Mixed Race Studies

Under the Moon’s Light

Directory of World Cinema
2011

English Title: Under the Moon’s Light
Original Title: Sous la clarté de la lune
Country of Origin: Burkina Faso, France
Studio: Les Films de la plaine, NDK productions
Director: Apolline Traoré
Producer(s): Idrissa Ouédraogo
Screenplay: Apolline Traoré
Cinematographer: Daniel Barrau
Editor: Lucie Thierry
Runtime: 90 minutes
Genre: Drama
Language: Moore (Moré), French
Starring/Cast: Rasmané Ouédraogo, Sylvain Lecann, Abdoulaye Koné, Tania Azar, Silvie Homawoo
Year: 2004
Volume: African / Nigerian

Reviewed by: Zélie Asava

Synopsis:

Sous la clarté de la lune interrogates African women’s personal and cultural histories and identities by foregrounding the experiences of mixed-race women and their families, thus exploring the history of interracial relationships in Africa and its diaspora. 

Its central story begins before the narrative starts, about 10 years earlier in a small village in Burkina Faso.  Patrick (Sylvain Lecann), a young white Frenchman steals his mixed-race daughter moments after her young Burkinabé mother has given birth.  As the film opens we see the child, who has been raised in France, return to her mother’s village with her father for what is supposed to be a brief encounter with her other home and family.  Her mother Kaya (Silvie Homawoo) has been mute since the incident.  The mixed-race daughter Martine (Tania Azar) hates the village and its inhabitants, thinking they are all inferior.  She believes her mother to be dead.   Her father Patrick treats the villagers as his servants.  The villagers have been waiting two years for an engineer and Patrick is in town to fix their water pump, as well as to discuss the past with Kaya.  While the locals may reject this white man because of the brutal history he left behind, they need his expertise and money.  The story thus has immediate resonances with Franco-African colonialism and neo-colonialism.

The film follows the three lead characters as they negotiate their differences to form a family.  A fourth key figure, Habib (Abdoulaye Koné), emerges as a young man in love with Kaya and through him spectators are introduced to village life, local systems of power and love, and come to realise that the story may also be read as a series of metaphors on issues of identity…

Read the entire review here.

(1) Man and His Forerunners (2) The Origin and Antiquity of Man (3) L’Uomo Attuale una Specie Collettiva (4) Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen

Nature
Volume 92, Number 2293 (1913-10-09)
pages 160-162
DOI: 10.1038/092160a0

(1) Man and His Forerunners. By Prof. H. v. Buttel-Reepen. Incorporating Accounts of Recent Discoveries in Suffolk and Sussex. Authorised Translation by A. G. Thacker. Pp. 96. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913.) Price 2s. 6d. net.

(2) The Origins and Antiquity of Man. By Dr. G. Frederick Wright. Pp. xx + 547. (London: John Murray, 1913.) Price 8s. net.

(3) L’Uomo Attuale una Specie Collettiva. By V. Giuffrida-Ruggeri. Pp. viiii + 192 + xiii plates. (Milano: Albright, Segati e C., 1913.) Price 6 lire.

(4) Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen. Dr. Eugen Fischer. Pp. vii + 327 + 19 plates. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1913.) Price 16 marks.

(1) In this excellent translation of Prof. Buttel-Reepen’s little book, with the German title altered to “Man and His Forerunners,” the statement occurs that “general treatises on Pleistocene man published before 1908 are now almost valueless.” Such a statement implies that our knowledge regarding the ancestry and evolution of man has been revolutionised in the last five years–a statement which no one familiar with the subject could support for a moment. Yet in that space of time certain events have occurred which do materially alter our conception of how and when mankind came by its present estate…

…(4) We have kept the most important of the four books here reviewed to the last–for there can be no doubt, from every point of view, that Prof. Eugen Fischer’s book merits such commendation. What happens when two diverse races of mankind interbreed throughout a long series of generations? Is a new race of mankind thus produced—a race which will continue to reproduce characters intermediate to those of the parent stocks? At the present time such an opinion is tacitly accepted by most anthropologists. It was to test the truth of such an opinion that Dr. Eugen Fischer, professor of anthropology at Freiburg, with financial assistance from the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, set out to investigate the Bastard people in the Rehoboth district of German South-West Africa. The Rehoboth Bastards form a community of 2500-3000 souls, and are the result of intermarriage between early Boer farmers and Hottentot women–an intermixture which began more than a century ago.

