Mixed Race Studies

Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Reasearch
Volume 11, Number 2, Article 24 (May 2010)
29 pages
ISSN: 1438-5627

José Ricardo Carvalheiro, Assistant Professor in the Communication and Arts Department
University of Beira Interior, Portugal

For many years the study of “race” relations was dominated by paradigms—of assimilationism and multiculturalism—which highlighted difference and division (as a problem, or a virtue). In more recent years the idea of racial and cultural mixing—creolization or hybridization—has become an important concept in ethnic and racial studies. The starting point of this article is the observation that the idea of racial and cultural mixture—hybridity or mestiçagem—was a key ideological feature of Portuguese colonialism in its last decades. If hybridity is not therefore a new discourse in Portugal, what is the place for it today and what kind of hybridity is being referred to? What might the Portuguese case tell us about discourses of hybridity more generally? The article explores these questions through a combined visual and linguistic analysis of the lifestyle magazine Afro as a site where contemporary discourses about “race” intertwine.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
3. The “African” Minority in Portugal
4. Afro, a Magazine in the Market
4.1 What does the existence of a lifestyle magazine such as Afro mean?
5. Racial Actors in Visual and Verbal Texts
6. Transnational Representations, “Race” Questions and Hybridity
7. Stories About Mixing: Layers of Discourse
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Author
Citation

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Phil Lynott: Famous For Many Reasons

Irish Migration Studies in Latin America
Volume 4, Number 3 (July 2006)
Published by The Society for Irish Latin American Studies

John Horan

Bronze statue of Phil Lynott on Harry Street, Dublin (by Paul Daly, cast by Leo Higgins, plinth hand-carved by Tom Glendon)

In view of the unique and colourful history of the ties between Ireland and Brazil that date back centuries, it is perhaps surprising that the most famous Irish-Brazilian was a mixed-race rock star from Dublin. Phil Lynott was one of Ireland’s first world-famous rock stars, and definitely the most famous black Irishman in the island’s history, long before the advent of a new era in the Republic that facilitated the immigration of people from various African nations from the 1990s. Lynott’s band, Thin Lizzy, was the first internationally successful Irish rock band, and Lynott himself was considered the biggest black rock star since Jimmy Hendrix.

Phil Lynott: THE ROCKER, a 2002 biography by Mark Putterford, begins with the sentence, “Phil Lynott was one of the most colorful and charismatic characters in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.” This sentence would be considered an understatement by those who knew him through all stages of his life. His family history was typical in some ways, but his mother’s personal history was anything but typical for Ireland in 1949, the year he was born.

Philomena Lynott was born in Dublin in 1930 to Frank and Sarah Lynott. She was the fourth of nine children, all of whom grew up in the working-class Crumlin district on the south side of Dublin. Economic hardships in the Republic prompted her to choose to move across the Irish Sea to Manchester to find work, while many of her friends went to Liverpool. Shortly after her arrival in Manchester, she was courted by a black Brazilian immigrant whose surname was Parris. To this very day, Philomena Lynott has never spoken publicly about her son’s father, so as to protect his privacy. She once said, “He was a fine, fine man, who did the decent thing and proposed marriage to me when I told him I was pregnant.” Philomena and her former boyfriend stayed in contact for five years after their son was born. However, when it became clear that marriage was no longer a possibility between the two, they drifted apart. It is said that Philip Lynott’s father returned to live in Brazil and started another family, which has always been the reason given for Philomena’s refusal to provide any information about the “tall, dark stranger” who was her son’s father, as she never wanted to disrupt his life with his new family. Several sources cite that the Brazilian made some level of financial contribution towards supporting his Irish son in the early years…

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In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2011-05-25

John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer

President Obama’s one-day visit to Ireland was a masterly orchestration of three visuals – one imaginary, two very real.

Imaginary visual: the apostrophe in O’Bama. “My name is Barack Obama,” he said in Dublin, “of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.” Anglo-Irish apostrophe, Kenyan last name, American tale…

…Obama was doing much more than playing to the folks at home, with a wink to Moneygall. He was doing no less than seeking to reverse American notions of race, origin, and ethnicity.

