Mixed Race Studies

The threat of ‘woolly-haired grandchildren’: Race, the colonial family and German nationalism

The History of the Family
Volume 14, Issue 4 (2009-10-26)
The Domestic Frontier: European Colonialism, Nationalism and the Family
Pages 356-368
DOI: 10.1016/j.hisfam.2009.08.002

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in International History
Flinders University, Australia

The German colonial world was marked by an ostensibly self-evident boundary between the white ruler and the black ruled that situated Europeans and indigenous peoples as diametrically opposed and socially discrete. This situation, however, was problematised by the gendered and sexualised interactions between European and indigenous society. The result was often a slippage between the administrative attempts to create recognisably ‘German’ families (perceived in racial terms), and the antinomian realities of human relationships that transgressed racial lines. This in turn gave rise to reproductive anxieties in the face of a new liminal population of ‘half-castes’ (Mischlinge) that refused the white–black, master–slave dialectic of the colonial ideal. Many historians have recently attempted to link the troubled history of race relations in German Southwest Africa to the later history of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, by focusing on the apparent continuities between the Holocaust and the Herero–Nama wars. However, an alternative genealogy for the cthat refutes this genocidal continuity thesis is possible through an investigation of the origins and contents of the debates about the nature of the German colonial family and its relationship to German citizenship between 1904 and 1914.

Article Outline
1. Introduction: narrating the colonial family
2. ‘Coloured Germans’, ‘half castes’ and ‘Africans’
3. The biologically German family: From the periphery to the core
4. Conclusion
References

Liminal blankness: Mixing Race and Space in Monochrome’s Psychic Surface

University of Plymouth, Devon, England
2002
320 pages

Angeline Dawn Morrison

A thesis submitted to the University of Plymouth In partial fulfilment for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Research Department Falmouth College of Arts

Blank space in western Art History and visual culture is something that has tended to be either explained away, or ignored. Pictures that do not depict challenge the visual basis of the ego and its others, confronting what I call the ‘Phallic reader’ (who sees according to the logic and rules of the Phallogocentric system he inhabits) and potentially disturbing his sense of the visible. The Phallic reader, the visible and the seeing ego’s sense of how to see, meet in what I call the ‘psychic surface’. Deploying this notion of a ‘psychic surface’ allows for readings which move on from the potentially confining logic of the Phallus. Paradoxically, the psychic structure of monochrome’s liminal blankness is homologous to the indeterminate Mixed Race subject, whose body transgresses not only the foundational historical binarism of `Black/White’, but also Lacanian psychoanalysis. This thesis aims to concentrate on exploring blank spaces, with particular reference to the monochrome within western Art History. Building on the considerable work since at least the 1960s that critiques the binary logocentrism of Eurocentric, Hegelian-originated Art History, this thesis aims to explore the specific ways monochrome evades, undermines and tricks commonly accepted ‘groundrules’ of Art History. The Phallic reader is severely restricted in understanding that which falls outside of the signifying logic of a particular system of Art History that follows a binary, teleological and Phallogocentric course. Both monochrome and the Mixed Race subject fall outside of this logic, as both contain the structure of the trick. In each case, the trick is activated in the tension between the psychic and the opticalsurfaces. I suggest that monochrome’s psychic space is pre-Phallic, a space of eternal deferral of meaning, a space that playfully makes a nonsense of binary structures. Psychoanalysis is largely used here as an analytic tool, but also appears as an object of critique. Art History provides an anchor for the optical surfaces under discussion. Theories of `radical superficiality’ both contradict and complement these ways of theorising the psychic surface. The trick/ster is a significant/signifiant means of deploying interdisciplinary methodologies to negotiate this difficult terrain between Black, White and monochrome. An interdisciplinary approach also enacts the psychic structure of indeterminacy of my objects of study. I hope that by proposing a potential transgressive power for those indeterminate things that continue to confound the binary systems that aim to contextualise and confine them, I will contribute to the areas of Visual Culture and ‘Race’ Theory.