This book contains the results of Prof. Fischer’s investigations and is a model for those who will follow in his footsteps. His observations have convinced him that a new and permanent human race cannot be formed by the amalgamation of two diverse forms of man–not from any want of fertility—for amongst the Bastards there is an average of 7.4 children to each family—but because certain characters are recessive, others are dominant, and the original types tend to re-assert themselves in the course of generations, according to Mendel’s law. Although the mean head-form of the Bastards is intermediate to those of the two parent races—Hottentot and Boer—yet in each generation a definite number of the Bastards tend to assume the head-form of the one or of the other of the parent races. There are certain facts relating to head-form known to English anthropologists which can be explained only on a Mendelian basis and are in harmony with Dr. Fischer’s observations. Between three and four thousand years ago England was invaded by a race with peculiarly formed, short and high heads. During those thousands of years the Bronze age invaders have been mingling their blood with that of the older and newer residents of England. Yet in every gathering of modern Englishmen—especially of the middle classes—one can see a number of pure examples of the Bronze age head-form. On the Mendelian hypothesis the persistence of such a head-form is explicable.

Dr. Eugen Fischer’s study of the Rehoboth Bastards will be welcomed by all students of heredity. No race has so many peculiar human traits as the Hottentots, and hence the laws of human inheritance—as Prof. Fischer was the first to recognise—can be advantageously studied in their hybrid progeny.

Read the entire article here.

Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer

The New York Times
2011-02-13

Richard Conniff

In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon.  He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown outside West Africa.  The gorilla’s resemblance to humans astonished many people, especially after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” later that year.  The politician Edwin M. Stanton was soon calling Abraham Lincoln “the original gorilla” and joking that Du Chaillu was a fool to have gone to Africa for what he could as easily have found in Springfield, Ill.

But the more common way to deal with our resemblance to monkeys and apes then was to fob it off onto other ethnic groups—typically black people, or sometimes the Irish.  A few white scientists even purported to find physiological evidence, in the configuration of the skull, for classifying other races as separate species, not quite as far removed as Caucasians from our primate cousins.  This undercurrent of scientific racism would play out to devastating effect in Du Chaillu’s own life.

When Du Chaillu arrived in London for the 1861 publication of his book, “Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,” he became the most celebrated figure of the season, and then, overnight, the most notorious.  He was, by all accounts, a charismatic presence, about 30 years old, with a thick moustache, a prominent brow, and bright, flashing eyes.  He also had a gift for colorful lectures about hunting fierce animals and befriending cannibals…

…But as I was researching my book “The Species Seekers,” I kept coming across hints of an uglier motive for the attack on Du Chaillu, based on race. A merchant in Gabon made the cryptic assertion that he possessed “from reliable sources, information the most exact as to [Du Chaillu’s] antecedents.”  Others whispered, as The New York Times reported, that “the suspicion of negro sympathies hangs around him in many ways.”  Du Chaillu presented himself as a white man, born in Louisiana, and an almost compulsive awareness of race runs through his book:  “’You are the first white man that settled among us, and we love you,’” a village chieftain declares at one point.  “To which all the people answered, ‘Yes, we love him! He is our white man, and we have no other white man.’”

But the truth seems to be that his mother was a woman of mixed race, possibly a slave, on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, where his father had been a merchant and slaveholder.  Concealing this background, the historian Henry H. Bucher Jr. has written, was “an understandable choice during the heyday of scientific racism.” In fact, Du Chaillu’s expedition to Gabon had been sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, then the center of scientific racism. (Samuel G. Morton kept a vast collection of skulls there, “the American Golgotha,” for the purpose of racial comparisons.) The “mysterious and rapid” end to Du Chaillu’s close association with the Academy in 1860 may have resulted, says Bucher, from “a committee member’s discovery of his maternal ancestry.”

A letter sent to an English friend in the thick of the Du Chaillu controversy supports this theory.  George Ord, an officer of the academy, wrote that some of his learned colleagues had taken note when Du Chaillu was in Philadelphia of “the conformation of his head, and his features” and detected “evidence of a spurious origin.”  Ord added:  “If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance.”…

…Curiously, the same issues of The Athenaeum in which the attack on Du Chaillu was playing out also featured a running plagiarism fight about a stage melodrama called “The Octoroon.”  It told the story of a dazzling New Orleans beauty “educated in every refinement and luxury” who was “almost a perfect white, her mother being a quadroon.”  In all three contesting versions of this tale, an “underhanded Yankee overseer” seeks to possess the heroine on the slave market.  And in each case, a dashing sea captain foils the nefarious plot and carries the beauty off to freedom.  Audiences apparently felt comfortable taking the heroine’s side because she was seven-eighths white.  But what if the sexes had been reversed, with a white woman falling for a mixed-race man—a man like Du Chaillu, say?…

Read the entire article here.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community [Review]

H-Net Reviews
May 2007

Sean H. Jacobs
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Mohamed Adhikari. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Africa Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xvii + 252 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-89680-244-5.

