Mixed Race Studies

“Representing” Anglo-Indians: A Genealogical Study

University of Melbourne
1999
350 pages

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer
School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University, Australia

Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English with Cultural Studies

The ‘mixed-race’ Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community was born of the European colonisation of India some four hundred years ago. This dissertation examines how historians, writers, colonial administrators, social scientists and immigration officials represented Anglo-Indians between 1850 and 1998. Traditionally, Anglo-Indians have sought to correct perceived distortions or misrepresentations of their community by disputing the accuracy of deprecatory stereotypes produced by ‘prejudicial’ writers. While the need to contest disparaging representations is not in dispute here, the present study finds its own point of departure by questioning the possibility of (re)presenting an undistorted Anglo-Indian identity.

The dissertation functions at three levels. First, it examines the construction of Anglo-Indian stereotypes in various discursive practices, offering a critique of the knowledges and images produced within specific literary and non-literary texts. Second, it retrieves the ‘buried’ texts of the Anglo-Indian community, which have been ‘disqualified’ by official discourses. Third, drawing on postcolonialism and poststructuralism, it mounts a practical argument against mimeticism or image analysis by demonstrating how complex discursive and ideological currents mediate stereotypical representations. More specifically, it enumerates the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the production of Anglo-Indian stereotypes, arguing that such figures are historically variable and internally contradictory. Using Foucault’s genealogical method as a starting point, the dissertation examines (mis)representations of Anglo-Indians as they meet and disperse within an interactive network of power/knowledge relations.

This strategy not only accounts for the emergence of pejorative stereotypes, but encourages the articulation of Anglo-Indian identities in their diversity. This contrasts with the impractical compulsion, articulated by Anglo-Indian image critics, to build a homogeneous community.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Contents
• Acknowledegments
• Introduction
• 1 (Mis)representing Anglo-Indian History
• 2 ‘Pangs of Nature and Taints of Blood’: The Anglo-Indian ‘Stereotype’ in Raj Literature
• 3 Sexual Relations, Colonial Governmentality and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 4 Imperial Power and Regimes of Truth: Racial Science and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 5 ‘Poor Relations’: Social Science and ‘The Eurasian Problem’
• 6 Ambivalent Stereotypes: Kipling, Rushdie, Chandra and Sealy
• 7 ‘The Good Australians’: Multiculturalism and the Anglo-Indian Diaspora
• 8 Conclusion: ‘Bringing it All Back Home’
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Being Anglo-Indian: Practices and Stories from Calcutta

Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
2005
263 pages

Robyn Andrews, Lecturer, Social Anthropology Programme
Massey University

A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This thesis is an ethnography of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta. All ethnographies are accounts arising out of the experience of a particular kind of encounter between the people being written about and the person doing the writing. This thesis, amongst other things, reflects my changing views of how that experience should be recounted. I begin by outlining briefly who Anglo-Indians are, a topic which in itself alerts one to complexities of trying to get an ethnographic grip on a shifting subject. I then look at some crucial elements that are necessary for an “understanding” of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the work that has already been done in relation to Anglo-Indians, the urban context of the lives of my research participants and I discuss the methodological issues that I had to deal with in constructing this account.

In the second part of my thesis I explore some crucial elements of the lives of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the place of Christianity in their lives, education not just as an aspect of socialisation but as part of their very being and, finally, the public rituals that now give them another way of giving expression to new forms of Anglo-Indian becoming.

