Mixed Race Studies

Boucicault’s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon

Atlantic Studies
Volume 6, Number 1 (April 2009)
pages 81-95
DOI: 10.1080/14788810802696287

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

This article challenges a number of myths the Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault himself created about his play The Octoroon. Boucicault claimed that London theatre audiences were dissatisfied with the ending, in which the heroine commits suicide, because they had become unsympathetic to American slaves. He rewrote the play for these audiences, and the two versions of The Octoroon have subsequently been used to suggest differences of attitude between New York and London, a shift in British racial politics in the early 1860s, and an antislavery position in Boucicault himself. This article questions all of these interpretations using contemporary reviews, Boucicault’s advertisements and self-promoting articles, and much hitherto undiscussed material: a Boucicault letter, his evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, and the source of Boucicault’s play, Mayne Reid’s novel The Quadroon. Boucicault was a showman and self-promoter, and his assertions ignored the political uproar the play had caused in New York, and deliberately misinterpreted his audiences in London. The article demonstrates that British audiences were in many cases more sympathetic to American slaves than Boucicault himself, that they objected to the play on aesthetic rather than political grounds, and that Boucicault changed the ending for commercial reasons. It also reveals what the rewriting controversy has obscured: Boucicault’s close attention in the play to the subtleties of the plantation social hierarchy. His concern with social differences and distinctions ties The Octoroon more closely to his Irish plays than has been recognized and illuminates contradictory impulses in The Octoroon, which also help to explain the two endings. While the ‘tragic ending’ reinforces the racial determinism that many critics have observed in the play, the scenes where an outside observer fails to comprehend the racial and social hierarchy on the plantation reinforce an alternative vision that helps justify the ‘happy ending’ versions. Both Boucicault and his play were more interestingly equivocal than the Octoroon myths have allowed.

Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon has figured frequently in recent analyses of representations of race, slavery and the transatlantic in the nineteenth century. Joseph Roach’s influential study of what he called the ‘‘circum-Atlantic’’ made The Octoroon a touchstone of its argument about theatrical and ritual performance in ‘‘the circulation of cultures, material and symbolic’’, around and across the Atlantic. Jennifer DeVere Brody also drew on the play in her study of the ‘‘mulatta’’ in nineteenth-century British/Black Atlantic culture, and Werner Sollors identifies in it many of the central characteristics he discusses in his study of “interracial” literature. Daphne Brooks examines it as a transatlantic ‘‘spectacle of race.’’ The play’s attraction for critics interested in cultural contact, hybridity and creolisation is obvious. As Roach remarks, it was written ‘‘after a brief period of residence in New Orleans by an Anglo-Irishman of French ancestry’’ (183). It is also concerned with the socially impossible position of the daughter of a planter and a slave, a woman deemed to have seven-eighths white ancestry, and one-eighth black…

…This article examines Boucicault’s 1866 testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee, an 1855 letter indicating his views on slavery, and New York and London reviews, advertisements and play scripts. Together they reveal a number of contradictions in the impression Boucicault created of the Octoroon incident, as does Boucicault’s source for the play, Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel The Quadroon. The significant changes Boucicault made in adapting the novel provide a fascinating index to Boucicault’s attitudes on race, interracial marriage and the nature of plantation society in the Southern United States. Boucicault’s focus is very different from Reid’s. His original play seems to insist on the unbridgeability of racial divisions, whereas Reid’s characters overcome them. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Boucicault incorporates into The Octoroon the dramatic interest in social distinctions and hierarchies which is evident in his other plays, including the ‘‘Irish dramas,’’ The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun. This is particularly evident in the dynamics of Boucicault’s dialogue. Many readings of The Octoroon concentrate on single speeches and pay relatively little attention to dramatic interaction, but as I shall show, it is in the interplay between characters that Boucicault displays a dramatic sensitivity to social relationships and institutions. The play’s exploration of the social implications of the ‘‘Octoroon’s’’ mixed heritage balances its sensationalist racial essentialism, and this may help to explain the complicated and contradictory ways in which contemporaries interpreted its stance on slavery…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Octoroon and English Opinions of Slavery

