The Anglo-Indians: Aspirations for Whiteness and the Dilemma of Identity

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Oceania, United Kingdom on 2011-03-30 04:45Z by Steven

The Anglo-Indians: Aspirations for Whiteness and the Dilemma of Identity

Counterpoints
The Flinders University Online Journal of Interdisciplinary Conference Papers
Volume 3, Number 1 (September 2003)
Flinders University of South Australia

Sheila Pais James
Department of Sociology
Flinders University of S.A.

The Anglo-Indian, as a distinct ethnic identity, was the product of the racialised social hierarchies of British India. Set off from the Indian majority by their claims to British heritage, they were, because of their mixed ancestry, never accorded full status as British. At the end of British rule, their anomalous status was confirmed in certain protections, including employment quotas, enshrined in the Indian constitution. Despite this, the Anglo-Indian community in India declined in the decades after Independence as many chose to leave. Climate, proximity, and its British roots meant that Australia was considered a desirable destination by many. In particular, this paper focuses on the relevance of the study of whiteness in relation to the study of the Anglo-Indians as an ethnic and racial minority. It traces the aspirations for whiteness among these diasporic people in their quest for identity. It explores the dimensions in the constructions of identity and the possibility of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians as transcolonial migrants in a multicultural Australian society.

…The discourse on whiteness as a theoretical notion that attempts to uncover the authority of the invisible is very promising. Studying whiteness delves into the silence or invisibility (Frankenberg, 1993; Dyer, 1997) about whiteness which lets everyone continue to harbour prejudices and misconceptions. This silence, when penetrated, opens channels for the understanding of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians and the identity choices they make vis-à-vis the skin colour of others in similar situations.

By the 19th century, the British separated themselves from the coloured people but accepted fairer (and often wealthier) people of dual heritage as ‘Anglo-Indian’ . Darker (and usually poorer) people were given the name ‘Eurasian’ . Anglo-Indians were of British descent and British subjects; some even claimed to be British to escape prejudice. The British did not however accept such identification. They did not see Anglo-Indians as kinsmen, socially viewing them as ‘half-caste’ members who were morally and intellectually inferior to the sons and daughters of Britain (Varma 1979). The Anglo-Indians tried to counter this by trying to be more like the British. Their campaign to be called ‘Anglo-Indians’ was aimed at establishing a closer link with the British Raj (rule) in contrast to the general term ‘Eurasian’ (Bose, 1979).

Under these circumstances, it was not easy for Anglo-Indians to develop a clear conception of their own identity. Europeans tended to think of them as Indians with some European blood; Indians thought of them as Europeans with some Indian blood. On both the cultural and social level they were alien to many other Indians, though kin to them on the biological level. Many of the prejudices of the British were adopted by the Anglo-Indians towards the Indian people of dark complexion, thus creating rejection of the Anglo-Indians both by the British and other Indian communities. The prejudices against them, real or imagined, or the prejudices that they themselves had against other Indians were an obstacle to both group and individual identity (Gist, 1972, Gist and Wright, 1973)…

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Mothering Children of African Descent: Hopes, Fears and Strategies of White Birth Mothers

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Oceania, Women on 2011-03-02 00:57Z by Steven

Mothering Children of African Descent: Hopes, Fears and Strategies of White Birth Mothers

The Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 2, Number 1 (November 2007)
pages 62-76

Annie Stopford, Ph.D., Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Adjunct Research Fellow
University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Introduction

It is often acknowledged that African identities are “complex, contested and contingent,” and that these negotiations and contestations are conducted in many locations around the globe (Ahluwalia and Zegeye 113). However, there has been little discussion thus far about the role of non-African parents of mixed African-Western children in these processes. In many parts of the world where the African Diaspora has spread, there are increasing numbers of children being born to African and non-African parents, particularly (but not only) African fathers and non-African mothers of diverse ethnicities. Non-African parents may play a significant role in facilitating, supporting, or obstructing their children’s positive identifications and associations with Africa and “Africanness,” especially if and when the marriage or relationship breaks down and the child or children reside with the non-African parent.

In this article, I use extracts from interviews with white Australian birth mothers of African Australian children to explore how they negotiate some of the complexities, challenges, and rewards of mothering children of African descent. I argue that the contributions of non-African mothers of African-other children add an important dimension to discussions about the complexities of postcolonial and Africana hybrid identities. The article begins with a description of empirical data sources, some information about the field of research, and an exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of the discussion. This is followed by a discussion of some issues described by research participants, with an emphasis on narratives about lived experience and intersubjective dynamics. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the implications of these narratives.

