Mixed Race Studies

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2011
232 pages
ebook ISBN: 9780230305243
Print ISBNs: 9780230298286 HB 9780230318519
DOI: 10.1057/9780230305243

Amar Acheraïou

This book offers an accessible, in-depth analysis of hybridity as a practice, discourse, and ideological construction. Its scope ranges widely, encompassing conceptualizations of hybridity from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. The views of such key figures as Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Virgil, Gobineau, Renan, and Tocqueville, as well as Bakhtin, Fanon, and Bhabha are all freshly reassessed. The ground-breaking perspectives provided reorient contemporary debates on hybridity and the ‘Third Space’. They significantly widen our awareness of the history of métissage and expand the methodological, conceptual, empirical, and ideological orientations of contemporary hybridity theorists.

Acheraïou deftly examines the questions of race, class, identity, binarism, postmodernist ideology, neoliberalism, and globalization. In particular, he recommends decolonizing postcolonialism, indicating ways to transcend the cultural and spatial turn predetermining current discussions of métissage, culture, and identity politics. Throughout, he analyzes hybridity in the light of globalization, suggesting how postcolonialism could become a genuinely counter-hegemonic mode of resistance to global neoliberal doxa.

Contents

• Introduction
• PART I Hybridity: A Historical Overview from Antiquity to Modern Times
  • 1 Métissage, Ideology, and Politics in Ancient Discourses
    • 1.1 Cultural, political, and scientific métissage in antiquity
    • 1.2 Reflexive and strategic hybridism
    • 1.3 Ancient literary, political, and philosophical perceptions of hybridity
  • 2 Myths of Purity and Mixed Marriages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
  • 3 Interracial Relationships and the Economy of Power in Modern Empires
    • 3.1 Syncretism in modern colonial politics and ideology
    • 3.2 Métissage: a double-edged colonial weapon
    • 3.3 Sexual politics, from tolerance to abjuration: the case of the British East India Company
    • 3.4 Hybridity as the space of the impossible: the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean
• PART II Hybridity in Contemporary Theory: A Critical Assessment
  • 4 The Ethos of Hybridity Discourse
  • 5 Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space
  • 6 Class, Race, and Postcolonial Hybridity Discourse
  • 7 Postcolonial Discourse, Postmodernist Ethos: Neocolonial Complicities
  • 8 Hybridity Discourse and Binarism
  • 9 The Global and the Postcolonial: Uneasy Alliance
    • 9.1 An overview of globalization: hegemony and resistance
    • 9.2 Empirical and theoretical insights into postcolonial and global relationships
  • 10 Hybridity Discourse and Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism
  • 11 Decolonizing Postcolonial Discourse
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

When the Mirror Speaks: The Poetics and Problematics of Psychic Performance for métisse Women in Bristol

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Chapter in: Ethnicity, Gender and Social Change
Macmillan
1999
pages 206-222
ISBN-10: 0312217633; ISBN-13: 978-0312217631

Edited by:

Rohit Barot, Harriet Bradley, and Steve Fenton

Note from Steven F. Riley. Click here to read a definition of the term métis and the reasoning of its usage and subsequent dis-usage by Dr. Ifekwunigwe.

Contents

• Introduction
• Setting the State
• Is English Synonymous with Essential Whiteness?
• Akousa: Is Being Dark-Skinned the Primary Criterion for Essential Blackness?
• Sarah: Narratives of Space, Place, and Belongings
• Ruby: Accepting Blackness when Praying Doesn’t Make One White
• Similola: Dressing ‘The Part’
• Yemi: Re-Defining ‘The Issues’
• Bisi: Racism in Our Families or Origin or Nowhere to Hide
• Beginnings by Way of Concluding Remarks
• Acknowledgments

We can try to deprive ourselves of our realities but in the darkest hour of the night, when no one else is around and we have gone to the loo to spend a penny, we must look in the mirror. Eventually that moment comes when we look in the mirror and we see a Black woman…

Sharon

Sharon is a woman in her thirties who grew up in racial isolation in care in the north of England without either her White English mother or her Black Ghanaian father. In an English society which codes its citizens on the basis of their colour, Sharon must reconcile the psychic split between a genealogical sense of herself which is Ghanaian and English and a racialized self which is Black and White. As her statement reveals, the psychological struggle begins when she realizes that hi-racialized English society dictates that she embrace her Blackness and deny her Whiteness.

