Mixed Race Studies

‘Beautiful Hybrids’: Caroline Gurrey’s Photographs of Hawai‘i’s Mixed-race Children

History of Photography
Volume 36, Issue 2 (May 2012)
pages 184-198
DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.654947

Anne Maxwell, Associate Professor of English
University of Melbourne, Australia

In the early years of the twentieth century the Hawaiian-based American photographer Caroline Gurrey produced a much praised set of the photographs of Hawai‘i’s ‘mixed race’ children. Critics have noted that stylistically Gurrey’s photographs belong to the pictorialist school and possibly even to the high art style of the Photo-Seccessionists, however research into her background and life, and the contexts in which these photographs were produced and consumed, suggests that if we want a fuller understanding of both Gurrey’s intentions and these photographs’ historical importance, we should also take note of the part they played in the burgeoning eugenics movement and indigenous Hawaiians’ reactions to American imperialism.

According to Naomi Rosenblum, professional women photographers did not emerge until the 1880s, following a shift in attitudes concerning female education and employment opportunities. When this occurred, there was a veritable explosion of female interest in the medium so that bv the early twentieth century not only were there thousands of amateur women photographers but the numbers taking up photography (or professional and artistic reasons were also large. Historians of photography have investigated the achievements of these early women photographers, with the result that over the last decade a rough consensus as to who were the most important has emerged. Not surprisingly, most of those singled out are from the USA, Great Britain, France and Germany, where the technology and the professional and social networks supporting early photography were most advanced. Missing are the professional women photographers who lived and worked in the smaller western and non-western countries adjacent or peripheral to these larger ones. Although fewer in number, these women warrant historical and critical attention, if only because the limited institutional support available in these places meant they had to labour that much harder to achieve recognition.

One such is the Hawai‘i-based American photographer Caroline Gurrey (whose name before marriage was Haskins), who was active during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Gurrey gained limited critical acclaim while she was alive, but because of her Hawaiian location, and because she was obliged to abandon her artistic ambitions for photojournalism, her name has now virtually sunk into oblivion. Of the few contemporary critics who know of Gurrey’s achievements, most agree that her most important works are the artistic portraits of Hawai‘i’s…

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Not Quite/ Just the Same/ Different: the Construction of Identity in Vietnamese War Orphans Adopted by White Parents

University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
2003
180 pages

Indigo Williams

Master of Arts by Thesis Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Global diasporas caused by wars carry many streams of people—in the 1970s one of these streams contained orphans from Vietnam delivered to white parents in the West. On arrival, the social expectation was that these children would blend seamlessly into the culture of their adoptive parents. Now some adoptees, as adults, reflect on their lives as ‘Asian’ or racially ‘Other’ children in white societies, charting the critical points in their maturation. This thesis interrogates their life histories to explore the role of birth-culture in the self-definition of people removed from that culture at birth or in childhood. Thirteen adult adopted Vietnamese participants were interviewed. These interviews provided qualitative data on issues of racial and cultural identity. These data were developed and analysed, using a framework drawn from symbolic interactionism and cultural studies, in order to reveal the interpersonal dynamics in which people were involved, and the broader cultural relations that sustained them.

The findings reveal that in early childhood the adopted Vietnamese identity process was shaped by a series of identifications with, and affirmations of, sharing their adoptive parents racial and cultural identity. Such identifications were then challenged once the adoptees entered society and were seen by others as different. The participants’ attempts to locate a secure sense of self and identity within the world they are placed in are disturbed by numerous uncertainties surrounding racial and cultural difference. One of the most crucial uncertainties is the adopted Vietnamese knowledge about their cultural background. While most felt they lacked positive knowledge about Vietnam and racial diversity, their sense of identity was unsettled by experiences with racism and negative cultural stereotypes throughout their late childhood to adolescence.

As their recognition and acceptance of their difference develops in adulthood, they experience a degree of empowerment due to their being able to access more knowledge about their cultural background and a greater appreciation of racial diversity. Many participants have formed closer ties with other people born in Vietnam, most notably other adoptees; most returned to visit Vietnam. The thesis concludes that those adoptees who were able to develop an understanding of the Vietnamese and other backgrounds to their complex identities, tended to be more integrated as adults than those who either rejected or were unable to come to terms with their Vietnamese ancestry.

