Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires

Routledge
2012-02-29
208 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-50429-4

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

This book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India by contrasting Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces. Starting in the sixteenth century, the author shows how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the central core of the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, the book considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, it situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts.

The book contributes to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, and it illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics interested in world/global history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Portuguese Legacies
3. Race and Reform
4. Contested Colonialisms
5. French Complexions
6. Race and Fraternity
7. Conclusion

Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–1792

French Historical Studies
Volume 31, Number 4 (2008)
pages 581-607
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2008-007

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

On October 16, 1790, a group of topas men wrote a petition to the Colonial Assembly at Pondichéry, protesting the decision of September that year to exclude them from the electoral list of active citizens on the basis of “race.” These propertied, free men of color demanded to have the same rights as Europeans and the métis. While historians of the French empire have long considered how mulatto and creole people in the French Caribbean negotiated the boundaries of citizenship after the Revolution, the debate that emerged in India offers a different view. This essay argues that the topas drew on precedents from other French colonies, as well as on the status of foreigners in France itself, to argue that domicile (ius solis) rather than bloodline (ius sanguinis) formed the basis of what it meant to be French. Hence skin color could not be a barrier to citizenship rights.

Read or purchase the article here.

Historicizing Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (2007)
pages 143-155
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082996

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

From White Mughals to Vikram Seth, novels, historical blockbusters and more nuanced anthropological and postcolonial critiques have exposed the fiction of fixed notions of “race” through sensitive understandings of the liminal space of the “inter-racial” relationship and the “mixed-race” experience. In an era where the textual and cultural production of hybridity has become a new form of cultural capital, articulations of racial “inbetween-ness” have also become somewhat universalised and romanticised. While acknowledging the radical potential of these new paradigms of transnational slippage and métissage as an affront to the old narratives of racial certainty, this article challenges the universalization of the term “mixed-race” in the context of colonial India, both ontologically and historically. By historicising cultural difference according to the social syntax that gives it meaning, it asks whether the term “mixed race” has political relevance in all colonial spaces and across time and culture or whether it needs to be interrogated as an historical product in itself. Finallly, this article turns to the politics of location in a global context to illustrate the limits of Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space” by moving beyond celebratory and static notions of the “mixed-race” experience.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

University of Texas Press
2004
6 x 9 in.
225 pages
ISBN: 978-0-292-74345-8
Print-on-demand title

Edited by:

SanSan Kwan, Associate Professor of Dance, Performance Studies
University of California, Berkeley

and

Kenneth Speirs (1964-2013), Professor of English
University of California, Berkeley

Foreword by

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

From Naomi Zack’s “American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues” to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger’s “Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance,” this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society’s discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the “one drop” rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.

Table of Contents

• Preface (Naomi Zack)
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs)
• I. Issues and Trends
  • 1. American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues (Naomi Zack)
  • 2. Misceg-narrations (Raquel Scherr Salgado)
• II. Multiracial Subjects
  • 3. A Passionate Occupant of the Transnational Transit Lounge (Adrian Carton)
  • 4. Miscegenation and Me (Richard Guzman)
  • 5. “What Is She Anyway?”: Rearranging Bodily Mythologies (Orathai Northern)
  • 6. Resemblance (Alice White)
  • 7. “Brown Like Me”: Explorations of a Shifting Self (Stefanie Dunning)
  • 8. Toward a Multiethnic Cartography: Multiethnic Identity, Monoracial Cultural Logic, and Popular Culture (Evelyn Alsultany)
  • 9. Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance (Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger)
  • 10. Against Erasure: The Multiracial Voice in Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (Carole DeSouza)
• About the Contributors