Mixed Race Studies

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

The Mayes

Chronicles of Oklahoma
Volume 15, Number 1 (March, 1937)
pages 56-65

John Bartlett Meserve

The saga of the Cherokees, from the dawn of their arrival in the old Indian Territory down to the present, is emphatically one of constant change in their social, economic, and political lives. The influence of the adventurous white men who intermarried and cast their fortunes among the Indians was very pronounced. The mixed blood descendants of those soldiers of fortune in numerous instances achieved wealth, distinction, and leadership among the Indians and strongly influenced their tribal life. Numerous families of prominence grew up among the mixed blood Cherokee Indians. These families, while none the less proud of their Indian blood, were and are today, capable, in many instances, of tracing an ancestry back to some early white colonial ancestor of more or less renown. The intermarriage of these families provoked a sort of aristocracy in the social and intellectual life of the Cherokees and today among them are families of the highest culture and refinement. They may have been clannish to a degree, but probably inherited this trait from the Scotch with whom they were largely intermarried. The Cherokees have their “first families” and most charming they are indeed. It is worthy of note that the Cherokee Nation had no principal chief of the full blood after the days of the adoption of its constitution in 1827. Its political affairs, after that time, were managed by shrewd, mixed-blood politicians bearing white men’s names and speaking the white man’s language and frequently, with scarcely enough Indian blood to evidence itself in their features.

The Adair family was outstanding among the Cherokees. Two brothers, John and Edward Adair, Scotchmen whose father is reputed to have achieved much prominence in England during the reign of George III, came to America in 1770 and engaged in trading operations with the Indians and ultimately intermarried among the Cherokees in Tennessee. John Adair married Ga-hoga, a full blood Cherokee Indian woman of the Deer clan and his son, Walter Adair, known as Black Watt, was born on December 11, 1783 and became an active character among the Cherokees. Walter Adair married Rachel Thompson, a white woman, on May 13, 1804 and died in Georgia on January 20, 1835. Rachel Thompson was born in Georgia on December 24, 1786 and died near what is today Stilwell, Oklahoma, on April 22, 1876. Nancy Adair, a daughter of Walter and Rachel Adair was born in Georgia on October 7, 1808, married Samuel Mayes on January 22, 1824 and died in what is today Mayes County, Oklahoma on May 28, 1876 and is buried in the old family cemetery on the Wiley Mayes place some seven miles east of Pryor, Oklahoma…

Read the entire article here.

Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62

The New York Times
2010-03-27

Margalit Fox

The prominent American poet Ai, whose work — known for its raw power, jagged edges and unflinching examination of violence and despair — stood as a damning indictment of American society, died on March 20 in Stillwater, Okla. She was 62 and lived in Stillwater.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of previously undiagnosed cancer, said Carol Moder, head of the English department at Oklahoma State University, where Ai had taught since 1999.

Born Florence Anthony, the poet legally changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese, as a young woman. She received a National Book Award in 1999 for “Vice: New and Selected Poems,” published that year by W. W. Norton & Company.

Her other books include “Sin” (1986), “Fate” (1991), “Greed” (1993) and “Dread” (2003). A posthumous volume, “No Surrender,” is to be published by Norton in September…

…Though Ai’s work was determinedly not autobiographical, its concern with disenfranchised people was informed, she often said, by her own fractional heritage. Many poems could be read as biting dissertations “On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish,” as the title of a 1978 essay she wrote in Ms. magazine put it. (The proportions are telling, too, for not quite adding up to a complete person.)…

…Florence Anthony was born in 1947 in Albany, Tex., and reared mostly in Arizona by her mother and stepfather. For years her biological father’s identity was kept from her. She later learned, as she wrote in an autobiographical essay in the reference work Contemporary Poets, that “I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Let’s Not Be Boxed in by Color / Other Americans Help Break Down Racial Barriers

“Let’s Not Be Boxed in by Color”
The Washington Post, Outlook
1997-06-08
pages C3

“Other Americans Help Break Down Racial Barriers”
International Herald Tribune
1997-06-10
page 9

Amitai Etzioni, University Professor and Professor of International Affairs; Director, Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

In 1990, the Census Bureau offered Americans the choice of 16 racial categories. The main groupings were white and black, which 92 percent of the population chose. The remaining categories were Native American, Aleut and Eskimo, 10 variations of Asian and Pacific Islanders, and “Other.” Some 9.8 million Americans, or 4 percent of the total population, chose “Other” rather than one of the established mono-racial categories—as compared to fewer than 1 million in 1970.