…The Research Field

Despite the plethora of recent literature about interracial and postcolonial subjectivities, there has been little in-depth discussion thus far about mothering children of mixed cultural, ethnic, and racial descent. The focus of discussion in mixed race and hybridity studies tends to be on the children of couples of mixed cultures and races, rather than the parents themselves, and the damage done by racist and essentialist discourse to the children of those people who cross “the color line,” especially black/white relationships.

There have, however, been some studies of mixed race and culture families that focus on the parents and their responses to their children (Phoenix and Owens 158-177; Dalmage 1-32). There has also been some feminist and critical race research and discussion specifically about or by white mothers of African descent children in Western locations, and white mothers of African descent children living in Africa, with a particular emphasis on the way white mothers resist racism and try to foster positive identifications with blackness (Reddy 43-64; Lazarre 21-51; Twine 729-746, 878-907; Adomako Ampofo In My Mother’s House). Because fighting racism and fostering Africana identities are of course inextricably linked, I see this research as continuing the work of the aforementioned writers.

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Notes on physical anthropology of Australian aborigines and black-white hybrids

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Oceania on 2011-01-24 01:28Z by Steven

Notes on physical anthropology of Australian aborigines and black-white hybrids

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 8, Issue 1 (January/March 1925)
pages 73–94
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330080105

Charles B. Davenport, Director
Department of Experimental Evolution
(Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

Introduction

In September 1914, after the meetings of the British Association in Australia, I was given transportation by the Government of New South Wales, enabling me to go to the government reservation for aborigines at Brewarrina on the Burke division of the State railroad. This reservation is on the Barwon fork of the Darling River, about 60 miles south of the Queensland boundary.  The purpose of the visit was to observe near by a number of  individuals of the fast disappearing race.

While at Brewarrina, during about six days, I enjoyed the hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold’s tact and good judgment that I was enabled to see as many of the inhabitants of the Station as time permitted and to make some simple measurements upon them…

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A shameful history: Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity [Book Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, Oceania, Politics/Public Policy on 2011-01-21 02:04Z by Steven

A shameful history: Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity [Book Review]

The Lancet
Volume 366, Issue 9495 (October 2005)
page 1428
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67586

Caroline de Costa, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Director of the Clinical School
James Cook University School of Medicine, Cairns Campus, North Queensland, Australia

Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity
Henry Reynolds
Viking, 2005
Pp 204. ISBN-0-670-04118-1

A few years ago my daughter, a poised young woman, found herself in a large rural Australian town she did not know well. She sought directions from an older white woman who, glancing briefly at her appearance, gave the required information, but in the slow and careful tones one might use for the mentally impaired. This incident annoyed but did not surprise my daughter; my husband is of Sri Lankan origin, and all of our six children, of varying hues and facial features, have at times been taken to be of mixed Aboriginal descent in rural Australia, and know something of the experience that can go with this.

So it was with great personal interest that I opened Henry Reynolds’ impressive study of the history of people of “mixed-race” in the 19th and 20th centuries in all those countries where colonists confronted people of different colour and physiognomy. As a 21st-century medical practitioner well aware that we are all one species, I was dismayed to find how much medical practitioners and scientists had contributed to repressive legislation and social engineering, both in Australia and elsewhere…

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Nowhere People

Posted in Anthropology, Autobiography, Books, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania, Politics/Public Policy on 2011-01-19 03:56Z by Steven

Nowhere People

Penguin Books Australia
January 2005
300 pages
Paperback ISBN-13:9780143001911

Henry Reynolds, Emeritus Associate Professor of History and Politics
James Cook University, Australia

‘That’s how at six at night on 11 May 1928 I stopped being a Yanyuwa child and became a nowhere person… Motherless, cultureless and stuck in a government institution because my mother was Aboriginal and my father was not. I ceased to be an Aboriginal but I would never be white. I was not something bad, shameful, called a half-caste.’—Hilda Jarman Muir

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry—half-castes—were commonly assumed to be morally and physically defective, unstable and degenerate. They bore the brunt of society’s contempt, and the remobal of their children created Australia’s stolen generations.

Nowhere People is a history of beliefs about people of mixed race, both in Australia and overseas. It explores the concept of racial purity, eugenics, and the threat posed by miscegenation. Award-winning author Henry Reynolds also tells for the first time of his own family’s search for the truth about his father’s ancestry, and gives a poignant account of the contemporary predicament facing people of mixed heritage.

