Mixed Race Studies

From exclusion and alienation to a ‘multi-racial community’: The image of the métis in New Caledonian literature

International Journal of Francophone Studies
ISSN: 13682679
Volume 8 Issue 3
December 2005
DOI: 10.1386/ijfs.8.3.305/1

Peter Brown 

In her 2005 New Year’s greetings, Marie-Noëlle Thémereau, the President of the New Caledonian government, expressed her confidence in the future of her multiracial country, echoing the recognition of New Caledonia’s demographic make-up in official discourse since the Noumea Accord (1998). This view of New Caledonian society has not, however, always been so optimistic or encompassing. The island’s mixed population of some 230,000 has given rise over the years to social and political tensions. In this context, representations of Self and Other found in the island’s literature, particularly as they concern the historically highly contentious issue of biological and cultural interaction, provide valuable perspectives on this subject, enabling us to trace the evolution of local attitudes to the question of métissage and acquire a broader vision of the lived experience of the island’s population.

‘Our sea of islands’: migration and métissage in contemporary Polynesian writing

International Journal of Francophone Studies
Volume 11, Issue 4 (December 2008)
pages 503-522
DOI: 10.1386/ijfs.11.4.503_1

Michelle Keown, Senior Lecturer of English Literature
University of Edinburgh

This article explores metaphors of oceanic migration in contemporary Polynesian writing, investigating the notion of a regional ‘Oceanic’ identity embraced by a variety of Pacific (and particularly Polynesian) writers and theorists, while also acknowledging the specific historical circumstances and consequences of sea migration within individual Polynesian cultures. Throughout, the essay maintains a multiple temporal focus, identifying the ways in which imagery of the sea – and more specifically the ‘traditional’ Polynesian waka/vaka (voyaging canoe) – has been deployed by Polynesian writers as a chronotope not only of pre-European (and early contact) patterns of migration and cultural exchange within the Pacific, but also of the large-scale migrations of Polynesians to various neighbouring nations since the Second World War. The essay also engages with the complex cultural exchanges brought about by various historical phases of European maritime exploration and settlement in the Pacific, analysing how Polynesian writers explore the effects of intermarriage and cultural contact between Polynesians and Europeans since the late eighteenth century. In investigating these patterns of cross-cultural exchange, the essay adopts the French term ‘métissage’, which, alongside the related concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘syncreticity’, denotes genetic and cultural exchanges and intermixing. Drawing upon the work of various postcolonial theorists, the essay examines métissage in the Pacific both at the level of (material) cultural exchange, and within literary texts produced by anglophone and francophone Polynesian writers, particularly those who explicitly identify themselves as of ‘mixed race’.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption

Vintage an imprint of Random House, Inc. Academic Resources
2003
688 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-70264-8 (0-375-70264-4)

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

From the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and Race, Crime, and the Law—a tour de force about the controversial issue of personal interracial intimacy as it exists within ever-changing American social mores and within the rule of law.

Fears of transgressive interracial relationships, informed over the centuries by ugly racial biases and fantasies, still linger in American society today. This brilliant study—ranging from plantation days to the present—explores the historical, sociological, legal, and moral issues that continue to feed and complicate that fear.

In chapters filled with provocative and cleanly stated logic and enhanced by intriguing historical anecdotes, Randall Kennedy tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics and of race in sexual politics, the prominence of legal institutions in defining racial distinction and policing racial boundaries, the imagined and real pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy, and the competing arguments around interracial romance, sex, and family life throughout American history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• One – In the Age of Slavery
• Two – From Reconstruction to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
• Three – From Black-Power Backlash to the New Amalgamationism
• Four – Race, Racism, and Sexual Coercion
• Five – The Enforcement of Antimiscegenation Laws
• Six – Fighting Antimiscegenation Laws
• Seven – Racial Passing
• Eight – Passing the the Schuyler Family
• Nine – Racial Conflict and the Parenting of Children: A Survey of Competing Approaches
• Ten – The Tragedy of Race Marching in Black and White
• Eleven – White Parents and the Black Children in Adoptive Families
• Twelve – Race, Children, and Custody Battles: The Special Status of Native Americans
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Read an excerpt of the book here.

Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide

Rowman & Littlefield
Paper: 0-9700-3841-0 / 978-0-9700-3841-8
June 2005
190 pages

Edited by

Marc Coronado
DeAnza College

Rudy P. Guevarra
University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeffrey A. S. Moniz, Associate Professor and Director
University of Hawai’i

Laura Furlan Szanto
University of California, Santa Barbara

Crossing Lines addresses the issues of race and mixed race at the turn of the 21st century. Representing multiple academic disciplines, including history, ethnic studies, art history, education, English, and sociology, the volume invites readers to consider the many ways that identity, community, and collectivity are formed, while addressing the challenges that multiracial identity poses to our understanding of race and ethnicity. The authors examine such subjects as social action, literary representations of multiracial people, curriculum development, community formation, Whiteness, and demographic changes.

List of Contributors
Marc Coronado (DeAnza College), Carina Evans (UC Santa Barbara), Melinda Gandara (UC Santa Barbara), Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. (UC Santa Barbara), Tomas Jimenez (Harvard University), George Lipsitz (UC San Diego), Jeffrey Moniz (University of Hawai’i), Paul Spickard (UC Santa Barbara), Laura Furlan Szanto (UC Santa Barbara), and Nicole Marie Williams (UC Santa Barbara).

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Clueless
  Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

• Noises in the Blood: Culture, Conflict, and Mixed Race Identities
  George Lipsitz

• Does Multiraciality Lighten? Me-Too Ethnicity and the Whiteness Trap
  Paul Spickard

• “My Father? Gabacho?” Ethnic Doubling in Gloria Lopez Stafford’s A Place in El Paso
  Marc Coronado

• Burritos and Bagoong: Mexipinos and Multiethnic Identity in San Diego, California
  Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

• Challenging the Hegemony of Multiculturalism: The Matter of the Marginalized Multiethnic
  Jeffrey A.S. Moniz

• Beyond Disobedience
  Nicole M. Williams

• “Fictive Imaginings”: Constructing Biracial Identity and Senna’s Caucasia
  Carina A. Evans

• The Beginning
  Laura Furlan Szanto

• Los Angeles Museum of Art: Looking Forward
  Melinda Gandara

• Multiethnic Mexican Americans in Demographic and Ethnographic Perspectives
  Tomas R. Jimenez