Mixed Race Studies

Eurasian/Amerasian perspectives: Kim Lefèvre’s Métisse Blanche (White Métisse) and Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted

Asian Studies Review
Volume 29, Issue 2 (2005)
pages 107-122
DOI: 10.1080/10357820500221162

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Associate Professor of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne

This article examines the articulation of Kim Lefèvre’s and Kien Nguyen’s difficult and traumatic childhoods in wartime Vietnam through their respective works Métisse blanche, first published in France in 1989, and The Unwanted, first published in the United States in 2001. Both Lefèvre and Nguyen had Vietnamese mothers and Western fathers—Lefevre’s was French. Nguyen’s was American. Their experiences are separated by a gap of thirty years, but their accounts reveal significant commonalities as well as differences. Their personal stories reflect those of the many children born of Vietnamese and European or American parents who were caught up in the maelstrom of colonialism, war, social prejudice and politics, and suffered rejection from both sides. Lefèvre grew up in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam while Nguyen was a child of the Vietnam War and relates the treatment meted out to so-called “half-breed” children in post-1975 communist Vietnam. Both bore the stigma of their mixed blood against a background of Vietnamese xenophobia and nationalism. Their looks signalled their heritage and were an unavoidable and unwelcome reminder of Vietnam’s fraught interaction with the West.

Eurasian/Amerasian métissage

Métissage as a positive site of cross-cultural mediation and negotiation has only recently been valorised in literary and critical discourse. Interpreted as cultural hybridisation, “cultural creolisation”, “cultural cross-breeding”, or, in Srilata Ravi’s aptly-chosen words “cultural cross-braiding” (Ravi. 2004. p. 300). métissage highlights the enriching effects of cultural pluralisation. The term “cross-braiding” beautifully illustrates the concept of entwined lives and cultures. As Ravi notes in ‘Métis, Métisse and Métissage’, …

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2010 Census Shows Black Population has Highest Concentration in the South

United States Census Bureau
CB11-CN.185
2011-09-29

People Who Reported as Both Black and White More than Doubled

The U.S. Census Bureau released today a 2010 Census brief, The Black Population: 2010, that shows 14 percent of all people in the United States identified as black, either alone or in combination with one or more other races. In 2010, 55 percent of the black population lived in the South, and 105 Southern counties had a black population of 50 percent or higher.

Of the total U.S. population of 308.7 million on April 1, 2010, 38.9 million people, or 13 percent, identified as black alone. In addition, 3.1 million people, or 1 percent, reported as black in combination with one or more other races. Together, these two groups comprise the black alone-or-in-combination population and totaled 42.0 million.

The black alone-or-in-combination population grew by 15 percent from 2000 to 2010, while the black alone population grew by 12 percent compared with a 9.7 percent growth rate for the total U.S. population.

Black and White Multiple-Race Population More Than Doubled

People who reported their race as both black and white more than doubled from about 785,000 in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2010. This group’s share of the multiple-race black population increased from 45 percent in 2000 to 59 percent in 2010…

Read the entire brief here.

No stigma was associated [in the early 1600s] with what we today call intermarriages. Black men servants often married white women servants. Records from one county reveal that one fourth of the children born to European servant girls were mulatto (Breen and Ennis 1980). Historian Anthony Parent (2003) notes that five out of ten black men on the Eastern Shore were married to white women. One servant girl declared to her master that she would rather marry a Negro slave on a neighboring plantation than him with all of his property, and she did (P. Morgan 1998). Given the demographics, servant girls had their choice of men. One white widow of a black farmer had no problem with remarrying, this time to a white man. She later sued this second husband, accusing him of squandering the property she had accumulated with her first husband (E. Morgan 1975, 334). In another case, a black women servant sued successfully for her freedom and then married the white lawyer who represented her in court (P. Morgan, 1998)…

Audrey Smedley, “The History of the Idea of Race… And Why it Matters,”  (paper presented at the conference on Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers, American Anthropological Association (AAA), Warrenton, Virginia, March 14-17, 2007).

The Rulers and the Ruled: the Singapore Eurasian Community Under the British and the Japanese

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
1999
DS610.25.E87 Con

John Gregory Conceicao

Mixed-race populations provide a challenging and fascinating subject for historical enquiry as they blend multiple cultures and, in the process, give rise to unique social and political forces. This thesis focuses on the Eurasians of Singapore, a distinct and disparate social group which arose from Singapore’s strategic location as an entreport that attracted Europeans from diverse backgrounds. As an ethnic group, the Eurasians were perhaps one of the earliest among the domiciled communities to look upon Singapore as their home and to develop a stake in the Colony, which had essentially been a place for travellers, transients and sojourners. This study focuses on the Eurasians and the complex relationships they forged with their two colonial overlords, the British and the Japanese, in the period prior to 1946.

