White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race

Posted in Anthropology, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania on 2013-04-29 03:39Z by Steven

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race

University of Melbourne Custom Book Centre
2010
318 pages
Paperback ISBN: 0980759420, 9780980759426

Marguerita Stephens

Explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’ and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. Based on the dissertation of the same name.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • The View from Coranderrk
  • Note on Language
  • Map
  • Introduction: Imperial Economies of Race
  • Chapter One: From Philanthropy to Race 1835-1848
  • Chapter Two: Colonising the Body: Infanticide and Governance
  • Chapter Three: Colonising the Body: A Species Apart
  • Chapter Four: Citizens, Rebels and Ambiguous Identities in the Ethno-Zoo
  • Chapter Five: The Coranderrk Dormitory: Gender, Caste and Extinction
  • Chapter Six: ‘You can make them white here without soap’
  • Conclusion: ‘Yarra, my father’s country’
  • Bibliography

INTRODUCTION: Imperial Economies of Race

In the expansionary movements of the European nation stales in the nineteenth century, race and empire were mutually constituted. ‘It was’, wrote Catherine Hall, ‘colonial encounters which produced a new category, race’.1 The idea of race raised colonialism to a biological imperative. The idea of race, and the ability of individuals to perceive the marks and differentials of race, have a history of their own. What follows is a history of how Europeans in one colonial encounter came to think that race mattered and how they produced specific categories of race that gave scientific and moral warrant to their rapacious colonising. It is a political economy of race.

This study is concerned with the multilateral connections between developments in the science of race across the European imperial domain and the operations of colonial policy in one location, that of Port Phillip, later Victoria, in south-eastern Australia in the middle and late nineteenth century. Specifically, it is concerned with the interactions between anthropology and the practical management of the Victorian government’s Aboriginal station Coranderrk, onto which the Kulin people, on whose land the colonial settlement of Melbourne was established in 1835, were gathered in 1863. It is concerned with the prominence of the Australians, particularly those from the south-eastern comer of the continent, in the formulation of European concepts of race, and with the daily lives of those on whom the ethnological gaze fell so heavily. It is concerned with the circularities of colonial theory and colonizing practice which produced the extinguishing Aboriginal body and the imperial fantasy of terra nullius. Colonialism and anthropology formed an hermetic ideological coupling of power and knowledge in which European desire, be it sexual or territorial, was projected onto the colonised with such force and effect that it delivered them up as objects who entreated their own colonization. It is with the twists and turns in this multidirectional relationship between theories of race and the practical expressions of colonial power through the categories of race that this study is concerned.

In the following chapters I explore how anthropology projected imminent Aboriginal extinction as an effect of biology and culture, rather than as an effect, and an animating ambition, of colonial practice. I also explore the complicity of humanitarian philanthropists in the production of the ‘ideological dissimulations’ encapsulated in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s provocative formula: ‘white men are saving brown women from brown men’ with its slippery and readily mutable verb. In south-eastern Australia, white men produced and reinforced colonizing power through the purported rescue of brown women, whose cthnologically-predicated ill-treatment by brown men provided the singular event that permitted the suspension of the letter of the law in order to impose ‘not only a civil but a good society’.

From the generalised rape, abuse and exploitation of the sexual labour of Aboriginal women and girls by colonists on the frontier in the late 1830s, to the emphasis laid by the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines (BPA) on the seizure of Aboriginal girls from their kin in the 1860s and 1870s, to the Board’s determination in the 1880s to bring ‘finality’ to the Aboriginal ‘problem’ by steering young Aboriginal women into marriages with white men, the exercise of power over Aboriginal women was the most crucial vector of colonial power. In Victoria, as in so many other colonial sites, the control of female sexuality and reproduction was, as Anne McClintock argues, crucial to the ‘transmission of white, male power’.

