Mixed Race Studies

Celtic Tiger, Hidden Dragon: exploring identity among second generation Chinese in Ireland

The Irish Migration, Race and Social Transformation Review
Volume 2, Issue 1 (Summer 2007)
pages 48-69

Nicola Yau, Independent Researcher

Through qualitative interviews, participant observation and an asynchronous group discussion on an Internet forum for second generation Chinese, this article explores identity among the second generation in ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. The Chinese, while being one of the largest minority ethnic groups, are almost invisible in other ways. This article examines how the second generation self-identify by analysing the theory of double consciousness, the significance of experiencing identity in contrast to a search for ‘authentic identities’ and the limitations of an Irish-only identity which questions what it really means to be Irish. The diasporic nature of identity is also explored through a ‘homing desire’ in terms of ties to China and Hong Kong, as is representation due to the changing nature of racialisation in Ireland following the recent arrival of ‘new’ Mainland Chinese immigrants and the addition of an ‘ethnic’ question to the 2006 Census form.

Introduction

Identity in the age of modernity is always in process, leading Stuart Hall (1996a) to pose the question: who needs ‘identity’? Whether we are migrants ourselves or products of migration, identity at home and away is vital in locating ourselves in the world. In the age of migration, identity gains greater saliency. In this article, I explore identity among second generation Chinese in ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. Identity formation has always played a significant part in my own life because my father is ethnic Chinese and I had often wondered who the other members of the second generation were and if they had similar experiences to my own. In my mind there was a ‘felt necessity’ (Stanley 1996: 48, original emphasis) to carry out this research because, while being one of the largest visible minority ethnic groups in Ireland, the Chinese are very much invisible in other ways. I believe it is also important to research self-identification among the second generation which will assist in understanding the wide variety of experiences making up the current ethnic diversity of the country.

I begin by looking at identity as a process, how the second generation self identify and how they feel they are perceived by mainstream Irish society. The diasporic nature of identity is explored through the idea of a ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1996), by examining ties to China and Hong Kong, and finally I use theories of home and belonging to look at how the second generation views Ireland and what it represents for them and their identities…

…When I asked my participants how they would describe their identity, answers varied depending on their own processes of identification. However, the sense of identification being a process, of becoming, of journeying was clear, for example, when Lucy said her identity was fragmented, fractured and belligerent. She explained this by saying:

Because you’re really on your own your parents aren’t really helping you out with that. I don’t think anyone can really help you out with that, you know what I mean…you kind of have to just, yeah, figure it out in your own head. It takes a few years…but then once you figure it out and are happy with what you figured out then it’s fine but up until that point it does give an awful amount of trouble.

It is clear that her identity was individual, that it was her journey and her sense of becoming. Identity to her was the process, not merely the label she chose to go by. It was only when I asked her how she would describe her national identity that she discussed labels, none of which she chose herself:

I think if you’re kind of half and half and in between I don’t know but maybe some people find it very easy in a country where there is a lot of other people like that, then it can be very easy to identify as being like say British or American, but in Ireland I don’t think you’re ever given the facility to do that. There just isn’t the, you know, there isn’t the acceptance here to do that; not that you need people’s acceptance but like that does have an influence on you, you know people’s reactions to you, so it doesn’t really mean that much, it’s a passport and it’s an accent and that’s about it. I think you can be yourself wherever you are, so you know you don’t have to be constantly identifying yourself as Irish to be like a person.

Lucy did not feel a particular affinity to being categorized as Irish. Her sense of becoming enveloped the process of identification as being a person of mixed-race origins. She highlighted the in-between nature of her identity and while her group of friends, all of whom are white Irish, would class her as Irish, she did not. Irish is an identity that is largely symbolic to her, which she reduces to an accent and a passport. Although she may be ethnically Irish and Chinese, she is racialised as Chinese which corresponds to Song’s (2003) statement that very often people are forcefully included in groups and attributed ethnic identities which are not the same as their own sense of identity…

…For those of mixed race origins there were additional elements in their identity processes. This was evident in how my participants reacted to me. When the issue of my visible Chineseness was raised, Ida drew attention to my dual heritage while Catherine, who is also of dual heritage, thought that I looked ‘obviously’ Chinese. This mirrors the idea that monoracial groups often question membership of mixed race people because they are not ‘fully’ of any one heritage (Song 2003). Therefore, self-perception and perception by others plays a significant role in identity formation. In the next section, I examine how the second generation feel they are perceived by mainstream Irish society…

…For some of my participants of mixed race origins the ethnicity question caused confusion. When discussing this with Jessica I asked her if she considered ticking the Other option, since it included those of a mixed race background. She came to the conclusion that:

I was going to tick it but then I thought well you know I do kind of identify as Chinese, so, and Asia is ok for me and it was a difficult one to fill in to be honest. It was the last question I filled in, in the whole census form because it doesn’t allow, I’m not a complicated background, race background and I had a dilemma of which of two to fill in.