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Thoroughly Modern Mulatta: Rethinking “Old World” Stereotypes in a “New World” Setting

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Oceania, Women on 2011-01-19 01:20Z by Steven

Thoroughly Modern Mulatta: Rethinking “Old World” Stereotypes in a “New World” Setting

Biography
Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
pages 104-116
E-ISSN: 1529-1456, Print ISSN: 0162-4962
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2005.0034

Maureen Perkins, Associate Professor of Sociology
Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

This paper examines the role of racial stereotypes in the life narratives of several women of color living in Australia. While coming from very different parts of the world, all show an awareness of popular images of the mixed race woman. Their sensitivity on this issue points to the continuing effects of past racism and the globalization of colonial discourse, as well as hints at a sense of community based on color which crosses established “ethnic” boundaries.

In 2001 I interviewed seven women “of color” who had come to Australia from different countries and cultures. I talked with each of them about their childhoods and their experiences of growing up. Although interviewers have often used life stories to understand the collective, (1) the purpose of my interviews was not to construct a picture of Australian society. I was more interested in what could be called transcultural commonality, ways in which these women, while coming from different linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds, felt that they could identify with “color” as a shorthand for certain types of understanding. I wanted to pursue the question of whether being a woman “of color” in a country which did not usually recognize this term in its lexicon of race and ethnicity actually provided a form of community that cut across more established “ethnic” identities. If it did so, it seemed to me that it would be the globalized nature of colonial discourse that created such a common understanding. It was, then, the points of intersection in these life stories that I set out to trace, rather than the specific context of individual narratives.

The meetings were, no doubt, greatly influenced by what I thought I shared with these women, and it would be no exaggeration to say that in some ways I was consciously learning about myself in the process. In asking specifically whether their skin color had been an issue in their childhoods, and whether they had felt it marked them out as different, I was using my own memories of growing up as a brown-skinned immigrant in 1950s London. Nevertheless, I tried to treat each contact as a conversation rather than a formal interview with specific questions. At no point did I introduce the term “mulatta” or “half-caste,” or even “mixed race,” but I did raise the question of whether they had experienced racism. Despite their very different backgrounds, all had experienced racism of some kind, and were acutely aware of its presence in Australian society. The history of colonialism was something that each referred to, though all were conscious of living much more liberated lives, in racial terms, than their parents had done.

Two historians of colonialism, Catherine Hall and Robert Young, have disagreed about whether the racial language of the past can change its meaning. Young writes that however many new meanings of “race” there are, the old refuse to die: “They rather accumulate in clusters of ever-increasing power, resonance and persuasion.” “So what,” is Hall’s reaction: “the origin of a word cannot determine its meanings across time” (127). The one key word about which they most disagree is “hybridity.” Young uses it in the subtitle of his influential book, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. He believes that, while given different inflections, the word cannot stand outside the past, and in fact “reinvokes it” (“Response” 146). Hall, on the other hand, writes about the possibility of re-articulating meanings, and the need to consider the historical context in which people make new meanings from old words.

This debate between Hall and Young is central to understanding the role of color in modern Western societies. Race theory developed by Europeans in the nineteenth century placed a high value on purity. Miscegenation, or breeding between races, was seen as a “mis” take, and like all “mis” words would have a sorry outcome. The legacy of this period of history has been to render all of the terms describing mixed race offensive and painful to some people. Australian Aboriginal communities, for example, reject the term “half-caste” because of its connotations of “part” Aboriginality and its association with the removal of the stolen generations. (2) Werner Sollors writes of the difficulty of describing a condition which in its very conceptualization necessitates thinking racially. Julian Murphet calls the “mulatto” an “unspeakable concept.” In a British context, the distinguished sociologist of race Michael Banton wrote in 2001: “The use of race in English to identify certain kinds of groups sometimes leads to use of the expression ‘mixed-race,’ which is objectionable because of its implication that there are pure races” (185). Banton would not be alone in thinking the term “mixed race” offensive.

Yet Banton’s comments were going to press at the same time as the English census forms for 2001 were becoming available, with their whole new category of “mixed.” Similarly, in the United States, the 2000 census allowed citizens to identify as mixed race for the first time. In both countries, people of “mixed race” themselves have been amongst those agitating for the recognition that such a census category would give them. At the same time, “mixed race studies,” using postcolonial hybridity theory, have become increasingly influential. (3) Can the connotations of a word change, so that its historical traces no longer impact in new contexts?…

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Theorizing Interracial Families and Hybrid Identity: And Australian Perspective

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Oceania, Social Science on 2010-11-22 03:07Z by Steven

Theorizing Interracial Families and Hybrid Identity: And Australian Perspective

Educational Theory
Volume 49, Issue 2 (June 1999)
pages 223–249
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00223.x