In all of my work I was driven by a desire to keep close to the experience of the people themselves and I have tried to write a “peopled” ethnography. This ambition is most fully realised in the final part of my thesis where I recount the lives of three key participants.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Representations of colonial intimacy in Anglo-Indian narratives

Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
2009
272 pages

Nandini Sengupta

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century manifestations of colonial intimacy in a range of texts produced by Anglo-Indians, capturing their colonial experience from the 1830s to the 1880s. Through these texts, I examine the ideological implications of interracial intimacy in a range of relationships that were established between the Indians and British in the ‘contact zone.’ The first two chapters examine the letters of Emily Eden and Fanny Parks to probe British women’s experience of India. I argue that the women forge an alternative space of intimacy that defies the notion that Anglo-Indian women remained on the periphery of Indian space as female ethnographers using their pen and pencil to engage in the act of colonial appropriation. Instead, such intimacies and attachments produce an alternative knowledge about India that expand our understanding of colonial interactions. In the third chapter, I read Philip Taylor’s novel Seeta (1872), which recuperates the events of the Sepoy Uprising of 1857. Taylor composes a story of interracial love and marriage between an English administrator and a Hindu widow. Probing the manifestations and ideological import of the sexual and emotional affinities for colonial relations in the moment of the Uprising, I argue that the interracial intimacy in the novel ultimately translates itself into an exercise of punishing the recalcitrant Indian man by embracing the compliant, loyal Indian woman. The final chapter continues the examination of interracial heterosexual intimacy through a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories contained in the volume Plain Tales from the Hills. In particular, I probe his delineations of interracial heterosexual intimacy between various officers of empire and socially marginalized Indian women belonging to different ethnic communities of India to construct an argument about the operations of class in colonial India.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Illustrative Material
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The British Woman Traveler in India: Diplomatic Intimacy and Hetero-Social Bonding in Emily Eden’s Up the Country
• Chapter Two: The British Woman Traveler in India: Cultural Intimacy and Interracial Kinship in Fanny Parks’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim In Search of the Picturesque
• Chapter Three: Interracial Love, Marriage and Female Friendship in Philip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta
• Chapter Four: “Behind the Wooden Gate”: Rudyard’s Kipling’s Stories of Love and Betrayal
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Curriculum Vita
• List of Illustrative Material
  • Page 50: Map of India in 1836
  • Page 89: Frontispiece from Fanny Parks’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque
• Acknowledgements

Black and White Both Cast Shadows: Unconventional Permutations of Racial Passing in African American and American Literature

University of Arizona
2012
220 pages

Derek Adams

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

This dissertation proposes to build upon a critical tradition that explores the formation of racial subjectivity in narratives of passing in African-American and American literature. It adds to recent scholarship on passing narratives which seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the connections between the performance of racial norms and contemporary conceptions of “race” and racial categorization. But rather than focusing entirely on the conventional mulatta/o performs whiteness plot device at work in passing literature, a device that reinforces the desirability of heteronormative whiteness, I am interested in assessing how performances of a variety of racial norms challenges this desirability. Selected literary fiction from Herman Melville, Mary White Ovington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and ZZ Packer provides a rich opportunity for analyzing these unconventional performances. Formulating a theory of “black-passing” that decenters whiteness as the passer’s object of desire, this project assesses how the works of these authors broadens the framework of the discourse on racial performance in revelatory ways. Racial passing will get measured in relation to the political consequences engendered by the transgression of racial boundaries, emphasizing how the nature of acts of passing varies according to the way hegemonic society dictates racial enfranchisement. Passing will be situated in the context of various modes of literary representation—realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism—that register subjectivity. The project will also explore in greater detail the changing nature of acts of passing across gendered, spatial, and temporal boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ABSTRACT
• INTRODUCTION: FOR COLOREDS ONLY?: RACIAL PASSING AND A REGIME OF LOOKING
• CHAPTER ONE: AS BLACK AS IT GETS: PERFORMING BLACKNESS IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
• CHAPTER TWO: THIS AIN’T BLACKFACE: WHITE PERFORMANCES OF BLACK AUTHENTICITY IN MARY WHITE OVINGTON’S THE SHADOW
• CHAPTER THREE: IMAGINING BLACK AND WHITE OTHERS: BLACK PASSING IN POST-RACIAL AMEICAN LITERATURE
• CONCLUSION: RACIAL PASSING LITERATURE AND AN AMERICAN USEABLE PAST
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.