LIST OF CONTENTS:

• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter One: NEITHER GENRE NOR COUNTER-GENRE: MONOCHROME & THE WILD CARD’S ETERNAL RETURNS
  • 1:0 Introduction
  • 1:1 The Square, The Rectangle and the Nemesis of Mimesis
  • 1:2 French Connections: Blank Satire vs. Blank Virtuosity
  • 1:3 Monochrome: Art or Object?
  • 1:4 The Monochrome World of Yves Klein
  • 1:5 The Monochrome Sublime: Barnett Newman
  • 1:6 Conclusion
• Chapter Two: STAGED AND MEDIATED MONOCHROMES: A NEW PROBLEMATIC OF THE PSYCHIC SURFACE
  • 2:0 Introduction: The White Eye of Photography
  • 2:1 The Deathlike in Photography
  • 2:2 Hiroshi Sugimoto & the Returns of Blankness
  • 2:3 John Hilliard & the Specular Monochrome
  • 2:4 The Interstitial Auditory
  • 2:5 Derek Jarman’s Blue: Fantasy of the Maternal Voice?
  • 2:6 Conclusion: Mixed Mediation
• Chapter Three: (IN)VISIBLE WHITENESSES: THE PSYCHIC SPACE OF THE MIXED RACE SUBJECT
  • 3:0 Introduction
  • 3:1 One: Two: Many
  • 3:2 When is a Signifier Not a Signifier? (When It’s a Monkey)
  • 3:3 Diluted Nigger or Dirty Nigger? The ‘Choice’ is Never Yours
  • 3:4 Neither Fish Not Fowl: Indeterminacy & (Ill)legibility
  • 3:5 ‘The New Colored People’
  • 3:6 Conclusion
• Chapter Four: ART & ABJECTHOOD: THE PSYCHIC SPACE OF MONOCHROME
  • 4:0 Introduction
  • 4:1 Silence, Castrated & Castrating
  • 4:2 Other Kinds of Silence
  • 4:3 Generative Blankness & Deathly Silence
  • 4:4 Kristeva’s Black Sun: Monochrome as Narcissistic Mirror
  • 4:5 Returns of the Repressed
  • 4:6 Conclusion: Mourning the Lost Object of An History?
• Chapter Five: CONCLUSION?
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• PICTURES FROM ‘CARLTON JOHNSON: MY “LIFE”‘

Read the entire dissertation here.

History and the (Un)making of Identifications in Literary Representations of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics

University of British Columbia
September 2000
465 pages

Marian Josephine Gracias

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English)

This dissertation examines selected literature by and about Anglo-Indians (Eurasians) and Goan Catholics from India and the Indian diaspora, focusing on its preoccupation with the history of these communities as a site of contested identifications. Especially polemical are perceptions (due to communalist stereotypes or internalisation) of Anglo Indians and Goan Catholics as mimic or intermediary communities who ended up capitulating to British and/or Portuguese colonialist structures respectively. Larger issues for both communities in India and in the diaspora also involve questions of racial or cultural hybridity, and the slippage between religion and culture, particularly the linking of conversion to Christianity with colonisation, Westernisation, denationalisation, and non-Indianness.

I argue for a more layered understanding of the concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and resistance in relation to identifications from these communities. By choosing literature set in times of national crisis and historical change (in India, and in East Africa for the Goan diaspora), I have been attentive to the varying ways in which literary characters and narrators confront, project, or elide contradictions of proximity and difference in the production of racial, cultural, and national identity. The main literary texts in the discussion of Anglo- Indian identifications include John Masters’ “Bhowani Junction”, Manorama Mathai’s “Mulligatawny Soup”, Stephen Alter’s “Neglected Lives” and Allan Sealy’s “The Trotter-Nama”. In these texts, I have examined how the narrative opens up or circumscribes the agency and racial identifications of Anglo-Indian characters. As well, I make some references to Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” and selected work by Ruskin Bond. The central literary texts in the discussion of Goan Catholic and diasporic identifications include Lambert Mascarenhas’ “Sorrowing Lies My Land”, Kiran Nagarkar’s “Ravan and Eddie”, João da Veiga Coutinho’s “A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History”, selected writing by damian lopes, and Peter Nazareth’s “In a Brown Mantle” and “The General is Up”. I also dwell in some detail on selected short stories by Lino Leitão, and Violet Dias Lannoy’s “Pears from the Willow Tree”. I examine the role of Anglo-Indian and Goan Catholic women literary characters, making the case that, for the most part, it is male characters who are given political and narrative complexity in terms of negotiating colonialism and nationalism, and that women characters, when central, are imaged as mediating grounds to advance or block access to male characters who are competing over nationalist and colonialist discourses about race and sexuality. An exception is the poetry of Eunice de Souza where there is critical reflection on the position of Goan Catholic women.