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Race-Crossing

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Live Events on 2013-04-26 02:08Z by Steven

Race-Crossing

Sacramento Daily Union
Volume 2, Number 4 (1890-06-08)
page 1, column 4
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Lima, the capital of Peru, is pronounced to be the headquarters of all the world’s mongreldom. Its population is the product of three centuries of race-crossing, and a scientific investigator finds easily distinguishable among the inhabitants the following crosses:

Cholo, offspring of white father and Indian mother.
Mulatto, offspring of white father and negro mother.
Quadroon, offspring of white father and mulatto mother.
Quinteroon, offspring of white father and quadroon mother.
Chino, offspring of Indian father and negro mother.
Chino Cholo, offspring of Indian father and Chinese mother.
Chino Oscuro, offspring of Indian father and mulatto mother.
Sambo China, offspring of negro father and mulatto mother.
Sambo, offspring of a mulatto father and Sambo Chino mother.
Sambo Claro, offspring of Indian father and Sambo Chino mother.

These are the most notable crosses, but there are many others.

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‘Improving’ the Māori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, Oceania, Politics/Public Policy on 2013-04-23 04:32Z by Steven

‘Improving’ the Māori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 80-97

Kate Riddell
Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington

IN 1996 THE CENSUS gave a total of 3,681,546 New Zealanders, of whom 524,031 were self-described as Māori or of Māori descent — thus, around 14%. The 1896 census gave 743,214 New Zealanders, and of that figure only 39,854 were described by the enumerators as Māori — around 5%. The closest thing to the category ‘of Māori descent’ in that census was the 5,762 ‘half-castes‘ described either as living as Pākehā or Māori. The New Zealand population in 1769 has been estimated as perhaps 100,000, and was 100% Māori.

These figures expose vast changes in the Māori population in size and compilation, from 100% of the population to a nadir of 5%, and back to an increasingly significant percentage of the overall New Zealand population at the close of the twentieth century. But the figures alone tell a small part of the revival of a supposedly ‘dying race’. This article explores the ideology of the censuses and the enumerators who contributed to them. At the core of this investigation is a belief that the prevalence of intermarriage between Māori and Pākehā directly affected popular views of whether or not the Māori population would survive the experiment of contact.

In 1896, with the Māori population at around 5% of the total population (and thought to be dropping), many did not believe that Māori would survive. That belief, however, flew directly in the face of much contemporary evidence to the contrary. Perhaps in one aspect, however, it was not so very wrong. Even some of the most ardent ‘fatal impact’ protagonists allowed that intermarriage with Pākehā would slow the extinction of the Māori. Others, perhaps best characterized as ‘assimilationists’, promoted intermarriage as the tool to save the Māori from themselves. To such people, the ‘half-caste’ product of intermarriage would improve the Māori ‘race’, both in terms of their statistical significance and as a people — rather like European husbandry would improve the land.

‘Half-caste’ is a problematic term. In New Zealand it has been used to describe both cultural and physical forms of the fruits of intermarriage. But it has almost never been used in a strictly biological sense. Once contact between Māori and Pākehā became widespread, ‘half-caste’ was never either a legal definition or a precise term for measuring blood-mixture. This is in direct contrast with strict legal and biological definitions in other New World colonies. In the censuses, the term came to be closely linked with the idea of ‘improving’ the Māori, like the land, by degrees. Intermarriage and the production of half-castes became synonymous with clearing away the native and planting the introduced…

…The Māori censuses to 1921 will be explored through three related myths. The myths are not easily separated, but each has some distinctive features. The first is an ambiguous one: the idea that Māori were better off either in close contact with or in isolation from Europeans. This myth expressed the belief that Māori were dying whether in close contact with Europeans or not, but that some factors could temporarily ameliorate or limit the effects of that contact. The second myth was that Māori were not worthy possessors of their own land. If they did not use it as Pākehā believed land was ordained to be used, then Māori would lose it. In this view, ‘improving’ the land and ‘improving’ the Māori went hand in hand. The third myth was that ‘half-castes’, the physical product of Māori and Pākehā intermarriage, were the only possible future for Māori (if Māori were to have a future at all). This explanation will be followed by a discussion of how the myths remained intact, despite the numerical evidence of the censuses to the contrary, and despite Māori opposition to the ideology of assimilation through intermarriage…

Read the entire article here.