Métis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of Métis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885-1980

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
March 2009
270 pages

Jonathan Anuik, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Alberta

A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

In the late-nineteenth century, Métis families and communities resisted what they perceived to be the encroachment of non-Aboriginal newcomers into the West. Resistance gave way to open conflict at the Red River Settlement and later in north central Saskatchewan. Both attempts by the Métis to resist the imposition of the newcomer’s settlement agenda were not successful, and the next 100 years would bring challenges to Métis unity. The transmission of knowledge of a Métis past declined as parents and grandparents opted to encourage their children and youth to pass into the growing settler society in what would become Saskatchewan. As parents restricted the flow of Métis knowledge, missionaries who represented Christian churches collaborated to develop the first Northwest Territories Board of Education, the agent responsible for the first state-supported schools in what would become the province of Saskatchewan. These first schools included Métis students and helped to shift their loyalties away from their families and communities and toward the British state. However, many Métis children and youth remained on the margins of educational attainment. They were either unable to attend school, or their schools did not have the required infrastructure or relevant pedagogy and curriculum. In the years after World War II, the Government of Saskatchewan noticed the unequal access to and achievement of the Métis in its schools. The government attempted to bring Métis students in from the margins through infrastructural, pedagogical, and curricular adaptations to support their learning.

Scholars have unearthed voluminous evidence of missionary work in Canada and have researched and written about public schools. As well, several scholars have undertaken research projects on Status First Nations education in the twentieth century. However, less is known about Métis’ interactions with Christian missionaries and in the state-supported or publicly funded schools. In this dissertation, I examine the history of missions and public schools in what would become Saskatchewan, and I enumerate the foundations that the Métis considered important for their learning. I identify Métis children and youth’s reactions to Christian and public schools in Saskatchewan, but I argue that Métis families who knew of their heritages actively participated in Roman Catholic Church rituals and activities and preserved and protected their pasts. Although experiences with Christianity varied, those with strong family ties and ties to the land adjusted well to the expectations of Christian teachings and formal public education. Overall, I tell the story of Métis children and youth and their involvement in church and public schooling based on how they saw Christianity, education, and its role on their lands and in their families. And I explain how Métis learners negotiated Protestant and Roman Catholic teachings and influences with the pedagogy and curriculum of public schools.

Oral history forms a substantial portion of the sources for this history of Métis children and youth and church and public education. I approached the interviews as means to generate new data – in collaboration with the people I interviewed. Consequently, I went into the interviews with a list of questions, but I strove to make these interviews conversational and allow for a two-way flow of knowledge. I started with contextual questions (i.e. date of birth, school attended, where family was from) and proceeded to probe further based on the responses I received from the person being interviewed and from previous interviews. As well, I drew from two oral history projects with tapes and transcripts available in the archives: the Saskatchewan Archives Board’s “Towards a New Past Oral History Project ‘The Métis’” and the Provincial Archives of Manitoba’s Manitoba Métis Oral History Project. See appendices A and B for discussion of my oral history methodology and the utility of the aforementioned oral history projects for my own research…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Passing as White: The Life Altering Effects on Loved Ones

Southern Connecticut State University
May 2006
122 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1435422
ISBN: 9780542641824

Kathleen Daubney

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Science

This thesis analyzes the theme of passing in Harlem Renaissance literature and deals with the consequences that such transitions to white society had on the passers’ friends and relatives. Choices that one person makes can have a domino and long lasting effect on his or her family and friends. This study focuses on: Passing by Nella Larsen, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson, “Passing,” by Langston Hughes, and Comedy: American Style and Plum Bun both by Jessie Fauset. This thesis discusses if the family and friends have knowledge of the passing, if they had a voice in the novel, and if the children had knowledge of their heritage. It also discusses the effects passing had on the families and friends of the passers, along with their responses.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PASSING AS WHITE: THE LIFE ALTERING EFFECTS ON LOVED ONES
• FAUSET’S PLUM BUN: PASSING AND RETURNING
• LARSEN’S PASSING: ESCAPE, WEALTH, OR APPEARANCE
• THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN: WHITE, BLACK, WHITE?
• HUGHES “PASSING”: I LOVE YOU, BUT
• COMEDY AMERICAN STYLE: OLIVIA’S PASSING, THE FAMILY’S ESCAPE
• CONCLUSION: TO PASS OR NOT TO PASS
• REFERENCES

Purchase the dissertation here.