Read the entire thesis here.

Finding culture in ‘poetic’ structures: The case of a ‘racially-mixed’ Japanese/New Zealander

Journal of Multicultural Discourses
Online Before Print: 2012-01-18
19 pages
DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2011.610507

Masataka Yamaguchi, Professor of Japanese Studies
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

In this article, I analyze discourse taken from my interviews with a ‘racially-mixed’ Japanese/New Zealander in which he represents his ethno-national identities to me in New Zealand. Drawing on the concept of ‘poetic’ structure, I reveal implicit assumptions in the patternings of discourse. Specifically, he discursively constructs his ‘racially-mixed’ identities by presupposing ‘pure race’ as a social fact. It is also shown that a powerful implicit assumption is the hegemony of whiteness, to which he responds in the construction of New Zealander identities. For comparative purposes, I further analyze interview data taken from another Japanese-heritage participant. Based on the analyses, I discuss implications for the analysis of multicultural discourses, and suggest that the reproduction of hegemonic values deserves more attention.

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Results of Inbreeding on Norfolk Island

Science  Magazine
Volume 65, Number 1693 (1927-06-10)
page x
DOI: 10.1126/science.65.1693.0x-s

Providing the original stock is sound, inbreeding among human beings results in no deterioration, physical or mental. Nor does mixture of widely differing races produce an inferior type.  Such are the conclusions of Dr. Harry L. Shapiro, ethnologist of the American Museum of Natural History, from a recent study of the inhabitants of Norfolk Island, a small island north of New Zealand.  They are the Tahitian-English half-castes whose history dates back  the mutiny of the crew of the ship Bounty in 1789.  At pesent there are more than 600 of these islanders and they are the descendants of twelve Tahitian women and nine Englishmen, part of the mutinous crew.

In 1789 the crew of the Bounty, a vessel sailing in the southern Pacific, mutinied, casting the captain adrift in a small boat and making for Tahiti. Here nine of the crew, fearing capture, sailed to Pitcairn, a small uninhabited island east of Tahiti. They took with them twelve Tahitian women and nine Tahitian men.  On Pitcairn the women were divided among the Englishmen as wives.  The Tahitian men were allowed no women. This lead to jealousy and the Tahitian men where killed, leaving no descendants.  The Tahitian women and the Englishmen all of them sound stock established a  line of half-castes.  They were completely isolated and they multiplied rapidly.

By 1856 the population was to great for the small space of Pitcairn. More that 150 moved to Norfolk Island which was at that time uninhabited. To-day there is a population of 600 on Norfolk Island and 175 on Pitcairn, all descendants of the original Tahitians and English.  It is of the Norfolk Islanders that Dr. Shapiro has made a study.

Dr. Shapiro has found these islanders to be of sound physique, taller than the average English and Tahitians, and of good mentality.  There is only one feeble-minded person, he said, on Norfolk Island.  Their education has of necessity been rudimentary for generations, but they are now provided with teachers by the Australian Government under the jurisdiction of which they come.  And the teachers are getting excellent results.

Thus, according to Dr. Shapiro, the Norfolk Islanders prove that, when the stock is sound to begin with, intensive in-breeding makes for no decrease in stamina.  Likewise, race mixture, in his opinion, brings go deterioration.

The idea that the half-caste is inferior, he maintained, comes largely from the fact that pure races have always look down on the half-caste. In Norfolk Island, he said, the half-caste has a chance to show his worth, for there is no discrimination against him, as the entire population is half-caste.  And Norfolk Island, he pointed out, is one of the only places in thw world with no stigma is attached to half-castes.

Migration and Race Mixture from the Genetic Angle

The Eugenics Review
Volume 51, Number 2 (July 1959)
pages 93-97

Sir Macfarlane Burnet, O.M., F.R.S., Director
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

This paper was prepared at the request of the Department of Immigration for discussion by delegates at the Australian Citizenship Convention. The views expressed in it are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department.