Under the British the Eurasians played a ‘middleman’ role vis-a-vis other Asiatic communities and, by doing so, obtained unique privileges. However, in the 1870s a point was reached when owing to changing circumstances and attitudes, the British began to adopt a less than favourable stance towards the Eurasians. While the British needed their support for political and economic reasons in order to run the administration of the Colony, they adopted a policy that vacillated between patronage and prejudice. This left the Eurasians in a difficult position as they were staunchly pro-British yet, confused at the disinterest displayed by their patrons. Without much success, the Eurasians tried to redefine privilege to mean rights, and to have a voice in running the affairs of a place they regarded as their home.

The onset of the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War deepened the Eurasian predicament. They were singled out by the Japanese authorities for political indoctrination and subjected to measures which combined chastisement and encouragement. The Japanese forced the Eurasians to re-examine and re-orientate their ethnic identity. Without doubt, they were now encouraged to see themselves as ‘Asiatics’.

In retrospect, the Eurasians were subjected by their British and Japanese overlords to inconsistent policies which often left them confused and helpless. As a consequence, their self-definitions of identity underwent marked changes over time. Post-war developments in Singapore brought about a torrent of political changes that particularly affected the Eurasians. They emerged as a people who sometimes felt displaced and marginalised. The strengths and unique traits which the community once possessed—domicility, education and social privilege—were no longer their preserve in a nation that aimed to make egalitarianism and merit the cornerstones of its polity. This thesis argues that circumstantialism has been a dominant force in powerfully shaping the Eurasian identity. This identity was not given in a primordialist sense but was constructed from historical configurations and social circumstances, in which the relationship between the ‘Rulers’ and the ‘Ruled’ played an extraordinarily potent part.

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“Home is Nowehere”: Negotiating Identities in Colonized Worlds

University of Georgia
2007
57 pages

Julia A. Tigner

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

The Bildungsroman, a term that derived from German literary criticism, is a genre of literature that highlights popular conceptions of manhood and depicts the growth of the male protagonist. Many female authors use the Bildungsroman as a form of cultural expression not only to transform patriarchal views, but also to redefine femininity, articulate cultural conflict, and describe what it means to be a woman in a colonized culture. I will revisit this topic in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), and examine family dynamics in order to show how each female protagonist negotiates the complexities of a hybrid identity and attempts to harmonize two opposite cultures.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTERS
  • 1. INTRODUCTION
  • 2. “BETWEEN AFRICANNESS AND EUROPEANNESS: FORGING IDENTITIES IN MICHELLE CLIFF’S ABENG”
  • 3. “TRADITION OR MODERNITY IN CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S PURPLE HIBISCUS”
  • 4. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Regulating Race: Interracial Relationships, Community, and Law in Jim Crow Alabama

University of Georgia
2008
96 pages

L. Kathryn Tucker

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

This thesis, based largely on legal cases concerning miscegenation in Alabama, argues that legal efforts to impose social control by prohibiting interracial marriages and relationships proved ineffective due to the efforts of defendants to find legal loopholes, the racial ambiguity of a tri-racial society, and the reluctance of many communities to prosecute offenders. Nationwide interest in matters of race fueled the passage of one-drop laws in the 1920s, but also provided defendants with ways to claim racial backgrounds that fell outside the scope of the laws. Concurrently, local communities proved disinclined to prosecute interracial relationships unless individuals felt personally involved through desires for revenge or monetary gain. This often long-term toleration of interracial relationships, along with interracial couples’ own efforts to escape prosecution, proves that southern race relations were often more flexible and accommodating than harsh laws and the attitudes behind them would suggest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER
  • 1. Miscegenation and the Law
  • 2. Patterns of Defense
  • 3. Defining Race
  • 4. Community Toleration
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
  • A. Map of Alabama Counties
  • B. Alabama Miscegenation Cases, 1883-1938
  • C. Alabama Appellate Miscegenation Cases 1865-1970
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

…Much of the difficulties that the courts faced in determining race, even by physical means, stemmed from the defendants’ own attempts at muddling the issues. By the 1920s, most blacks came from families that at some point had experienced racial mixture—whether by choice or by force—and many white families, contrary to their fervent beliefs, also had racially mixed forebears. Savvy defendants in miscegenation cases used this fact to their benefit, claiming ancestors who variously possessed Spanish, Indian, or the ambiguous “Creole” or “Cajun” blood in order to explain dark skin tones. This defense proved particularly valuable in states such as Alabama, where the legislatures never outlawed marriage between Indians and whites. Closely linked to attempts to define race based on physical characteristics of both defendants and families, attempts to explain away ambiguous features based on Indian heritage often proved successful….

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