Her sentiments reflect the profound existential paradox facing individuals whose lineages historically situate them as grandchildren of both the colonizers and the colonized. I refer to such individuals métis(se). In England, the multiplicity of terms in circulation to describe individuals who straddle Black and White racial borders drove me in search of a new formulation. More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being métis(se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘Black’/’White’ racial categories as well as the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and overlapping historical traditions. The lack of consensus as to which term to use as well as the limitationsof this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to métis(se) and métissage.

In the French African (Senegalese) context, in its conventional masculine (métis) and feminine (métisse) forms, métis(se)refers to someone who, by virtue of parentage, embodies two or more world views, for example, French mother and Black Senegalese father (Diop, 1992; Koubaka, 1993). However, it is not exclusively a ‘racial’ term used to differentiate individuals with one Black parent and one White parent from those with two Black or White parents. Métis(se) also pertains to people with parents from different ethnic/cultural groups within a country, for example in Nigeria, Ibo and Yoruba, or in Britain, Scottish and English. By extension, métissageis a mind set or a shorthand way to describe the theorizing associated with métis(se) subjectivities: oscillation, contradiction, paradox, hybridity, polyethnicities, multiple reference points, ‘belonging nowhere and everywhere’,  métissage also signals the process of opening up hybrid spaces and looking at the sociocultural dynamics of ‘race’, gender, ethnicity, nation, class, sexuality, and generation and their relationship to the mechanics of power.

Sharon is one of twenty five métis(se) individuals who were participants in my two-year-long ethnographic study based in Bristol, England. Their individual and collective voices represent the significant part of a greater multigenerational whole comprising people in England with Black continental African or African Caribbean fathers and White British or European mothers. By virtue of the aforementioned contradictory bi-racialized classification in Britain, métis(se) individuals’ narratives of self and identity both reflect the gender, generational, racial and ethnic tensions of English society and are located outside it in an imagined but not imaginary ‘grey’ space. That is, the ways in which the women and men I worked with tell their stories are as newfangled griot(te)s. They simultaneously construct dual narratives, which embody lived stories. At the same time, their memories preserve and reinterpret senses of past interwoven cultures. In his essay, The Choices of Identity,’ Denis-Consant Martin talks about identity as narrative (1995,
pp. 7-8):

The narrative borrows from history as well as from fiction and treats the person as a character in a plot. The person as a character is not separable from its life experiences, but the plot allows for the re-organization of the events which provide the ground for the experiences of the person/character… Narrative identity, being at the same time fictitious and real, leaves room for variations on the past—a plot can always be revised—and also for initiatives in the future.

These métis(se) narratives of identity provide scathing sociopolitical commentaries and cultural critiques of contemporary English African Diasporic life and its manifest bi-racialized problematics.

However, the specific focus of this chapter is the differcnts ways in which cultural memories shape contradictory meanings of ‘race’, self and identity for six women who by virtue of birth transgress boundaries and challenge essentialized constructions of self, identity, place and belonging. Their specific lived realities epitomize psychosocial struggles to make sense of explicit epistcmological tensions between subjectivity and alterity. In particular, drawing on their testimonies, I will address the ways in which six métissewomen confront problematic tensions between being métisse and becoming Black. English and Ghanaian philosopher Anthony Appiah (1992, p. 178) formulates an ethos of identities politics which reflects this complexity:

identities arc complex and muliiple and grow out of a history of changing responses to economic, political, and cultural forces, almost always in opposition to other identities… that they flourish despite what I earlier called our ‘misrecognition’ of their origins; despite that is, their roots in myths and lies… there is, in consequence, no large place for reason in the construction—as opposed to the study and management of identities.

The principal narrators are: Similola who has a White German mother and a Black Tanzanian father and Ruby, whose mother is middle class White English and her father middle class Black Nigerian, both of whom were brought up in children’s homes; Yemi and Bisi, who are sisters, grew up in a middle class family in Ibadan, Nigeria with both their White Northumberland English mother and their Black Yoruba-Nigerian father; and another set of sisters, Akousa and Sarah who came of age in a working class, predominantly Black African Caribbean community in Liverpool, with their orphaned White Irish mother and without their Black Bajan (from Barbados) father. Each woman’s mother is at once White and Irish, English or German. Their fathers are both Black and either Bajan, Nigerian or Tanzanian.

Accordingly, as their stories reveal, most of their identities work concerns the management and negotiation of polycthnicity in social and cultural contexts which frequently demand that they choose an essentialized Black identity. This is despite the fact that by virtue of lineage, they can and do situate themselves within at least two specific and yet over-lapping historical narratives…

Read the entire chapter here.

Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2008-02-29

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
University of California, Berkeley

The Obama candidacy challenges our notions of identity politics

In their support for Hillary Rodham Clinton over Barack Obama, prominent black leaders have made it clear that black skin color itself is not as big a deal in American politics as it once was. The spectacle of John Lewis, Charles B. Rangel, and Andrew Young, among others, trying to persuade black Americans to vote for a white woman rather than the first black man with a real chance at the White House is a striking example of how the Obama campaign has become a postethnic phenomenon.

There are plenty of other signs as well. In a society long accustomed to a sharp black-white color line — and to relying on the rule of “one drop of black blood” to locate that line — commentators are discussing the choices of identity available to the mixed-race Obama. In a recent video on The New York Times Web site, Glenn C. Loury and John H. McWhorter, two prominent black intellectuals, casually reviewed Obama’s range of options. Yet it was not so long ago that the lightskinned Colin Powell declared matter-of-factly: “When you look like me, you are black.”…

…Obama’s mixed ancestry, however, is not what most generates the new uncertainty about blackness. Much more important is the fact that his black ancestry is immigrant rather than American-born. Before getting to that, however, let me clarify the postethnic flavor of the support for Clinton on the part of a substantial segment of the black political establishment…

Read the entire article here.

Woman traces her Tanzanian roots in film

The Citizen
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
2012-02-04

Tyrone Beason

Sometimes a journey begins with a song. In the case of Seattle documentary filmmaker Eli Kimaro, it was a transporting version of the classic lullaby Summertime from the African-American opera Porgy and Bess, this one sung by the Benin-born artist Angelique Kidjo as a West African spiritual, full of cooing background vocals and soul-tapping percussion.

Kimaro’s father is Tanzanian. Her mother is Korean. She’d always been comfortable with her mixed-race background, but something about hearing that song eight years ago sparked a longing to better understand the people she came from, particularly the relatives in Kilimanjaro region, where her father grew up and where she’d visited many times as a child.It dawned on her that she should make a film about her father’s side of the family, even though she’d never directed a movie in her life.

The result, A Lot Like You, debuted at the Seattle International Film Festival last year to positive reviews.

The film helps raise the profile of a population in the United States that many people who identify with just one racial or ethnic group scarcely understand…

…Elikimaro is part of a new wave of multiracial pride, discussion and activism rooted in a very real demographic shift.

America is, in fact, more multiracial. According to the 2010 U.S. census, more than 9 million Americans identified themselves as belonging to two or more racial groups, or about 2.9 per cent of the total population, up from 2.4 per cent a decade ago.

Since 2000, the census has made it easier than ever for people answering its surveys to pick more than one racial group; and Americans who have mixed-race backgrounds, long a cause for derision and marginalization, are ever more comfortable checking all the boxes that apply to them…

Read the entire article here.

Black Is a Multiracial Country

The Atlantic
2011-02-15

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor

Tami [Tamara Winfrey Harris] finds out she’s 30 percent white. This changes nothing:

So, now, after discovering that I am 70 percent sub-Saharan African with cultural ties to Balanta and Fula peoples in Guinea-Bissau, the Mende people in Sierra Leone, and the Mandinka people in Senegal… that I am part of Haplogroup L1b, one of the oldest female lineages on Earth… and that I am also 30 percent European…Who am I now?

Well… the same person I was before. I am a black American woman with all the rich, cultural history that implies. Thirty percent European biogeographical ancestry (likely derived through oppression and sexual violence), doesn’t change my identity. I don’t think 60 percent European ancestry would change my identity. I am a black American—my culture is my culture. I would also add that learning more about my African roots doesn’t make me Senegalese or Fula or Mende. I am a black American—my culture is my culture.

I’ve been thinking about my response to the whole beiging of America story, and part of it is premised on the arguments, but I think another part (and perhaps the deepest part) is premised on my own understanding of identity. I haven’t been tested, but I recently “discovered” that some generations back I also had “white” ancestors. My response was basically the same as Tami’s—I’m black…

…The point here is that when we discuss a “beiging of America” as though it’s new, it really ignores the fact that beige people are as old this country. But sometime in the 17th century, for rather embarrassing reasons, we decided to call them “black.” Therein is the diabolical lesson of American racism. Prejudice is arbitrary. There are no fixed, natural rules that say who is in and who is out. As soon as the people change, given a good reason, “race” and “racism” change with it…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Forgetting, and the Law

The Atlantic
2010-07-30

Sara Mayeux

Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America is a tour-de-force of archival research, bringing to light countless criminal prosecutions, civil cases, and bureaucratic decisions through which miscegenation laws were enforced not just in the South but throughout the nation; and not just in the deep past, but well into my parents’ lifetimes; and not just between blacks and whites but between blacks and whites and Japanese and Filipinos and Mexicans….. the list could go on. The book spans the 1860s through the 1960s, with a focus on the less-well-known story of race-based marriage laws in the Western states, including California.

