Mixed Race Studies

The Arabs of Africa

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 1 (1972)
pages 1-9
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969036

Ali Mazruia, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities
State University of New York, Binghamton

The combination of acculturation and inter-mating between races might be called a process of biocultural assimilation Some degree of integration between groups is achieved by the process of mixing blood and fusing cultural patterns. There are two concepts here which need to be further refined. One is the concept of symmetrical acculturation and the other is the concept of symmetrical miscegenation. Symmetrical acculturation arises when a dominant group not only passes on its culture to the groups it dominates but is also significantly receptive to the cultural influence of its subjects or captives.

There have been occasions in history when acculturation has been asymmetrical, and yet the receiving group has been the politically dominant. The classical example is that of Greek influence on the Roman conquerors. A more common example is the kind of asymmetry in which the politically dominant culture transmits itself to its subjects and captives and receives little in return. The British cultural influence in much of Africa has been of the second category. We might call this descending asymmetry, and call the Greek-Roman example a model of ascending asymmetry.

As for symmetrical miscegenation, this would arise in a situation where two racial communities inter-marry and produce a comparable number of both men and women who crossed the racial boundary to seek partners from another community. In very isolated circumstances, and even there with some qualifications, such symmetry is conceivable, where one race or ethnic group is patrilineal and the other is matrilineal. The matrilineal group might not mind its women crossing the border and marrying men from the other country. The patrilineal group, in like manner, might permit the men to be exogamous. By the matrilineal race the child is regarded as sharing the race of its mother; while the patrilineal wing recognises the child’s racial affinity to its father. Tensions in such situations are conceivable, precisely in the duality of citizenship and the pulls of potentially conflicting loyalties. A much more prevalent phenomenon is that of asymmetrical miscegenation. In the great majority of cases where black people have inter-married with non-black people, a lack of symmetry has been a continuing characteristic. In this paper, we shall pay special attention to racial mixture as between the Arabs and black Africans. We are going to do this in a broad comparative perspective, relating the Afro-Arab experience to the different histories of racial mixture in the United States, in Latin America and in South Africa. These three, when combined with the Afro-Arab model, provide four distinct patterns of the relationship between miscegenation and social structure.

All four models of miscegenation are asymmetrical but In significantly different ways. In each case the dominant ethnic group has produced many more husbands in the racial mixture than wives. Over 70% of the so-called black population of the United States has white blood. But overwhelmingly the white blood has come through white males rather than white females…

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Daniel McNeil to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #219-Daniel McNeil
When: Wednesday, 2011-08-03, 22:00Z (18:00 EDT, 17:00 CDT, 15:00 PDT)

Daniel McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Daniel McNeil teaches Media and Cultural studies at Newcastle University, and is a Visiting Fellow of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation. His most recent book, Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs, documented the freedom dreams and self-fashioning of mixed-race individuals in the Black Atlantic, and he is currently writing a book about ‘Slimy Subjects’: White Liberals, Black freedom and the ethics of racial identity.

Listen to the episode here or download it here.

‘Queer magic’: Performing mixed-race on the Australian stage

Contemporary Theatre Review
Volume 16, Issue 2, 2006
pages 171-188
DOI: 10.1080/10486800600587138

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Half-caste-woman, living a life apart.
What did your story begin?
Half-caste-woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?…

(Noël Coward, Half-caste Woman, 1931)

Used variously to denote fusion, border crossing, miscegenation, transculturation, diaspora, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, hybridity as a term runs the risk of being so stretched that it ceases to have any critical purchase for meaningful analysis. It is my contention that despite the extensive range of analysis of hybridity in contemporary postcolonial studies, the body and processes of embodiment have been largely under explored. The focus of attention tends to be on cultural negotiations and performances of identity, Even when race and racism is invoked, the analysis tends to centre on the power mechanisms that produce specific subjectivities and types of bodies. There is very little attention given to how subjected bodies themselves respond somatically to this will to power, nor of how hybridity itself is embodied and performed The invisibility of the body in hybridity-talk is all the more surprising given the genealogy of the term and its association with miscegenation. In order to explain this lack, it is necessary to briefly trace the history of hybridity.

Robert Young points out in his seminal text, Colonial Desire that the English word ‘hybrid’ stems from the latin term hybrida meaning…

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Miscegenation’s ‘dusky human consequences’

Postcolonial Studies
Volume 5, Issue 3, 2002
pages 297-307
DOI: 10.1080/1368879022000032801

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

In recent years there has been a surge in academic endeavours to claim hybridity as a site of transgression, subversion and liberation. In particular, hybridity has been deployed as a strategy for the negotiating of difference which, according to Homi Bhabha, is ‘neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between‘. Within this transformative ‘third space’, boundaries are remade and fixities destabilised. In the hands of less careful scholars, however, hybridity runs the risk of being idealised and dehistoricised as the only ‘enlightened’ response to oppression. Despite the evidence for reading the colonial process as one of mutual transculturation. affecting both coloniser and colonised cultures, the celebratory discourses of hybridity tend to foreground the destabilising of the latter. The danger of this notion of  ‘enlightened hybridity’ as Anne McClintock points out, is that it rehearses the myth of colonialism as the progress and liberation of humanity from a state of deprivation to enlightened reason. Other critics including Jean Fisher have argued that hybridity as a concept is too deeply embedded within a discourse of biology, and as such cannot extricate us from an original dualism of self and other.’ While this does not preclude the potential for the concept to be liberated from its origins and strategically transformed,  there is a need to be more attentive to the ways in which this transformation is mobilised.

Hybridity has its origins in nineteenth-century racial science; whether used to describe physiological 0r cultural difference, hybridity has served as the primary metaphor for the dangerous consequences of cross-racial contact. This essay focuses on the ambivalent figure of the Eurasian within the Australian national imaginary in order to elaborate on the thorny issue of hybridity as a source of both desire and anxiety. The term ‘race’ is commonly associated with hereditary qualities that manifest in visible, phenotypical markers. The emphasis on somatic signifiers is important since the living product of cross-racial heterosexuality is primarily identified with and through the body. As my discussion goes on to demonstrate, the body of the racial hybrid is both the physical manifestation of cross-racial desire and the source of repulsion and fear. While race as a scientific category has long been disproven, it remains one of the most insidious aspects of our colonial heritage. The idea of race survives because the most consistent arguments about it have always been framed within cultural and aesthetic terms. Hence, in looking at the discourse of cross-racial desire. I am less interested in…

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