Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands

Routledge
2016-12-20
246 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781138677708

Edited by:

Farida Fozdar, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
University of Western Australia

Kirsten McGavin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Anthropology)
School of Social Science
University of Queensland

This volume offers a “southern,” Pacific Ocean perspective on the topic of racial hybridity, exploring it through a series of case studies from around the Australo-Pacific region, a region unique as a result of its very particular colonial histories. Focusing on the interaction between “race” and culture, especially in terms of visibility and self-defined identity; and the particular characteristics of political, cultural and social formations in the countries of this region, the book explores the complexity of the lived mixed race experience, the structural forces of particular colonial and post-colonial environments and political regimes, and historical influences on contemporary identities and cultural expressions of mixed-ness.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: “Mixed Race” in the Australo-Pacific Region / Kirsten McGavin and Farida Fozdar
• 1. Descentism in Three Acts / Emma Kowal
• 2. Reimagining Ancestry in Northern Australia’s Gulf Country: The Politics of History, Indigeneity and Race / David Trigger and Richard Martin
• 3. Raising “Mixed Race” Asian/European Migrant Children in Australia / Maki Meyer and Farida Fozdar
• 4. “See This Skin, It Is Black and White Together” / Margot Ford and Ailsa Purdon
• 5. Asian (Con)Fusion: Identity Markers Among Mixed-Asian “Race” Individuals in Perth, Western Australia / Crystal Abidin
• 6. Who Are We?German-Tongan Identity in New Zealand and Australia / Kasia Cook
• 7. Constructing and Interpreting “Mixed Race” and “Mixed Parentage” in Papua New Guinea / Helen Johnson and Kirsten McGavin
• 8. Papua New Guinean-Australian Hybridity: Reflections of an “Insider” / Anita Iko Togolo
• 9. The Transformations of the “Métis Question” in New Caledonia (1853-2009) / Adrian Muckle and Benoit Trepied
• 10. A Categorical Failure: “Mixed Race” in Colonial Papua New Guinea / Michael Goddard
• 11. Searching for a Sound: Music and “Mixed Race” Identity in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea / Michael Webb
• 12. Lingering Legacies of German Colonialism: The “Mixed Race” Diasporas in Oceania / Christine Winter
• 13. “Mixed Race” Identity and West Papuan Political Activism: Two Case Studies / Camellia Webb-Gannon
• 14. “It’s a Bicultural Nation. But the Journey Towards True Biculturalism, It’s Not There Yet”: Exploring Fathers’ Involvement in Bringing Up Their Mixed Race Children in New Zealand / Rosalind Edwards
• 15. When “Mixed Race” Is No Longer “Mixed”: A Case from Aotearoa/New Zealand / Neriko Musha Doerr

The Presumption of Indigeneity: Colonial Administration, the ‘Community of Race’ and the Category of Indigène in New Caledonia, 1887–1946

The Journal of Pacific History
Published online: 2012-06-29
pages 1-20
DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2012.688183

Adrian Muckle, Lecturer in History
Victoria University of Wellington

From 1887 to 1946, the administrative apparatus known as the indigénat provided French administrators in New Caledonia with a set of exceptional measures to streamline the governing and summary repression of persons defined as indigènes (‘natives’). This paper examines the place of the indigénat, the role of colonial administrators in defining one or more communities of race and the variable status of the category of indigène in New Caledonia in the period to 1946. Particular consideration is given to the influence (or absence thereof) of the science of race on administrative thinking about native policy in New Caledonia, the distinctions drawn between different categories of indigène, the extent to which cultural and political divisions between the Grande terre (mainland) and the Loyalty Islands were imagined or constructed in racial terms and the situation of métis (‘half-castes’). The paper argues that an incipient definition of the indigène as a person of Melanesian, Polynesian, mixed or Oceanian race must be understood in the context of the development of the indentured labour and immigration regimes (the importation of workers from Asia and other parts of Oceania) as well as the ways in which the indigénat was differently applied and experienced between New Caledonia’s mainland and its dependencies (notably the Loyalty Islands), as well as by métis.

Read or purchase the article here.