Mixed Race Studies

Showing Her Colors: An Afro-German Writes the Blues in Black and White

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 2003
pages 306-319
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0045

Karein Kirsten Goertz, Lecturer of Germanic Language and Literature
University of Michigan

This essay undertakes a detailed analysis of May Ayim’s Blues in Schwarz Weiss and examines her development of what she terms Ayim’s “hybrid language”—an expressive poetic style in which African and German elements are not mutually exclusive but rather two interwoven strands that Ayim brings together to articulate the texture of her identity as a Black German. Goertz contends that Ayim’s use of complex forms of irony and displacement constitutes a sophisticated practice of “defamiliarization” that represents an important new signifying practice in German literary expression.

I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.
—Audre Lorde

That bird is wise, look. Its beak, back turned, picks for the present what is best from ancient eyes, then steps forward, on ahead to meet the future, undeterred.
—Kayper-Mensah

Through her poetry, essays and political activism. May Ayim sought to dissolve the socially and politically constructed borders that continued to exist after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. To her, the post-unification “new German solidarity” with its nationalistic rhetoric of Heimat (homeland), Volk (the people) and Vaterland (fatherland) signaled a redrawing of the line between those who were considered part of the German collective and those who were not; the previous ideological and geopolitical faultline between Fast and West was being replaced by a division along ethnic lines. Afro-Germans and other ethnic minorities living in Germany recognized that “the new ‘We’ in ‘this our country’ did and does not make room for everyone.” Rather than feeling summoned by this newly constructed collective identity, they understood it to be a place of confinement or delimitation and exclusion: “ein eingrenzender und ausgrenzender Ort” (Ayim, “Das Jahr” 214). Ayim’s spatial description of the pronoun signals that the repercussions of its limited parameters are real and practical, as well as psychological. Unable to identify with the new definition of the first-person possessive pronoun, she invariably finds herself cast into its second-person negative.

The title poem of Ayim’s first poetry volume, Blues in Schwarz Weiß (Blues in Black and White), published in 1995, traces the process of marginalization along color lines, with German unification as one of its more recent manifestations. To explain the age-old dynamic between black and white, she references the African-American tradition of the blues: during the celebration of German unity, some rejoiced in white, while others mourned on its fringes in black—together they danced to the rhythm of the blues. The blues were born out of the experience of oppression, but, as Angela Davis points out, blues also offers the key to transcending the racial and gender imbalance…

Read or purchase the article here.

First Annual Convention Report: Black German Cultural Society NJ

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey
German Historical Institute
Washington, D.C.
2011-08-19 through 2011-08-21
14 pages

By Priscilla Layne and S. Marina Jones

The First Annual Black German Cultural Society, NJ Convention was an important opportunity for scholars, students, and individuals personally affected by Afrogerman history and culture, from both sides of the Atlantic, to come together. Participants included numerous members of the Afrogerman community many of whom are themselves scholars, authors, filmmakers, and activists…

Read the entire report here.

Half-Blood Blues

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
2011-09-03
304 pages
8.5 X 5.5 X 0.9 in
Cloth ISBN:9780887627415
Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 9781250012708

Esi Edugyan

• Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris—where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance—Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

African Diasporas: Afro-German Literature in the Context of the African American Experience

Lit Verlag
2006
144 pages
ISBN: 3-8258-9612-9

Aija Poikane-Daumke

This book investigates the development of Afro-German literature in the context of the African American experience and shows the decisive role of literature for the emergence of the Afro-German Movement. Various Afro-German literary and cultural initiatives, which began in the 1980s, arose as a response to the experience of being marginalized—to the point of invisibility—within a dominant Eurocentric culture that could not bring the notions of “Black” and “German” together in a meaningful way. The book is a significant contribution to the understanding of German literature as multi-ethnic and of the the transatlantic networks operating in the African Diasporas.

Redrawing the Color Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti

Journal of Caribbean History
Volume 30, Numbers 1 & 2 (1996)
pages 28-50

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

This article examines the social and political construction of race in French colonial Saint-Domingue. After 1763 white elites redefined the category “free coloured” using negative images of femininity rooted in French political discourse. This engendering of racial stereotypes solidified a racial hierarchy that whites found alarmingly fluid. Planters’ councils and the governors they opposed evoked images of sexually powerful women and effeminized men to explain colonial despotism and disorder. In the late 1780s, however, free men of colour deliberately asserted their civic virtue and virility, challenging these stereotypes and eventually destroying the colonial racial hierarchy.