Throughout, Pascoe is attentive not just to ideologies of race but also to ideologies of gender, and the complex interactions between them. This history is not, she insists, simple, and “interracial couples should be relieved of the burden of having to stand as one-dimensional heroes and heroines.” Many, like the now-famous Lovings, wanted mostly to be left alone. “Mr. Cohen,” Richard Loving told his Supreme Court advocate, “tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

One of Pascoe’s themes is the role that forgetting plays in the law. In the years immediately following the Civil War, some state courts had upheld interracial marriages (typically in cases involving a white husband whose privileges and property rights the courts wanted to protect), and some states had repealed their antebellum anti-miscegenation laws. But this was all quickly forgotten. After legislators had reinstated the laws and judges had overturned or simply abandoned the earlier rulings, bans on interracial marriage came to seem, to almost everyone, “natural” and “traditional,” the way it had always been…

Read the entire review here.

Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History

Arcadia Publishing
2002-10-21
160 pages
ISBN: 9780738523958

Arwin D. Smallwood, Associate Professor of History
The University of Memphis

The lives of the Native American, African, and European inhabitants of Bertie County over its 400 years of recorded history have not only shaped, but been shaped by its landscape. One of the oldest counties in North Carolina, Bertie County lies in the western coastal plains of northeastern North Carolina, bordered to the east by Albemarle Sound and the tidewater region and to the west by the Roanoke River in the piedmont. The county’s waterways and forests sustained the old Native American villages that were replaced in the eighteenth century by English plantations, cleared for the whites by African slaves. Bertie County’s inhabitants successfully developed and sustained a wide variety of crops including the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—as well as the giants: tobacco, cotton, and peanuts. The county was a leading exporter of naval stores and mineral wealth and later, a breadbasket of the Confederacy. Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History documents the long history of the region and tells how its people, at first limited by the landscape, radically altered it to support their needs. This is the story of the Native Americans, gone from the county for 200 years but for arrowheads and other artifacts. It is the story of the African slaves and their descendants and the chronicle of their struggles through slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights Movement. It is also the story of the Europeans and their rush to tame the wilderness in a new land. Their entwined history is clarified in dozens of new maps created especially for this book, along with vivid illustrations of forgotten faces and moments from the past.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: An Ecological History
• 1. Early History: Roanoke Island and the Chowan and Roanoke River Valleys, 1584-1711
• 2. Cultures in Conflict: The Tuscarora War and Forced Migration, 1711-1722
• 3. Life during the Colonial era, 1722-1774
• 4. The American Revolution and the Early Years of the New Republic, 1774-1803
• 5. Religion, Cotton. Tobacco, and Peanuts; The Antebellum Years, 1803-1861
• 6. A County Divided: From the Civil War to the Collapse of Reconstruction, 1861-1877
• 7. The Collapse of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow Era, 1877-1954
• 8. Life in the Rural “New South”: During and Since the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-2002
• Bibliography
• Index

Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes

University of Massachusetts Press
December, 2001
256 pages
6.125 x 9.25
ISBN (paper):  978-1-55849-310-0

Susan Sleeper-Smith, Professor of History
Michigan State University

An innovative study of cultural resilience and resistance in early America

A center of the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period, the Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. In this well-researched study, Susan Sleeper-Smith focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions—the role played by Indian women who married French traders. Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, she shows how these women used a variety of means to negotiate a middle ground between two disparate cultures. Many were converts to Catholicism who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society, thus facilitating the integration of Indian and French values. By the mid-eighteenth century, native women had extended these kin linkages to fur trade communities throughout the Great Lakes, not only enhancing access to the region’s highly prized pelts but also ensuring safe transport for other goods. Indian Women and French Men depicts the encounter of Old World and New as an extended process of indigenous adaptation and change rather than one of conflict and inevitable demise. By serving as brokers between those two worlds, Indian women who married French men helped connect the Great Lakes to a larger, expanding transatlantic economy while securing the survival of their own native culture. As such, Sleeper-Smith points out, their experiences illuminate those of other traditional cultures forced to adapt to market-motivated Europeans.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Fish to Furs: The Fur Trade in Illinois Country
• 2. Marie Rouensa and the Jesuits: Conversion, Gender, and Power
• 3. Marie Madeleine Réaume L’archêveque Chevalier and the St. Joseph River Potawatomi
• 4. British Governance in the Western Great Lakes
• 5. Agriculture, Warfare, and Neutrality
• 6. Being Indian and Becoming Catholic
• 7. Hiding in Plain View: Persistence on the Indiana Frontier
• 8. Emigrants and Indians: Michigan’s Mythical Frontier
• Notes
• Index

Plein Air: Mapping Mary Ann Armstrong

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments
Number 24 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Deborah Fries, Editorial Board Member

The first time I saw her picture, I wanted to know everything about her. 

