Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige: Lim Boon Keng and Overseas Chinese–China Relations

Why would a foreign-born overseas Chinese endeavor to reconnect with or return to China? While scholars have generally attributed such acts to the emigrant’s primordial affinity to the ancestral homeland, or his nationalistic concerns for China, historian Philip Kuhn’s recent conception of “corridors” allows us to instead focus on the personal and socio-economic reasons behind the emigrant’s engagement with China. This article examines a well-known effort by a third-generation overseas Chinese from Singapore, Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957), who re-established a corridor to China and eventually returned to work in Xiamen. Lim was secure with his racial hybridity and with the fact that he was an overseas Chinese; and it was in response to the changing socio-economic conditions in Singapore that he acknowledged Chinese culture and China, and hoped to use them to ensure the welfare and continual prosperity of his Straits Chinese community in their place of residence.

Racial Hybridity

This paper explores some possible contributions analytical psychology may make to theorising racial hybridity. Already a ‘hybrid psychology’, Lu suggests that analytical psychology is particularly well-positioned to speak to the specific experiences and challenges posed by multiraciality. In particular, Lu critically reflects on his hopes, fears, and fantasies that have arisen with the birth of his multiracial children, which may in turn act as a springboard to greater depth psychological reflections on the unique and equally ‘typical’ experience of raising mixed-raced children. Such concerns have been articulated by others such as Bruce Lee, who faced the challenge of raising multiracial children amidst a backdrop of racism in the Unites States. This paper critically assesses possible ways in which racial hybridity may be theorised from a Jungian perspective and argues that a Post-Jungian approach must reflect the flexibility and fluidity of hybridity itself.

In Search of Identity: A Slave, a Half-Blood, a Senhora

The present article is devoted to the study of the genesis of the “strong woman” type in Latin American prose. It shows that this type, traditionally associated with the modern novel, has appeared in the literature of the continent as early as in the XIX century. The analysis of female images created in the cult novels of leading Latin American writers (an Argentinean José Mármol, a Cuban Cirilo Villaverde and Brazilian Bernardo Guimarães and José de Alencar) during the period of formation of young nations, allows to conclude that they bear the imprint of a chaotic contradiction -based reality. There is a pattern performed by the “strong” female characters of the analyzed novels, marked by the features of social, gender, and racial hybridity; in search of their identity they assert themselves in one way or another in the world of men. The article examines various means via which the characters manage to acquire their own identity, be it dissociation from the civilizing principle, unwillingness or inability to recognize their own “roots”, or “self -actualization” attempts of a talented person. Thus, María Josefa Ezcurra in Amalia by Mármol and Aurelia in Senhora by Alencar – each in her own way – become “men in women’s guise”: the image of the former embodies the “barbaric” essence of young Argentina; the image of the latter embodies “masculine” pragmatism of the transitional era in Brazil. The daring and self -willed Cecilia Valdés from Villaverde's eponymous novel, the “victim” and “executioner” of a white man, painfully realizes her place in the mestizo society of colonial Cuba, passions and vices of which have determined her character. At the bottom of this scale of self -determination in prose of period there is a slave, as it is illustrated in Bernardo Guimarães’s novel Isaura, The Slave Girl.

Sophie Tucker, Racial Hybridity and Interracial Relations in American Vaudeville

This article discusses Sophie Tucker's racialized performance in the context of early twentieth-century American vaudeville and black–Jewish interracial relations. Tucker's vaudeville musical acts involved mixed racial referents: ‘black-style’ music and dance, Jewish themes, Yiddish language and the collaboration of both African American and Jewish artists. I show how these racial combinations were a studied tactic to succeed in white vaudeville, a corporate entertainment industry that capitalized on racialized images and fast changes in characters. From historical records it is clear that Tucker's black signifiers also fostered connections with the African American artists who inspired her work or were employed by her. How these interracial relations contended with Tucker's brand of racialized performance is the focus of the latter part of the article. Here I analyse Tucker's autobiography as a performative act, in order to reveal a reparative effort toward some of her exploitative approaches to black labour and creativity.