From the long-term point of view, immigration is chiefly important to Australia for the overall changes that it will eventually make in the genetic character of our population. Every growing country that receives substantial immigration from other parts of the world is in a sense a melting-pot from which new combinations of body-build, of skin colour, and even of personality, may eventually emerge. The process is immensely complex and can only be described in broad outline. In many ways our description can be no more than an attempt to interpret the human observations in terms of genetic ideas that have been developed from the study of such very different animals as fruit ffies and mice. Yet the very fact that basically similar gentic laws are evident in the behaviour of mice, of fruit flies, and of bacteria, makes us confident that they are equally applicable to man…

…Advantages and Disadvantages of Race Mixture

Extensive reading has failed to locate a single example where it can be shown that hybrid races or individuals living under circumstances where no social disability attached to their condition, were demonstrably inferior to both parents. Where healthy typical individuals of each race are concerned, the offspring can be expected to show greater physical health than either and-though here the evidence is slighter-a greater likelihood of exceptional mental ability.

Serious attempts have been made to show that where different racial groups mingle, there the likelihood of an outcropping of genius is highest. Kretchmer considered that where the Alpine race containing Neanderthal genes made contact with Nordics in the German speaking parts of Europe, there had appeared an exceptional number of outstanding men. Toynbee generalized that “the geneses of civilization require creative contributions from more races than one”. It seems to be the general rule that there is a lag period of a few centuries between the beginnings of race mixture in a given region and the full flowering of a new culture or civilization.

There are potential genetic disadvantages of race mixture and it is probably true that particularly in later generations than the primary hybrid, occasional individuals with discordant characters, e.g. teeth over-large for the jaw that carries them, can be seen. It has not been shown decisively that such discordancies are more frequent than in people not descended from recent racial mixture…

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The Mixed Blood in Polynesia

The Journal of the Polynesian Society
Volume 58, Number 2 (June, 1949)
pages 51-57

Ernest Beaglehole
Victoria University College

This paper was prepared as a contribution to a symposium on the position and problems of peoples of mixed blood in the Pacific area held during the Seventh Pacific Science Congress, February, 1949. Other contributors to the symposium discussed the situation in New Zealand and Hawaii. For this reason, though these areas are part of Polynesia, the position of the Maori and Hawaiian mixed bloods are not considered in the present context.

Over the past century and a half race-mixture has been fairly continuous in the Polynesian islands of the Pacific. From the time of their discovery most islands have carried a numerically small alien population which has mixed with the island population. A characteristic frontier society during this period, the alien elements were initially European men—runaway sailors, beachcombers, traders. Only the missionaries brought their wives. The other Europeans mated freely with the hospitable Polynesian islanders. Later intrusive elements were Asiatics, Indians, a few Negroes and a fewT Japanese. With the exception of the Indians, these later-comers also mixed with the indigenous inhabitants. The position today, therefore, is that the population of Polynesia consists of an unknown number of pure-blood Polynesians and an equally unknown number of mixed-bloods. Keesing is of the opinion that at least one-ninth to one-tenth of those who claim pure Polynesian ancestry today are of mixed heredity, and of those who claim to be non-natives, a proportion certainly are of mixed blood.

The number of mixed bloods in Polynesia is difficult to calculate with any accuracy for two reasons. One is the fact that over a century and a half of contact, distant inter-marriages of several generations ago may well have been forgotten, or the intermixture of European blood may have come from passing liaisons which were forgotten as readily…

Racial Ambiguity and Whiteness in Brian Castro’s Drift

Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia
Volume 2, Number 2, 2009
pages 113-126
ISSN 2013-6897

Marilyne Brun, Lecturer in Postcolonia Studies
Université Nancy 2

This article focuses on Drift, the fifth novel of contemporary Australian writer, Brian Castro, and concentrates on the ambiguous racial inscriptions of some of its characters. While white experimental British writer B.S. Johnson progressively becomes darker in the novel, his desire to escape his whiteness is complicated by another extreme, the albinism of Tasmanian Aboriginal Thomas McGann. This article discusses one essential aspect of these surprising fictional representations: the critique of whiteness that they articulate. The racial ambiguity of the two main characters offers a subtle reflection on Tasmania’s colonial legacy. Yet beyond Castro’s exploration of the contingencies of the Tasmanian context, the characters‟ racial ambivalence destabilises conventional representations of whiteness. The novel both exposes the metonymic nature of whiteness and critiques the specific modes of reading the body that are involved in preoccupations with whiteness.

