Mixed Race Studies

A Matter Of Honour: Being Chinese in South Africa

Jacana Media
2008
256 pages
235 x 155mm
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-77009-568-7

Yoon Jung Park, Senior Researcher in the Centre for Sociological Research
Humanities Research Village
University of Johannesburg

The South African-born Chinese community is a tiny one, consisting of 10,000 to 12,000 members in a population of approximately 45 million. Throughout much of the history of this most race-conscious country, the community has been ignored or neglected, and officially classed along with Coloureds (people of mixed race) or with Indians in that particularly South African category of ‘Asiatic’.

More recently, as China’s aid, trade and investment in Africa grow and large numbers of new Chinese immigrants stream into South Africa and other African states, Chinese South Africans are beginning to receive both media and scholarly attention. For this reason it is timely to focus on the only resident community of Chinese on the continent.

This book, based on a PhD thesis, focuses on Chinese South Africans by examining their shifting social, ethnic, racial and national identities over time. Using concepts of identity, ethnicity, race, nationalism, and transnationalism, and drawing on comparisons with other overseas Chinese communities, it explores the multi-layered identities of the South African group and analyses the way in which their identities have changed over time and with each generation.

As the book makes clear, Chinese identities in South Africa have been shaped by both external and internal forces. As regards external factors, the state—both that of China and of South Africa—played a key role in establishing the parameters of identity construction. Over time the weight of this influence changed, as a result of international political events, internal racial policies, and external trade and political relations. At the same time, individual and community agency, and the force of the ‘China myth’, played important parts in the construction of Chinese South African identity.

Woman traces her Tanzanian roots in film

The Citizen
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
2012-02-04

Tyrone Beason

Sometimes a journey begins with a song. In the case of Seattle documentary filmmaker Eli Kimaro, it was a transporting version of the classic lullaby Summertime from the African-American opera Porgy and Bess, this one sung by the Benin-born artist Angelique Kidjo as a West African spiritual, full of cooing background vocals and soul-tapping percussion.

Kimaro’s father is Tanzanian. Her mother is Korean. She’d always been comfortable with her mixed-race background, but something about hearing that song eight years ago sparked a longing to better understand the people she came from, particularly the relatives in Kilimanjaro region, where her father grew up and where she’d visited many times as a child.It dawned on her that she should make a film about her father’s side of the family, even though she’d never directed a movie in her life.

The result, A Lot Like You, debuted at the Seattle International Film Festival last year to positive reviews.

The film helps raise the profile of a population in the United States that many people who identify with just one racial or ethnic group scarcely understand…

…Elikimaro is part of a new wave of multiracial pride, discussion and activism rooted in a very real demographic shift.

America is, in fact, more multiracial. According to the 2010 U.S. census, more than 9 million Americans identified themselves as belonging to two or more racial groups, or about 2.9 per cent of the total population, up from 2.4 per cent a decade ago.

Since 2000, the census has made it easier than ever for people answering its surveys to pick more than one racial group; and Americans who have mixed-race backgrounds, long a cause for derision and marginalization, are ever more comfortable checking all the boxes that apply to them…

Read the entire article here.

Race in South Africa: Still an issue

The Economist
2012-02-04

Mixed-race citizens remain uneasy about black rule

If Barack Obama lived in South Africa, he might be called a coloured. Under apartheid, the government decided to which of four racial categories a South African belonged—black, coloured, Indian/Asian or white—depending mostly on looks. The same categorisation still exists, but it is now left up to individuals.

Given that coloureds were formerly regarded as racial misfits, once dismissed by the wife of former president F. W. de Klerk, Marike, as “non-persons…the leftovers”, one might have expected the number of South Africans wishing to describe themselves as such to plummet. But since the end of apartheid in 1994 the coloured population has in fact grown by almost a third, to 4.5m.

Most live in Cape Town and the Western Cape region, where they originated some 350 years ago after the arrival of the first Dutch settlers. Given the dearth of European women at the time, the Dutch—soon to be followed by French, German and English settlers—often took the pale-skinned indigenous Khoisan or, later, imported Asian and African slaves as their wives and mistresses…

Read the entire article here.

Are there ‘Mestizos’ in the Arab World? A Comparative Survey of Classification Categories and Kinship Systems

Middle Eastern Studies
Volume 48, Issue 1 (January 2012)
pages 125-138
DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2011.643301

Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste, Professor of Social Anthropology
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Terminology devoted to miscegenation and inter-ethnic relationships is extremely problematic, and this article shows that many of these categories are more classificatory than descriptive. Some North African and Middle Eastern examples reveal that theoretical concepts about mixture reflect the folk conceptions of the observers rather that the meaning of local categories which not necessarily share those notions of mixture. In this sense, it is suggested that social categorizations of miscegenation are created from specific structures of descent which consider the transmission of two different social statuses, and that the pre-eminent unilineal descent systems of the Arab world should refrain from the political construction of such classification categories.