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Becoming Mexipino: A Book Event with Rudy Guevarra Jr.

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, History, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2013-04-22 19:28Z by Steven

Becoming Mexipino: A Book Event with Rudy Guevarra Jr.

California State University, Fullerton
Langsdorf Hall 402 (Map)
Thursday, 2013-04-25, 16:00-17:30 PDT (Local Time)

Rudy Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California from 1900-1965. Rudy Guevarra Jr. traces their earliest interactions under Spanish colonialism, when they did not strongly identify as Mexican or Filipino, to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

This event is sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and Humanities & Social Sciences. For more information, please contact Dr. Edward Robinson.

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Mixed bloods of the Upper Monongahela Valley, West Virginia

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2013-04-22 00:46Z by Steven

Mixed bloods of the Upper Monongahela Valley, West Virginia

Washington Academy of Sciences
Volume 36, Number 1 (1946-01-15)
pages 1-13
Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library

William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.
Library of Congress

We are accustomed to think of West Virginia as a racially homogeneous State populated by Old Americans of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish descent with an additional contingent in recent years of Poles and Italians in the mining areas. It may come as somewhat of a surprise to many to learn that there exists in the northern counties of the State a racial island of mixed bloods, known locally as “Guineas,” numbering several thousand persons. The origin of this mixed race is unrecorded, and the relative proportion of white, Negro, and Indian blood entering into its makeup is difficult to ascertain. The main seat of this people is in northern Barbour County and southern Taylor County, but small groups are to be found in over half a dozen adjoining counties and in Garrett County, Md. From their homes in the hill country many have gone in recent years to the factory cities of West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan in search of economic opportunity and social betterment.

It is difficult to find a completely acceptable term to designate these mixed people. Stigmatized by white public opinion as a sort of outcast group, they dislike and resent any designation used by outsiders for themselves. They especially resent the terms “Guinea” or “Guinea Nigger,” which are most generally applied to them by their white neighbors. There are several possibilities in explaining the origin of this sobriquet.

An educated member of this group is said to have worked out a genealogy for them several years ago in which he claimed that an English nobleman went to the Guinea coast of Africa in the early days (possibly as a remittance man), married a native Negro woman, and produced a large family of crossbreeds. Later some of these descendants came to America and became the ancestors of the “Guineas.” Hu Maxwell, in his History of Barbour County (pp. 310-311), asserts that the mixed bloods of that county are called “Guineas” under the mistaken notion that they are Guinea Negroes. They are said, however, to have claimed for many years a descent from one of the Guineas (British, French, or Portuguese) in Africa or from one of the Guianas (British, French, or Dutch) in South America, and that their blood was native Negro or Indian…

Read the entire article here.

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Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Oceania, Philosophy, Social Science on 2013-04-21 15:37Z by Steven

Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940

Australian National University Press
October 2008
372 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1921313994; ISBN-13: 978-1921313998
Online ISBN: 9781921536007

Edited by:

Bronwen Douglas, Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

Chris Ballard, Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

From the 18th century, Oceania became the principal laboratory of raciology for scholars, voyagers, and colonisers alike. By juxtaposing encounters and theory, this magisterial book explores the semantics of human difference in all its emotional, intellectual, religious, and practical dimensions. The argument developed is subtle, engrossing, and gives the paradigm of ‘race’ its full use value. Foreign Bodies is a model of analysis and erudition from which historians of science and everyone interested in intercultural relations will greatly profit.

This book is also available as a free download in PDF, HTML and mobile device formats. Please read Conditions of Use before downloading the formats.