American Quarterly
Volume 8, Number 2 (Summer, 1956)
pages 166-170

Nils Erik Enkvist
Akademi Abo, Finland

After his great successes, and notably that of Colleen Bawn, Dion Boucicault became something of a leading figure among English-speaking playwrights, while the critics as well as the public eagerly watched his prolific pen. In the summer of 1861, everyone in London knew he was about to produce his topical play about slavery, which had been so favorably received in the United States. This was indeed a subject well cut out for his cosmopolitan powers; when, after considerable delay, The Octoroon was finally presented at the Adelphi Theatre on Monday, November 18th, 1861, it came as a shock both to the playwright and to the critics that the fifth act was hailed by the audience with many rude noises. The reasons for this were debated at some length in the London papers; they provide a significant insight into Anglo-American relations at that time.

As readers of Professor Quinn’s Representative American Plays will recall, the story of The Octoroon was based upon the fact that a white man could not marry the one-eighth-Negro slave girl he loved. In the original fifth act Zoe had poisoned herself to preserve her maiden purity from the ruffianly overseer who had bought her. It was Zoe’s suicide that finally roused the tempers of the English audience. Possibly they felt cheated, having read in their playbills how Southerners sometimes escaped the predicament of the present hero and heroine by cutting their veins and mixing their blood, which, technically, sufficed to make a colored person of a white man. This hoary stock device was not used, and the tragic impact of the octoroon…

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing

Routledge
2012-05-25
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-59804-0

Edited by

Suki Ali, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

People from a ‘mixed’ racial and ethnic background, and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, are increasingly visible internationally and often construed in diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, images of racial and ethnic diversity are posed in opposition to unity and solidarity, creating a crisis of cohesive social trust. On the other hand, there are assertions that the portrayals of segregation and conflict ignore the reality of ongoing interactions between a mix of minority and majority racial, ethnic and religious cultures, where multiculture is an ordinary, unremarkable, feature of everyday social life.

This interdisciplinary volume brings internationally well-respected researchers together to explore the different contexts and concepts underpinning discussions about mixedness and mixing. Moving beyond pathologically focused research about confused identities and a dualistic black-white conception of mixedness, the book includes chapters on:

• Multiraciality and race classification
• Mixed race couples
• Mixedness in everyday life
• Mixed race politics

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing develops theoretical perspectives and presents intellectually shaped empirical evidence that can deal with complexity and normalcy in order to move the debate onto more fruitful grounds. It is an important book for students and scholars of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / Suki Ali, Chamion Caballero, Rosalind Edwards and Miri Song
2. Multiraciality and census classification in global perspective / Ann Morning
3. Mixed race across time and place: an international perspective / Ilan Katz
4. Scaling diversity: mixed-race couples, segregation and urban America / Steven Holloway
5. The geography of mixedness in England and Wales / Charlie Owen
6. From ‘Draughtboard Alley’ to ‘Brown Britain’: the ordinariness of mixedness in British life / Chamion Caballero
7. How mixedness is understood and experienced in everyday life / Peter Aspinall and Miri Song
8. Finding value on a council estate in Nottingham: voices of white working class women / Lisa McKenzie
9. How to find mixed people in quantitative datasets / Anne Unterreiner
10. When ethnicity became an important family issue in Slovenia / Mateja Sedmak
11. Same difference? Developing a critical methodological stance in critical mixed race studies / Minelle Mahtani
12. Mixed race politics / Suki Ali

TV Review: Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BioNews
Number 630 (2011-10-24)

Anoushka Shepherd

Mixed Race Britain: Mixed Britannia, BBC2, 6-20 October 2011, Presented by George Alagiah

I am mixed race, and thereby a member the fastest growing ethnic minority in the UK. My British dad met my Sri Lankan mum while travelling in the 1970s. They married and settled in Manchester where I grew up. And although I was definitely alive to the fact that their marriage was a joining of two very different cultures, I had no idea of the deep and contentious history of mixed relationships in this country.