“Clearly, a political bet is being made here that this will make beautiful political theater for 2012,” says Matt Wray, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University. “But that isn’t where the conversation ends. There’s a performance here of race and ethnicity that does suggest the terms are changing in the U.S. These images of Obama quaffing Guinness as a son of Ireland really do strike even casual observers as historically new.”

Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

…Obama’s speech in Dublin told of Fulmouth Kearney, his grandfather’s grandfather, who got out of tiny Moneygall in 1850, ended up in Ohio, bought land, and started a line of middling, obscure, working Americans. How was Kearney to know his line would braid with a Kenyan line, to run within an American (yes) president? An American tale.

Gallagher says, “What Obama did is fantastic. He’s telling the truth: that ethnicity is absolutely fluid, and you can reclaim the full spectrum of your identity. It’s further blurring of the color line, and it gives permission to Americans, many of whom have incredibly diverse origins, to explore them all.”

As Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

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Drôle de Félix : A Search for Cultural Identity on the Road

Wide Screen
Volume 3, Number 1 (2011)
ISSN: 1757-3920

Zélie Asava

With the emergence of la culture beur in the 1980s—and the birth of a new type of filmmaking influenced by postcolonial politics, world cinema, the new hood films of the African-American community and its hip hop culture—questions of identity, multiculturalism and being mixed-race came to the fore.  Since then, many films have tackled the representation of France’s ethnic minorities onscreen and attempted to  move towards representing the dream 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal expressed of a ‘Mixed-Race France’. This article will explore representations of ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Drôle de Félix/The Adventures of Felix (1999), through the figure of Félix, a homosexual, mixed-race (French-North African) man searching for his absent father and his ‘true’ identity.  The film focuses on the demystification of imperialist absolutes and divisions to reveal what lies between, in the interstices. Through its focus on transgressive identity it transforms traditional representations to explore what lies beyond.  This article interrogates the representational schema of Drôle de Félix, by exploring the cinematic stereotypes and taboos challenged and maintained in the film in comparison to traditional beur cinema and established ideas of Maghrebi-French characters in French cinema.

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Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

HarperCollins
480 pages
2001
ISBN: 9780060959616

Hans J. Massaquoi (1926-2013)

This is a story of the unexpected. In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir—an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer’s spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door—or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

Prologue

To write of ones self, in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, and egotism, is a work within the ability of hut few; and I have little reason to believe that I belong to that fortunate few.
—Frederick Douglass

I could not agree more wich the above sentiments, expressed so eloquently over a century ago by the great abolitionist in the preface to his autobiography, My Bondage, My Freedom. If, like Mr. Douglass, I nonetheless decided to risk being thought of as weak, vain, and egocentric by making public the story of my life, it was mainly because of the persistent urging of persons whose literary judgment I felt was above reproach, such as my longtime friends Alex Haley, the author of Roots; Ralph Giordano, of Cologne, Germany, author of Die Bertinis; and my former employer and mentor. Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. Each convinced me that my experiences as a black youngster growing into manhood and surviving in Nazi Germany—an eyewitness to, and frequent victim of, both Nazi racial madness and Allied bombings—followed by my years in Africa were so unique that it was my duty as a journalist to share this rather different perspective on the Holocaust. Alex felt that because I was both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider, I had a rare perspective on some of the Third Reich’s major catastrophic events. He also urged me to record my equally unique experience of finding my own African roots.

Four fundamental aspects set the private hell I endured under the Nazis apart from both the pogroms suffered by my Jewish compatriots in Germany and from the racial persecution inflicted on my African-American brothers and sisters in the United States.

As a black person in white Nazi Germany, I was highly visible and thus could neither run nor hide, to paraphrase my childhood idol Joe Louis. Unlike African-Americans, I did not have the benefit of inherited survival techniques created and perfected by countless ancestors and passed down from generation to generation of oppressed people. Instead, I was forced to traverse a minefield of potential disasters and to develop my own instincts to tell me how best to survive physically and psychologically in a country consumed by racial arrogance and racial hatred and openly committed to the destruction of all “non-Aryans.”

