Mixed Race Studies

Positioning American Japanese in the Context of Japanese and Okinawan Nationalism and Ethnicity

Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume II (October 2009)
18 pages

Stephanie Otani
Stanford University

have the right…
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity.
Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy…
To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify…
To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial…
To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.

~from the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, by Maria P.P. Root

They wear war in their faces. They are the symbols of foreign domination. They embody the transgression of sacred boundaries. In Okinawa, people of Japanese and American descent (or Amerasians) are first and foremost foreigners, no matter how Japanese or Okinawan their language, customs, mannerisms, or worldviews may be. Before they even speak, their face and skin signal to people the circumstances of their births. The rights claimed by Root in the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” ultimately culminate in the right to first and foremost be understood as a human being as opposed to racial anomaly or mistake. As of now, these rights are insubstantial claims for those who carry signs of American parentage in their appearance throughout Okinawa and the rest of Japan. Instead, they continue to be externally categorized as gaijin or “foreigners” in their own homes.

Japan does not contain the linguistic nor legal infrastructure to accommodate them under the idea of Japaneseness. Within Japan, Okinawa is a particularly interesting and relevant site to explore issues of cultural and political legitimacy and conflicts between internal and external identity. The historical experience of Okinawa and its struggle for political sovereignty in international affairs mirrors the experience of American Japanese and their struggle to find a sense of national belonging. It is because of the contentious physical and political space Okinawa has historically inhabited that Amerasians struggle to fit into a larger Okinawan or Japanese identity.

Amerasians Within the Broader Context of Japan

In this section I will discuss the overall Japanese attitude toward multiracial people by examining the terms used to refer to multiracial people and the legal status of international couples. These two aspects of Japanese society reflect its reluctance to incorporate ethnic difference…

Read the entire article here.

Addressing Issues of Biracial Asian Americans

Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies
Washington State University Press
1988
Chapter 15, pages 111-116

Edited by: G. Y. Okihiro, S. Hune, A. A. Hansen, and J. M. Liu

Stephen L. Murphy-Shigematsu

Revising the Asian American Studies curriculum

One of the more dramatic changes in the post-World War II Asian American population is the increase in those of biracial ancestry. Over the past forty years large numbers of Asian women have married Americans and come to the United States. [n 1] During this period, too, thousands of Asian American men and women have married outside their ethnic group. [n 2] The burgeoning population of biracial youth that has resulted from these developments, represents a significant change in the face of Asian America.

In the light of the above situation, one of the challenges confronting Asian American Studies is to adapt and revise a curriculum created in the early 1970s that was designed primarily for American born Chinese and Japanese. It has become necessary to redesign courses to better accommodate the needs, interests, and backgrounds of the more diverse group of Asian Americans who are presently underrepresented in the curriculum, and increasingly in Asian American Studies classes and in the general population. Those of biracial ancestry are one emerging group whose experiences and needs must be addressed in curriculum development…

Read the entire chapter here.

Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture & History, 1890-2000

University of Rochester Press
2005-03-01
266 pages
Pages: 266
Size: 9 x 6
Hardback 13 Digit ISBN: 9781580461832
Imprint: University of Rochester Press

Edited by

Patricia M. Mazón, Associate Professor of History
State University of New York, Buffalo

Reinhild Steingröver, Assistant Professor of German
University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music

Since the Middle Ages, Africans have lived in Germany as slaves and scholars, guest workers and refugees. After Germany became a unified nation in 1871, it acquired several African colonies but lost them after World War I. Children born of German mothers and African fathers during the French occupation of Germany were persecuted by the Nazis. After World War II, many children were born to African American GIs stationed in Germany and German mothers. Today there are 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany out of a population of 80 million. Nevertheless, German society still sees them as “foreigners,” assuming they are either African or African American but never German.

In recent years, the subject of Afro-Germans has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for several reasons. Looking at Afro-Germans allows us to see another dimension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of race that led to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the experience of Afro-Germans provides insight into contemporary Germany’s transformation, willing or not, into a multicultural society. The volume breaks new ground not only by addressing the topic of Afro-Germans but also by combining scholars from many disciplines.

Table of Contents

1. Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity
2. The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890-1914
3. Converging Specters of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Pre- 1945 Afro-German History
4. Louis Brody and the Black Presence in German Film Before 1945
5. Narrating “Race” in 1950s’ West Germany: The Phenomenon of the Toxi Films
6. Will Everything Be Fine? Anti-Racist Practice in Recent German Cinema
7. Writing Diasporic Identity: Afro-German Literature since 1985
8. The Souls of Black Volk: Contradiction? Oxymoron?