In this three-part documentary, George Alagiah recounts the largely untold story of mixed race Britain and the many love stories that overcame extreme social hardship to create it…

…In summary, all three programmes are packed with interviews and are rich in photographs and footage from the archives. This is a very real and intimate recollection of the history of this country told in the refreshingly honest words of those who were there. All the stories told are different, interesting and moving in their own ways…

Read the entire review here.

Dreams of a Life

The Arts Desk
2011-12-14

Nick Hasted

Carol Morley’s moving documentary brings a dead woman lost in London back to life

The decontamination squad scraped the remains of 38-year-old ex-City professional Joyce Vincent from her seat, in front of a TV which had flickered unseen for three years. They took her wrapped Christmas presents too, and left unsolvable mysteries. How did she die? And how does someone become so alone that they’re left in a north-London flat above a busy shopping centre till their body melts into it?

When director Carol Morley read a Sun headline announcing the macabre discovery in 2006, she pined for those answers, putting ads in the London press, the internet and even a black cab, and working obsessively towards this documentary. It gives feature-length attention to an unknown soldier of 21st-century urban life: a woman who was ignored till she disappeared.

…Death’s tragedy, of course, is often worse for the living. From a primary schoolfriend to work colleagues, Morley’s interviewees show genuine affection, puzzlement and shock as Vincent’s jigsaw is pieced incompletely together. The most heartbreaking figure in her film, though, isn’t Vincent, but Martin, that old boyfriend, who she once asked to marry, and always dropped everything for her. Parental disapproval at her mixed race stymied the wedding but, as he finally breaks down on camera and wails, she was the love of his life. He is bereft for himself that they didn’t stick together, that he didn’t help her even more, that she’s gone…

Read the entire article here.

Bridgetower – Black Musicians and British Culture, 1807-2007

Gresham College
2007-07-02

Mike Phillips, Professor of Music
Gresham College

George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the son of an Abyssinian slave, was hailed as a musical prodigy in the eighteenth century. Taught by Haydn, his appearance at the court in Windsor to play in front of George III led to his subsequent ‘adoption’ by the Prince Regent. Friends with Beethoven—Bridgetower was the original dedicatee of the Kreutzer Sonata and they gave the first performance together—his life offers a powerful symbolism for the creation and establishment of a black British community which has its roots in the 18th century importation and migration of slaves and ex-slaves.

Professor Mike Phillips is the librettist for the newly-commissioned opera, Bridgetower – A Fable of 1807, to be given its premier as a part of the City of London Festival on the 5th of July. He will be discussing the role of black musicians in British culture in the two hundred years since the Abolition of the Slave Trade act.

I must begin by making it clear that I am not an academic researcher or an expert on slavery or an expert on the culture and customs of the Caribbean or Africa, and I have not spent many years in the British Library digging up obscure facts about this topic.  So I am not going to get into arcane disputes about the precise number of black musicians who lived in Southwark or how often they did their laundry!  But I have read a considerable amount about the topic.  I am a novelist and a curator and I have written an exhausting number of words about the history of black people in Britain.  This is not a talk about urban rioting or reggae or calypso or gospel music or jazz, although these forms dominate the experience of recent years.  I am telling you this partly because I am going to end at the end of the 19th Century, because I only have an hour, and if I got on to the 20th Century, I would be here all night!  But in fact, because of the subject of the new opera Bridgetower, a Fable of 1807, and because in general this part of the City of London Festival has focused on the 18th Century and the early 19th Century, I will be dealing roughly with those years.

The other point is that, in general, we tend to talk about black people in Britain, or about the multiracial nature of the population, as if it was an exclusively 20th Century phenomenon.  We talk about the respective cultures as if they existed behind barriers, and we talk as if the colour of people’s skins defines their cultural prospects and abilities, a tendency which is an exact match for the strictures of 18th Century racial science, with its appalling attempts to categorise human beings in line with a preordained network of characteristics.