Mulatto Bend: Free People of Color in Rural Louisiana, 1763-1865

Tulane University
2012-04-02
307 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3519906
ISBN: 9781267512932

Johanna Lee Davis Smith

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2012 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation examines community and identity formation among free people of color in rural Louisiana between 1763 and 1865. The group studied here used the family, community, and financial benefits available to them as the mixed-race descendants of European and African ancestors in order to set themselves apart from the larger enslaved community and to avoid possible re-enslavement. Atlantic World influences played a key part in the establishment of Mulatto Bend, a small community of white and free black residents located on the Mississippi River in close proximity to Baton Rouge. Ideas of race and the paternalism of the French period resulted in a group of mixed-race offspring of French men and African women who were freed by their fathers and sometimes received financial assistance from them. Spanish control of Louisiana resulted in the even more relaxed environment in which authorities hungry to find settlers suitable to populate and guard their colony freely granted land to free people of color as well as whites. The community which developed was constituted of free mixed-race individuals who were property-owning Catholics, who intermarried, lived in a single geographical area, and cooperated in almost all facets of social, legal, and economic life in order to maintain their identity as a group. The records of the Spanish government of West Florida, parish probate documents, church parish sacramental records, and census records provide the major sources of information regarding the community. While quite successful during the Spanish period, the community began to decline in size by the 1830s as a result of financial stress brought on by general economic malaise and the sociopolitical hardening of the American period. Finally, emancipation removed the major difference between free people of color and slaves, forcing the former to search for ways to maintain their pre-emancipation social and economic status, most of which had been eroded by the depredations of war. This study will add to the body of knowledge regarding the lives of free people of color in the Gulf South who did not live in the more intensely studied city of New Orleans.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Assimilating Hawai‘i: Racial Science in a Colonial “Laboratory,” 1919-1939

University of Minnesota
July 2012
322 pages

Christine Leah Manganaro

A DISSERTATION IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation demonstrates how American physical anthropologists and sociologists working in Hawai‘i framed the biological and cultural assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into Americanness as natural rather than ideological, thus naturalizing the islands’ incorporation into the United States as a story about integration rather than colonization. Scientists argued that mixing in this “racial laboratory” improved the quality of the majority non-white population, that migration and colonization were features of a natural historical trajectory of Americanization, and that race relations in the islands were the product of a human ecology that went hand in hand with capitalist development. All of these ideas became the racial common sense that traveled to the continental U.S. and perpetuated American amnesia about empire.

This project revisits the historiography of the supposed retreat of scientific racism and, by closely examining the methods, actual data, and conclusions of scientists whose work shaped their disciplines, demonstrates how racialist thinking persisted in work that has been characterized as either questioning the race concept, as politically progressive, or both. Taking cues from studies of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and recent debate about the actuality of a retreat of scientific racism in the United States, this dissertation demonstrates how treating assimilation as a natural process that needed to be better understood, rather than a discursive project of colonial governance, legitimated American power in the islands.

During a period when scientists and politicians alike were interested in fitness, degeneracy, and the consequences of immigration and miscegenation as part of debates about national progress, scientists viewed Hawai‘i as a laboratory where they could conduct research on heredity and cultural change that was difficult or impossible to do in the continental United States. American social scientists working in Hawai‘i framed the processes they studied, particularly the assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into American culture and identity, as natural rather than ideological. American scientists with sometimes opposing political orientations such as Louis R. Sullivan and L.C. Dunn concluded that, unlike mixed race people generally and especially “mulattoes,” Chinese-Hawaiian “hybrids” were actually improvements on their supposedly pure parents (chapter 1).

Physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, in his study of racial plasticity among migrants in a changed environment, developed few concrete findings, but helped establish Hawai‘i as a long-term human research site. Sociologist Romanzo Adams, who was trained at the University of Chicago, produced the history of Hawai‘i as a history of admixture that exaggerated the degree of interracial reproduction and suggested that the territorial population was well on its way to complete biological amalgamation (chapter 3).

Through a series of interviews with couples in interracial marriages and the collection of student papers about identity and racial prejudice, many of which contradicted Adams’ findings and predictions, graduate researcher Margaret M. Lam recorded the testimony of residents who both resisted certain types of racialization as they also participated in the construction and maintenance of racial boundaries and meanings (chapter 4).

Finally, sociologist Andrew Lind, framed social inequality and tense race relations in the territory as a product of competition for jobs and housing, a “natural” feature of “human ecology,” rather than a product of intentional labor control and government decisions (chapter 5). This advanced the idea that social conditions in Hawai‘i were a natural product of modernization rather colonization.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Biologically Better” Studies and Hybrids: The Persistence of Racialism in Studies of Race Mixing in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1916-1932
• Chapter 2: A Racial Laboratory for the World: Establishing Studies of Race Mixing, Migration, and Environment in the 1930s
• Chapter 3: Turning a Colony into a Melting Pot: Romanzo Adams’ Interracial Marriage in Hawaii and the Natural History of Hawai‘i’s Americanization, 1919-1937
• Chapter 4: Narrating Colonial Racial Formation: Race Consciousness and Identity in the Vernacular, 1928-1936
• Chapter 5: Defining an “Island Community”: Race Relations as Ecological Succession, 1927-1939
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Miscegenation in the Marvelous: Race and Hybridity in the Fantasy Novels of Neil Gaiman and China Miéville

University of Western Ontario
2012
120 pages

Nikolai Rodrigues

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English

Fantasy literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries uses the construction of new races as a mirror through which to see the human race more clearly. Categorizations of fantasy have tended to avoid discussions of race, in part because it is an uncomfortable gray area since fantasy literature does not yet have a clear taxonomy. Nevertheless, race is often an unavoidable component of fantasy literature. This thesis considers J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a taproot text for fantasy literature before moving on to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, both newer fantasy novels which include interesting constructions of race and raise issues of miscegenation and hybridity. This thesis moves towards an understanding of what purpose creating and utilizing races serves, and how fantasy literature allows for the identification and potential resolution of a number of human anxieties regarding race.

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Creating the Covers of Our Own Books: A Look at Multiracial Identity Communication

Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington
December 2011
63 pages

Helyse Sina Turner

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty in Communication and Leadership Studies School of Professional Studies Gonzaga University, In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Communication and Leadership Studies

Today’s world is diverse. Different races, ethnicities, and cultures increasingly intermingle and the population of multiracial people has increased. What is increasingly clear is that first-glance judgments about a person’s racial background can no longer be made with presumption of guaranteed accuracy. And socially, multiracial people are burdened with explaining who they are racially to others. To better understand this situation, this study examined the ways in which multiracial people communicate their backgrounds. Four research questions were posed, targeting nonverbal communication of race, reasons behind decisions to racially self-identify in a specific way, effect of the increasing multiracial population in the United States, and racial identity revision. Data was gathered through a survey and focus groups. The data was then examined using various identity, racial, biracial, and multiracial theories as lenses. The results of the study shed light on multiracial communication, nonverbal expressions of race, comfort and self-identity. Also significant is the adaptation of Root’s biracial theory and Renn’s multiracial college student theory to form another theory regarding multiracial identity development. Suggestions and recommendations for future research are also provided to help better understand multiracial communication and multiracial self-identification.

Read the entire thesis here.