Mixed Race Studies

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool

Princeton University Press
2005
312 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hunter College of the City University of New York

The port city of Liverpool, England, is home to one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Its members proudly date their history back at least as far as the nineteenth century, with the global wanderings and eventual settlement of colonial African seamen. Jacqueline Nassy Brown analyzes how this worldly origin story supports an avowedly local Black politic and identity—a theme that becomes a window onto British politics of race, place, and nation, and Liverpool’s own contentious origin story as a gloriously cosmopolitan port of world-historical import that was nonetheless central to British slave trading and imperialism.

This ethnography also examines the rise and consequent dilemmas of Black identity. It captures the contradictions of diaspora in postcolonial Liverpool, where African and Afro-Caribbean heritages and transnational linkages with Black America both contribute to and compete with the local as a basis for authentic racial identity. Crisscrossing historical periods, rhetorical modes, and academic genres, the book focuses singularly on “place,” enabling its most radical move: its analysis of Black racial politics as enactments of English cultural premises. The insistent focus on English culture implies a further twist. Just as Blacks are racialized through appeals to their assumed Afro-Caribbean and African cultures, so too has Liverpool–an Irish, working-class city whose expansive port faces the world beyond Britain–long been beyond the pale of dominant notions of authentic Englishness. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail studies “race” through clashing constructions of “Liverpool.”

Read the entire first chapter for free here in HTML or PDF format.  Excerpts are below.

“TO UNDERSTAND Black people, you’ve got to understand Liverpool.” So argued my friend Scott, a sixty-year-old Black man born and raised in that city…

…In the midst of describing the center’s aims he stopped short, interrupting himself to say, “To understand Black people, you’ve got to understand Liverpool.” He explained that Stanley House was established by charitable White people.  But their charter referred to the children of African seamen and the White women to whom they were often married as “half-castes,” a much despised term now…

Variations of that question were being posed in seaports all over Britain and in the overlapping arenas of social work, philanthropy, and academia, which would, in the mid to late nineteenth century, include physical anthropology and ethnology.  In contrast to eighteenth-century British ideas about human variation, which considered religion and clothing as key indices of civilization and posited climate as an explanation of different human potentials, the 1840s saw the emergence of a more biological argument (Wheeler 2000; Hamer 1996).  Physical types, which were correlated with areas of geographic origin, became the basis of racial distinctions and served to explain differential human capacities. Classificatory schema abounded. In this respect, Brontë’s mysterious, somewhat monstrous representation of the racially ambiguous Heathcliff is intriguing; it accords with the fearful image of the half-caste conjured up in Gothic literature and other discursive contexts.  As H. L. Malchow provocatively explains, “[O]ne may define [the Gothic] genre by characteristics that resonate strongly with racial prejudice, imperial exploration and sensational anthropology—themes and images that are meant to shock and terrify, that emphasize chaos and excess, sexual taboo and barbarism, and a style grounded in techniques of suspense and threat” (1996: 102).  Just as the unpredictable and brooding Heathcliff posed an ever-present danger, so too were the “hundreds of half-caste children” in 1920s Cardiff said to have “vicious tendencies.” These children also confused the categories of science, exhibiting, according to the press, a “disharmony of physical traits and mental characteristics” (Rich 1986: 131). In an era when science had attained unprecedented legitimacy (Lorimer 1996), the racially ambiguous or mixed person was a threat to the social order. Again, Malchow writes, “The terms ‘half-breed’ and ‘half-caste’ are double, hyphenated constructions resonating with other linguistic inadequacies and incompletes—with ‘half-wit’ or ‘half-dead’, with ‘half-naked’ or ‘half-truth’, and of course with ‘half-civilized’” (1996: 104). The person of mixed race was a pathology to be studied from both literary and “scientific” points of view. Their sexuality was of particular concern. It was one thing to be born of immoral unions in immoral circumstances; but as freaks of nature themselves, what moral predilections would they reproduce? Could they reproduce? (Malchow 1996; Young 1995)…

…Into a milieu defined, at the very least, by the above-described dynamics of colonialism, race, nationality, place, sexuality, class, and gender entered one Muriel Fletcher, infamous in present-day Liverpool for a study she conducted in 1928 under the auspices of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half- Caste Children. Fletcher was trained in social research at the Liverpool University School of Social Science, where her circle included eugenicist anthropologists (Rich 1986).  The subjects of Fletcher’s research were White women who were formerly involved with African men and their “half-caste” children. She published her conclusions in Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports. Ultimately, the Fletcher Report, as it is commonly called, concludes that “the colour problem” in that city owed not to the racist structuring of British society, the ideologies promulgated by the British state and its institutions, nor those circulating within Liverpool’s social welfare establishment, nor to the everyday racism of White Liverpudlians who routinely subjected colored seamen to violence. Rather, Fletcher attributed the colour problem in Liverpool to African seamen. It would be hard to state emphatically enough how thoroughly racial politics in Liverpool/Britain reflect the legacy of the Fletcher Report….