Even now, in this country, young black musicians still face a series of nudges in the direction of what everyone will describe as ‘their culture’, meaning steel bands and rapping.  Young black musicians who lean towards classical forms will be more or less guaranteed a difficult time—it would be easier if they wanted to do percussion.  Historically, that has meant that, by and large, black musicians in Europe have been written out of the narrative of the very landscape that they helped to shape, and we find ourselves obliged to rediscover figures like the Chevalier de Saint-George or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—people who were household names in their own time.

In that context, one of the most illuminating and reassuring aspects of looking at the lives of black cultural figures in Britain and Europe is that if you go back between the 16th Century and the 20th Century, you encounter black artists, poets, novelists and musicians who had no problems nor inhibitions in engaging in the cultural environment in which they found themselves.  In the process, they tended to affect the culture in which they lived in various specific ways.

I mentioned the 19th Century, but as far back as 1505 we have an African drummer working for James IV in Edinburgh, arranging a dance with dancers in black and white costumes for the Shrove Tuesday festivities.  Black musicians are repeatedly mentioned in pageants, fairs and at least one tournament from the 16th Century onwards.

If you come to the 18th Century, they’re relatively well-known—black musicians like Cato, who ended up as a head gamekeeper to the Prince of Wales around about 1740, and who was reputed to blow the best French horn and trumpet in his time.  In the 18th Century, Londoners were already dancing in what were called black hops, where 12 pence would get you admission…

…But I will go on to talk about George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower.  Bridgetower is an interesting person, not simply because he was born in the Esterhazy household; not simply because he was black; not because he was a child protégé, but all those things together, at the time when he arrived in Britain and during his career, had a particular kind of significance…

Read the lecture here.
Download the video (very large! 330 MB).
Download the audio (56.5 MB).

CCIG Forum 24: ‘Mixing’/’Non-mixing’? The in/significance of race in mixed raciality, family narratives and welfare practices

Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance
Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Library Seminar Rooms 1 & 2
2011-12-06, 10:00-17:00Z

Keynote speakers: Chantal Badjiie (Editorial Lead on the Mixed Race Season on the BBC, TBC), Petra Nordqvist (University of Manchester), Monica Dowling (Open University).

That Britain has one of the fastest growing mixed race population in the world, with 3% of children under 16 being classified as mixed race and 10% of children under 16 living in a family with more than one ethnicity, is an accepted fact. What is less clear is whether this should be celebrated as evidence of a long history of tolerance and mixing among ordinary people, e.g. from the port cities of Cardiff, Liverpool, London, South Shields in the interwar period right up to the contemporary moment in all the major cities and towns, or whether it represents a major challenge to politicians, policy makers and practitioners across a wide range of services and the public at large. While the MOBO awards are an example of the former approach, the claims that multiculturalism has failed and the recent changes to the Adoption Statutory Guidance by the English government indicate the anxieties that continue to surround issues of race, ethnicity and culture. Added to this, research into the physical preferences of those seeking to start a family via methods of assisted conception suggests that ideas about and discourses of race and ethnicity inform these preferences, albeit in a benign and unconscious way.

How can these contradictory patterns be understood? What are their implications for how relationships and families are conceived and researched? What dilemmas of practice arise for those working in policy development and implementation in a wide number of health and welfare areas? What light can a psychosocial approach to the issues offer? What analytical traction and theoretical development can be gained from approaching the issue of mixed-raciality through the concerns of those involved in non-traditional modes of family and household formation, such as assisted conception? What gets lost and what gets brought into the foreground when we focus on the factors that get counted in ‘the mix’?

These are pressing issues for social scientists concern with questions of citizenship, identity and governance as much as they are for those concerned with the development of policy and practice equipped for the realities of contemporary Britain. Jointly convened by the Psychosocial and Families and Relationships Research Programmes of CCIG, this Forum will explore these issues.

For more information, click here.

Not as simple as black or white

The Voice
2011-11-21

Elizabeth Pears

How mixed-race Brits are tackling issues surrounding dual heritage

LAST MONTH, the UK’s fastest growing ethnic minority, as part of the BBC’s Mixed Britannia series, reignited the debate of what it means to be ‘mixed-race’.