Jessica’s decision to choose the Asian Irish option ahead of the Other category highlights her desire to stress both her identities, which the latter did not allow her to do. This reflects the opinions of Darryl Slater who is of dual heritage. He stresses his two ethnic identities, even though mainstream British society sees him only as Black. The mixed race lived experience adds a further dimension to the process of identification. As Song (2003) concludes, it is Slater’s experience of his parents and his family relationships, if nothing else, that is distinct from that of monoracial people.

This reflects Anderson’s (1991: 166) contention that ‘the fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions’. On the contrary, there is uncertainty and there are fractions. This sentiment was further conveyed by Lucy:

I think that people who are, you know, mixed race and Chinese and Irish or brought up Irish like, you kind of fall down between the cracks really because you can’t, because you’re asked to identify yourself with one particular group but it’s kind of hard to do it because culturally you might be but racially you’re not really, still you’re not seen as the same, so eh, which is a bit ridiculous really because it doesn’t really matter…that’s Ireland though because in America you wouldn’t have that because it’s all just everyone, whatever, loads of different people you know you can all end up being American although you can have your separate identity but in Ireland it seems you have to be Irish and that’s it and if you don’t fit white Irish then you’re not really Irish…

Read the entire article here.

The passing of Charles Chesnutt: Mining the white tradition

Wasafiri
Volume 13, Issue 27
pages 5-10
DOI 10.1080/02690059808589583

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

In May 1880, the young Charles Chesnutt confided to his diary his ambition to write a book. Its object would be ‘not so much the elevation of the colored people’—the concern of most late nineteenth century reformers, both white and black—‘as the elevation of the whites,’; for he considered it was ‘the unjust spirit of caste’, rather than the moral or economic or educational conditions of blacks which lay behind racial inequities in America. Chesnutt’s focus on white Americans as the problem would be accompanied by a particular methodology. He did not propose ‘a fierce indiscriminate onslaught; not an appeal to force, … (for) the subtle almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the negro, which is common to most Americans …, cannot be taken by assault’. Instead, ‘their [garrison) must be mined, and we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it’. This metaphor, of the secret operation which carries the writer silently into the enemy’s camp, is a peculiarly apt one for Chesnutt’s writing. His first book would not be published until 1899 but the two collections of stories which came out that year, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, were both as subtle and as determined to make his point as the image suggests. In those books too, and in a subsequent novel, The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt would often appear to be taking his stand on enemy ground and revisiting fictions which were themselves part of the problem. Chesnutt not only took white authors as his models but seemed at times to seek out genres particularly associated with that ‘feeling of repulsion toward the negro’ which he believed so prevalent.

In a sense Chesnutt’s literary tactics reflected his own anomalous position in a society obsessive about racial boundaries. The son of free North Carolina blacks, Chesnutt was probably also the grandson, on both sides, of white men. His appearance was pale enough to ‘pass‘ for white, though it was an option he rejected. Physically ‘white’ to the eyes of the unacquainted, culturally ‘white’ in his education and tastes, Chesnutt was nonetheless black historically; in the place he inherited in America’s rigidly stratified society. Chesnutt’s writing addressed his country’s racial inequality and its slave-owning history but formally it continued to resemble the ‘white’ tradition of writing on the subject…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Classification and History

Routledge
1997-02-01
376 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8153-2602-1

Edited by

E. Nathaniel Gates (1955-2006)
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Yeshiva University

Explores the concept of “race”

The term “race,” which originally denoted genealogical or class identity, has in the comparatively brief span of 300 years taken on an entirely new meaning. In the wake of the Enlightenment it came to be applied to social groups. This ideological transformation coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were natural, and not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of “races” as genetically distinct entities. The results of this view were the encoding of “race” and “racial” hierarchies in law, literature, and culture.

How “racial” categories facilitate social control

The articles in the series demonstrate that the classification of humans according to selected physical characteristics was an arbitrary decision that was not based on valid scientific method. They also examine the impact of colonialism on the propagation of the concept and note that “racial” categorization is a powerful social force that is often used to promote the interests of dominant social groups. Finally, the collection surveys how laws based on “race” have been enacted around the world to deny power to minority groups.