…The African man creates the White woman’s problems, while they both create the myriad crises said to befall their “half-caste” children. Fletcher uses the term half-caste in various ways. At times she distinguishes between “Anglo-Negroid” and “Anglo-Chinese” children; yet both of these groups belong to the half-caste category. Fletcher remarks at the outset, however, that “Anglo-Chinese” children are quite well-adjusted.  Since they pose no problem, we need not hear anything more about them.  As well, in the early pages, Fletcher uses the term Anglo-Negroid for children of African men and White women.  In detailing the minute phenotypical features of “half-caste” children, the Fletcher Report marks some of them “English,” as in “30 per cent. had English eyes… A little over 50 per cent. had hair negroid in type and colour. 25 per cent. had English, while the remaining 25 per cent. exhibited some curious mixtures… About 12 per cent. had lips like the average English child” (27).   She refers to these children’s social characteristics in similar terms. While she does not suggest that biological inheritance is at work, the children nevertheless manifest a troubling duality, exhibiting the worst trait of each parent.  Here speaking about “half-caste” girls, Fletcher argues, “From her mother the half-caste girl is liable to inherit a certain slackness, and from her father a happy-go-lucky attitude towards life” (34). The problems of half-caste children are not of their own making, then. They are victims. They attend earnestly to their schoolwork and seem amiable enough. But the immorality that characterizes their home life, given the low character of both parents, cannot help but be reproduced in these hapless children….

Read the entire first chapter for free here in HTML or PDF format.

Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space

Cultural Anthropology
Volume 13, Issue 3 (August 1998)
pages 291–325
DOI: 10.1525/can.1998.13.3.291

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hunter College of the City University of New York

The terms black Liverpool and black America, no less than the African diaspora, refer to racialized geographies of the imagination. The mapping of racial signifiers onto geographical ones lends such terms the illusion of referring to physical rather than social locations. That there is no actual space that one could call “the African diaspora,” despite how commonly it is mapped onto particular locales, points attention to the ways that social spaces are constructed in tandem with processes of racial formation…

Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s first book, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), I set out in 1991 to study the meanings and practices surrounding “race” andnation in Liverpool, England. Set in a city with one of the longest-settled black populations in the United Kingdom, my research investigated why and how black identity is constituted as the mutual opposite of English and British identities. Yet in pursuing these themes, I became increasingly amazed at how frequently my informants would make discursive forays into “black America.” Nested at key moments in their narratives were references to the formative influence that black America—in many forms—has had on racial identity and politics in their city. The experiences they narrated were varied, and the narratives themselves were rich, poignant, and deeply gendered. Black Liverpudlians told of their relations with the black American servicemen (or “GIs”) who were stationed outside their city for some 25 years following World War II. Men and women also spoke about the travels of their own African, Afro-Caribbean, and native black Liverpudlian fathers who were employed as seamen by Liverpool shipping companies. The global wanderings of the city’s black men often brought them to black Atlantic ports of call-many in the United States. Narratives of black Liverpudlians’ diasporic encounters also referred to the emigration of local women to the mythical place called “black America.” Finally, and crucially, men and women told of how and why they have accessed the many black American cultural productions that have, for decades, circulated around the social space of black Liverpool.

Setting Sail: The Birth of Liverpool’s Black Community

When black Liverpudlians narrate their history, three themes often emerge. The first concerns the participation of black men in the city’s shipping industry; the second concerns the birth of the black population-a process narrated with special reference to the prevalence of interracial  marriage in Liverpool; and the third concerns the transformation of their racial identity from “half-caste” to “black.” These related processes, to be examined briefly below, have given rise to the contemporary form of black Liverpudlians’ local and racial identities…

African seamen, as has been suggested, are heralded in Liverpool for essentially giving birth to the black community. Yet they are also noted for setting another phenomenon into motion: the institution of interracial marriage. The prevalence of interracial marriage is a crucial theme in narratives on local history. During their careers at sea, African men commonly docked in Liverpool’s port, formed romantic relationships with local women, mostly white, and later married them, had children, retired from seafaring, and settled in the city—so the dominant narrative goes, both in social scientific and local discourse. Diane Frost’s recent explanation is exemplary of the former. She writes,

Transient work patterns that derive from the nature of seafaring… led to short-term relationships with local women. Permanent and long-standing relationships with local women through marriage (formal or common-law) usually occurred when these seamen became permanently domiciled in Liverpool or in some cases this became a reason for gaining domicile. [1995-96:51]

Several black Liverpudlians told me of a much earlier study of this phenomenon. Published in 1930, it was written by an anthropologist named Muriel Fletcher and given the revealing title Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports (Fletcher 1930). Mark Christian marks the publication of “the Fletcher Report” as the dawn of philanthropic racism in Liverpool because it expressed “concern” both for the “morally degenerate” white women who consorted with African seamen, and for their haplessly pathological “half-caste” children (1995-96). The sexualized interpretation of seafaring lends specificity to the racialization not only of interracial unions, but also of the children born of them.