By 1789 French Saint Domingue was home to the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident free population of African descent in the Americas. Comprising close to half the colony’s free population, these gens de couleur won civil equality with whites from the French Legislative Assembly in April 1792 and their political demands helped produce the Haitian Revolution. Why did such an extraordinary population emerge in this colony?

This article contends that the size, wealth, and self-confidence of this group were partly the result of new social and legal definitions of race formulated in Saint-Domingue after 1763. As this frontier society became the centerpiece of the French empire after the Seven Years’ War, prejudice established a deep and apparently permanent gulf between “whites” and “people of colour.” This new legal and social discrimination was deeply influenced by politicized French gender stereotypes, which whites used to reinforce a new, biological conception of racial difference. Old colonial families were relabeled gens de couleur. After 1769 whites considered free people of mixed African/European descent to be not merely “between” whites and blacks, but morally and physically inferior to both races. This exaggeration of the difference between white and brown colonists reinforced the ambiguous category “free people of colour” and served as an effective target during the French Revolution for wealthy “mulattos” and “quadroons” eager to claim full citizenship.

At the heart of the new racism were conflicts over Saint-Domingue’s political and cultural identity. After the Seven Years’ War new immigration from Europe and the increasingly “civilized” tone of elite colonial society raised the question of how “French” Saint-Domingue could become. Could a slave plantation colony produce a civic-minded public of the sort said to be emerging in France at this time? Many colonial planters, magistrates, and merchants wanted to believe it could. These elites appropriated metropolitan political discourse to explain why free Dominguan society differed from France. After the Seven Years’ War they began to describe free men and women of colour as passionate, narcissistic, and parasitic, terms used in France to vilify powerful women at court. This redirected and highly politicised misogyny helped solidify the ambiguous category gens de couleur, placing these families and individuals firmly outside respectable colonial society. The new image of people of mixed ancestry answered troubling questions about white behaviour in Saint-Domingue and seemed to guarantee that an orderly, rational colonial public could emerge. Grafting a stereotyped effeminacy onto emerging biological notions of race legitimised the disenfranchising of free people of colour, some of whom were indistinguishable from “whites” in wealth, education, distance from slavery, even physical appearance. In Saint-Domingue’s rough-and-tumble seventeenth-century buccaneer society, race was not the obsession it would later become. Early censuses did not distinguish between “whites” and “mulattoes,” but between free and enslaved residents. Before the massive importation of slaves for sugar work, children of mixed African/European descent were apparently considered free from birth. Even in 1685, the metropolitan authors of France’s slave law, the Code Noir, were more concerned about sin than race and racial mixture. The Code ordered colonial officials to confiscate mixed-race children and slave concubines from their owners, but stated that if a master married his slave mistress, she would be automatically free, as would the children of their union. Under the original terms of the Code Noir, ex-slaves enjoyed all the rights of French subjects…

For example, as he charted the somatic varieties produced by different combinations of African and European “blood,” Moreau also described distinct moral qualities. Blacks were strong and passionate while whites were graceful and intelligent. Therefore, mulattoes, who were one-half black, were stronger than quarterons, who were only one-quarter African. According to Moreau, African appetites for physical pleasure were especially pronounced when combined with white qualities. Mulattoes lived for sexual gratification, and the offspring of a mulatto and a black had a “temperament impossible to contain.”

Convinced that black women had strong psychological and physical inclinations to be mothers, Moreau believed that mulatto and quadroon women had difficulty giving birth, due to their physical and moral deficiencies. Men of mixed descent were similarly flawed. Mulattos were often intelligent and attractive, but they were lazy, beardless, foppish, and sensual, according to Moreau. Nor did free coloured military service challenge this image:

It seems that then [in the ranks a mulatto] loses his laziness, but all the world knows that a soldier’s life, in the leisure it provides, has attractions for indolent men … A mulatto soldier will appear exactly to the calls of day, perhaps even to those of the evening, but it is in vain that one tries to restrict his liberty at night; [the night|] belongs to pleasure and he will not indenture it, no matter what commitments he has made elsewhere…

Read the entire article here.

Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture

University of Kansas
April 2011
358 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3456911
ISBN: 9781124667348

Rozanne McGrew Stringer

In this study, I examine images of the black female and black male body and the female Spanish Gypsy by four artists—Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—that articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to racialized populations by French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1862 and 1900. Notably, whiteness—made visible and raced—is also implicated in some of the images I analyze. I look closely at the visual stereotype of the seductive, dark-skinned female Spanish Gypsy and the primitive and debased black male, as well as at representations of the abject black female body. I also consider the construction of “whiteness” as an unfixed and complex notion of French identity, particularly as it applies to the bourgeois white female body.

