Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Roots Japan ミックスルーツ・ジャパン: Towards a Japan Model of a Multicultural Society

The Mixed Roots Academic Forum is now in its third year, hosted by Osaka University GLOCOL and planned by Mixed Roots Japan. With the aim of promoting “firsthand social dialogue”, various panel discussions, performances, and short film screenings are organized.

In the absence of a formal academic recognition of the subject of mixed roots studies in Japan, we are especially working hard to connect various academics and the development of young researchers by providing them a venue for presentation. Out participation is not limited to the Kansai region—presenters and acdemics converge from as far as Okinawa, Sendai, and the United States.

We are also collaborating with the bi-annual Hapa Japan Conference organized by Prof. Duncan Williams (formerly at UC Berkley), which will be held at University of Southern California in April 2013.

Please email us for inquiries and RSVPs.

For more information, click here.

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe

Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland
2012-10-14 through 2013-01-21
Open Wednesday-Sunday, 10:00-17:00 ET (Local Time)
Telephone: 410-547-9000

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, an unprecedented exhibition, explores the world of Renaissance art in Europe to bring to life the hidden African presence in its midst. During the first half of the 1500s, Africa became a focus of European attention as it had not been since the time of the Roman Empire. The European thirst for new markets already in the mid 1400s drove the Portuguese (and subsequently the English and Dutch) to explore the establishment of new trading routes down the west coast of Africa and, by the turn of the new century, into the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa brought the Turks into military and political conflict with European interests. These elements, along with the importation of captured Africans as slaves, primarily from West Africa, increasingly supplanting the trade of slaves of Slavic origin, resulted in a growing African presence in Europe.

1. Annibale Carracci (attributed). Portrait of a Black Servant (Fragment of larger portrait), ca. 1580s, oil on canvas, 24 x 12 in. (60.96 x 30.48cm). Leeds, private collection. 2. Jacopo da Pontormo. Portrait of Maria Salviati de Medici and Giulia de Medici, ca. 1539, oil on panel, 34 5/8 x 28 1/16 in. (88 x 71 cm). The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 3. German or Flemish. Portrait of a Wealthy Black Man, ca. 1540, oil on panel, diameter 11.7 in. (29.7 cm). Private Collection, Antwerp.

The first half of the exhibition of approximately 75 works explores the historical circumstances as well as the conventions of exoticism that constituted the prism of “Africa” through which individuals were inevitably perceived.

11. Cristovao de Morais. Portrait of Juana of Austria with her Black Slave Girl,1555, oil on canvas, 39 x 31 7/8 in. (99 x 81 cm). Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels. 12. Paolo Veronese. Study of a Black Boy Eating, ca. 1570s, black and white chalk on paper, 6 x 7 in. (15.5 x 20 cm). Mia Weiner, Norfolk, Connecticut. 13. Bronzino (workshop replica). Portrait of Duke Alessandro de Medici, ca 1553, oil on tin, 5 7/8 x 4 in. (15 x 12 cm). Uffizi, Florence. 14. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Two Flemish Peasants (Africans), ca.1564-5, etching, ca. 5 x 7 3/8 in. (13/3 x 18.7 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

In the second half, attention shifts to individuals, focusing on portraits. These often very sensitive images underscore the role of art in bringing people from the past to life. While some Africans played respected, public roles, the names of most slaves and freed men and women are lost. Recognizing the traces of their existence is a way of restoring their identity…

For more information, click here.

“Representing” Anglo-Indians: A Genealogical Study

University of Melbourne
1999
350 pages

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer
School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University, Australia

Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English with Cultural Studies

The ‘mixed-race’ Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community was born of the European colonisation of India some four hundred years ago. This dissertation examines how historians, writers, colonial administrators, social scientists and immigration officials represented Anglo-Indians between 1850 and 1998. Traditionally, Anglo-Indians have sought to correct perceived distortions or misrepresentations of their community by disputing the accuracy of deprecatory stereotypes produced by ‘prejudicial’ writers. While the need to contest disparaging representations is not in dispute here, the present study finds its own point of departure by questioning the possibility of (re)presenting an undistorted Anglo-Indian identity.

The dissertation functions at three levels. First, it examines the construction of Anglo-Indian stereotypes in various discursive practices, offering a critique of the knowledges and images produced within specific literary and non-literary texts. Second, it retrieves the ‘buried’ texts of the Anglo-Indian community, which have been ‘disqualified’ by official discourses. Third, drawing on postcolonialism and poststructuralism, it mounts a practical argument against mimeticism or image analysis by demonstrating how complex discursive and ideological currents mediate stereotypical representations. More specifically, it enumerates the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the production of Anglo-Indian stereotypes, arguing that such figures are historically variable and internally contradictory. Using Foucault’s genealogical method as a starting point, the dissertation examines (mis)representations of Anglo-Indians as they meet and disperse within an interactive network of power/knowledge relations.