I wanted to know where she’d lived before she married my great, great grandfather in 1859.  I wanted to know what her parents, Mariah and William G. Armstrong, looked like; whether William G. had been a planter in Tyrrell County, North Carolina, or a yeoman farmer.  I wanted to know which of Mary Ann’s six children looked like her, rather than their eagle-featured father, Edward Parisher.  I wanted to know why she looked so very serious.

All of that wanting began in 2000, when distant relative and genealogical researcher Mark Bateman sent me a scanned photo of my great, great grandparents, along with a generous amount of his own Parisher family research.   And even though I’ve gathered a little more information, even had my mitochondrial DNA tested, most days I’m sure that I’ll never have enough facts to salvage historical certainty out of the shipwreck of fantasy.

Instead, I’ll have a breeches bucket of images: smoke rising from decaying peat in the Great Dismal Swamp; moss hanging from a pecan tree in a sandy yard; dogs sleeping in the shade of a magnolia; the ghosts of torn-down farmhouses and tobacco barns; rows of corn bending under hurricane winds; gold-rimmed English paste ware sitting on a sideboard.  A wide-cheek-boned woman in a lace collar frozen in her ante-bellum portrait, a man with a long goatee beside her.  I’ll be left with mysteries and wish-based assumptions, and an impressionistic synthesis of how my own family illustrates the rich history of the people who have lived on the south shore of the Albemarle Sound for more than 400 years..

Long after I opened the envelope from Mark that contained the photos of Mary Ann Armstrong and Edward Parisher, as well as scanned tintypes of two of their six children, I remained intrigued by the racial ambiguity of my great, great grandmother.  In 2008, I ordered a test kit from the research firm with the largest DNA database, sure that my matrilineal line would escort me back to Mary Ann’s genes and provide definitive conclusions. Was she biracial?  Triracial?  In all census records, she and her parents are listed as White, a mono-racial identity the picture seems to belie.  Mark had heard she was “part Indian.”  The molecular test results, I expected, would be oracular…

…Mary Ann’s appearance and information about her planter paternal line raised new questions.  Recently, I’ve been able to pose some of those questions to Dr. Arwin Smallwood, a University of Memphis history professor whose work in eastern North Carolina maps the entwined lives of Native, African, and European Americans from first contact to the present.

Smallwood, author of Bertie County, An Eastern Carolina History and The Atlas of African-American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times, as well as other scholarly works, grew up about 30 miles northwest of my maternal family’s farmstead.  Triracial himself, he is currently overseeing additional research projects in eastern North Carolina.   If anyone would understand the social permutations that were negotiated over hundreds of years in that region, and reflected in the picture of  my great, great grandmother, it would be Dr. Smallwood…

Read the entire article here.

Origin Traditions of American Racial Isolates: A Case of Something Borrowed

Appalachian Journal
Volume 11, Number 3 (Spring 1984)
pages 201-213

David Henige
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Beginnings have an irritating but essential fragility and one that should be taken to heart by all who occupy themselves with history.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There are many groups of localized, isolated peoples scattered throughout the eastern United States. Generally they are varying mixtures of white, black, and Indian, and this composite quality has contributed both to their distinctiveness and to perceptions of their origins. Like many other oral cultures, such as those of Africa and Oceania, these groups perceived their distant past as being characterized by constant large-scale migrations, because most traditions denied autochthonous origins and spoke instead of the movement(s) of ancestors into their present locale.

In the past few years most (though not yet quite all) historians who use oral historical materials have become convinced that while ideas and products may have moved over long distances more or less freely, as a rule people did not. It may be useful, therefore, to examine the traditions of origin of four of the so-called racial isolates of the eastern United States, for these permit some direct comparisons between the earliest available documentary sources, later traditions, and learned speculation. At the same time they throw interesting light on the interplay between practical expediency and changing points of view in the matter of origins.

Today the so-called Guineas number about 7,000 people who reside primarily in Barbour and Taylor counties in West Virginia. The name (or rather epithet) Guinea seems not to be of their own devising but has been applied to them by neighbors as a convenient all-purpose pejorative. The Guineas themselves resent the implication of black blood. So it is both surprising and unaccountable that members of the Guinea community have developed theories of the group’s origins which seek to explain the hated…