Contents

  • 1. Introduction: Foreign Bodies in Oceania Bronwen Douglas
  • Part One — Emergence: Thinking the Science of Race, 1750–1880
    • 2. Climate to Crania: science and the racialization of human difference Bronwen Douglas
  • Part Two — Experience: the Science of Race and Oceania, 1750–1869
    • 3. ‘Novus Orbis Australis’: Oceania in the science of race, 1750–1850 Bronwen Douglas
    • 4. ‘Oceanic Negroes’: British anthropology of Papuans, 1820–1869 Chris Ballard
  • Part Three — Consolidation: the Science of Race and Aboriginal Australians, 1860–1885
    • 5. British Anthropological Thought in Colonial Practice: the appropriation of Indigenous Australian bodies, 1860–1880 Paul Turnbull
    • 6. ‘Three Living Australians’ and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1885 Stephanie Anderson
  • Part Four — Complicity and Challenge: the Science of Race and Evangelical Humanism, 1800–1930
    • 7. The ‘Faculty of Faith’: Evangelical missionaries, social anthropologists, and the claim for human unity in the 19th century Helen Gardner
    • 8. ‘White Man’s Burden’, ‘White Man’s Privilege’: Christian humanism and racial determinism in Oceania, 1890–1930 Christine Weir
  • Part Five — Zenith: Colonial Contradictions and the Chimera of Racial Purity, 1920–1940
  • Epilogue
    • The Cultivation of Difference in Oceania Chris Ballard
    • Index
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AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, Communications/Media Studies, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2013-04-21 14:44Z by Steven

AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics

New York University Press
November 2006
342 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814775806
Paper ISBN: 9780814775813

Edited by:

Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Professor of English
University of Maryland in Europe

Shannon Steen, Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
University of California, Berkeley

With a Foreword by Vijay Prashad and an Afterword by Gary Okihiro

How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Paul Robeson’s support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian American youth culture?

AfroAsian Encounters is the first anthology to look at the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas. While these two groups have often been thought of as occupying incommensurate, if not opposing, cultural and political positions, scholars from history, literature, media, and the visual arts here trace their interconnections and interactions, as well as the tensions between the two groups that sometimes arise. AfroAsian Encounters probes beyond popular culture to trace the historical lineage of these coalitions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

A foreword by Vijay Prashad sets the volume in the context of the Bandung conference half a century ago, and an afterword by Gary Okihiro charts the contours of a “Black Pacific.” From the history of Japanese jazz composers to the current popularity of black/Asian “buddy films” like Rush Hour, AfroAsian Encounters is a groundbreaking intervention into studies of race and ethnicity and a crucial look at the shifting meaning of race in the twenty-first century.

Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Foreword: “Bandung Is Done”—Passages in AfroAsian Epistemology / Vijay Prashad
  • Introduction: AfroAsian Encounters—Culture, History, Politics / Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen
  • Part I Positioning AfroAsian Racial Identities
    • 1. “A Race So Different from Our Own”: Segregation, Exclusion, and the Myth of Mobility / Sanda Mayzaw Lwin
    • 2. Crossings in Prose: Jade Snow Wong and the Demand for a New Kind of Expert / Cynthia Tolentino
    • 3. Complicating Racial Binaries: Asian Canadians and African Canadians as Visible Minorities / Eleanor Ty
    • 4. One People, One Nation? Creolization and Its Tensions in Trinidadian and Guyanese Fiction / Lourdes López Ropero
    • 5. Black-and-Tan Fantasies: Interracial Contact between Blacks and South Asians in Film / Samir Dayal
  • Part II Confronting the Color Hierarchy
    • 6. “It Takes Some Time to Learn the Right Words”: The Vietnam War in African American Novels / Heike Raphael-Hernandez
    • 7. Chutney, Métissage, and Other Mixed Metaphors: Reading Indo Caribbean Art in Afro Caribbean Contexts / Gita Rajan
    • 8. These Are the Breaks: Hip-Hop and AfroAsian Cultural (Dis)Connections / Oliver Wang
  • Part III Performing AfroAsian Identities
    • 9. Racing American Modernity: Black Atlantic Negotiations of Asia and the “Swing” Mikados / Shannon Steen
    • 10. Black Bodies/Yellow Masks: The Orientalist Aesthetic in Hip-Hop and Black Visual Culture / Deborah Elizabeth Whaley
    • 11. The Rush Hour of Black/Asian Coalitions? Jackie Chan and Blackface Minstrelsy / Mita Banerjee
    • 12. Performing Postmodernist Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff, and Ghost Dog in Yellowface/Blackface / Cathy Covell Waegner
  • Part IV Celebrating Unity
    • 13. Persisting Solidarities: Tracing the AfroAsian Thread in U.S. Literature and Culture / Bill V. Mullen
    • 14. Internationalism and Justice: Paul Robeson, Asia, and Asian Americans / Greg Robinson
    • 15. “Jazz That Eats Rice”: Toshiko Akiyoshi’s Roots Music / David W. Stowe
    • 16. Kickin’ the White Man’s Ass: Black Power, Aesthetics, and the Asian Martial Arts Fred Ho Afterword: Toward a Black Pacific / Gary Y. Okihiro
  • About the Contributors
  • Index