I analyze images in which representations of racial identity seem unproblematic, but I show that these images articulate a host of uncertainties. I contextualize each image through analyses of nineteenth-century French representations of the black person and Spanish Gypsy by modernist and academic artists, nineteenth-century racialist science, French fiction and periodicals, and entertainment spectacles such as the circus and human zoos. My methodology draws primarily on formalism, social history, and postcolonial and feminist theory.

In my examination of representations of racial difference in late nineteenth-century French visual culture, I investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through the lens of hybridity, a term employed by nineteenth-century biologists and natural scientists to define the intermixing of races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly dominated the discourses on racial hierarchies and classifications. I explore nineteenth-century notions of racial hybridity through the emerging science of anthropology, but I also expand my study to interrogate hybridity as the cross-fertilization of cultures and identity. I consider how these images expand and problematize the meaning of hybridity and its antithetical concept of racial purity. I also demonstrate the paradoxical correspondence and oscillation between the racial stereotype and the culturally dominant power responsible for the stereotype’s creation and perpetuation. My study seeks to illuminate what I see as the hybridity and heterogeneity of racial identity, for the person of color as well as for the “white” European, discretely and subtly disclosed in these images.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Mme Camus’s Shadow: Degas and Racial Consciousness
• Chapter Two: Manet’s Gypsy with a Cigarette: Unfixing the Racial Stereotype
• Chapter Three: Beholding Beauty: The Black Female Body in Frédéric Bazille’s Late Oeuvre
• Chapter Four: Masculinity and the Object of Desire in Toulouse-Lautrec’s Chocolat dansant dans un bar
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Illustrations

Introduction

The juxtaposition of a black woman and white woman in Frédéric Bazille’s canvas, La Toilette [Figure 1], 1870, at first glance seems to uphold normative nineteenth-century conceptions about the separation and hierarchization of the races. The semi-nude kneeling black woman, attired only in a headscarf and multi-colored striped skirt, attends to the seated light skinned female nude who is placed at the center of the composition. Standing to the left of the seated nude is a second female servant with dark eyes and hair, and a sallow complexion. Surprisingly, it is the interchange between the kneeling and seated women that especially commands the viewer’s attention. While one might expect to see the white woman depicted as the principal focus of the pairing, her body is rendered as a limp and generalized form. Yet, the body of the black woman is depicted with specificity and not reduced to a racialized type. Indeed, the skin coloration of the seated female nude in Bazille’s image could be characterized as “blank” whiteness while Bazille imparts an unexpected radiance to the black woman’s skin. Bazille composed the flesh tones of the seated nude woman from a palette of analogous icy whites which contrasts markedly with the array of luminous hues—warm browns, copper, orange, pink, and plum—with which he painted the black woman’s skin. In formal terms, Bazille painted the image of a black woman that was at odds with established social and pictorial traditions by suggesting an aestheticized and a particularized black female body.

Bazille’s image of the black female body in La Toilette is situated at an intersection between mid- to late nineteenth-century French scientific models that established the strategies of defining racial and hierarchical difference and the visual representation of race. Certainly, artists employed multiple strategies for visualizing racial difference during the second half of the nineteenth century, but many producers of visual culture subscribed to the ideology that essential differences separated the human races. In this dissertation, I will show how signs of racial difference in images by Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec evoke ambivalence toward racial identity. I explore how fluid notions of race in late nineteenth-century France are unexpectedly disclosed in these works.

In my examination of representations of constructions of race in late nineteenth-century French visual culture, I have chosen to investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through the lens of hybridity, a term employed by nineteenth-century biologists, natural scientists, and most notably by contemporary cultural historian and postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha to define the intermixing of races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly dominated the nineteenth-century discourse about racial hierarchies and classifications. The images I have selected expand and problematize the notion of hybridity and its antithetical concept of racial purity. “Hybridity … makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different,” writes Robert J. C. Young in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Young distinguishes biological hybridity—inter-racial mixing that produces heterogeneous offspring—from cultural hybridity, which he argues is transformative and irrevocably alters the physical, spatial, and metaphorical separation of two discrete entities. I will explore the concept of hybrid zones as sites where boundaries between absolute difference and sameness are effaced, and contact and interaction result in shifts of identity that dismantle the sense of racial or cultural exclusivity and authenticity.

