a white woman, from hordes of zombies. From this moment on, the film binds this interracial couple, casting them as partners attempting to survive the horrific attacks of the living dead. Cristina Isabel Pinedo (Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Vieiwng) claims that “racial silence” is the film’s “structuring absence,” and this absence falls no more silent than the romance this interracial coupling implies (29). The film pairs the cantankerous and controlling Mr. Cooper with the long-suffering and submissive Mrs. Cooper while coupling the young, star-crossed lovers Tom and Judy. According to North American cinematic logic, one could safely assume that Ben and Barbra, the remaining adults, would fall in love by film’s end. While the late 60s might have been ready to see a black man save, protect, and even punch a white woman, the era apparently was not prepared to see him walk away hand-in-hand with her as innumerable zombies rise from the dead to keep Night’s black white couple from the normative romantic conclusion of North American cinema.

This romantic tension between black man and white woman continues in Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead. The film focuses on four survivors: Fran, a resourceful news producer; Steve, a helicopter pilot and Fran’s lover; Roger, a S.W.A.T. team member; and Peter, a S.W.A.T. team member and the quartet’s only black man. Robin Wood (“Normality and Monsters: The Films of Larry Cohen and…

Read or purchase the article here.

How Do Children of Mixed Partnerships Fare in the United Kingdom? Understanding the Implications for Children of Parental Ethnic Homogamy and Heterogamy

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 643, Number 1, September 2012
pages 239-266
DOI: 10.1177/0002716212444853

Lucinda Platt, Professor of Sociology
Institute of Education, University of London

Many claims are made about the significance of interethnic partnerships for individuals and for society. Such partnerships continue to be seen as a “barometer” of the openness of society and have spawned extensive analysis investigating their patterns, trends, and determinants. But we know little about the experience of children growing up in families of mixed parentage. In the United Kingdom, the increase in the self-defined “mixed” population is often celebrated. But there has been little quantitative sociological analysis that has investigated the circumstances of the children of mixed ethnicity partnerships. Using two large-scale UK datasets that cover a similar period, this article evaluates the extent to which mixed parentage families are associated with circumstances (both economic and in terms of family structure) that tend to be positive or negative for children’s future life chances and how these compare to those of children with parents from the same ethnic group. It shows that there is substantial variation according to the outcome considered but also according to ethnic group. Overall, children in mixed parentage families do not unequivocally experience the equality of outcomes with majority group children that the assimilation hypothesis implies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Introducing the Mix-d: Professionals’ Pack

Mix-d:
2012-07-13

Everything you need to work confidently with the mixed-race subject.

The Mix-d: Professionals’ Pack is an essential guide for teachers, facilitators, mentors and professional carers.

The pack will equip you, your staff and organisation with the resources and knowledge to deal confidently with all aspects of the mixed-race topic…

For more information, click here.

The Arab and the Brit: The Last of the Welcome Immigrants

Syracuse University Press
2012
248 pages
6 x 9; 12 black-and-white illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8156-0974-2

Bill Rezak, Former President
Alfred State College, Alfred, New York

Born of a Palestinian father and a British mother, Rezak has always been intrigued by the different worlds from which his parents came. His father’s ancestors were highwaymen on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century. They sparred unsuccessfully with ruling Ottoman Turks and escaped with their families to America. His mother’s parents were sent separately from Great Britain into indentured servitude in Canada, alone at the ages of ten and sixteen. They worked off their servitude, met, married, and moved to New York State. In The Arab and the Brit, a memoir that spans multiple generations and countries, Rezak traces the remarkable lives of his ancestors. Narrating their experiences against the backdrop of two world wars and an emerging modern Middle East, the author gives readers a textured and vivid immigrant story.

Rezak recalls his paternal grandmother apprehending would-be Russian saboteurs during World War I, his grandfather’s time at Dr. Bernardo’s home, a shelter for destitute children, and his father’s work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association following World War II. Told with humor and captivating detail, The Arab and the Brit chronicles the trials and triumphs of one family’s struggle to succeed in the New World.

Black GIs, English women, and ‘brown babies’ (1944-1950)

Mix-d: Museum: Timeline
Mix-d:
2012-07-10

During the period 1942-45 around one million US servicemen were based in England as part of the preparations for the invasion of Europe in June 1944 and around 130,000 (13%) of these were Black (African American) GIs. This caused endless worry for British officials who were reluctant to support American segregation practices formally, but were nevertheless highly concerned about the possible growth of interracial relationships and ‘half-caste babies’ in Britain. British authorities tried to discourage relationships between white British women and black – and other minority ethnic – troops in a number of ways: social segregation at dance halls, pubs and cinemas, restrictions put on female military staff, police surveillance and ‘whispering campaigns’.  These actions did little, however, to stop these interracial relationships. The black troops tended to be popular with Britons, who tended to oppose the American idea of segregation, and they were particularly popular with white British women, much to the angry bewilderment of white American GIs…

Read the entire timeline section and view the video clip here.