Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race in Asia: Past, Present and Future

Routledge
2017-06-15
250 pages
1 B/W Illus.
Hardback ISBN: 9781138282674
eBook ISBN: 9781315270579

Edited by:

Zarine L. Rocha, Managing Editor
Current Sociology and the Asian Journal of Social Science

Farida Fozdar, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology
University of Western Australia

Mixed racial and ethnic identities are topics of increasing interest around the world, yet studies of mixed race in Asia are rare, despite its particular salience for Asian societies.

Mixed Race in Asia seeks to reorient the field to focus on Asia, looking specifically at mixed race in China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and India. Through these varied case studies, this collection presents an insightful exploration of race, ethnicity, mixedness and belonging, both in the past and present. The thematic range of the chapters is broad, covering the complexity of lived mixed race experiences, the structural forces of particular colonial and post-colonial environments and political regimes, and historical influences on contemporary identities and cultural expressions of mixedness.

Adding significant richness and depth to existing theoretical frameworks, this enlightening volume develops markedly different understandings of, and recognizes nuances around, what it means to be mixed, practically, theoretically, linguistically and historically. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral and other researchers interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity, Sociology and Asian Studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mixed Race in Asia / Zarine L. Rocha and Farida Fozdar
• Section One: China and Vietnam
  • Chapter One: “A Class by Themselves”: Battles over Eurasian Schooling in Late-19th-Century Shanghai / Emma J. Teng
  • Chapter Two: Mixing Blood and Race: Representing Hunxue in Contemporary China / Cathryn Clayton
  • Chapter Three: Métis of Vietnam: An Historical Perspective on Mixed-Race Children from the French Colonial Period / Christina Firpo
• Section Two: South Korea and Japan
  • Chapter Four: Developing bilingualism in a largely monolingual society: Southeast Asian marriage migrants and multicultural families in South Korea / Mi Yung Park
  • Chapter Five: Haafu Identity in Japan: half, mixed or double? / Alexandra Shaitan and Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis
  • Chapter Six: Claiming Japaneseness: recognition, privilege and status in Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ ethnic identity constructions / Fiona-Katharina Seiger
• Section Three: Malaysia and Singapore
  • Chapter Seven: Being “Mixed” in Malaysia: Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity / Caryn Lim
  • Chapter Eight: Chinese, Indians and the Grey Space in between: Acceptance of Malaysian Chindians in a plural society / Rona Chandran
  • Chapter Nine: ‘Our Chinese’: The Mixedness of Peranakan Chinese Identities in Kelantan, Malaysia / Pue Giok Hun
  • Chapter Ten: Eurasian as Multiracial: mixed race, gendered categories and identity in Singapore / Zarine L. Rocha
• Section Four: India and Indonesia
  • Chapter Eleven: Is the Anglo-Indian ‘Identity Crisis’ a Myth? / Robyn Andrews
  • Chapter Twelve: When Hybridity Encounters Hindu Purity Fetish: Anglo-Indian Lived Experiences in an Indian Railway Town / Anjali Gera Roy
  • Chapter Thirteen: Sometimes white, sometimes Asian: Boundary-making among transnational mixed descent youth at an international school in Indonesia / Danau Tanu
  • Chapter Fourteen: Class, Race and Being Indo (Eurasian) in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia / Ros Hewett
• Afterword / Paul Spickard

Quiting India: the Anglo-Indian Culture of Migration

sites: a Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Volume 4, Number 2 (2007)
pages 32-56
DOI: 10.11157/sites-vol4iss2id73

Robyn Andrews, Lecturer, Social Anthropology Programme
Massey University

In my work with the Anglo-Indians in Calcutta I was reminded of Caplan’s (1995) comment that Anglo-Indians had a ‘culture of emigration’, as I observed a steady stream of Anglo-Indians leaving India. Even though destination opportunities are being eroded, the Anglo-Indians I spoke with regularly referred to relatives living abroad, and in the main wanted to emulate this pattern of migration.

In this paper I draw particularly on case study material collected in India and Australia over the past five years. I explore the nexus between Anglo-Indian identity, which they often regarded as more Western than Indian, and their migration patterns. Concentrating on their reasons for leaving, I contribute to the ‘culture of migration’ literature through this analysis of the migration culture of an ethnic group which exhibits variations on the set of reasonably distinct characteristics associated with groups having a ‘culture of migration’.

Read the entire article here.

Being Anglo-Indian: Practices and Stories from Calcutta

Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
2005
263 pages

Robyn Andrews, Lecturer, Social Anthropology Programme
Massey University

A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This thesis is an ethnography of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta. All ethnographies are accounts arising out of the experience of a particular kind of encounter between the people being written about and the person doing the writing. This thesis, amongst other things, reflects my changing views of how that experience should be recounted. I begin by outlining briefly who Anglo-Indians are, a topic which in itself alerts one to complexities of trying to get an ethnographic grip on a shifting subject. I then look at some crucial elements that are necessary for an “understanding” of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the work that has already been done in relation to Anglo-Indians, the urban context of the lives of my research participants and I discuss the methodological issues that I had to deal with in constructing this account.

In the second part of my thesis I explore some crucial elements of the lives of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the place of Christianity in their lives, education not just as an aspect of socialisation but as part of their very being and, finally, the public rituals that now give them another way of giving expression to new forms of Anglo-Indian becoming.

In all of my work I was driven by a desire to keep close to the experience of the people themselves and I have tried to write a “peopled” ethnography. This ambition is most fully realised in the final part of my thesis where I recount the lives of three key participants.

Read the entire dissertation here.