Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

However, the scientific founding behind the distinction of race based on geographic ancestry is highly questionable, and theorists in favor of social construction philosophy seeking to uphold race as a social construct refute the ancestry-race connection, calling it an antiquated and generalized treatment of the multifarious and intricate notion that is racial identity and heritage. By locating race within one’s ancestral historic place of origin, biological determinism fails to acknowledge the constant “migration and gene flow [which] have spread human genes around the world in a myriad of ways. Successive migrations, conquests, absorptions, intermarriages, alliances, and extinctions of populations have produced a constant, never-ending shuffling of human genetic material” (Alland 2002: 47). How can biological determinism account for the massive population of mixed race?

At the core of biological determinism theories is the deprecating confusion of geographic ancestry and race. For example, Senegalese, Jamaican, and African American are all considered part of the same conglomerate race: black. All Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are Asian. Polish, German, French, and Canadian; white. Race, “as used by the average educated speaker of English, connotes geographic ancestry” (Levin 2002: 25) that has then been messily combined into general genetic racial groups. However these peoples, of vastly differing geographic location but the same socially constructed racial group are almost guaranteed to have very drastically different genetic profiles because of the connection between geographic ancestry and genetics. Two people considered the same race but from separate poles of the world will not be genetically similar, yet two people from the same location but of considered different races are very likely to share very similar genomes due to ancestral intermarriage and proximity.

Danielle Antonia Craig, “From Medical Innovation to Sociopolitical Crisis: How Racialized Medicine Has Shifted the Scope of Racial Discourse and its Social Consequences,” (Senior Essay, Wesleyan University, 2013), 11-12.

Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-09-01 01:00Z by Steven

Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels

History of Intellectual Culture
Volume 4, Number 1 (2004)
ISSN 1492-7810

Hsu-Ming Teo, Senior Lecturer and Head of Modern History
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

This article examines Anglo-Indian romance novels written by British women during the period of the Raj. It argues that these love stories were symptomatic of British fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial relations as well as experimenting with the modern femininity of the New Woman. With the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, British interest in India as a locus for romance rapidly declined, thus demonstrating that these novels were never concerned with India but with British lives and British colonialism.

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Tags: History of Intellectual Culture, Hsu-Ming Teo, India

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Mixed Race Studies

Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels

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