The aim of this study is to consider the cultural classifications of mixture as a social category, despite the fact that the social sciences have used many concepts in an arbitrary way as analytical categories that arc supposedly neutral and descriptive of something evident, deriving from biology. In fact, the central problem is that historians and anthropologists have projected their folk conceptions of mixture onto the societies studied, instead of analysing it as a political exercise in social classification: mestizo, half-caste, half-blood, mulatto and so on are far from being objective concepts that describe people; they are social and political categories created in specific historical contexts. The question I would like to pose is what these mixture categories as applied to persons, taken for granted by those who should question them, refer to, and whether these ideas of mixture are applicable to Arabic societies. From this standpoint. I aim to show that: (1) the ideas about mixture depend on social classification systems, so that socio-political categories construct the idea of the mixture of people and not the reverse: (2) in the Maghreb, and in the Arab-Muslim world in general, there is an apparent absence of mixture categories as applied to persons: (3) explaining why some societies produce classifications about miscegenation while others do not involves taking into account political factors and the role of the systems of descent in defining group membership.

In social sciences, the idea of a mixture of people has become a category that is not only taken for granted, but is also considered as a description of a target biological phenomenon. My proposal is that the mixture can only emerge when one considers the contribution of two different entities that are transmitted in a bilateral way; and therefore requires that such entities be thought of as being different. This is the premise already discussed by Jean-Loup Amselle in terms of the paradox of racial mixing as an affirmation of pure essences. In contrast, the data I shall present regarding Arab contexts reflect the weight of a system of patrilineal descent that establishes membership without recognizing mixtures, and is based on the formal reproduction of the male lines.

In Western ideas about mixture, two major dimensions have converged concepts which are in fact based on a bilateral approach to the transmission of social status: (1) the idea that sexual mixing generates new people (mestizos, mulattos, half-caste, etc.), in accordance with the emerging racialist thinking of the eighteenth century,…

Read or purchase the article here.

Study provides first genetic evidence of long-lived African presence within Britain

University of Leicester
Press Release
2007-01-24

Research reveals African origins in the UK and US

New research has identified the first genetic evidence of Africans having lived amongst “indigenous” British people for centuries. Their descendants, living across the UK today, were unaware of their black ancestry.

The University of Leicester study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and published today in the journal European Journal of Human Genetics, found that one third of men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare Y chromosome type previously found only amongst people of West African origin.

The researchers, led by Professor Mark Jobling, of the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester, first spotted the rare Y chromosome type, known as hgA1, in one individual, Mr. X. This happened whilst PhD student Ms. Turi King was sampling a larger group in a study to explore the association between surnames and the Y chromosome, both inherited from father to son. Mr. X, a white Caucasian living in Leicester, was unaware of having any African ancestors.

“As you can imagine, we were pretty amazed to find this result in someone unaware of having any African roots,” explains Professor Jobling, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. “The Y chromosome is passed down from father to son, so this suggested that Mr. X must have had African ancestry somewhere down the line. Our study suggests that this must have happened some time ago.”

Although most of Britain’s one million people who define themselves as “Black or Black British” owe their origins to immigration from the Caribbean and Africa from the mid-twentieth century onwards, in reality, there has been a long history of contact with Africa. Africans were first recorded in the north 1800 years ago, as Roman soldiers defending Hadrian’s Wall…

…“This study shows that what it means to be British is complicated and always has been,” says Professor Jobling. “Human migration history is clearly very complex, particularly for an island nation such as ours, and this study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations or ‘races’.”…

Read the entire press release here.

Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses

Cambridge University Press
January 2002
224 pages
Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780521004275
Hardback ISBN: 9780521808231
eBook ISBN: 9780511029325
DOI: 10.2277/0521004276

Edited by:

David I. Kertzer, Dupee University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology & Italian Studies
Brown University

Dominique Arel, Professor of Political Science
University of Ottawa

This study examines the ways that states have attempted to pigeon-hole the people within their boundaries into racial, ethnic, and language categories. These attempts, whether through American efforts to divide the U.S. population into mutually exclusive racial categories, or through the Soviet system of inscribing nationality categories on internal passports, have important implications not only for people’s own identities and life chances, but for national political and social processes as well. The book reviews the history of these categorizing efforts by the state, offers a theoretical context for examining them, and illustrates the case with studies from a range of countries.

Features

• The first in a new series that specifically addresses the needs of the student
• Focuses on the charged topic of efforts to categorize individuals into racial and ethnic categories in the national census
• Highly integrated volume with extensive introductory chapter that helps define a new field

Table of Contents

1. Censuses, identity formation, and the struggle for political power David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel
2. Racial categorization in censuses Melissa Nobles
3. Ethnic categorization in censuses: comparative observations from Israel, Canada, and the United States Calvin Goldscheider
4. Language categories in censuses: backward- or forward-looking? Dominique Arel
5. The debate on resisting identity categorization in France Alain Blum
6. On counting, categorizing, and violence in Burundi and Rwanda Peter Uvin
7. Identity counts: the Soviet legacy and the census in Uzbekistan David Abramson.