Coloured Categories

What are “Coloureds“? For most South Africans and others familiar with South Africa the answer will be “people of mixed race.” This invocation of “mixing” inevitably links to a racial binary that relies on two opposing and ossified (primordial) identities of black and white. Linked to this view is of course the persistence of the stereotype of “tragic mulattoes“—long a trope in South African writing—in which the “products of miscegenation” can never be “true” South Africans. These were the views of apartheid’s planners and retain their resonance for most South Africans today, including many whom self-identify as Coloured.

Mohamed Adhikari’s work attempts a corrective to this kind of de-contextualized portrayal and assessment of Coloured politics and identity. In Not White Enough, Not Black Enough—a slim volume of 187 pages—Adhikari attempts to place Colouredness as a product, not of any biological process such as “mixture,” but rather as one of the politics of the last century or so. For him, Coloured identity is, in fact, both a product of apartheid category-making and of vigorous identity-building on the part of Coloured political actors themselves. That is, Adhikari also targets attempts to “do away” with Coloured identity, as by proclaiming it a species of false consciousness. The book’s main focus is on attempts by Coloureds themselves to construct identity and history. While much of the material he covers is useful and interesting, it is not clear that Adhikari has quite managed to get out from under the weight of inherited categories and analytic frames in quite the way he sets out to do.

Coloureds make up 4.1 million of South Africa’s 46.9 million people. Mostly working class and concentrated in (but not restricted to) the Western Cape Province (where they comprise 53.9 percent of the total population) and the more rural Northern Cape, they, along with Africans—despite some changes at the apex of the class pyramid—account for most of South Africa’s urban and rural poor…

Read the entire review here.

The Rise and Decline of Hybrid (Metis) Societies on the Frontier of Western Canada and Southern Africa

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
Volume 3, Number 1 (1983) (Special Issue on the Metis)
ISSN  0715-3244

Alvin Kienetz

A comparison of the development of the Metis in Canada and similar peoples in Southern Africa reveals some remarkable similarities between the two groups. The existence of these parallels suggests that a more extensive comparative study of peoples of mixed race throughout the world would be of value.

Une comparaison de l’évolution des Métis au Canada et de celle de certains peuples similaires dans le Sud africain révèle des ressemblances frappantes entre les deux groupes. Ce parallèle suggère qu’une étude comparative plus complete des peuples de race mixte dans le monde entier présenterait une valeur incontestable.

Read the entire article here.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Crown an Imprint of Random House
July 1995
464 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-38341-9 (0-307-38341-5)

Barack Obama, President of the United States

Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.

Mapping the liminal identities of mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean literatures

Pennsylvania State University
December 2006
285 pages
AAT: 3343682
ISBN: 9780549992738

Khadidiatou Gueye

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2006

In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial hybridity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of liminality, this study investigates how mulattas negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural environments, times, and places. Four writers of African descent and dissimilar socio-historical backgrounds are studied: Abdoulaye Sadji from Senegal, Bessie Head from South Africa, Mayotte Capécia from Martinique, and Nella Larsen from the United States.

The study is divided into five chapters that deal with the experiences of mulattas in autobiographical writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and expatriation. Thematic and stylistic discrepancies in the works examined are ancillary to the common liminal strategies of de-marginalization and self-reconstruction of female heroines. Their attempts at self-assertion appear in the ways in which they resist the constrictions of patriarchal and racist regimes. Their construction of spaces of agency is interwoven with ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions, which are emblematic of the discontinuities of their lives and paradigmatic of their intricate search for identity. In the works, the liminal experiences of mulattas are framed within the quests for social visibility, the affirmation of humanity, the renegotiation of space, and the anomic straddling between oppositional boundaries and statuses. Through their striving to rise above the limitations imposed on their gender and race, mulattas commit acts of transgression and dissemblance, and disrupt racial taxonomy. I demonstrate that liminality is a major unifying thread that runs through all the narratives and argue that it creates alternative existential paradigms for mixed-blood women. Liminality is an appropriate tool that challenges monolithic views of identities through the re-articulation of cultural meanings.