This strategy not only accounts for the emergence of pejorative stereotypes, but encourages the articulation of Anglo-Indian identities in their diversity. This contrasts with the impractical compulsion, articulated by Anglo-Indian image critics, to build a homogeneous community.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Contents
• Acknowledegments
• Introduction
• 1 (Mis)representing Anglo-Indian History
• 2 ‘Pangs of Nature and Taints of Blood’: The Anglo-Indian ‘Stereotype’ in Raj Literature
• 3 Sexual Relations, Colonial Governmentality and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 4 Imperial Power and Regimes of Truth: Racial Science and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 5 ‘Poor Relations’: Social Science and ‘The Eurasian Problem’
• 6 Ambivalent Stereotypes: Kipling, Rushdie, Chandra and Sealy
• 7 ‘The Good Australians’: Multiculturalism and the Anglo-Indian Diaspora
• 8 Conclusion: ‘Bringing it All Back Home’
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Scot Nakagawa: Dismantling the Fulcrum of White Supremacy

GRITtv
2012-08-24

Laura Flanders, Host

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Parner
ChangeLab

Race, according to activist and writer Scot Nakagawa, was an idea created originally to justify the enslavement of a people, and has displayed pernicious staying power in the centuries since. That’s why, as Nakagawa explains in this video with Laura Flanders, he believes that his liberation and the liberation of all people of color in the United States is tied to the liberation of African-Americans. For Nakagawa, anti-black racism is “the fulcrum of white supremacy.”

ITYC Audio Journal #2: What Are You?-Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations

Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color
2012-10-07

Michelle McCrary, Host

Last Thursday, I attended an event at the Brooklyn Historical Society for their “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations” series called What Are You? The panel tackled the this perpetual question often aimed at people who are perceived to be ethnically ambiguous.

Presenting their own encounters/experiences with the “what are you?” question were Angela Tucker, creator of the webseries Black Folk Don’t; Heidi Durrow, author of the New York Times Bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and co-host of Mixed Chicks Chat; Jen Chau, founder of Swirl, Inc.; Erica Chito Childs, author of Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture and Ken Tanabe, founder of Loving Day.

Here, in this second installment of ITYC Audio Journal, I share details about the panel discussion and some of my personal thoughts about race, identity and “what are you?”

Download the audio here (00:40:48).

Being Anglo-Indian: Practices and Stories from Calcutta

Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
2005
263 pages

Robyn Andrews, Lecturer, Social Anthropology Programme
Massey University

A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This thesis is an ethnography of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta. All ethnographies are accounts arising out of the experience of a particular kind of encounter between the people being written about and the person doing the writing. This thesis, amongst other things, reflects my changing views of how that experience should be recounted. I begin by outlining briefly who Anglo-Indians are, a topic which in itself alerts one to complexities of trying to get an ethnographic grip on a shifting subject. I then look at some crucial elements that are necessary for an “understanding” of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the work that has already been done in relation to Anglo-Indians, the urban context of the lives of my research participants and I discuss the methodological issues that I had to deal with in constructing this account.

In the second part of my thesis I explore some crucial elements of the lives of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the place of Christianity in their lives, education not just as an aspect of socialisation but as part of their very being and, finally, the public rituals that now give them another way of giving expression to new forms of Anglo-Indian becoming.

In all of my work I was driven by a desire to keep close to the experience of the people themselves and I have tried to write a “peopled” ethnography. This ambition is most fully realised in the final part of my thesis where I recount the lives of three key participants.

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Vanishing Race

Chronicles of Oklahoma
Volume 4, Number 1 (June, 1926)
pages 100-115

G. A. Crossett, Editor
Caddo Herald

One of the largest and most intelligent tribes of original American Indians in the United States today is the Choctaws, who inhabit the southeastern portion of Oklahoma.

The Choctaws formerly occupied the central and northern portions of Mississippi. At the time of the war of the American Independence they numbered about twelve thousand. They early made friends with the white settlers, and rarely gave serious trouble to their white neighbors. They were loyal to the United States Government.

AIDED JACKSON

In the War of 1812, the Choctaws furnished a large regiment of soldiers to the American army, commanded by Andrew Jackson. Their outstanding leader was a young man named Apushmataha. He was unlettered, but a brilliant leader of men; strong and wise in council, eloquent and convincing in speech. He made a journey to the neighboring tribes of Cherokees, Creeks and Chickasaws, and won them over to the cause of the Americans in this campaign. It was during this campaign that he and Andrew Jackson became fast friends—a friendship that continued as long as both men lived. He was with Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and his men gave a good account of themselves, being expert marksmen with their popular weapons, the rifle.

Later years saw Apushmataha the spokesman of his people in Washington, before the Interior Department and Congress. His intimacy and friendship with Jackson was renewed when that warrior became president. It was during this period that agitation for removal of the Indian tribes from the southeastern states began. The white settlers had found the soil good, and wanted it all for themselves…

…By nature the Choctaws were roving, loved the field and forest, the great outdoors. He liked the dew, the big wide places; he built his houses far apart. He communed with his God, Chiowa, he called Him, in His vaulted dome; he felt the pull of the Great Spirit in the outdoors. Not many fullbloods are left. He had mixed his blood with the white, until they truly are a, vanishing race. He has taken on white man’s ways; he has accepted his God; he has taken his language; he has built homes like his white brothers. He is no longer pure American in his blood. Now he lives like the white man. He has as many characteristics as there are people. He has take on the good and the bad. He is simply now like the average American white man.

Read the entire article here.