Introduction: AfroAsian Encounters Culture, History, Politics / Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen

For a long time, many critics understood W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous diagnosis of the twentieth century as plagued by the problem of the color line as a description of white/nonwhite antagonisms. However, in the aftermath of identity movements on the part of a variety of racial and ethnic groups, as well as saddening clashes between them, it has become impossible to construe the twentieth century as riven by a single color line. Instead, we now conceive of the modern world as having been fractured by a network of lines dividing a range of racial and ethnic groups. How else can we comprehend the identity struggles of South Asian visual artists in the Caribbean, the treatment of the Vietnam War by African American novelists, or the absorption of hip-hop by Asian American youth culture?

AfroAsian Encounters addresses an important connection that until recently has received only scant attention: the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas in the Americas. Across the Americas, these two groups have often been thought of as occupying radically incommensurable cultural and political positions. In this collection, we examine AfroAsian interconnections across a variety of cultural, political, and historical contexts in order to examine how the two groups have interacted, and have construed one another, as well as how they have been set in opposition to each other by white systems of racial domination. We build here on the burgeoning interest in AfroAsian cultural histories reflected in a number of venues. From the conferences hosted by Boston University’s African American studies department (2002, 2003, 2004), to special editions on AfroAsian studies in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (2002) and positions: East Asia cultures critique (2003), to the numerous essays and books generated by scholars across a number of disciplines from Gary Okihiro and Vijay Prashad to Claire Jean Kim and Frank Wu, as well as work by contributors we include here, research on black-Asian racial interactions and formations has expanded at a rapid pace during the last decade. We seek to widen the energetic investigations that AfroAsian studies have provided relative to histories of diasporic and racial formations and globalization across a variety of fields, and with this book we hope to offer an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate. We have framed our treatment of black-Asian interactions within a neologism—rather, we have altered the typography for the term: AfroAsian. While there have been references to the “Afro-Asian” century and the “Afro-Asian” world, we have decided to drop the hyphen from the term in order to denote a unique, singular set of cultural dynamics that our authors analyze.

This collection constitutes the first interdisciplinary anthology to treat AfroAsian encounters. In keeping with the systems of intellectual inquiry established within African American and Asian American studies, we have gathered here essays that reflect a wide disciplinary range, including literary studies, musicology, history, and performance and visual studies.With this array we follow the recent move in the scholarly academy to allow interdisciplinary analysis to bridge the traditional divides that reflect the specialization of academic knowledge to the detriment of actual cultural and social processes. These essays provide rich, progressive, innovative directions in AfroAsian studies and invigorate the status of current thought on interracial encounters across multiple disciplines. This work does not just present a medley of essays with AfroAsian encounters in the Americas as their only common denominator; rather, we have taken Claire Jean Kim’s discussion of “racial triangulation” in Asian American studies as an invitation to further the discourse of AfroAsian encounters. Moving beyond the traditional black/white binary, the essays claim that to understand historical and contemporary AfroAsian encounters, the third, white, signifier, cannot be separated from a discussion as this signifier has informed or influenced AfroAsian binary encounters in the Americas, often without being visibly or literarily present.