My main contribution is twofold. First, I extend the traditional cartography of liminality, which is usually based on small-scale societies where individuals have loyalty to their primary communities. Second, I suggest new vistas for race criticism in diasporic studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One
  • Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux
  • Introduction
  • Black/White Polarization
  • Racial Hybridity
  • Betwixt and Between: The Ambiguity of Liminality
• Chapter Two
  • Liminal Psychoautobiographies: Rites and Routes
  • Autobiography as Autrebiographie: Je-Jeu in Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise
  • Internal Drama: Spectralized Presences in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
• Chapter Three
  • The Liminal Experience of Sexuality and the Problematic of Respectability
  • Sexuality at Point Zero in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Sexuality and Normative Illegitimacy in Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal: Between Sexual Empowerment and Disempowerment
• Chapter Four
  • Herspace: Liminal Madness and Racial Passing of the Mulatta
  • I am Mad But I am Not Mad: Shuttling Between Seamless Identities in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
  • Telling a New Story: Racial Performance and Ambiguity in Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Chapter Five
  • The Limen of Journeys: Mulattas and Colonial Paris
  • The French Métropole: Interior Landscapes in Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal
  • Migration and Trans-Caribbean Identity in Je suis martiniquaise and La négresse blanche
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

The development of memory for own- and other-race faces

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Volume 98, Issue 4 (December 2007)
pages 233–242
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2007.08.004

Gail S. Goodman
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis
University of Oslo

Liat Sayfan
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis

Jennifer S. Lee
Department of Psychology
Cabrillo College, Aptos, California

Marianne Sandhei
University of Oslo

Anita Walle-Olsen
University of Oslo

Svein Magnussen
University of Oslo

Kathy Pezdek
Department of Psychology
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Patricia Arredondo
Department of Psychology
California State University, Los Angeles

This study demonstrates that experience and development interact to influence the ‘‘cross-race effect.’’ In a multination study (n = 245), Caucasian children and adults of European ancestry living in the United States, Norway, or South Africa, as well as biracial (Caucasian–African American) children and adults living in the United States, were tested for recognition of Asian, African, and Caucasian faces. Regardless of national or biracial background, 8- to 10-year-olds, 12- to 14-year-olds, and adults recognized own-race faces more accurately than other-race faces, and did so to a similar extent, whereas 5- to 7-year-olds recognized all face types equally well. This same developmental pattern emerged for biracial children and adults. Thus, early meaningful exposure did not substantially alter the developmental trajectory. During young childhood, developmental influences on face processing operate on a system sufficiently plastic to preclude, under certain conditions, the cross-race effect.

Read the entire article here.

Identity, Discrimination and Violence in Bessie Head’s Trilogy

University of South Africa
November 2002
71 pages

Corwin Luthuli Mhlahlo

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the subject of English

This dissertation seeks to explore the perceived intricate relationship that exists between constructed identity, discrimination and violence as portrayed in Bessie Head’s trilogy from varying perspectives, including aspects of postcoloniality, materialist feminism and liminality.

Starting with a background to some of the origins of racial hybridity in Southern Africa, it looks at how racial identity has subsequently influenced the course of Southern African history and thereafter explores historical and biographical information deemed relevant to an understanding of the dissertation.

Critical explorations of each text in the trilogy follow, in which the apparent affinities that exists between identity, discrimination and violence are analysed and displayed.  In conclusion the trilogy is discussed from a largely sociological perspective of hope in a utopian society.

Read the entire thesis here.

Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century [Book Review]

H-Africa
H-Net Reviews
March 2004

Eric S. Ross, Coordinator, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco

George Brooks’s Eurafricans in Western Africa is the sequel to his Landlords and Strangers (1993). This book covers Western African coastal trading networks from the Senegal River to Cape Palmas (including the Cape Verde Islands) from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Brooks uses the term “Eurafrican” to designate Luso-Africans, Franco-Africans, and Anglo-Africans, the offspring of the union of transient European male traders and African women, often of elite social status. The term is meant to emphasize the greater African heritage of the mothers, as opposed to the Portuguese, French, or English heritage of the fathers.

As the subtitle indicates, the book deals extensively with social status, religion, and gender-related issues among Eurafricans. According to Brooks, African laws regarding inheritance and property rights largely determined the social status of Eurafricans, and these laws differed considerably depending on whether a society was acephalous or politically stratified. Religious observances and gender roles, in turn, depended on social status. Brooks makes good use of primary sources, particularly the accounts of Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English travelers and traders, nearly all of them men. In the preface, the author recognizes that his assessment of Eurafricans is limited by these informants and observers, who were “misinformed, self-serving, and imbued with racial prejudice” (p. xi). Also, only the most “successful” Eurafricans, of elite status, have survived in the historical record; porters, mariners, servants, and slaves, as all too often, re main anonymous seen but not heard…

Read the entire review here.