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Cultural encounters and hyphenated people

The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia
Volume 1, 2009
pages 97-107
ISSN 1988-5946

Anne Holden Rønning, Professor Emerita
University of Bergen, Norway

Cultural encounters are a dominant feature of contemporary society. Identities are ever-changing ‘routes’ as Hall and others have stated, so we become insiders and outsiders to our own lives. The manifaceted expression of cultural belonging and its formation is illustrated by examples from Australasian writers who express not only the conflict of belonging to more than one culture, but also its inherent value. Such writers provide the reader with alternative ways of reading culture and illustrate the increasing trend to see ourselves as hyphenated people belonging nowhere specific in a globalised world.

In the move from a colonial to a post-colonial, multicultural, and transnational society critics have spoken of identity, identities, pluralism and hyphenated peoples. Globalization and extensive migration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have increased encounters between cultures and raised further questions of integration and assimilation. Matthews has defined culture as “the information and identities available from the global supermarket” (27). He sees culture as hyphenating in our materialistic society since the cultural supermarket, dominated by the mass media, leaves the ability to appropriate culture in an adequate manner socially to the individual rather than the group.

If we consider the manifaceted expression of cultural belonging and its formation, two of the most common encounters are linguistic and cultural, expressed in texts of different kinds in art, music, literature, or drama. The themes of many recent EASA conferences have underlined this aspect of Australian studies, from pluralism at the first conference, to maintaining the national, re-visioning, remembering, re-invention of itself, and translating cultures, to mention just some. In art, for example, this has been demonstrated by papers on the use of palimpsest in Japanese-Australian pottery, a fascinating picture of sculptures and vases with half Chinese and half Australian motifs. On another occasion it was shown how older colonial Australian landscape paintings were painted over, or had new features imposed on them by indigenous painters—for example, barbed wire, different indigenous signs—thus subverting and reclaiming the land. And, of course, literature has provided a plethora of examples of cultural encounters at all conferences. Brydon and Tiffin think of this kind of “cross-cultural interaction” in terms of flora, comparing it to a rhizome which spreads its roots out and shoots up in other places, yet retains its contact with the centre (1993, 12), symptomatic of the diversification of cultures and identities…

…Hyphenated people

Though the word ‘hyphenated’ has often been thought of in negative terms, in today’s society it is increasingly thought of as positive, indicating multiculturality—since the days of homogeneity of race are long gone. However, recently when speaking of this I have been met with a sense of derision—another attempt to make oneself different, another labelling. But are we not all hyphenated in some way, the two parts intertwined? An understanding of this could lead to a world less full of conflicts. Bhahba has discussed what happens when cultures meet, historically from the point of view of colonization, and today with immigration as the site for such exchange. He describes “[h]ybridity [as] a fraught, anxious and ambivalent condition. It is about how you survive, how you try to produce a sense of agency or identity in situations in which you are continually having to deal with the symbols of power or authority” (THES 1999). But he also acknowledges the mix of cultures he himself represents in this ironic description of himself as Mr. Hybrid: “The very process of colonization shifts certainties and sureties. It exposes the fictionality of certain ideas that are seen to be universal. (…) Hybridity is like the way I’m dressed – Indian jacket, silk scarf, corduroys and a collarless shirt from Italy. There you are, Mr. Hybrid” (THES 1999)