In this study, I employ both the literal and metaphorical notions of hybridity. Since the requisite for biological hybridity is the intermixing of distinct “races,” my dissertation focuses on racialized populations with which the French had significant contact in the nineteenth century: Negroes and Gypsies. I also interrogate what constituted “whiteness” for the French in the second half of the nineteenth century and how visual culture inscribed, indeed participated in creating, unstable and fluid designations of racial difference for populations of color as well for the “white” Spanish Gypsy by Degas, Manet, Bazille, and Toulouse-Lautrec that expose the unreliability of racist ideologies and articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to racialized populations by many French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1860 and 1900. I investigate nineteenth-century notions about racial hybridity through the lens of biology and ethnology, but I also expand my study to interrogate hybridity as the cross-fertilization of cultures and identity.

I examine how French representations of the African Caribbean, North and West African black, and Spanish Gypsies visually expressed the anxieties about and fascination with the growing numbers of non-white populations living in France. Colonial expansion in the West Indies and Africa resulted in unions between French colonists and colonized women and the offspring of these interracial relationships elicited concerns about the degradation of the white race and civilization. Within their nation’s borders, the French viewed immigrant populations of blacks from their colonies and itinerant Spanish Gypsies – deemed ethnically distinct from Europeans – with suspicion, derision, and desire. The Negro and Gypsy were simultaneously marked as overtly sexual, primitive, and intellectually inferior. Although the French established a racial hierarchy that affirmed Europeans superior to non-white races, colonialism and immigration inevitably contributed to the dissolution of precise racial boundaries. My dissertation considers the areas where the dominant culture and its perceived inferior intersect and how artists represented those “in-between”6 states of racial and cultural identity…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Harvard University Press
February 2012
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
17 halftones, 1 line illustration, 1 map
Hardcover ISBN 9780674047747

Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law
University of Michigan

Jean M. Hébrard, Historian and Visiting Professor
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
University of Michigan

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family’s quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.

Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie’s great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.

Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

There are Italians with black skin

Africa News
2010-05-28

Stephen Ogongo

Interview with Sabrina Jacobucci, President of Association of Afro-Italian Children

To be black and Italian at the same time is a new reality the Italian society is still struggling to accept.  Adoption and increase in the number of mixed marriages between Italians and Africans are gradually leading to an increase in the number of Black Italian children, the so-called Afro-Italians.  But the Italian society seems unprepared to cater for the social and educational needs of these children.  In this exclusive interview with Africa News, Ms. Sabrina Jacobucci, aka Flora NW, President of the Association of Afro-Italian Children, reveals the reasons that led to the foundation of the Association, the problems mixed heritage children face in the country, and suggests what should be done to make the education system more responsive to the needs of mixed heritage children.

Sabrina, please share with us the story behind the formation of the Association of Afro-Italian Children.

The Association was initiated by an Italian mother of two mixed-race children born abroad, who, when returning to Italy, started to express the need of meeting other black children since they were the only black children in school, in their block, whenever they went to the park or to after school activities. They started to ask: why aren’t there children like us on TV or on advertisements?  The Italian mother started to look for a group where children could meet other black children, but could only find associations of various migrant communities, or churches which catered for the Nigerian, or the Congolese or the Ghanaian and so forth.  The children could not, though, identify with any ethnic or migrant community in particular, being black Italians. So to answer the children’s need to see themselves represented, this woman started to look for other parents of black or mixed-race children to set up a group where the kids could, at least once a month, meet and feel stronger, in a society where to be black is often neither appreciated nor valued.

When was it founded?

A couple of years ago.

Who was involved?

I, the white Italian mum of Black Italian daughters (who also share an English, Nigerian and Jamaican mixed parentage), had the idea of setting up a group where my children could meet other Afro-Italian children. I thought gathering other parents of black children willing to meet would be easy.

Unfortunately, the number of black and mixed-race children is very low in Rome, especially in my area. So I started to “advertise” on the web, first of all on www.insenegal.org, a site which has a rich forum where a number of mothers of children having a Senegalese father write. But most of them weren’t from Rome. So I wrote to other parents’ forum, but they were attended mostly by parents of white children. And then, on one of these forums, I met the adoptive mum of a girl of Nigerian parentage, who shared the same need as mine. We were then joined by other adoptive and biological parents of black and mixed-race children, thanks to the website I manage http://afroitaliani.splinder.com, where I announce our meetings and other activities…

…From your experience, in Italy, are mixed heritage children facing different problems from those of other children?