Where relevant, I draw from particular areas of cultural studies, postcolonial and feminist theories (including those dealing with psychoanalysis), and writings about Indian history and nationalism. Writings from these areas offer pertinent insights on ambivalence in the production of subjectivity, and on the construction of Indianness in relation to arguments on colonialism, gender, caste, class, secularism, and the religious right (especially the discourses of Hindutva). While the identifications and identity of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics appear in the genre of history, these communities are largely absent or peripheral in the area of literary analysis, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory pertaining to India. Therefore, I hope that a study of these communities will contribute to the discussion of religious and multiracial identifications that is increasingly relevant to the field of postcolonial and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Copy Cat Copy Cat?
• Chapter 1: “A Certain Way of Being There”
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 Proximity and Distance: Colonialism and the Construction of Mimic Subjectivity
  • 1.3 Forms of Mimic Subjectivity and the Question of Subversion
  • 1.4 Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Construction of Indianness
• Chapter 2: Negotiating Classifications: Writing an Anglo-Indian History
  • 2.1 Introducing Mixed Race Classifications
  • 2.2 Anglo-Indians and the Discourse of Mixed Races under British Colonialism
  • 2.3 Scientific Racialism and Other Discourses of Mixed Races
  • 2.4 Conclusion: (Dis)placing Anglo-Indian Classifications and Affiliation
• Chapter 3: (By) Passing Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications in Literature
  • 3.1 Literary Antecedents: Representations of Mixed Race People
  • 3.2 “Species Loyally”: Anglo-Indian Identifications in John Masters’ Bhowani Junction
  • 3.3 Between Homes: Manorama Mathai’s Mulligatawny Soup
  • 3.4 Escaping from History: Stephen Alter’s Neglected Lives
  • 3.5 Interracial Relationships in Bhowani Junction, Mulligatawny Soup and Neglected Lives: Possibilities and Closures
• Chapter 4: Beyond Doom and Gloom: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
  • 4.1 Introduction: Alternatives to Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications
  • 4.2 Contending with “The Grey Man’s Burden”: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
• Chapter 5: Writing Identity in Goan History
  • 5.1 Claims in the Writing of Goan History.
  • 5.2 Early History of the Portuguese in India and Goa
  • 5.3 Mixing Trade, Religion, and Race
  • 5.4 Conversion to Christianity and the Practice of Religion Under British and Portuguese Colonialism
  • 5.5 Caste, Conversion, and National Identity in Portuguese Goa and British India
  • 5.6 Placing the Politics of Resistance to Portuguese Rule
  • 5.7 Claiming Goa: Liberation or Invasion?.
  • 5.8 The Impact of Language and Migration in the Construction of Goan Identity Today
  • 5.9 Colonial and Caste Effects in Locating Conversion to Christianity Within Communal and Secular Debates in Contemporary India
• Chapter 6: Identifications in Crisis: Goan Catholics in Literature
  • 6.1 The Question of Goan Identity
  • 6.2 Writing Against Colonialism: Lambert Mascarenhas’ Sorrowing Lies My Land, Lino Leitão’s “The Miracle” and “Armando Rodrigues”
  • 6.3 The Crisis of Leadership: Violet Dias Lannoy’s Pears from the Willow Tree and Lambert Mascarenhas’ A Greater Tragedy
  • 6.4 Interrogating Gender: The Poetry of Eunice de Souza
  • 6.5 Hindus and Catholics: Where Parallel Worlds of Difference Meet in the Horizon of Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie
• Chapter 7: “The Intimate Outsider”: History and Location in Literature from the Goan Catholic Diaspora
  • 7.1 Introductory Issues in Writing Diaspora
  • 7.2 The Search for a Theory of Goan History: João da Veiga Coutinho’s A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History.
  • 7.3 East African Goan Catholics: Narrating the Third That Walks Between Black and White in Peter Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle and The General Is Up
  • 7.4 Intermediary Positions and Peter Nazareth’s Narrators
  • 7.5 Navigating Historical Legacies in damian lopes’ Writing
• Chapter 8: Epilogue: The Politics of Engagement
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.