This number will continue to expand. Since 1970, the number of mixed-race children in the United States has quadrupled to reach the 2 million mark. And there are six times as many intermarriages today as there were in 1960. Indeed, some sociologists predict that, even within a generation, Americans will begin to look more like Hawaii’s blended racial mix.

It’s time to acknowledge the increasing number of multiracial Americans—not only because doing so gives us a more accurate portrait of the population, but because it will help to break down the racial barriers that now divide this country. And the place to recognize these new All-Americans is with the next census in the year 2000. Although the actual count will not begin for another two years, the decision about which racial categories are to be used will be made this year — and it is already the subject of considerable controversy…

…Introducing a multiracial category would help soften the racial lines that now divide America by making them more like transitory economic differences rather than harsh, immutable caste lines. Sociologists have long observed that a major reason the United States experiences few confrontations along lines of class is that people in this country believe they can move from one economic stratum to another — and regularly do so. For instance, workers become foremen, and foremen become small businessmen, who are considered middle-class. There are no sharp class demarcation lines here, based on heredity, as there are in Britain. In the United States, many manual workers consider themselves middle-class, dress up to go to work, with their tools and lunches in their briefcases.

But confrontations do occur along racial lines in America because color lines currently seem rather rigid: Many members of one racial group simply couldn’t imagine belonging to another.

If the new category is adopted and, if more and more Americans choose it in future decades, it will help make America look more like Hawaii, where races mix freely, and less like India where castes still divide the population sharply. And the blurring of racial lines will encourage greater social cohesiveness overall…

Read the entire essay here.

Literature and Racial Ambiguity

Rodopi
2002
320 pages
8.7 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-90-420-1428-2 / 90-420-1428-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-90-420-1418-3 / 90-420-1418-0

Edited by:

Teresa Hubel, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College in London, Ontario

Neil Brooks, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College at Western University, London, Ontario

Contents

• Neil Brooks and Teresa Hubel: Introduction
• 1. Peter Clandfield: “What Is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the work of Jackie Kay
• 2. Neluka Silva: “Everyone was Vaguely Related”: Hybridity and the Politics of Race in Sri Lankan Literary Discourses in English
• 3. Teresa Zackodnik: Passing Transgressions and Authentic Identity in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• 4. Myriam Perregaux: Whiteness as Unstable Construction: Kate Pullinger’s The Last Time I Saw Jane
• 5. Bella Adams: Becoming Chinese: Racial Ambiguity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
• 6. Jennifer Sparrow: Strategic Créolité. Caliban and Miranda after Empire
• 7. Jennifer Gibbs: White Identity and the New Ethic in Faulkner’s Light In August
• 8. Elizabeth DeLoughrey: White Fathers, Brown Daughters: the Frisbie Family Romance and the American Pacific
• 9. Rita Keresztesi Treat: Writing Culture and Performing Race in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood ‘(1927)
• 10. Kathryn Nicol: Visible Differences: Viewing Racial Identity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and “Recitatif”
• 11. Yvette Tan: Looking Different/Rethinking Difference: Global Constants and/or Contradictory Characteristics in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies and Adib Kalim’s Seasonal Adjustments
• 12. Margaret D. Stetz: Jessie Fauset’s Fiction: Reconsidering Race and Revising Aestheticism
• 13. Paul Allatson: “I May Create A Monster”: Cherríe Moraga’s Transcultural Conundrum
• 14. Michele Hunter: Revisiting the Third Space: Reading Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• Notes on the Authors