Nazi racists, unlike their white American counterparts, did not commit their atrocities anonymously, disguised in white sheets and under the protection of night. Nor did they operate like some contemporary American politicians who advance their racist agendas by dividing black and white Americans with cleverly disguised code words about “unfair quotas,” “reverse discrimination,” and “states’ rights.” Racists in Nazi Germany did their dirty work openly and brazenly with the full protection, cooperation, and encouragement of the government, which had declared the pollution of Aryan blood with “inferior” non-Aryan blood the nation’s cardinal sin. For all practical purposes—except for the courageous and unflagging support I received from my German mother, who taught me to believe in myself by believing in me and my potential—I faced the constant threat that Nazi ethnic-cleansing policies posed to my safety alone. I faced this threat without the sense of security and reeling of belonging that humans derive from being members of a group, even an embattled one. Because of the absence of black females and the government-imposed taboo of race mixing, I had no legal social outlet when I reached puberty. Unlike the thousands of Africans and so-called “brown babies”—children of black GI fathers and German mothers—who reside in the Federal Republic of Germany today, there simply was no black population to speak of in Germany during the Hitler years, certainly none that I encountered. Not until long after the war did I learn that a small number of black Germans—the tragic so-called “Rhineland bastards” fathered by World War I French and Belgian colonial occupation troops—were exterminated in Hitler’s death camps.

Because Germans of my generation were expected to be fair skinned and of Aryan stock, it became my lot in life to explain ad nauseam why someone who had a brown complexion and black, kinky hair spoke accent-free German and claimed Germany as his place of birth. So let me state here once again, for the record, that I was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, because my grandfather, then consul general of Liberia to Hamburg, had brought with him his sizable family. His oldest son became my father after an intense courtship with my mother, a German nurse. Shortly before Hitler’s rise to power, my grandfather and father returned to Liberia, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves in an increasingly hostile racist environment…

Barack Obama’s Irish Roots

The Daily Beast
2011-04-11

Tom Sykes

President Obama set down in Dublin Monday [2011-05-23] as part of a six-day European trip that will include a stop in Moneygall, the tiny town where his great-great-great grandfather was born. In anticipation, the 350 people who live there have painted their homes and opened a coffee shop called “Obama’s café.” Tom Sykes on the president’s Irish roots.

The great, but generally unvocalized, astonishment of the people of Moneygall is not so much that one of their descendants is president of the United States, but that one of their descendants is black. You see, a lad going off to America and doing well for himself … well, all the folks in the pub drinking their pints of Guinness can get their heads around that story; sure, wasn’t JFK the most famous Irishman of all?

But a black man? From Moneygall? What?…

…But the fact remains: Moneygall is very, very white. There are no black people living in the village, although there is a “very nice Indian family” living in the housing estate outside town. But Moneygall is not unusual in that respect; rural Ireland is very, very white. The 2006 census showed that just 1.06 percent of Irish citizens are black, and outside major city centers, black people are still a rarity. In the countryside, the presence of black people is usually commented on. Inadvertent racism pervades conversation and society, both polite and impolite. Mixed-race people, for example, are often referred to as “half-castes” or “half-and-halfs.”…

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The Subject in Black and White: Afro-German Identity Formation in Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Autobiography Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben

Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture
Volume 21 (2005)
pages 62-84
DOI: 10.1353/wgy.2005.0012
E-ISSN: 1940-512X;Print ISSN: 1058-7446

Deborah Janson, Associate Professor of Foreign Languages
West Virginia University

Black Germans still experience prejudice and social isolation based on their appearance. Alhough they are born and raised in Germany, their fellow citizens often do not accept them as Germans because of their skin color. Such social exclusion makes it difficult for Black Germans to define for themselves who they are and where they belong. Yet through their own community-building efforts and the transnational diasporic interactions with Blacks in other countries, Black Germans are developing the means to resist marginalization and discrimination, to gain social acceptance, and to construct a cultural identity for themselves. This essay explores these and other aspects of Afro-German identity formation via an examination of Ika Hügel-Marshall’s autobiography, a work that, until now, has received little scholarly attention despite its relevance to the ongoing—albeit relatively new—Black European identity movement. As an “occupation baby” of mixed-race origins who was raised in a Catholic home for children with special needs, Hügel-Marshall’s transformation from a neglected and abused child into an empowered and politically active adult is inspiring, while her experiences with racism are paradigmatic for the Black-German experience.