Race in the past century and a half has not functioned within national or ethnic boundaries. The cultural and racial groupings examined by our contributors indicate the ways in which these groups do not exist in isolation but within complicated interactions, and they ask us to reevaluate how we define the category “race” itself. Perhaps the most important contribution of AfroAsian studies lies in its potential ability to disrupt the black/white binary that has so persistently characterized race and ethnic studies.Within the last ten years or so, the stability of the term “race” has come under growing scrutiny. Increasingly, race is considered to be not an ontological, coherent category but a dynamic system of affiliation, exclusion, and disavowal that is constantly being reinvented. This sense of “performing” race, of its contingent, assumed nature, has come to be understood in relation to processes of national self-conception, such that “race” is seen as a category produced by the nation itself. As Paul Gilroy, Lisa Lowe, and Etienne Balibar have pointed out in different ways, national and racial boundaries are concomitant; race subtends dominant nationalist discourses—it extends underneath or functions in opposition to definitions of the nation. While the strategic, tactical fluidity of terms like race and nation in this formula are crucial to our understanding of their unstable, changing processes, the logic of opposition that has underwritten this conception of race has also had the unfortunate effect of reinscribing its terms within binary relations and has somewhat perniciously limited our understanding of “race” to dichotomous models largely cast in terms of black and white. To this point, the great intervention in this binary system has been the assertion by postcolonial theorists of an “interstitial” position that occupies the spaces between these oppositions. But this is not our only option.

Scholars in Asian American studies have mounted energetic campaigns to move beyond the conceptual limitations of the racial binary in the last decade or so—we might think here of Claire Jean Kim’s above-mentioned discussion of “racial triangulation,” Gary Okihiro’s question “Is Yellow Black or White?,” and Frank Wu’s assertion that Asian American identities constitute something “beyond” either. For the most part, this work has demanded that we begin to understand race in terms of a polymorphous, multifaceted, multiply-raced immigration diaspora in combination with the histories of the African slave diaspora. However, race scholars still struggle to produce a flexible model that answers calls to move “beyond the binary.” In AfroAsian Encounters we contribute to this dialogue around racial formation by moving away from the focus on black-white interactions; moreover, we do so by examining the interactions of two racial groups now set up in opposition to one another within, for example, contemporary U.S. racial systems. We hope that the essays gathered here can intervene in these binary systems—methodologically, in terms of expanding the objects of race studies and, conceptually, through the expansion of the reigning paradigm of race studies away from blackness/antiblackness and whiteness/antiwhiteness schemas.

To understand contemporary U.S. racial systems, we must step more boldly into Europe’s past, as Paul Gilroy urges us. He writes:

We must be prepared to make detours into the imperial and colonial zones where the catastrophic power of race-thinking was first institutionalized and its distinctive anthropologies put to the test, above all, in the civilizing storms of colonial war. . . . That redemptive movement must be able to pass beyond a compensatory acknowledgement of Europe’s imperial crimes and the significance of its colonies as places of governmental innovation and experiment. The empires were not simply out there—distant terminal points for trading activity where race consciousness could grow—in the torrid zones of the world at the other end of the colonial chain. Imperial mentalities were brought back home . . . and altered economic, social, and cultural relations. . . . Europe’s openness to the colonial worlds it helped to make, might then be employed to challenge fantasies of the newly embattled European region as a culturally bleached or politically fortified space, closed off to further immigration.