Demographers have predicted that Britain’s mixed-race population will reach 1.3 million by 2020 – almost double the number recorded in 2001. Of this figure, 45 percent are mixed white and black.

But despite increasing acceptance of inter-racial relationships and more visible mixed-race people such as Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, actress Thandie Newton and Olympian Kelly Holmes, the concept of being mixed-race remains quite literally a grey area – a type of no man’s land where nothing is as simple as black or white.

Some critics find the need for mixed-race people to identify as such divisive, and argue that biologically there can be no such thing. Others argue that by merit of having a collective experience, mixed-race people should be free to align themselves in this way, and subsequently, get their voice heard when it comes to policy and decision-making.

Self-defining

Then there are those who are comfortable self-defining as black in the political sense as a means of navigating British society.

Bradley Lincoln, founder of social enterprise Mix-D, whose aim is to provide a year-round national platform for mixed-race debate, said: “When we talk about being mixed-race there is a danger of either over-celebrating or sounding like a victim.

“Mixed-race people are not foot soldiers for a new racism. It is not a homogenous group. It is not a separate ethnic grouping – but it is time to move the conversation forward, particularly within the education and the social care system where many mixed children are considered just black.”…

Read the entire article here.

Only Skin Deep? The Harm of Being Born a Different Colour to One’s Parents: A (a minor) and B (a minor) by C (their mother and next friend) v A Health and Social Services Trust [2010] NIQB 108; [2011] NICA 28

Medical Law Review
Volume 19, Issue 4 (Autumn 2011)
pages 657-668
DOI: 10.1093/medlaw/fwr029

Sally Sheldon, Professor of Medical Law and Ethics
University of Kent

The complainants, A and B, were twins born as a result of IVF treatment involving donated sperm provided by the Defendant Trust to their mother. While the children’s parents were white, the twins had darker skin than either of them and different skin colour to each other, a difference that had become more marked as they had grown older. It transpired that while the Trust’s normal practice would be to request only sperm from ‘Caucasian’ or ‘white’ donors for a white couple, in this instance sperm from a ‘Caucasian (Cape Coloured)’ donor had mistakenly been used. The implication of this error was that while the sperm donor was white, there was no guarantee that his genetic children would also be so. By the time the action reached the courts, the twins were eleven years old.

The Trust admitted liability to the parents. However, it opposed the action brought on behalf of the twins, in which they alleged three broad kinds of harm. First, because of their colour, the twins had become ‘the subject of derogatory comment and hurtful name calling from other children, causing emotional upset’. Secondly, they had been the subject of adverse and hurtful comment about the colour of their skin and their physical dissimilarity from each other, on the one hand, and between themselves and their parents on the other. This had led them to question their parents about whether they were adopted. Thirdly, should either twin go on to have a child with a partner of mixed race, any child born to them was likely to have a different skin colour from either parent.

The court proceedings raised, by common agreement of the parties, a number of legal issues: first, the existence and nature of a duty of care owed to A …

Read or purchase the article here.

Old Whine, New Vassals: Are Diaspora and Hybridity Postmodern Inventions?

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Chapter in: New Ethnicities, Old Racisms? (pages 181-204)
Zed Books
May 1999
253 pages
ISBN-10: 185649652X; ISBN-13: 978-1856496520

Edited by:

Phil Cohen, Emeritus Professor
University of East London

The recent bag of re-poetics (recuperate, rewrite, transport, transform, and so forth) proffers the opportunity to confront many of the assumptions and confusions of identity I feel compelled to ‘reconfigure’. The site of this poetics for me, and many other multi-racial and multi-cultural writers, is the hyphen, that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides… a crucial location for working out the ambivalences of hybridity… In order to actualize this hybridity … the hybrid writer must necessarily develop instruments of disturbance, dislocation and displacement. (Wah 1996:60)