A multidisciplinary resource

This collection of outstanding articles brings multiple perspectives to bear on race theory and draws on a wider ranger of periodicals than even the largest library usually holds. Even if all the articles were available on campus, chances are that a student would have to track them down in several libraries and microfilm collections. Providing, of course, that no journals were reserved for graduate students, out for binding, or simply missing. This convenient set saves students substantial time and effort by making available all the key articles in one reliable source.

Table of Contents

• Volume Introduction
• The Crime of Color—Paul Finkelman
• Reflections on the Comparative History and Sociology of Racism—George M. Fredrickson
• The Italian, a Hindrance to White Solidarity in Louisiana, 1890-1898—George E. Cunningham
• Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia—C. Fasseur
• Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship—Ian Haney Lopez
• The Prerequisite Cases—Ian Haney Lopez
• Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology—Alexander Saxton
• Introduction: Historical Explanations of Racial Inequality—Alexander Saxton
• Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia—Ann Stoler
• Irish-American Workers and White Racial Formation in the Antebellum United States—David R. Roediger
• The Race Question and Liberalism: Casuistries in American Constitutional Law—Stanford M. Lyman
• Introduction: From the Social Construction of Race to the Abolition of Whiteness—David R. Roediger
• Acknowledgments

In My Experience: A Multi-Racial Heritage

Forum: with Michael Kransy
KQED Radio
San Francisco, California
2011-12-16

Dave Iverson, Host

As part of our series “In My Experience,” spotlighting the personal stories of our listeners, we talk with a panel of biracial and multi-racial people about race, identity and what it’s like to grow up looking different from your neighbors and even your parents. We listen to their stories, and we welcome yours.

Download the episode (00:51:58) here.

Boucicault’s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon

Atlantic Studies
Volume 6, Number 1 (April 2009)
pages 81-95
DOI: 10.1080/14788810802696287

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

This article challenges a number of myths the Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault himself created about his play The Octoroon. Boucicault claimed that London theatre audiences were dissatisfied with the ending, in which the heroine commits suicide, because they had become unsympathetic to American slaves. He rewrote the play for these audiences, and the two versions of The Octoroon have subsequently been used to suggest differences of attitude between New York and London, a shift in British racial politics in the early 1860s, and an antislavery position in Boucicault himself. This article questions all of these interpretations using contemporary reviews, Boucicault’s advertisements and self-promoting articles, and much hitherto undiscussed material: a Boucicault letter, his evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, and the source of Boucicault’s play, Mayne Reid’s novel The Quadroon. Boucicault was a showman and self-promoter, and his assertions ignored the political uproar the play had caused in New York, and deliberately misinterpreted his audiences in London. The article demonstrates that British audiences were in many cases more sympathetic to American slaves than Boucicault himself, that they objected to the play on aesthetic rather than political grounds, and that Boucicault changed the ending for commercial reasons. It also reveals what the rewriting controversy has obscured: Boucicault’s close attention in the play to the subtleties of the plantation social hierarchy. His concern with social differences and distinctions ties The Octoroon more closely to his Irish plays than has been recognized and illuminates contradictory impulses in The Octoroon, which also help to explain the two endings. While the ‘tragic ending’ reinforces the racial determinism that many critics have observed in the play, the scenes where an outside observer fails to comprehend the racial and social hierarchy on the plantation reinforce an alternative vision that helps justify the ‘happy ending’ versions. Both Boucicault and his play were more interestingly equivocal than the Octoroon myths have allowed.

Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon has figured frequently in recent analyses of representations of race, slavery and the transatlantic in the nineteenth century. Joseph Roach’s influential study of what he called the ‘‘circum-Atlantic’’ made The Octoroon a touchstone of its argument about theatrical and ritual performance in ‘‘the circulation of cultures, material and symbolic’’, around and across the Atlantic. Jennifer DeVere Brody also drew on the play in her study of the ‘‘mulatta’’ in nineteenth-century British/Black Atlantic culture, and Werner Sollors identifies in it many of the central characteristics he discusses in his study of “interracial” literature. Daphne Brooks examines it as a transatlantic ‘‘spectacle of race.’’ The play’s attraction for critics interested in cultural contact, hybridity and creolisation is obvious. As Roach remarks, it was written ‘‘after a brief period of residence in New Orleans by an Anglo-Irishman of French ancestry’’ (183). It is also concerned with the socially impossible position of the daughter of a planter and a slave, a woman deemed to have seven-eighths white ancestry, and one-eighth black…