With this mindset, Europeans “created” their “New World,” and the Americas became their dream, their geographically locatable paradise. That their creation contained problematic cross-cultural and cross-racial encounters from the start was not problematic for white ideology and imagination; the European colonial color hierarchy was designed to regulate such problems. Racial divisions were arranged according to the white/nonwhite binary. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782, 1793) John de Crèvecoeur provided a definition of the only true American “race”:

What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither a European nor the descendant of a European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced . . . and the new rank he holds. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. . . . The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared…

…Key to the history of interaction between the two groups is the process by which their intermixing was made possible. The first AfroAsian contact can be traced back to antiquity through the great spice routes that we normally think of as a characteristic of the Greco-Roman cultural world. These routes also provided the conditions for cultural and economic exchange between what we now refer to as Tanzania, Somalia, Egypt, Persia, India, and China, as these empires traded precious commodities such as cinnamon and myrrh (in fact, the archeological record is unclear as to whether the AfroAsian routes preceded the Greco-Roman involvement in the spice trade). Two millennia later, the early- to mid-nineteenth-century abolition of the slave trade produced the context of AfroAsian encounters of modernity. In the wake of the British abolition of the trade in African lives, cheap labor sources were needed to fuel British colonial industries around the globe. Indians were transplanted to southern Africa to build railroads, and Chinese were taken to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations. A similar economic necessity drove the importation of Asian labor to the United States. As the national debate over slavery grew over the course of the early nineteenth century, and more states (especially western states) were added to the “free soil” roster, the need for cheap labor did not abate. The early development of new states like California happened to coincide with the massive displacement of peoples in Guangdong province in the wake of the Opium Wars. As John Kuo Wei Tchen has pointed out, prior to the construction of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 it took two to three months to travel overland to San Francisco from Boston or New York, but only two weeks to travel from Canton by clipper ship, creating circumstances that made Chinese immigrants the perfect candidates to step into the labor shortage caused by booming industries in mining, shipping, transportation, and agriculture in California.  AfroAsian relations, then, are the issue and, potentially, the subversion of the European dream of “the new world.” Given the extraordinary richness of AfroAsian interactions of modernity, particularly those created within the shadow and against the force of this colonialist history, we have chosen to focus the volume within the period beyond emancipation. The colonial processes that created the Americas made possible the very connections our authors investigate.

For these AfroAsian encounters in the Americas, the twentieth century invented another problematic triangulated concept—the “model minority” myth. This construct enabled white society to pit Asian Americans against many other groups, not just African Americans. Yet, for the Afro-Asian mutual perspective of each other and for their encounters, the concept has carried additional problems: while Asian Americans have been constructed as model minorities, their economic success heralded as proof of the availability of the American Dream to all, African Americans have continued to be plagued by negative associations and to be systematically excluded from the American political economy.

Read the entire Introduction here.

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Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs on 2013-04-20 21:05Z by Steven

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity

Beacon Press
2001
232 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-080705011-8

Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

Selected as One of the Village Voice’s Favorite 25 Books of 2001

In this landmark work, historian Vijay Prashad refuses to engage the typical racial discussion that matches people of color against each other while institutionalizing the primacy of the white majority. Instead he examines more than five centuries of remarkable historical evidence of cultural and political interaction between Blacks and Asians around the world, in which they have exchanged cultural and religious symbols, appropriated personas and lifestyles, and worked together to achieve political change.

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Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America’s Future?

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Social Science, Social Work, United States on 2013-04-20 17:45Z by Steven

Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America’s Future?

Social Forces
Volume 73, Issue 4 (1995)
pages 1365-1383
DOI: 10.1093/sf/73.4.1365

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Rowena Fong, Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Professor in Services to Children and Families
University of Texas, Austin

Americans are rapidly becoming an ethnically plural people. Not only are there many different peoples in the U.S., but a sharply increasing number of individuals are coming to have and to recognize multiple ethnic strains within themselves. The current literature on ethnicity is inadequate, for it assumes that people have only single ethnic identities when, in fact, many people, like Pacific Islander Americans, have long held multiethnic identities. Drawing on survey data and interviews as well as literary sources, this article analyzes the features of Pacific Islander American multiethnic identity: it is situational; individuals commonly simplify their ethnicity in practical living; and people with multiple ancestries are admitted to group membership on much the same basis as people with single ancestries. The bases of Pacific Islander American ethnicity include ancestry, family, practice, and place.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Race and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-First Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Law, Media Archive, Philosophy, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2013-04-14 19:44Z by Steven

