Mixed Race Studies

Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities

Rodopi
2002
152 pages
Hardback: 978-90-420-1378-0 / 90-420-1378-8
Paperback: 978-90-420-1368-1 / 90-420-1368-0

Edited by:

Elizabeth Russell, Professor of Womens Studies and British Literature
University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona

The essays in this collection (on Canada, the USA, Australia and the UK) question and discuss the issues of cross-cultural identities and the crossing of boundaries, both geographical and conceptual. All of the authors have experienced cross-culturalism directly and are conscious that positions of ‘double vision’, which allow the / to participate positively in two or more cultures, are privileges that only a few can celebrate. Most women find themselves “caught between cultures”. They become involved in a day-to-day struggle, in an attempt to negotiate identities which can affirm the self and, at the same time, strengthen the ties which unites the self with others. Theoretical issues on cross-culturalism, therefore, can either liberate or constrict the /. The essays here illustrate how women’s writing negotiates this dualism through a colourful and complex weaving of words – thoughts and experiences both pleasurable and painful – into texts, quilts, rainbows. The metaphors abound. The connecting thread through their writing and, indeed, in these essays, is the concept of ‘belonging’, a theoretical/emotional composite of be-ing and longing. ‘Home’, too, assumes a variety of meanings; it is no longer a static geographical place, but many places. It is also a place elsewhere in the imagination, a mythic place of desire linked to origin.

Policies of multiculturalism can throw up more problems than they solve. In Canada, the difficulties surrounding the cross-cultural debate have given rise to a state of “messy imbroglio”. Notions of authenticity move dangerously close to essentialist identities. ‘Double vision’ is characteristic of peoples who have been uprooted and displaced, such as Australian Aboriginal writers of mixed race abducted during childhood. ‘Passing for’ black or white is full of complications, as in the case of Pauline Johnson, who passed as an authentic Indian. People with hyphenated citizenship (such as Japanese-Canadian) can be either free of national ties or trapped in subordination to the dominant culture; in these ‘visible minorities’, it is the status of being female (or coloured female) that is so often ultimately rendered invisible.

Examination of Canadian anthologies on cross-cultural writing by women reveals a crossing of boundaries of gender and genre, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, national boundaries, in an attempt to connect with a diasporic consciousness. Cross-cultural women writers in the USA may stress experience and unique collective history, while others prefer to focus on aesthetic links and literary connections which ultimately silence difference. Journeying from the personal space of the / into the collective space of the we is exemplified in a reading of texts by June Jordan and Minnie Bruce Pratt. For these writers identity is in process. It is a painful negotiation but one which can transform knowledge into action.

Contributors
Isabel Carrera Suárez
Dolors Collellmir
Mary Eagleton
Teresa Gómez Reus
Aritha van Herk
Elizabeth Russell
María Socorro Suárez Lafuente

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Introduction
• ARITHA VAN HERK: Cross-Dressed Writing in Canada
• ISABEL CARRERA SUÁREZ: Hyphens, Hybridities and Mixed-Race Identities: Gendered Readings in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Texts
• MARÍA SOCORRO SUÁREZ LAFUENTE: Creating Women’s Identity in Australian Civilization
• DOLORS COLLELLMIR: Australian Aboriginal Women Writers and the Process of Defining and Articulating Aboriginality
• ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Cross-Cultural Subjectivities: Indian Women Theorizing in the Diaspora
• TERESA GÓMEZ REUS: Weaving / Framing / Crossing Difference: Reflections on Gender and Ethnicity in American Literary and Art Practices
• MARY EAGLETON: Working Across Difference: Examples from Minnie Bruce Pratt and June Jordan
• List of Contributors

Hey Mum, What’s a Half-Caste?

Independent Publishing Group
April 2010
316 pages, Trade Paper, 5.75 x 8.25
35 B/W Photos
ISBN: 9781921248030 (1921248033)

Lorraine McGee-Sippel

Compelling and honest, this memoir recounts the diffuse effects of a governmental policy that required the author’s adoptive parents to be informed of her Afro-American ancestry. Chronicling her personal search for cultural identity, this account also delves into indigenous studies, Australian history, and psychology. This remarkable story is simultaneously universal and deeply personal and will educate and inspire readers.

Lorraine McGee-Sippel is a descendent of the Yorta Yorta people from the Murray-Goulburn region on the Victorian-NSW border. She is a contributor to numerous anthologies and publications, and in 2008 she received the Inaugural Yabun Elder of the Year Award for her contribution to reconciliation and community work.

I Define My Own Identity: Pacific Articulations of ‘Race’ and ‘Culture’on the Internet

Ethnicities
Vol. 3, No. 4
pp. 465-490
(2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1468796803003004002

Marianne I. Franklin
University of Amsterdam

Most of the participants in the internet discussion forums, the Kava Bowl and the Kamehameha Roundtable, herald from the South Pacific islands of Tonga and Samoa. These forums are part of a cluster of popular online meeting places for the ‘Polynesian Diaspora’ and other people from the Pacific Islands who live in the USA, Australia and New Zealand for the most part. They have been going strong since the mid-1990s, nearly as long as the worldwide web. One of the most recurring topics in the discussions is the nature of Tongan and/or Samoan ‘identity’ and how this relates to ‘living overseas’. In these discussions, participants – many of whom are of ‘mixed race’ – exchange personal experiences, political opinions, emotional and intellectual expectations about the outer and inner limits of race/ethnicity, and/or culture in their everyday lives. This article reconstructs several of the more substantial debates on the meaning and implications of ‘identity’ that show how these generations of the postcolonial South Pacific Islands are (re)defining what it means to be Tongan, Samoan – Polynesian – in a diasporic context. Discussions revolve around several axes; the personal and political issues of race (ethnicity) as everyday embodiments; Tongan/Samoan and Pacific Island cultures as negotiable rather than fixed practices; ways of turning colonialist categories for Pacific Island societies, such as ‘Polynesian’, into futurist tropes for communities who are often socioeconomically disadvantaged and discriminated against both ‘at home’ and ‘overseas’. As they argue, write, read, send emails and interact with one another on and offline, the creators of thousands of interwoven online texts over the years have been articulating ‘race’ and ‘culture’ on their own terms. They have been doing so in the public cyberspaces of the worldwide web, tracing, as they come and go, a nascent postcolonial politics of representation.

Australian Mixed Race

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 7, Number 2 (May 2004)
pages 177-199
DOI: 10.1177/1367549404042493

Maureen Perkins, Associate Professor of History, Anthropology and Sociology
Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

This article argues against the case for colour-blindness as a fundamental principle of liberal policy and recommends more colour consciousness rather than less. The growth in mixed race studies around the world suggests that the use of terms of colour, black and white, to indicate a simple racial binary is being eroded by more complicated ‘in-between’ positions, which are now demanding recognition. In Australia, where black and white mean Indigenous and non-Indigenous, terms of ‘mixed’ identity carry a residue of colonial racist usage and are unequivocally rejected by Aboriginal communities. In refusing to consider ‘mixedness’, however, Australian culture makes national loyalty and a sense of belonging difficult for those non-white Australians who are not Indigenous. The article compares the Australian census with those in the UK and US to show that there needs to be much more discussion of the terminology used to discuss colour in order to keep up to date with the crumbling of racial boundaries and the increasing numbers of interracial children.

Read or purchase the article here.