…This article examines Boucicault’s 1866 testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee, an 1855 letter indicating his views on slavery, and New York and London reviews, advertisements and play scripts. Together they reveal a number of contradictions in the impression Boucicault created of the Octoroon incident, as does Boucicault’s source for the play, Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel The Quadroon. The significant changes Boucicault made in adapting the novel provide a fascinating index to Boucicault’s attitudes on race, interracial marriage and the nature of plantation society in the Southern United States. Boucicault’s focus is very different from Reid’s. His original play seems to insist on the unbridgeability of racial divisions, whereas Reid’s characters overcome them. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Boucicault incorporates into The Octoroon the dramatic interest in social distinctions and hierarchies which is evident in his other plays, including the ‘‘Irish dramas,’’ The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun. This is particularly evident in the dynamics of Boucicault’s dialogue. Many readings of The Octoroon concentrate on single speeches and pay relatively little attention to dramatic interaction, but as I shall show, it is in the interplay between characters that Boucicault displays a dramatic sensitivity to social relationships and institutions. The play’s exploration of the social implications of the ‘‘Octoroon’s’’ mixed heritage balances its sensationalist racial essentialism, and this may help to explain the complicated and contradictory ways in which contemporaries interpreted its stance on slavery…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Negro Defined

The Yale Law Journal
Volume 20, Number 3 (January, 1911)
pages 224-225

In many of the states where a considerable portion of the population is colored, statutes define the term negro and establish his status where the same is considered, because of local conditions, as essentially different from that of Caucasians. Where legislatures have either negligently or intentionally left the terms “negro” and “colored” undefined, courts have faced difficulty in reaching exact decisions on the point of just what proportion of negro blood in a person of mixed racial descent will constitute him or her a “negro” or “colored.” The question is purely academic, and its settlement lies largely in the discretion of the court, in combining technical definitions of ethnological experts and accepted public opinion on the subject.

In the recent case of State of Louisiana v. Treadway, 52 So., 500, an exhaustive review of statutory and judicial law resulted in a divided court on the question in issue. Here the defendant, a male octoroon, was indicted, charged with having lived in concubinage with a female member of the Caucasian race. The statute governing the alleged offense made criminal, concubinage between members of the Caucasian race and members of the negro or black race.

The decision hinged on the question in issue: “Was an octoroon a member of the negro or black race?” The court decided, three to two, that the defendant, an octoroon, was not a negro within the meaning of the statute…

Read the entire article here.

The Octoroon and English Opinions of Slavery

American Quarterly
Volume 8, Number 2 (Summer, 1956)
pages 166-170

Nils Erik Enkvist
Akademi Abo, Finland

After his great successes, and notably that of Colleen Bawn, Dion Boucicault became something of a leading figure among English-speaking playwrights, while the critics as well as the public eagerly watched his prolific pen. In the summer of 1861, everyone in London knew he was about to produce his topical play about slavery, which had been so favorably received in the United States. This was indeed a subject well cut out for his cosmopolitan powers; when, after considerable delay, The Octoroon was finally presented at the Adelphi Theatre on Monday, November 18th, 1861, it came as a shock both to the playwright and to the critics that the fifth act was hailed by the audience with many rude noises. The reasons for this were debated at some length in the London papers; they provide a significant insight into Anglo-American relations at that time.

As readers of Professor Quinn’s Representative American Plays will recall, the story of The Octoroon was based upon the fact that a white man could not marry the one-eighth-Negro slave girl he loved. In the original fifth act Zoe had poisoned herself to preserve her maiden purity from the ruffianly overseer who had bought her. It was Zoe’s suicide that finally roused the tempers of the English audience. Possibly they felt cheated, having read in their playbills how Southerners sometimes escaped the predicament of the present hero and heroine by cutting their veins and mixing their blood, which, technically, sufficed to make a colored person of a white man. This hoary stock device was not used, and the tragic impact of the octoroon…

The “myth of racial democracy”, like the good myth it is, contains distortions in its much vaunted absolute equality, but does contain partial truths in indicating a singularity in the relationship between the races, mainly between races and culture. Indeed, several studies prove there to have been one distinguishing feature in Portuguese colonization: the incentive towards miscegenation, which was considered a strategic point of the settlement policy. This feature stands out even more when contrasted with other approaches to colonization—such as the American model—in which restrictive policies with regard to legalizing mixed marriages were adopted, or when one perceives similarities with former Portuguese colonies in Africa. But, one cannot forget, that was not just a question of character but a contextual question, connected with the lack of women involved in the Portuguese colonization. In my point of view that is not a question of defining the differences—cultural differences—or transforming it in fossilized parameters. It is not even a question of judging the models positively or negatively, but rather of reflecting on individual modes of discrimination, a Brazilian way of discriminating.