The hyphenated person retains parallel cultures, both influencing the other but yet remaining separate. This is most clearly seen in migrant and settler communities, but is equally relevant for all who no longer live in their so-called ‘country of origin’. Trinh-Minh-Ha, the American Vietnamese film critic, has written much on these issues as she sees film as a particular example of cross-cultural encounters both in viewer and maker as well as in text and performance. She envisages such encounters as often resulting in a bricolage, a pastiche, quoting Scott Momaday: “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves (…) The greater tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined” (‘Out There’ cited in Minh-Ha 8). For those migrating or of mixed racial and ethnic parentage literature has always had a vital role to play in disseminating and problematizing issues of hyphenation, from the time of Shakespeare’s Caliban onwards. In When the Moon Waxes Red Trinh Minh-Ha uses the moon as a symbol of the constant and yet the changing, and therefore I would suggest symbolic of how cultural encounters function. The title of the book refers to a belief in Chinese mythology that a red moon is a portent of coming calamity—the eclipse as dangerous. Just as the moon waxes and wanes, yet retains its form, so do our identities vary according to time and place, and the cultural encounters we meet…

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Pacific children of US servicemen for study

Otago Daily Times
University of Otago, New Zealand
2010-01-05

Allison Rudd

World War 2 brought two million United States servicemen to New Zealand and many Pacific Islands. Inevitably, many formed liaisons with local women and fathered possibly several thousand children. What happened to those babies, and, more than 60 years later, where are they now? Allison Rudd talks to University of Otago historian Prof Judith Bennett, who has won funding to try and trace the all-but forgotten offspring.

Judith Bennett was doing some research when she got sidetracked.

She was compiling information for a book on the environmental effect of the war on Pacific Island countries when she came across references to the mixed-race children of local women and United States servicemen.

Her interest was piqued.

“I was very curious because I could find very little on this topic.

“So it seemed to me there were questions that needed to be answered: How were these children accepted?

“Did their parentage affect their land rights?

“Did it affect their marriage prospects?

“How were their mothers characterised in their own societies?

“How did the US Government view marriage?

“How did the indigenous people view these relationships?

“Were they profitable, were they shameful, or were they a mixture?

“What have been the long-term effects of mixed parentage?

“These children would have looked different – their fathers were white or African American.

“What impact did that have on them as they were growing up and when they were adults?”

Now Prof Bennett hopes to satisfy her curiosity, having secured a $917,000 Marsden grant to embark on a three-year research project…

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Dreams and Nightmares of a White Australia: Representing Aboriginal Assimilation in the Mid-twentieth Century

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2009
257 pages
Weight: 0.410 kg, 0.904 lbs
Paperback ISBN:  978-3-03911-722-2
Series: Studies in Asia-Pacific “Mixed Race” (Volume 3)

Catriona Elder, Professor of Sociology
University of Syndney

By the mid-twentieth century the various Australian states began changing their approaches to Aboriginal peoples from one of exclusion to assimilation. These policy changes meant that Aboriginal people, particularly those identified as being of mixed heritage, were to be encouraged to become part of the dominant non-Aboriginal community—the Australian nation.

This book explores this significant policy change from a cultural perspective, considering the ways in which assimilation was imagined in literary fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on novels from a range of genres—the Gothic, historical romance, the western and family melodrama–it analyses how these texts tell their assimilation stories.

Taking insights from critical whiteness studies the author highlights both the pleasures and anxieties that the idea of Aboriginal assimilation raised in the non-Aboriginal community. There are elements of these assimilation stories—maternal love, stolen children, violence and land ownership—that still have an impact in the unsettled present of many post-colonial nations. By exploring the history of assimilation the author suggests ideas for a different future.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• CHAPTER 1: Writing a story of mixed-race relations in ‘white Australia’  (first 3 pages)
• CHAPTER 2: Mapping a ‘white Australia’: political and government responses to the ‘half-caste’ problem
• CHAPTER 3: Blood: elimination, assimilation and the white Australian nation in E. V. Timms’ The Scarlet Frontier
• CHAPTER 4: Making families white: Indigenous mothers, families and children in Gwen Meredith’s Blue Hills: the Ternna-Boolla Story
• CHAPTER 5: Haunted homes: children, desire and dispossession in Helen Heney’s The Leaping Blaze
• CHAPTER 6: Scopic pleasure and fantasy: visualising assimilation and the half-caste in Leonard Mann’s Venus Half-Caste
• CHAPTER 7: Dead centre: frontier relations in Olaf Ruhen’s Naked Under Capricorn
• CHAPTER 8: Conclusion
• Bibliography