Carmen Luke, Emeritus Professor of Education
University of Queensland

Allan Luke, Research Professor
Queensland University of Technology

This essay is a theoretical exploration at how interracial families are sites for the development and articulation of hybrid identity: complex ways of representing and positioning oneself within larger social constructs of racial, social class, gender, and cultural difference. Our aim here is to examine the significance of place, locality, and situated “racializing practices” in the constitution of  identity. We draw on Stuart Hall’s concepts of “New Times” and “hybridity” to argue that interracial subjects or family formations have always been and continue to be of cultural and political concern in both postcolonial and post-industrial nation states and economies. Our cases and illustrations come from the context of the current public and political debate over immigration and multiculturalism, in Australia, a debate that highlights once again the centrality of “race” in the popular imaginary. Working from postcoloinial and feminist theory, we argue that “between two cultures” theorizations, and extant research and social policies on multiculturalism do not adequately account for the hybridity and multiply situated character of several generations of interracial subjects. Throughout we offer comments from interracial families we interviewed. In closing, we turn to more specific narratives of the development of racializmg practices and racial identities in two specific local sites: the cities of Darwin and Brisbane.  We conclude by drawing implications from this study for multicultural and antiracist educational theorizing and practices.

The Study

This essay draws on interview narratives from the initial phase uf a three year study ot mtciethmc families in Australia, In the first two years of the study (1996-1997), we interviewed couples in 42 visibly mixed-race marriages, where one partner was visibly Caucasian, white Australian and the other was of visibly Indo-Asian background. Because a key focus was on the effects of the visibility of mixed-race families in what historically has been a predominantly white Anglo-European society, we selected cuuples where one member was of visible racial difference. Because we were also concerned with understanding how the development of…

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Turning Aboriginal—Historical Bents

Posted in Articles, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Oceania on 2010-11-01 22:19Z by Steven

Turning Aboriginal—Historical Bents

borderlands: e-journal
Volume 7, Number 2 (2008)
pages 1-19

Regina Ganter, Associate Professor, School of Humanities
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Under the pressures of binary identity politics the search for Aboriginal identity among people of mixed descent has become a Russian roulette that may end up with a public hanging where those with a larger public profile draw a bigger crowd. This essay explores the historical dimensions that underpin confusion and uncertainty: changing definitions of Aboriginality and the external, often discretionary, imposition of identity. Historical case studies illustrate that a certain slippage was always part and parcel of the quest to define who is, and who is not, considered as Aboriginal.

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Mixed Messages, Mixed Memories, Mixed Ethnicity: Mnemonic Heritage and Constructing Identity Through Mixed Parentage

Posted in Articles, Canada, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Oceania, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2010-08-20 04:34Z by Steven

Mixed Messages, Mixed Memories, Mixed Ethnicity: Mnemonic Heritage and Constructing Identity Through Mixed Parentage

New Zealand Sociology
Volume 25, Number 1 (2010)
pages 75-99

Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar in the Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

This article explores the concept of mixed ethnic identity from a social memory-based perspective. Drawing on the personal testimonies of individuals of mixed ethnic heritage in New Zealand, the UK, Australia and Canada, the complex influence of collective memory on the construction of a mixed ethnic identity is drawn out, highlighting the contradictions and reconciliations negotiated by those who feel a strong sense of belonging to two groups, with potentially contrasting stories and memories. Participants express their feelings of belonging in multiple ways, showing how appreciation of heritage and internalization of family memories do not have to be equal nor experienced in the same way for both sides of the family. Rather, the unpredictable way in which collective memory shapes mixed ethnic identity indicates that each collectivity can have its own way of being understood for the individual, without reducing or denying its importance.

…The lingering idea of marginalization and internal conflict is particularly interesting from the memory perspective. Do individuals of mixed heritage experience internal conflict due to the different experiences and mnemonic heritages of their parents? Is it possible to reconcile “mixed memories”? Vivero and Jenkins (1999, p. 12) describe the “cultural homelessness” of mixed heritage, indicating that the lack of a coherent memory framework can lead to psychological distress: “Culturally homeless individuals may have the intense feeling and longing to ‘go home’; however, they cannot, because they have never had a cultural home… they cannot rely on memories of having had a cultural home”. In contrast, a number of recent studies have found that individuals of mixed descent have multiple and positive senses of identity, identifying to different extents with both sides of their heritage (Binning, et al., 2009; Root, 1992; Stephan & Stephan, 1989; Ward, 2006).