May Ayim: A Woman in the Margin of German Society

The Florida State University College of Arts and Scienes
Spring Semester, 2005
76 pages

Margaret MacCarroll, Professor of Modern Languages: German Division
Florida State University

A thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

This work explores the life of the Afro-German writer May Ayim by analyzing her writings as well as by discussing the social circumstances in which she lived. Chapter 1 provides a look at the Ayim’s life, with special emphasis on major factors influencing her childhood. The effects of the personal as well as social pressures that Ayim dealt with as a child and young adult are also discussed. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of Afro-German children born shortly after World War II. Chapter 3 includes an explanation of Minor Literature and an examination of May Ayim as an author of such literature. Her importance as such is established. Due to Ayim’s position outside the mainstream of German society, social factors that greatly affected her life as a result of this situation are discussed in Chapter 4. These factors are: identity, culture, and ethnicity. In Chapter 5 Ayim’s attempts to incorporate both the white and black aspects of herself despite the deeply rooted history of racism in Germany are also discussed. Chapter 6 includes an examination of the toll that Ayim’s familial and social experiences played on her feelings of romantic love, especially toward another Afro-German. Chapter 7 examines the exhaustion that Ayim felt toward the end of her life.

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION

1. GROWING UP BLACK IN GERMANY
    Ayim’s Struggle with “Otherness“
    Childhood Pressure
    The White World and Ayim’s Black Father
    Grasping her Africanness
    Desire for Whiteness even in Africa

2. HISTORY OF RACISM IN GERMANY
    Recent History of Racism and Mischlingskinder after World War II

3. MAY AYIM, AUTHOR OF MINOR LITERATURE
    The Afro-German Minority Represented in Ayim’s Poetry

4. THE IDENTITY, CULTURE AND ETHNICITY OF PEOPLE ON THE FRINGES

5. MINOR RACE IN MAJORITY CULTURE
    Racism on the Global Scale
    Incorporating Her White and Black Self

6. MAY AYIM’S LOVE LIFE

7. AYIM’S EXHAUSTION ON THE FRINGE OF SOCIETY

CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Read the entire thesis here.

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

New York University Press
2010-03-22
320 pages, 8 illustrations
ISBN: 9780814797174

Susan Zeiger

Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions.

In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in United States foreign relations. Entangling Alliances draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Cupid in the AEF”: U.S. Soldiers and Women abroad in World War I
• 2. “The Worst Kind of Women”: Foreign War Brides in 1920s America
• 3. GIs and Girls around the Globe: The Geopolitics of Sex and Marriage in World War II
• 4. “Good Mothers”: GI Brides after World War II
• 5. Interracialism, Pluralism, and Civil Rights: War Bride Marriage in the 1940s and 1950s
• 6. The Demise of the War Bride: Korea, Vietnam, and Beyond
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author

…One of the most important factors in the structuring of soldier marriage has been race. The state’s repression and condemnation of interracial relationships was a feature of war bride marriage for much of the century. In World War I, for instance, U.S. military and civilian authorities took a paternalistic stance toward white soldiers, determined to “protect” them from sexually promiscuous foreign women. But this attitude was reversed in the case of “colored troops,” as military officials warned allies of the sexual danger that African American servicemen allegedly posed to the white women of other nations. By World War II, racial ideology in the United States had begun to face resistance by activists of color and their white allies, who challenged racial segregation in the military and at home, as well as “oriental exclusion” in immigration policy. Yet despite the state of flux in race relations in the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government, with the urging of the armed services, maintained its segregationist policies in soldier marriage.  These included initially excluding Asian women from the GI Brides Act and denying the marriage requests of black and white interracial couples on the grounds that “miscegenous unions” were illegal in many U.S. states. Deeply held views about racial inferiors and superiors continued to underlie American military engagement in the Cold War. The legacy of biracial relationships in the Vietnam War, as it involved Vietnamese women, American men, and their “Amerasian” children, is one further indication of the centrality of race in analyzing gender relationships in wartime and postwar periods…

A Letter to My Father: Growing up Filipina and American

University of Oklahoma Press
2008
184 pages
5.5″ x 8.5″ x 0″
8 b&w illustrations, 2 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8061-3909-8

Helen Madamba Mossman

Going from the jungles of the wartime Philippines to the schoolyards of northwestern Oklahoma is no easy transition. For one twelve-year-old girl, it meant distance not only across the globe but also within her own family.

Born to a Filipino father and an American mother, Helen Madamba experienced terrifying circumstances at a young age. During World War II, her father, Jorge, fought as an American soldier in his native Philippines, and his family camped in jungles and slept in caves for more than two years to evade capture by the Japanese. But once the family relocated to Woodward, Oklahoma, young Helen faced a different kind of struggle.

Here Mossman tells of her efforts to repudiate her Asian roots so she could fit into American mainstream culture—and her later efforts to come to terms with her identity during the tumultuous 1960s. As she recounts her father’s wartime exploits and gains an appreciation of his life, she learns to rejoice in her biracial and multicultural heritage.

Written with the skill of a gifted storyteller and graced with photos that capture both of Helen’s worlds, A Letter to My Father is a poignant story that will resonate with anyone familiar with the struggle to reconcile past and present identities.

Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific

University of Hawai’i Press
July 2009
304 pages
15 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3342-8

Fiona Paisley, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities
Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia

Perspectives on the Global Past

Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories.

Glamour in the Pacific tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history. Early chapters consider the first PPWA conferences and the decolonizing process undergone by the association. Following World War II, a new generation of nonwhite women from decolonized and settler colonial nations began to claim leadership roles in the Association, challenging the often Eurocentric assumptions of women’s internationalism. In 1955 the first African American delegate brought to the fore questions about the relationship of U.S. race relations with the Pan-Pacific cultural internationalist project. The effects of cold war geopolitics on the ideal of international cooperation in the era of decolonization were also considered. The work concludes with a discussion of the revival of “East meets West” as a basis for world cooperation endorsed by the United Nations in 1958 and the overall contributions of the PPWA to world culture politics.

Read the introduction here.

The limits of internationalist interventions into the politics of “race” and the historical legacies of imperialism, nationalism and colonialism familiar to much contemporary world history were fundamental questions preoccupying women at the PPWA also. As I argue in this book, the resilience of race thinking and the limits of the cross-cultural ethos within the PPWA should be read not as constituting the organization’s failure to somehow transcend history, but rather as a reminder of the inherence of racialism to modern feminism and liberal thought more generally. Wishing to be unbounded by territory yet inevitably preoccupied by territorial issues, the Pan-Pacific conferences discussed in the following chapters provide unique insight into the profoundly interconnected histories of race and gender that have shaped feminist internationalism, as well as other progressive politics, and illustrate their on-the-ground, embodied, and passionate contestations.  By viewing the interwar Pacific as a newly conceived territory of modernity in both spatial and temporal terms, this book sees the interwar period as a pivotal moment in the twentieth century, one in which new ways of thinking about the world opened up, however partially, to questions of diversity and difference at the global level that still occupy us today. Not least, these decades saw new accounts of the flow of populations across the Pacific, encouraging a generation of ethnographers, demographers, and anthropometrists to declare the similarities between the races and cultures and in the Pacific in particular, to announce the future intermixing of peoples and cultures as the Pacific solution to world affairs, and to predict the future advancement of world civilization. Warwick Anderson points out that racial intermixture was claimed by many of those undertaking studies in the Pacific such as Felix and Marie Keesing, who feature in this study, to announce the way forward for humankind, thus envisaging interracial relations in stark contrast to the disavowal of racial mixing in the United States and its anxious management in Australia and elsewhere. The Keesings were also critical of the mandate of their own country, New Zealand, in Samoa (alongside the United States), contrasting that regime with their ideal of advancement through dynamic racial and cultural flows.  As Tony Ballantyne explains, the region was conceptualized spatially and temporally as the product of waves of population linking more recent colonization to deep time.

Brown Babies in Britain

Radcliffe Quarterly
Winter 2007
Dean’s Lecture Series

Julia Hanna

When white British women met black servicemen during World War II, mixed-race children sometimes resulted from their relationships. In her November 2 [2007] Dean’s Lecture, Hazel V. Carby addressed issues of race and class by drawing on scholarship and personal experience as one of the “brown babies” who caused social consternation and marked, according to Carby, the beginnings of Britain as a racialized state. Her lecture was titled “Brown Babies: The Birth of Britain as a Racialized State, 1943–1948.”…

Yet her research into memos sent between various branches of the British government shows an acute awareness of West Indian servicemen as well as black American troops stationed in Britain. Concern was expressed that a “social problem” might arise if nonwhites mixed with the local white population during the war or stayed in Britain after the war, and a program of covert racial segregation was put in place to monitor and manage black troops. When relationships and pregnancies resulted between white women and black men despite such interventions, the women were often counseled to give up their children and avoid marriage. Although her own parents ignored this advice, Carby has continued to search for the depersonalized meaning of her “half-caste” presence in the public sphere by studying memory, history, and citizenship, all of which she hopes to address in a forthcoming work, “Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post WWII Britain.”

The Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, a professor of American studies, and director of the Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization at Yale University, Carby is the author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (Verso, 1999).

To watch Carby’s lecture, click here.

Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America

Harvard University Press
April 2003
382 pages
11 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-01033-8
ISBN 10: 0-674-01033-7

Renee C. Romano, Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies
Oberlin College

Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states, politicians argued for segregated facilities in order to prevent race mixing, and interracial couples risked public hostility, legal action, even violence. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America.

Although significant numbers of both blacks and whites still oppose interracial marriage, larger historical forces have greatly diminished overt racism and shaped a new consciousness about mixed-race families. The social revolutions of the 1950s and ’60s (with their emphasis on individualism and nonconformity), the legal sanctions of new civil rights laws, and a decline in the institutional stability of marriage have all contributed to the growing tolerance for interracial relationships. Telling the powerful stories of couples who married across the color line, Romano shows how cultural shifts are lived by individuals, and how they have enabled mixed couples to build supportive communities for themselves and their children.

However, Romano warns that the erosion of this taboo does not mean that racism no longer exists. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.