French colonial and post-colonial hybridity: condition métisse

Journal of European Studies
Volume 28, Number 1 (1998)
pages 103-120
DOI: 10.1177/004724419802800108

Dina Sherzer, Professor Emeritus of French and Italian and Comparative Literature
The University of Texas, Austin

One of the central issues which shapes and agitates contemporary France, as well as other European countries, is that of identity. Multiple discourses on French identity are crisscrossing France today and are channelled in two different domains—a revisiting of the colonial past, and a reflection on what constitutes contemporary Frenchness. Since the mid-1980s a cultural phenomenon has emerged in France which involves the rediscovery, reassessment and representation of the Empire, colonial politics and ideology, and colonial life. The colonial moment of France’s past (1830-1962), which had been repressed and censured, is now reappearing in studies by historians, sociologists and anthropologists. Film directors and novelists have contributed to this growing interest in the colonies by their imaginings and refigurings of the colonial past. Studies of the colonial period have shown that, based on a set of asymmetrical arrangements, life in the contact zone was organized according to two worlds whereby the colonized were subservient to and dominated by the colonizers. French hegemony was concretized by division and segregation based on race and economics. The French were considered pure and therefore superior, while the Others, the colonized, were considered inferior and somehow savage and impure. What was of utmost importance in the colonies was to preserve French identity; and life in multiracial settings fostered and exacerbated racial consciousness.

It was also in the mid-1980s, as France was becoming increasingly multi-ethnic with a growing population of individuals from the ex-colonies of Africa and North Africa, that the notion of French identity became a national debate, stirring up the country on the right and the left. And it is now possible to speak of a ‘logique contradictorielle’ because, as has been noted, France is ‘un pays de meteques avec une tres forte ideologie antimeteque’. It is a country which has constructed its identity on the concept of universality, and yet particularism is thriving under the impulse of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his followers. As a result the country is divided by two contradictory attitudes: the desire for ethnic purity and xenophobia on one hand, and for tolerance, acceptance of the Other and celebration of contacts, mixings and ‘metissages’ on the other hand. Thus notions such as to be Francais-Francais, Francais-non Francais, or non-Francais; the presence in cities and outskirts of cities of a multiracial population, referred to as ‘les trois B’ (Blacks, Blancs, Beurs); and questions of immigration, integration and assimilation are constantly in the news, in political debates, in journalistic writings, and in films.

Because of the cohabitation of colonizers and colonized, and because of immigration of individuals from the former colonies to France, mixed marriages or unions took place in the colonies and are more and more frequent in contemporary France. For instance in 1994, 22% of second-generation Algerians were married to French individuals born of French parents. Nowadays hybrid individuals constitute a significant part of the French population. They are referred to as, and call themselves ‘sang meles’, ‘croises’or ‘metis’. Many well known personalities in sports, politics and the arts are metis and their hybridity is often mentioned and underscored by the media. Thus it is well known that the actress Isabelle Adjani has a Maghrebi father and a German mother; Raphaëlle Delaunay, a dancer at the Paris opera, has a father from Martinique and a mother from Alsace; Harlem Desir, the anti-racist activist, has an Antillean father and an Alsatian mother; Yannick Noah, the ex-tennis champion now pop singer, has a father from Cameroon and a French mother from Alsace; the lawyer Jacques Verges is Eurasian. Concomitant with and participating in the revisiting of the colonial past and the thinking about the post-colonial present, a number of studies, films, novels and autobiographies have appeared which engage and articulate with ethnicity and identity in focusing on hybrid, mixed-blood, metis individuals; they highlight the fact that if racial mixing, hybridity and ‘metissage’ were of utmost concern during the Empire, in the contact zone, now the same concern is manifesting itself in post-colonial France.