Major and minor publications on blacks in Liverpool always condemn the Fletcher Report for essentially developing a non-category (“neither black nor white”) to speak of blacks of mixed racial parentage. Their struggles to overcome that inscription is an absolutely central theme in black Liverpudlian accounts of the way they became black. While some blacks of mixed parentage specifically cite black American influences on the rise of a black identity in Liverpool, the blacks I knew with two black parents tended to boast that “we were always ‘black’ in our family”—speaking somewhat disparagingly, perhaps, of those who took longer to claim that identity. Yet the narratives of black Liverpudlians of mixed parentage reveal the difficulty of that process, for these Liverpudlians indicated rather painfully that their African fathers, whom they said they looked to for racial identity, often perceived their children as racially different than themselves. Blacks of mixed parentage in Liverpool commonly reported that their African fathers referred to them as “half-caste.” While this is not the place to historicize the term, we must grant the obvious possibility that West African societies colonized by the British were heavily influenced by Victorian constructions of “race” that were characterized by a concern for “purity” (Lorimer 1978). African informants in Liverpool reported that they, too, grew up with the term, and never recognized it as derogatory. A relatively recent immigrant to England explained, “Growing up in Nigeria, it was acceptable to call people of mixed race ‘half-caste’ because to a lot of Nigerians it was not an abusive term. It was purely a biological description of somebody who comes from a mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.

BBC Two explores what it means to be mixed-race in Britain

British Broadcasting Corporaton
2010-03-10

Mixed-Race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn on BBC Two in a collection of revealing and compelling new programmes.

Britain in 2011 has proportionately the largest mixed population in the Western world, but 100 years ago people of mixed race lived on the fringes of British society, an invisible community unacknowledged by the wider world.

With an exciting mix of drama and documentaries, the programmes provide a window into the varied and surprising lives of mixed-race people in the UK and help us understand what the increasing rise in mixed-race people means for the way we live now in Britain.

…Leading the programming is Shirley Bassey—A Very British Diva (working title), an intimate and revealing drama that tells the extraordinary life story of Dame Shirley Bassey—one of Britain’s national treasures and one of the world’s most enduring and successful divas. But her rise from poverty to international stardom is no ordinary rags-to-riches story…

In a three-part series, journalist and TV presenter George Alagiah leads viewers through the remarkable and untold story of how Britain’s mixed-race community has become part of everyone’s lives today. With previously unseen footage and unheard testimony, Mixed Britannia (working title) uncovers a tale of illicit love, marriage, children, tragedy and triumph.

Charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George explores the social factors that have influenced the shape of the mixed-race Britain we see today.

He’ll find out about the flourishing love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers during the First World War; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples—including English aristocrats—adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making them the fastest-growing ethnic group in the UK.

Mixed—Sex, Race And Empire is a one-off documentary exploring the social, sexual, economic and political issues that led to the race mixing of people across the world. From India to West Africa via South America and the USA, this programme reflects upon the stories and consequences of racial mixing across the world…

Read the entire press release here.

Notes from Steven F. Riley.

For some early 20th century background material on the topics covered in Mixed Britannia, see:

• Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4).
• Mark Christian. “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3 (2008): 213-241.
• Lucy Bland. “White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War,” Gender & History, Volume 17, Issue 1 (2005): 29-61.
• Rachel M. Fleming.“Human hybrids in various parts of the world,” Eugenics Review, Volume 21, Number 4 (1930): 257-263.
• Carina E. Ray. “‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa,” Gender & History, Volume 21, Number 3 (2009): 628-646.
• Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. (London: Routledge, 2009, 204 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-87226-3).
• Alison Blunt. “Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain,” International Journal of Population Geography (Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora) Volume 9, Issue 4 (2003): 281-294.
• Sydney F. Collins. “The Social Position of White and “Half-Caste” Women in Colored Groupings in Britain,” American Sociological Review, Volume 16, Number 6 (1951): 796-802.

Black Europe and the African Diaspora

University of Illinois Press
2009
368 pages
6 x 9 in. 
15 black & white photographs, 1 map
Cloth: ISBN 978-0-252-03467-1
Paper: ISBN 978-0-252-07657-2

Edited by

Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies
Northwestern University

Trica Danielle Keaton, Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies
the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Stephen Small, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Multifaceted analyses of the African diaspora in Europe

The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and “Black Europe” itself as lived and perceived realities.

Contributors are Allison Blakely, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina Campt, Fred Constant, Alessandra Di Maio, Philomena Essed, Terri Francis, Barnor Hesse, Darlene Clark Hine, Dienke Hondius, Eileen Julien, Trica Danielle Keaton, Kwame Nimako, Tiffany Ruby Patterson, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Stephen Small, Tyler Stovall, Alexander G. Weheliye, Gloria Wekker, and Michelle M. Wright.