Mixed Race Studies

Race-Mixing, Radicalism, and Reimaginating the Nation

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2010
pages 253-256
E-ISSN: 1527-2036, Print ISSN: 1042-7961

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Maryland

The title of Kumari Jayawardena’s monograph, Erasure of the Euro-Asian, reveals the degree to which people of mixed racial ancestry have been silenced in histories of nationalism and national identity in South Asia. The same holds true for the story of mixed race groups in Africa under colonial rule. An obsession with racial purity and the pervasive image of the “tragic mulatto” has dominated popular and academic discourse to the point that we fail to recognize the complex ways that people who lived “betwixt and between” colonial powers created their own sense of group identity and negotiated the politics of race, class, and gender to assert their own interests and even develop a radical critique of colonial rule. Overemphasis on the idea that people of mixed racial ancestry were destined to live lives of marginalization or that they acted simply as the unwitting agents of colonial powers has, thus, erased the critical contributions that Euro-Asian women and men made as leaders, public intellectuals, and reformers in the land of their birth and in the colonial societies of which they were a part.  Erasure of the Euro-Asian uncovers these hidden histories and in doing so complicates our assumptions about collaboration and resistance and disrupts the notion that assimilation or mimicry constituted the only possible response for people of mixed racial ancestry within modern colonial societies.

Jayawardena’s study of Euro-Asians over several generations, from first encounters in the sixteenth century to the emergence of modern nationalism in South Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, confirms my own research on métis identity and French colonialism in Senegal, West Africa. In Senegal, the history of Euro-Africans begins in the period of the Atlantic slave trade. African and Afro-European women known as signares married…

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Naming the Subject: Recovering “Euro-Asian” History

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2010
pages 257-262
E-ISSN: 1527-2036, Print ISSN: 1042-7961

Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations; Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The historic election of Barack Obama as America’s first biracial president has drawn attention once again to a phenomenon that has been gathering momentum since the 1990s: that is, the movement among so-called “multiracial” or “mixed-race” people for recognition, both political and cultural. Although the American media has mostly focused on the multiracial movement in the US, this push for recognition actually has global dimensions. Kumari Jayawardena’s Erasure of the Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia is among the latest in a spate of books published in Asia that seeks to restore those of Asian/European ancestry to the historical record, including Michael Roberts, et al., People Inbetween: The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformation within Sri Lanka (1989), Myrna Braga-Blake’s Singapore Eurasians—Memories and Hopes (1992), and Vicki Lee’s Being Eurasian: Memories across Racial Divides (2004).  In fact, if Paul Spickard identified a “biracial biography boom” in the US during the 1990s, we seem to be currently in the midst of a “Eurasian publishing boom” that spans the globe from Asia, to Australia, Europe, and the US.  This publishing trend includes not only academic books like Jayawardena’s, but also memoirs, family biographies/genealogies, dictionaries, musical CDs, and even cookbooks.  It further includes projects such as the Anglo Indian Heritage Books series, which reprints classic works such as H.A. Stark’s Hostages to India (1926) and Cedric Dover’s Cimmerii?: or Eurasians and Their Future (1929).

What does Jayawardena’s book add to the mix? Although South Asian studies is beyond my own field, I can say…

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Erasure of Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia

Women Unlimited
2009
312 pages
8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
ISBN-10: 8188965405; ISBN-13: 978-8188965403

Kumari Jayawardena, Emeritus Associate Professor
University of Colombo

This book, focuses on the interaction between Asia and Europe in the wake of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British imperialism. It emphasises the vanguard role of the Euro-Asian communities in South Asia, the Burghers, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians, in struggles for democratic rights, long before colonial conditions were ripe for radical social and political change. With their utopian vision of a future democratic society, they agitated for widespread reforms such as worker and peasant rights, early radicalism, proto-nationalism, secularism and gender equality. Jayawardena brings the path-breaking efforts of these Euro-Asian pioneers from the footnotes of history into the main text, asks why their contributions have been ‘hidden from history’ and suggests that the obsession with ‘purity’ of race, both in South Asia and Europe, led to erasing the importance of this radical intelligentsia of mixed origin.

Recasting The Half-Caste

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2010
E-ISSN: 1527-2036 Print ISSN: 1042-7961
pages 263-267

Kumari Jayawardena

In Sri Lanka, serious book reviews are not only few and far between, but authors also do not usually reply to reviews of their books. So while it was a real windfall to receive four reviews simultaneously, to comment briefly in reply is a rather unusual task. However, I really appreciate the reviews, and thank Shefali Chandra, Hilary Jones, Shoshana Keller, and Emma Teng for their perceptive insights and for opening up this discussion.

On a personal note, my academic background is multidisciplinary. I am not a “historian” with a degree in history, but a political scientist who specialized in industrial relations. My interests moved on to feminist history and I continue to be active in the women’s movement. Using these experiences, I have written on several issues ranging from working-class agitation to ethno-nationalism, feminism, peasant rebellion, and the rise of capitalism in Sri Lanka. In this book, I combine many of these themes, and as Shefali Chandra noted, I deal with “race, caste, class, sexuality, and nationalism”—a wide sweep, using examples from several countries.

I should also make it clear that my book is not a history of Euro-Asians, but a political study of the roots of colonial dissenting movements, including feminism, and the role of Euro-Asians as pioneers of struggles for democratic rights and against semifeudalism in South Asia. The word “Euro-Asian” is coined to include persons of mixed European and Asian origin in the maternal or paternal line. Emma Teng calls this “an important contribution” and states that the “highly fraught” issue of nomenclature “has been of great symbolic importance for those struggling for recognition,”—especially, if I may add, since those of mixed origin have historically been referred to by derogatory names. In Sri Lanka, the Euro-Asian “public intellectuals,” who had been educated in English, were inspired by the French Revolution and the European “Enlightenment.”…

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