In my discussion I will draw on a representative selection of films and texts together with relevant scholarly studies. The presentation of the ‘condition metisse’ in colonial times appears in the 1988 film by Martinican director Euzhan Palcy, Rue cases-negres, autobiographies such as Kim Lefevre’s Metisse blanche (1990), Dany Carrel’s L’Annamite (1991) adapted into a telefilm with the same title screened in June 1996 on TF1, and a 1993 autobiographical essay entitled Metis by Patrice Franchini. Several novels set in the colonies, from the 1980s to the present, also present metis characters. Examples are the 1930 novel by Erwan Bergot set in Indochina, Le Courrier de Saigon, reedited in 1990, L’Amant by Marguerite Duras from 1988 and Annaud’s 1991 adaptation of it, as well as a 1994 novel by Régine Desforges, Route de la soie. Set in contemporary France, Leïla Sebbar’s Le Chinois vert d’Afrique (1984) and Marie N’Diaye’s En famille (1990) have hybrid individuals as central characters. Films also take on this topic as a subtext, as in Jean-Loup Hubert’s La Reine blanche (1991). Goyav, a popular magazine newly created and found at newsstands in public places, devoted its third issue in June 1996 in large part to ‘la condition metisse’ with articles and interviews about this topic. In these renderings of ‘la condition metisse’, set in the colonies and in post-colonial France, I propose to examine how hybrid individuals have been constructed, what identity they have been given and how they have been made to live and perceive their hybridity. Then I will discuss the significance of the emergence of such texts in the context of contemporary France and, more specifically, examine how these cultural micro-expressions in popular and high culture shape and participate in the creation of the mood, mentality, and attitudes of contemporary France alongside current events, political and sociological writings, and TV debates.

Metissage and colonialism

Metissage is a term invented during the colonial period, as mixed-blood children were born from relationships between French men and Asiatic, African and North African women in the colonies. It had negative connotations, implying miscegenation, mongrelization and impurity. After World War I successive waves of immigration brought to France Italians, Poles and Spaniards who married French individuals and had children, but no specific term was used for these European mixed-blood individuals. Thus, language already shows that mixing between Europeans was acceptable, whereas when it took place with a coloured Other it was marked negatively. The study of rules, regulations and attitudes during the Empire reveals that metis individuals were considered to be degenerate and represented a threat to racial purity. Yet in the colonies colonizers and colonized were in very intimate contact; native women were available and became sexual partners as the colonizers desired it. The colonies were places where the French appropriated land, goods and women, and in fact one of the incentives for going to the colonies was the promise of adventures which entailed unlimited access to women. Postcards, posters and advertisements from the period enticed prospective colonizers, travellers and soldiers by displaying native women and young girls. Exotic sexual encounters were part of the ‘imaginaire colonial’. In Metis Franchini proposes the following analysis of today’s connotations of the word Eurasian, which applies to the more…

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Memories of Interracial Contacts and Mixed Race in Dutch Cinema

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (2007)
Pages 69 – 82
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082947

Pamela Pattynama, Professor of Media and Culture
University of Amsterdam

This essay explores the (post)colonial relationship between the present-day Netherlands and its former colony the Dutch East Indies—a continuing relationship that has generated a wide range of memories. Exploring two Dutch films on the colonial past and comparing them with two autobiographical writings of Dutch writers of mixed race, it argues that the recurrent theme of interracial contacts emerges as the privileged metaphor for the relation between Holland and its ex-colony. A recurring feature of Dutch representations of interracial contacts, it is specifically the figure of the Indonesian concubine, the so-called nyai, which continues to obsess the male gaze. The essay concludes that through their focus on loss, separation and failure in representing interraciality, the films speak primarily to the incapacity of the Dutch nation to engage effectively with its colonial past.

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Communicating With Children of Interracial/Interethnic Parentage

IUC Journal of Social Work Theory & Practice
Issue 4 (2001/2002)

Toyin Okitikpi

Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity. Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity.

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