Race and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-First Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy

Cognella
2011
436 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-93555-160-7

Edited by:

Rashawn Ray, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Maryland, College Park

This book examines the major theoretical and empirical approaches regarding race/ethnicity. Its goal is to continue to place race and ethnic relations in a contemporary, intersectional, and cross-comparative context and progress the discipline to include groups past the Black/White dichotomy. Using various sociological theories, social psychological theories, and subcultural approaches, this book gives students a sociohistorical, theoretical, and institutional frame with which to view race and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

  • Race and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-First Century / Rashawn Ray
  • The Embedded Nature of ‘Race’ Requires a Focused Effort to Remove the Obstacles to a Unified America / Dr. James M. Jones
  • PART 1 THE SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT OF RACE
    • The Science, Social Construction, and Exploitation of Race / Rashawn Ray
    • Science of Race
      • The Evolution of Racial Classification / Tukufu Zuberi
    • Social Construction of Race
      • Racist America: Racist Ideology as a Social Force / Joe R. Feagin
    • Exploitation of Race
      • White Racism and the Black Experience / St. Clair Drake
  • PART 2 THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES
    • Racial Attitudes Research: Debates, Major Advances, and Future Directions / Rashawn Ray
    • Individual and Structural Racism
      • Racial Formation: Understanding Race and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
      • From Bi-racial to Tri-racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the U.S.A. / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
    • The Social Psychology of Prejudice and Perceived Discrimination
      • Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position / Herbert Blumer
      • Reactions Toward the New Minorities of Western Europe / Thomas F. Pettigrew
    • Racial Attitudes and Public Discourses
      • Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century / Lawrence D. Bobo
    • Race, Gender, and Sexuality
      • Getting Off and Getting Intimate: How Normative Institutional Arrangements Structure Black and White Fraternity Men’s Approaches Toward Women / Rashawn Ray and Jason A. Rosow
    • Colorism, Lookism, and Tokenism
      • “One-Drop” to Rule them All? Colorism and the Spectrum of Racial Stratifi cation in the Twenty-First Century / Victor Ray
    • Assimilation Perspectives: Group Threat Theory, Contact Theory, and Ethnic Conflict
      • The Ties that Bind and Those that Don’t: Toward Reconciling Group Threat and Contact Theories of Prejudice / Jeffrey C. Dixon
    • Citizenship, Nationalism, and Human Rights
      • Citizenship, Nationalism, and Human Rights / Shiri Noy
  • PART 3 THE CUMULATIVE PIPELINE OF PERSISTENT INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
    • The Cumulative Pipeline of Persistent Institutional Racism / Rashawn Ray
    • Individual and Structural Racism
      • A Different Menu: Racial Residential Segregation and the Persistence of Racial Inequality / Abigail A. Sewell
    • Education
      • Cracking the Educational Achievement Gap(s) / R. L’Heureux Lewis and Evangeleen Pattison
    • The Labor Market, Socioeconomic Status, and Wealth
      • Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination / Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan
      • Black Wealth/White Wealth: Wealth Inequality Trends / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
      • The Mark of a Criminal Record / Devah Pager
    • The Criminal Justice System
      • Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality / Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson
    • The Health Care System
      • Root and Structural Causes of Minority Health and Health Disparities / Keon L. Gilbert and Chikarlo R. Leak
  • PART 4 CONFRONTING THE PIPELINE: SOCIAL POLICY ISSUES
    • Engaging Social Change by Embracing Diversity / Rashawn Ray
    • When Is Affirmative Action Fair? On Grievous Harms and Public Remedies / Ira Katznelson
    • Engaging Future Leaders: Peer Education at Work in Colleges and Universities / Alta Mauro and Jason Robertson
    • What Do We Think About Race? / Lawrence D. Bobo
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