The reconciliation of mixed memories is illuminated by [Homi] Bhabha’s concept of a “third space” of hybridity, which illustrates new forms of identity and belonging where different cultures collide and collude (Ang, 1999, p. 558; Bhabha, 1994). In contrast to historical discourses of “hybrids” as the mingling of biologically separate “races”, this antiessentialist understanding of identity can instead highlight different forms of cultural recombination, whether based in ancestry or interaction (Bolatagici, 2004, p. 75; Gomes, 2007; Parker & Song, 2001, p. 4). Hybridity thus emphasises the fluidity and multiplicity of mixed ethnic identity, as constructed through memory and experience – suggesting that “cultural homelessness” may not be a lack of a home, but rather “…belonging at one and the same time to several ‘homes’ (and to no one particular ‘home’)” (Hall, 1992, p. 310)…

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Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Canada, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United Kingdom, United States, Women on 2010-02-07 01:03Z by Steven

Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities

Rodopi
2002
152 pages
Hardback: 978-90-420-1378-0 / 90-420-1378-8
Paperback: 978-90-420-1368-1 / 90-420-1368-0

Edited by:

Elizabeth Russell, Professor of Womens Studies and British Literature
University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona

The essays in this collection (on Canada, the USA, Australia and the UK) question and discuss the issues of cross-cultural identities and the crossing of boundaries, both geographical and conceptual. All of the authors have experienced cross-culturalism directly and are conscious that positions of ‘double vision’, which allow the / to participate positively in two or more cultures, are privileges that only a few can celebrate. Most women find themselves “caught between cultures”. They become involved in a day-to-day struggle, in an attempt to negotiate identities which can affirm the self and, at the same time, strengthen the ties which unites the self with others. Theoretical issues on cross-culturalism, therefore, can either liberate or constrict the /. The essays here illustrate how women’s writing negotiates this dualism through a colourful and complex weaving of words – thoughts and experiences both pleasurable and painful – into texts, quilts, rainbows. The metaphors abound. The connecting thread through their writing and, indeed, in these essays, is the concept of ‘belonging’, a theoretical/emotional composite of be-ing and longing. ‘Home’, too, assumes a variety of meanings; it is no longer a static geographical place, but many places. It is also a place elsewhere in the imagination, a mythic place of desire linked to origin.

Policies of multiculturalism can throw up more problems than they solve. In Canada, the difficulties surrounding the cross-cultural debate have given rise to a state of “messy imbroglio”. Notions of authenticity move dangerously close to essentialist identities. ‘Double vision’ is characteristic of peoples who have been uprooted and displaced, such as Australian Aboriginal writers of mixed race abducted during childhood. ‘Passing for’ black or white is full of complications, as in the case of Pauline Johnson, who passed as an authentic Indian. People with hyphenated citizenship (such as Japanese-Canadian) can be either free of national ties or trapped in subordination to the dominant culture; in these ‘visible minorities’, it is the status of being female (or coloured female) that is so often ultimately rendered invisible.

Examination of Canadian anthologies on cross-cultural writing by women reveals a crossing of boundaries of gender and genre, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, national boundaries, in an attempt to connect with a diasporic consciousness. Cross-cultural women writers in the USA may stress experience and unique collective history, while others prefer to focus on aesthetic links and literary connections which ultimately silence difference. Journeying from the personal space of the / into the collective space of the we is exemplified in a reading of texts by June Jordan and Minnie Bruce Pratt. For these writers identity is in process. It is a painful negotiation but one which can transform knowledge into action.

Contributors
Isabel Carrera Suárez
Dolors Collellmir
Mary Eagleton
Teresa Gómez Reus
Aritha van Herk
Elizabeth Russell
María Socorro Suárez Lafuente

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Acknowledgements
  • ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Introduction
  • ARITHA VAN HERK: Cross-Dressed Writing in Canada
  • ISABEL CARRERA SUÁREZ: Hyphens, Hybridities and Mixed-Race Identities: Gendered Readings in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Texts
  • MARÍA SOCORRO SUÁREZ LAFUENTE: Creating Women’s Identity in Australian Civilization
  • DOLORS COLLELLMIR: Australian Aboriginal Women Writers and the Process of Defining and Articulating Aboriginality
  • ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Cross-Cultural Subjectivities: Indian Women Theorizing in the Diaspora
  • TERESA GÓMEZ REUS: Weaving / Framing / Crossing Difference: Reflections on Gender and Ethnicity in American Literary and Art Practices
  • MARY EAGLETON: Working Across Difference: Examples from Minnie Bruce Pratt and June Jordan
  • List of Contributors
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