The Evolution of ‘Portuguese’ Identity: Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

The Journal of African History
Volume 40, Issue 2 (1999)
pages 173-191

Peter Mark, Professor of Art History
Wesleyan University, Connecticut

During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from Portugal known as lançados—some of them Jews seeking to escape religious persecution—settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities. By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or ‘Portuguese’ as they called themselves, were established at trading centers from the Petite Côte in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone. Descendants of Portuguese immigrants, of Cape Verde islanders, and of West Africans, the Luso-Africans developed a culture that was itself a synthesis of African and European elements. Rich historical documentation allows a case study of the changing ways Luso-Africans identified themselves over the course of three centuries.

The earliest lançados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and European traders and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Their position was formally discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the sixteenth century, but they nevertheless played an important role in trade with Portugal and the Cape Verde islands. Lançado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Côte, while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lançados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present day Bissau. The offspring of these lançados and African women were called filhos de terra and were generally considered to be ‘Portuguese’.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendants of the lançados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape Verde islands. Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages. Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, mainland Luso-Africans and Cape Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were ‘Portuguese’, and both sub-groups employed the same essentially cultural criteria of group identification.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed marriage: ‘I am coming to Senegal and I want to marry you’

Surprising Europe: Share Your Migration Experience
Netherlands
2010-03-26

This website is part of the international cross-media project Surprising Europe, initiated by Ssuuna Golooba, who left Uganda in the hope of a better life. Surprising Europe consists of a documentary and a nine part television series. Surprising Europe.com is a community of people who are interested in African-European migration issues.

Turid from the Netherlands fell in love with Moussé from Senegal when she was staying in Senegal. She went back, but realized that Moussé was the one: ‘I called him and said: ‘I am coming to Senegal next month and I want to marry you.’ He replied: ‘Can I call you back tomorrow?’

Turid didn’t know it at the time, but Moussé had to do something important before he could answer her question: ‘I first had to ask my parents, that’s tradition in Africa. But they thought is was great, asked me if I was in love and I said “yes!”, so we married,’ he smiles. Now they live in The Netherlands with their three children…

Read the article and watch the video here.

Multinational families, creolized practices and new identities: Euro-Senegalese cases

Oxford University
The Oxford Diasporas Programme
2011-01-01 through 2015-12-31

Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach, Oxford Diaspora Programme Research Fellow, African Studies Centre Junior Research Fellow
St Anne’s College, University of Oxford

The Oxford Diasporas Programme is a five-year research programme involving various centres at the University of Oxford and led by the International Migration Institute.
 
The research consists of 11 projects focusing on the impact of diasporas.
 
The programme is funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2015.

One of the effects of the global intensification of mobility is the formation of multicultural and transnational families involving spouses with different citizenships, as well as linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds. In many parts of coastal West Africa, there is a long history of marriage with Europeans, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade. With a focus on bi-national families involving a Senegalese and a European partner as a case study, this project explores processes of family making in a diasporic context, from a gendered and cross-generational perspective. This project will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the resilience of diasporas over time and their integration into ‘host societies’.

For more information, click here.

The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World

Cambridge University Press
March 2011
278 pages
8 b/w illus. 3 maps
228 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN:9780521192866

Peter Mark, Professor of Art History
Wesleyan University, Connecticut

José da Silva Horta
Universidade de Lisboa

This book traces the history of early seventeenth-century Portuguese Sephardic traders who settled in two communities on Senegal’s Petite Côte. There, they lived as public Jews, under the spiritual guidance of a rabbi sent to them by the newly established Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. In Senegal, the Jews were protected from agents of the Inquisition by local Muslim rulers. The Petite Côte communities included several Jews of mixed Portuguese-African heritage as well as African wives, offspring, and servants. The blade weapons trade was an important part of their commercial activities. These merchants participated marginally in the slave trade but fully in the arms trade, illegally supplying West African markets with swords. This blade weapons trade depended on artisans and merchants based in Morocco, Lisbon, and northern Europe and affected warfare in the Sahel and along the Upper Guinea Coast. After members of these communities moved to the United Provinces around 1620, they had a profound influence on relations between black and white Jews in Amsterdam. The study not only discovers previously unknown Jewish communities but by doing so offers a reinterpretation of the dynamics and processes of identity construction throughout the Atlantic world.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Two Sephardic communities on Senegal’s Petite Côte
• 2. Jewish identity in Senegambia
• 3. Religious interaction: Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in early 17th-century Upper Guinea
• 4. The blade weapons trade in seventeenth-century West Africa
• 5. The Luso-African ivories as historical source for the weapons trade and for the Jewish presence in Guinea of Cape Verde
• 6. The later years: merchant mobility and the evolution of identity
• Conclusion
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Index