In the past six years or so, Wah’s literary summons has been answered by a virtual flourishing of North American (Canada and the United States) texts in the forms of websites, fiction, poetry, autobiographies, biographies, and academic texts by ‘mixed-race’ writers who are overwhelmingly middle-class and either academics or students. On the other hand, there have been relatively few books in England during this period by ‘mixed-race’ writers about ‘mixed-race’ identity politics. These countries’ different historical legacies vis-à-vis immigrant and indigenous communities might explain this discrepancy: ‘While the United States is a country of immigrants where ethnic diversity is constitutive of the society, British society has aspired and continues to aspire to monoculturalism: the people of the empire have no claim on British territory’ (LaForest 1996: 116). In a more profound way than in the United States and Canada, the rigidity of the class structure in Britain also limits the extent to which ‘hybrid’ writers are recognised, published, marketed and received (Sabu 1998). However, Friedman would argue that on both sides of the Atlantic a ‘hybrid’ identity is not accessible to the poor: ‘The urban poor, ethnically mixed ghetto is an arena that does not immediately cater to the construction of explicitly new hybrid identities. In periods of global stability and/or expansion, the problems of survival are more closely related to territory and to creating secure life spaces* (Friedman 1997: 84).

My fundamental contention is that as socio-cultural and political critiques, fluid contemporary métis(se)A narratives of gendered identities engage with, challenge and yet have been muffled by two competing racialised, essentialised and oppositional dominant discourses in England. The first is the territorialised discourse of ‘English nationalism, based on indigeneity and mythical purity. That is, ‘Englishness’ is synonymous with ‘whiteness’:

something to do with an elusive but powerful sense of one’s own Englishness and what that means in terms of belonging. The notion of the collective unconscious, after all, suggests the unity of thosewho partake of the racial memory at the same time as it defines the ‘other’. The ‘other’ is everybody else. (Maja-Pearce 1990: 132).

The second is the deterritorialised discourse of the English African diaspora which is predicated on (mis)placement and the one-drop rule: that is, all Africans have been dispersed and one known African ancestor designates a person as ‘black’. For example, Paul Gilroy’s configuration of the ‘Black Atlantic’ is based on compulsory blackness and displacement:

The black Atlantic, my own provisional attempt to figure a deterritorialised multiplex and anti-national basis for the affinity or “identity of passions’ between diverse black populations, took shape in making sense of sentiments like these which are not always congruent with the contemporary forms assumed by black political culture. (Gilroy 1996: 18)

On the other hand, Avtar Brah’s formulation of ‘diaspora space’ speaks to an ‘entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’ (Brah 1996: 181). Although Brah’s model recognises the forged dialectical relationship between settlers and indigenous communities, her conceptualisation is still both racialised and binary rather than fluid. ‘Migrants and their descendants’ (black) have been dispersed. The ‘English’ (white) are ‘natives’ (Brah 1996: 181). As a result, like Gilroy, Brah has not created conceptual space for méttis(se) individuals for whom by virtue of both English and diasporic parentage, ‘home’ is de/territorialised (Pieterse 1995)- As such, ‘home’ represents an ambivalent bi-racialised sense of both territorialised place—England—and de-territorialised diasporic longings. Their family histories are braided from the gendered, bi-racialised and sexualised residues of imperial domination and colonised submission (Young 1995; Lavie et al 1996; Fanon 1967).

I want to illustrate the ways in which, as we hobble towards the new millennium, métis(se) declarations delimit and transgress bi-racialised discourses and point the way towards a profound realignment of thinking about ‘race’, ethnicity and ‘English’ identity. This chapter engages with notions of biological and cultural hybridities as articulated in nineteenth-and twentieth-century discourses on ‘race’ and identities. I have divided the chapter into three sections. First, I trace the origins of the term hybridity back to its problematic beginnings in ninteenth-century ‘race’ science, and especially evolutionary anthropology. Second, I critique contemporary cultural theorising on hybridities which reframes ‘race’ as difference(s). Third, the testimonies of contemporary métisse women provide necessary context and content for my discussions of continuities between theories predicated on so-called biological ‘race’ science and ‘postmodernist’ cultural explanations. These autobiographical examples illustrate that the older construct of hybridity as a biological ‘grafting’ of so-called different ‘races’ is continuous with its contemporary redefinition as cultural heterogeneity, fragmentation and diaspora(s)…

Read the entire chapter here.