Hybridity and its Discontents

Politics, Science, Culture

Avtar Brah, Annie Coombes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415194020
• eBook ISBN: 9781134650057
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Hybridity and its Discontents explores the history and experience of 'hybridity' - the mixing of peoples and cultures - in North and South America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The contributors trace manifestations of hybridity in debates about miscengenation and racial purity, in scientific notions of genetics and 'race', in processes of cultural translation, and in ideas of nation, community and belonging.
The contributors begin by examining the persistence of anxieties about racial 'contamination', from nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation to more recent debates about mixed race relationships and parenting. Examining the lived experiences of children of 'mixed parentage', contributors ask why such fears still thrive in a supposedly tolerant culture? The contributors go on to discuss how science, while apparently neutral, is part of cultural discourses, which affect its constructions and classifications of gender and 'race'.
The contributors examine how new cultural forms emerge from borrowings, exchanges and intersections across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and conclude by investigating the contemporary experience of multiculturalism in an age of contested national borders and identities.

Part I
Miscegenation and racial purity

1 Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia

Ann Laura Stoler

This chapter is concerned with the construction of colonial categories and national identities and with those people who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened these imperial divides.¹ It begins with a story about métissage (interracial unions) and the sorts of progeny to which it gave rise (referred to as métis, mixed bloods) in French Indochina at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a story with multiple versions about people whose cultural sensibilities, physical being and political sentiments called into question the distinctions of difference which maintained the neat boundaries of colonial rule. Its plot and resolution defy the treatment of European nationalist impulses and colonial racist policies as discrete projects, since here it was in the conflation of racial category, sexual morality, cultural competence and national identity that the case was contested and politically charged. In a broader sense, it allows me to address one of the tensions of empire which this chapter only begins to sketch: the relationship between the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism and equality which informed liberal policy at the turn of the century in colonial Southeast Asia and the exclusionary, discriminatory practices which were reactive to, coexistent with and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself.²

Nowhere is this relationship between inclusionary impulses and exclusionary practices more evident than in how métissage was legally handled, culturally inscribed, and politically treated in the contrasting colonial cultures of French Indochina and The Netherlands Indies. French Indochina was a colony of commerce occupied by the military in the 1860s and settled by colons in the 1870s with a métis population which numbered no more than several hundred by the turn of the century.³ The Netherlands Indies by contrast, had been settled since the early 1600s, with those of mixed descent or born in the Indies numbering in the tens of thousands in 1900. They made up nearly three-quarters of those legally designated as European. Their Indische mestizo culture shaped the contours of colonial society for its first two hundred years.⁴ Although conventional historiography defines sharp contrasts between French, British and Dutch colonial racial policy and the particular national metropolitan agendas from which they derived, what is more striking is that similar discourses were mapped onto such vastly different social and political landscapes.⁵

In both the Indies and Indochina, with their distinct demographics and internal rhythms, métissage was a focal point of political, legal and social debate. Conceived as a dangerous source of subversion, it was seen as a threat to white prestige, an embodiment of European degeneration and moral decay.⁶ This is not to suggest that the so-called mixed-blood problem was of the same intensity in both places nor resolved in precisely the same ways. However, the issues which resonated in these different colonies reveal a patterned set of transgressions that have not been sufficiently explored. I would suggest that both situations were so charged, in part because such mixing called into question the very criteria by which Europeanness could be identified, citizenship should be accorded and nationality assigned. Métissage represented not the dangers of foreign enemies at national borders, but the more pressing affront for European nation-states, what the German philosopher Fichte so aptly defined as the essence of the nation, its ‘interior frontiers’.⁷

The concept of an interior frontier is compelling precisely because of its contradictory connotations. As Etienne Balibar has noted, a frontier locates both a site of enclosure and contact, of observed passage and exchange. When coupled with the word interior, frontier carries the sense of internal distinctions within a territory (or empire); at the level of the individual, frontier marks the moral predicates by which a subject retains his or her national identity despite location outside the national frontier and despite heterogeneity within the nation-state. As Fichte deployed it, an interior frontier entails two dilemmas: the purity of the community is prone to penetration on its interior and exterior borders, and the essence of the community is an intangible ‘moral attitude’, ‘a multiplicity of invisible ties’.⁸

Viewing late nineteenth-century representations of a national essence in these terms, we can trace how métissage emerges as a powerful trope for internal contamination and challenge conceived morally, politically and sexually.⁹ The changing density and intensity of métissage’s discursive field outlines the fault lines of colonial authority: in linking domestic arrangements to the public order, family to the state, sex to subversion, and psychological essence to racial type, métissage might be read as a metonym for the biopolitics of the empire at large.