Mixed race children often face the same issues black mono-heritage children face. No matter their skin tone, they are seen as black and therefore it is healthier and more empowering for them to identify as such, without denying their dual heritage at the same time. A racist is not going to ask them whether they are mixed-race. And yes, black and mixed race children definitely face different problems from those of white children…

…Do you think the education system in Italy fully caters for the needs of mixed heritage children?

I don’t think so. I don’t think the education system has even started to consider or understand the needs of mixed heritage children or of black children for that matter. They are invisible to the system because they are not even seen as a group. Also, mixed heritage is a concept that encompasses too broad a category. Our experience is that of parents of mixed-race children, black/white, and as such they face the same problems of institutional racism embedded in the education system black “mono-heritage” children face. I think that to separate mixed-race children from the black children amounts to “fractioning” the black community, and at this moment, when the community needs unity and strength, is not advisable…

Read the entire interview here.

The threat of ‘woolly-haired grandchildren’: Race, the colonial family and German nationalism

The History of the Family
Volume 14, Issue 4 (2009-10-26)
The Domestic Frontier: European Colonialism, Nationalism and the Family
Pages 356-368
DOI: 10.1016/j.hisfam.2009.08.002

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in International History
Flinders University, Australia

The German colonial world was marked by an ostensibly self-evident boundary between the white ruler and the black ruled that situated Europeans and indigenous peoples as diametrically opposed and socially discrete. This situation, however, was problematised by the gendered and sexualised interactions between European and indigenous society. The result was often a slippage between the administrative attempts to create recognisably ‘German’ families (perceived in racial terms), and the antinomian realities of human relationships that transgressed racial lines. This in turn gave rise to reproductive anxieties in the face of a new liminal population of ‘half-castes’ (Mischlinge) that refused the white–black, master–slave dialectic of the colonial ideal. Many historians have recently attempted to link the troubled history of race relations in German Southwest Africa to the later history of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, by focusing on the apparent continuities between the Holocaust and the Herero–Nama wars. However, an alternative genealogy for the cthat refutes this genocidal continuity thesis is possible through an investigation of the origins and contents of the debates about the nature of the German colonial family and its relationship to German citizenship between 1904 and 1914.

Article Outline
1. Introduction: narrating the colonial family
2. ‘Coloured Germans’, ‘half castes’ and ‘Africans’
3. The biologically German family: From the periphery to the core
4. Conclusion
References

Interracial Marriage in the Last Portuguese Colonial Empire

Journal of Portuguese History
Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2007
23 pages
ISSN: 1645-6432

Maria Eugénia Mata, Associate Professor of Economic History and History of Economics
University of Lisbon

The paper presents both the institutional background and the government philosophy regarding equality and non-prejudice within all of the territories under Portuguese sovereignty in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as tests carried out to discover if the decision to marry and racial homogamy could be considered independent variables, using annual data from statistical yearbooks relating to the colonies.

The conclusions demonstrate the existence of a social prejudice towards inter-racial marriage. The paper supports the belief that social divisions based on ethnicity must be included as part of the explanation for decolonization and independence.

The Government’s philosophy on cohesion during the last Portuguese Empire

In the last phase of the Portuguese empire (1930s-1974/5), the government’s political philosophy in relation to the colonial territories was based on considerable propaganda about the respectful relationship between the Portuguese and other peoples in their colonies. It is the aim of this study to describe the official Portuguese literature on these issues and check its accuracy for interpreting social interaction through marriage in the Portuguese colonial territories of the period.

In political speeches, Portugal was presented as a vast and great nation. Its domains and sovereignty spread over a vast range of territory and were distributed across all the continents of the planet. This was a supreme achievement, according to J. M. da Silva Cunha, one of Salazar’s Secretaries of State, later appointed Overseas Minister: “Providence led Portugal to the mission of bringing all the peoples of Europe and other continents together, taking to them the Christian message, along with European civilization”. Official speeches usually presented Portugal as an honorable nation that had set sail from Portuguese coasts to discover the whole world. This heritage was still present in the Portuguese empire, made up of a mainland territory in Western Europe, four archipelagoes in the Atlantic (the Madeira Islands, Azores, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe), Angola and Mozambique on the African continent, several territories in India, a special pearl close to China, namely Macau, and the territory of East Timor in the Pacific Ocean. So, Portuguese territory was comprised of several provinces, beginning in the northern mainland province of Minho (near Spanish Galicia) and reaching all the way to the antipodes, in Timor.