“Blood Politics: Reproducing the Children of ‘Others’ in the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act”

This article examines the u.s. Congressional debates in 1981 and 1982 over the Amerasian Immigration Act (aia), which provided preferential immigration status for the Amerasians of Southeast Asia. The debates exposed conflict on issues of American identity, race, and nation and the gendered nature of u.s. immigration and citizenship policy. This article considers how lawmakers on both sides of the debate justified accepting the Amerasians as American children or rejecting them as Asian. In each case, lawmakers in the post-Vietnam War era struggled to reconcile the physical appearance of the Amerasians and their racial hybridity with an American national identity. The aia is evidence of the confusion. While the bill defined Amerasians as children of American citizens, it failed to grant them American citizenship. This article argues that although the rhetoric of inclusion and kinship within the aia recognized the Amerasians as children of American fathers, the exclusion of citizenship from the bill formalized their status as the children of “others,” and thus foreign children. Ultimately, the bill exposed the problematic existence of mixed-race populations in the United States, and a history of exclusionary immigration and citizenship policies against people of Asian descent.

Dominican Ethnic Identities, National Borders, and Literature

The formation of Dominican identity has been linked to the historical nexus that placed Dominicans in relationship to Haiti, Spain, and the United States. The foundational literature of the 19th century sought to shape national identity as emerging from racial hybridity through notions of mestizaje that obscured Dominican African roots. In the early to mid-20th century, at the hands of the Trujillo intelligentsia, these myths shaped legal, educational, and military structures, leading to violence and disenfranchisement. Since the death of Trujillo in 1961, Dominican writers, artists, and scholars have been articulating other ways of being Dominican that include Afro-Dominican episteme and accounts for the experiences of colonialisms, bordering, and diasporic movements. These articulations of dominicanidad have led to a vibrant, exciting, and incredibly diverse literary production at home and abroad.

A “WHITE BOY . . . WHO IS NOT A WHITE BOY”: RUDYARD KIPLING'S KIM, WHITENESS, AND BRITISH IDENTITY

Rudyard Kipling's final novel, Kim (1901), begins with an intriguing – if paradoxical – description of the eponymous Kim, or Kimball O'Hara: he is an “English” boy with an Irish name and Irish parentage who speaks “the [Indian] vernacular by preference” (1). While the narrator hastens to reassure the reader that Kim is both “white” and “English,” Kim is also “burned black as any native” and speaks his supposed “mother tongue,” English, in an “uncertain sing-song” (1). If we are to take Kipling's assertion at face value, that Kim is, indeed, “English,” then certainly this is a kind of Englishness that is divorced completely from the racially pure ideals of Anglo-Saxon whiteness that were privileged by many racial theorists earlier in the nineteenth century. As an Irish Celt, Kipling's protagonist is always already at a layer of remove from ideals of pure Englishness, but Kipling renders Kim's racial identity even more complicated in the text. The manuscript of Kim gives us some telling clues about the contexts that inform Kipling's peculiar descriptions of “burned black” whiteness in his finished novel. While the published text baldly declares that “Kim was English. . . . Kim was white” (1; ch. 1; emphasis mine), parts of the manuscript are much less certain of this fact, as that document asserts that Kim “looked like a half caste” (Kipling, Kim o’ the ‘Rishti n. 3). And while Kipling ultimately removed this explicit link between Kim and Eurasian bodies in the opening of his published text, this disavowal is neither complete nor convincing throughout Kim. For instance, in the novel, the narrator later describes a “half-caste woman who looked after [Kim . . . and] told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister” (1; ch. 1). While this woman is not, in fact, the boy's aunt, Kim's near-familial tie with her underlines the intimate connection between him and the hybridized subjects of empire. Indeed, Kim demonstrates ideological and affective links to non-white Others and to people of mixed race, and this connection between whiteness and racial hybridity is of central importance to Kipling. If Kim is tenuously white, then he can only perform this whiteness in immediate proximity to racial hybridity, with which whiteness is ideologically contiguous in this text. As I contend in this paper, Kim reveals the under-examined links between early twentieth-century ideas of white British identity and descriptions of imperial miscegenation. In Kim, “White” and “English” emerge as a vexed pair of signifiers that reveal unprecedented traces of racial and national hybridization.

Is Brazil a Postcolonial Country?

The starting point of this essay is the text written by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant entitled “The Cunning of the Imperialist Reason,” in which they discuss the pertinence of transferring concepts regarding race from the American context to the Brazilian context. The authors maintain that this transfer is a ‘false friend’ because the same words are used to signify different things. In this article, I argue that certain uses of postcolonial theory in Brazil might also function as ‘false friends,’ particularly in the use of complex notions of Mestizaje within the art world. The key point of departure for this essay is the following contradiction: abroad, Brazil attracts a great deal of international interest due to its postcolonial condition, and the power of its discourses of racial hybridity through concepts such as cultural anthropophagy which challenge eurocentric paradigms. But, internally, postcolonial studies have attracted little or no interest, especially in academic circles. Why? We will use the exhibition Mestizo Histories (2015) as a case study for this purpose.