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, “Not black, not white: just the opposite. Culture, race and national identity in Brazil,” Centre for Brazilian Studies, Working Paper Number CBS-47-03, (2003): 5.

Wealthy free women of color in Charleston, South Carolina during slavery

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2007
271 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3275800
ISBN: 9780549175599

Rita Reynolds, Assistant Professor of History
Wagner College, Staten Island, New York

This dissertation focuses on the lives and experiences of a small group of affluent free mulatto women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike their enslaved sisters we know very little about their community and the place they occupied in it. To comprehend the everyday world wealthy free women of color inhabited I begin by examining the origins of the wealthy free colored community in Charleston. I then investigate individual case studies of five wealthy free mulatto and black women and how their varying choices, made under differing degrees of societal duress, molded and formed their lives. Biographical sketches of Rachel and Martha Inglis, Nancy Randall, Hagar Richardson and Margaret Bettingall consider the different options each woman experienced under the same social, economic and racial framework. All five women (whose stories are told here for the first time) dealt with enslavement from either a personal perspective as slaves themselves, or as a recent memory in recalling a mother or grandmother’s bondage. Their stories relate how the lives of wealthy free women of color were paradoxical and how they often dealt with triumph and tragedy in the same instance.

Like the majority of wealthy southern white women who spent a portion of their time as sophisticated urbanites, wealthy free women of color also set out to participate as free people in a slave society. To fully share in the economic and social benefits of society these women made deliberate efforts to improve their station through education, religious participation, social institutions and caste and racial identification with their wealthy white neighbors. However, the oppressive nature of Southern slave society greatly thwarted their best efforts. As a result, free blacks basic rights were fundamentally denied. This examination of five wealthy free women of color will analyze the manner in which social, community and family relationships influenced the world these women occupied. Racial and class status were also defining creeds for free wealthy women of color. By probing into the importance of race and class affiliations in the free mulatto community a clearer portrait of racial hierarchy among the wealthy emerges.

Chinese Caucasian interracial parenting and ethnic identity

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1988
264 pages
Publication Number: AAT 8813254

Jeffrey B. Mar

This exploratory study looks at Chinese-Caucasian interracially married parents’ experience of raising their children. The goal is to characterize these parents’ stances toward their children’s ethnic identity. A semi-structured, clinical interview was developed for the study in order to gather information about the respondent’s family and individual histories, as well as their childrearing practices and beliefs. The sample consisted of 29 interracially married parents who had at least one child older than nine years old. Eight intraracially married Chinese parents were also interviewed for comparison purposes. The interview data was subjected to a content analysis which generated the following six-dimensional conceptual framework of ethnic identity: (1) Group Identification; (2)Ethnic Continuity; (3) Physical Characteristics; (4) Objective Culture; (5) Subjective Culture; (6) Sociopolitical Consciousness.

It was found that parents did not feel that their children’s ethnic identity was the focus of a great deal of concern. Parents also emphasized that it had rarely been a source of psychological or social difficulty for their children. The ethnic identity of the Chinese parent was stressed far more than the ethnic identity of the Caucasian parent. Surprisingly, parents expressed very little concern about their children’s racial marginality or the issue of racial continuity. On a conscious level, parents were more strongly committed to “group identification” and “objective culture.” In actual practice, however, their commitment in these areas carried a great deal of ambivalence. On an unconscious level, parents were most likely to pass down “subjective culture.” This was the one area of regular cultural conflict in these families, particularly around expectations about family roles. These parents’ greatest concern revolved around their children losing their Chinese culture. However, parents were generally unsuccessful when they tried to actively guide their children in an ethnic direction. Parents stressed that their children’s most durable ethnic commitments developed largely independently of their own efforts to influence, emphasizing that their own personal ethnic involvements (modelling) seemed to have the most impact.

The study concludes by offering some integrative comments about the nature of ethnic identity and the forces that propel it across generations. An important area of future research would be to talk with these parents’ biracial children about their ethnic identities.

Purchase the dissertation here.