Also, according to the language of its government, the Portuguese people were a cohesive nation, speaking the same language (Portuguese), sharing the same faith (Christianity), working under the same political rule (the Portuguese administration), and taking pride in the same flag (the Portuguese flag), which was flown in all of the national territory on every continent. There were no ethnic conflicts: “We arrived where we are now, more than five centuries ago, to spread Christianity and to remain”. School children were taught that all Portuguese were equal. Whatever might be their birth, their geographical origin, or the color of their skin, they were all equal. As Cunha (1964) puts it: “So, from the beginning we considered Africans as our equals, in this way eliminating all racial discrimination”.

The Portuguese culture was a single culture, it was said. Even considering that local conditions might be different, the official ideology always stressed that, although they might differ, there were no superior or inferior cultures. Miscegenation was to be the rule, as nineteenth-century literature accused Portugal of a weakness in terms of colonization, which stemmed from miscegenation: “(…) specialist literature of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (…) accused us of a colonizing disability (as was said at the time), because we could not preserve the purity of our race”.

So, the Portuguese nation, according to the government, was a multi-continental, multi-racial unit based on a Portuguese identity of high moral and political standards: “Portugal will continue to remain integral, with her own features of a State and multi-continental Nation, made up of the most varied ethnicities”.8 Even scholars and academics shared a good deal of this vision. According to Boxer (1961), “It is to the credit of Portugal (…) that she made no distinction of race and color and that all her subjects, once they had become Catholics, were eligible for official posts.” Despite abandoning the thesis of  a shared religious faith, a Portuguese professor of economics at the Technical University of Lisbon was to write in an academic work: “We have created throughout five centuries the most extraordinary multi-racial, national community of all times, in which merit comes from the value of the human being and not from the color of the skin. (…) Historically and currently, the Portuguese nation is, as a consequence, a mosaic of multi-continental, multi-racial populations with religious diversity”.

Sometimes a “civilization-bas” argument was added, and contradictions about the “non-superior character” of some cultures appeared: “While the Portuguese policy for human relationships in the overseas territories is impressive because of the vastness of the territories in which it applies, it is even more impressive because of its purpose of transforming aborigines into Portuguese, as Portuguese as anyone born in mainland Portugal, as it is high moral and social standards that lead them to Lusitanity, and to complete integration in the Nation”.

Did such honorable official aims result in a social cohesion that could be expressed in terms of statistical categories or indicators? Did territorial discontinuities encapsulate different societies, with different literacy levels and prejudice? Was this philosophy confirmed in terms of race relationships, inter-racial marriage and miscegenation? Is it possible to find such a Lusitanity expressed in attitudes towards marriage that lie hidden in the data of registered marriages recording different colored skins throughout the empire? It is a fact that Portugal had one of the most far-reaching colonial empires in world history and that the Portuguese had a reputation for particularly integrative and intimate relations with the indigenous groups that were colonized. In order to unify all of the territories under the same legal rules, to endow them with the same status, and to prove that they were considered as a homogeneous territory, each of the colonies was designated a province, an institutional status that was introduced in the constitutional reform of 1951. In this new institutional framework, overseas provinces and mainland provinces were partners in the same empire. However, did this predominant official discourse reflect the truth? Can we believe in this perspective for the Portuguese colonial empire in the period after the Second World War?

The aim of this paper is to test the accuracy of the language used in official political speeches during these decades, by observing how different kinds of local cultural cleavages led to different social experiences of marriage in the various territories. As far as culture, education and ethnicity are concerned, interracial marriage and miscegenation were two important aspects to be observed in Portuguese colonial territories. This paper observes that social and color differences can help to explain how there was a racial prejudice in the Portuguese Empire that must be recognized as yet one more factor helping to explain the success of the colonial wars for independence.

There is a long bibliography on the period, dating from the creation of the Estado Novo to the independence of the territories that were previously under Portuguese sovereignty (1920s-30s to 1974-75). However, most of the contributions are devoted to imperial, political or economic aspects, and even those studies devoted to analyzing the colonial philosophy, social prejudice and social cleavages do not approach the aspects of inter-racial marriage in a quantitative way.15 A recent work (Matos, 2006) is quite exhaustive in dealing with questions of racial representations and color from the 16th century to the 1970s, although it follows an anthropological approach and does not use any consistency checks.

The independence achieved by the different colonies also makes the study of ethnic and social cleavages much more interesting in so many countries, since they have such different features and geographical locations, while nonetheless sharing a common Portuguese colonial past. This paper seeks to shed some light on the study of all of these colonies today…

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