In both Indochina and The Netherlands Indies, the rejection of métis as a distinct legal category only intensified how the politics of cultural difference were played out in other domains.¹⁰ In both colonies, the métis-indo problem produced a discourse in which facile theories of racial hierarchy were rejected, while confirming the practical predicates of European superiority at the same time. The early Vietnamese and Indonesian nationalist movements created new sources of colonial vulnerability, and some of the debates over the nature and definition of Dutch and French national identity must be seen in that light. The resurgence of European nationalist rhetoric may partly have been a response to nationalist resistance in the colonies, but it cannot be accounted for in these terms alone.¹¹ For French Indochina, discourses about the dangers of métissage were sustained in periods of quiescence and cannot be viewed as rhetorics of reaction tout court. This is not to suggest that there was no correspondence between them.¹² But anti-colonial challenges in Indochina, contrary to the discourse which characterized the métis as a potential subversive vanguard, were never predominantly led nor peopled by them. And in the Indies, where persons of mixed descent made up a potentially powerful constituency, the bids they made for economic, social and political reform were more often made in contradistinction to the demands of the native population, not in alliance with them.

Although the content of the métis problem was partially in response to popular threats to colonial rule, the particular form that the securing of European privilege took was not shaped in the colonies alone. The focus on moral unity, cultural genealogy, and language joined the imagining of European colonial communities and metropolitan national entities in fundamental ways. Both visions embraced a moral rearmament, centring on the domestic domain and the family as sites in which state authority could be secured or irreparably undermined.¹³

At the turn of the twentieth century, in both metropole and colony, the liberal impulse for social welfare, representation and protective legislation focused enormous energy on the preparatory environment for civic responsibility: on domestic arrangements, sexual morality, parenting and more specifically on the moral milieu of home and school in which children lived.¹⁴ Both education and upbringing emerged as national projects, but not as we might expect, with a firm sense of national identity imported to the periphery from the metropolitan core. As Eugene Weber has argued for late nineteenth-century France, ‘patriotic feelings on the national level, far from instinctive, had to be learned’.¹⁵ As late as 1901, six out of every ten French army recruits had not heard of the Franco- Prussian war.¹⁶ Thus the Gallicization of France and its colonies through compulsory education, moral instruction and language was not a one-way process with a consensual template for that identity forged in the metropole and later transported by new metropolitan recruits to colonial citizens. Between 1871 and 1914, French authorities were preoccupied with the threat of national diminishment and decline, with the study of national character a ‘veritable industry in France’.¹⁷

French anxieties over national identity are commonly attributed to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870, but of perhaps equal import was the collective assimilation of over 100,000 Algerian Jews under the Crémieux Decree of the same year.¹⁸ Debates over who was really French and who was not intensified over the next twenty years as increasing numbers of working-class Italians, Spanish and Maltese in Algeria were accorded French citizenship. A declining birth rate (accelerating in the 1880s) placed a premium on expanded membership in the French national community but prompted a fear of internal aliens and pseudocompatriots at the same time.¹⁹ The Dreyfus affair coupled with concerns over the suspect loyalties of the new French of Algeria gave particular urgency to debates about the cultural contours of what it meant to be French.²⁰

Heightened debates over the mixed-blood question in the Dutch context converged with domestic and colonial social reform, crystallizing in a civilizing offensive of a somewhat different order. It targeted the ‘dangerous classes’ in both locales – Holland’s paupered residuum (as distinguished from its respectable working class) and the Indies’ growing population of impoverished (Indo) Europeans, the majority of whom were of mixed descent but legally classified as European. The domestic project joined liberals and conservatives, Protestants and Catholics in a shared mission, with middle-class energies concentrated around the ‘uplifting’ of the working-class family and its moral reform. This ‘civilizing offensive’ focused in large part on child welfare and particularly on those ‘neglected’ and ‘delinquent’ children whose ‘upbringing’ ill-prepared them for ‘their future place in the social system’ and thus marked them as a danger to the state.²¹

Although national anxieties were not at the same pitch as in France, there is evidence that, at the turn of the century, Dutch national feeling – what Maarten Kuitenbrouwer has called an ‘extreme nationalism’ – underwent something of a revival’, then later subsided again.²² In tandem with the domestic offensive was also an imperial one that spanned concerns about Dutch paupers in the Indies and ‘vagabond Hollanders’ in South Africa both. Efforts to counter ‘the perils of educational failure’ and the increased mixing, marrying and interaction of poor whites with colonized populations in the two locales gave rise to increased investments in the education of poor white children and assaults on the parenting styles those children were subject to at home.²³ The securing of Dutch influence in South Africa on the eve of the Boer War centred on strategies to instil a cultural belonging that was to mark the new boundaries of a ‘Greater Netherlands’ embracing Flanders, South Africa and the Indies.²⁴ In both metropolitan class and imperial projects, questions of national identity, childrearing and education were on the public agenda and intimately tied.

Thus, the question of who might be considered truly French or Dutch resonated from core to colony and from colony to core.²⁵ In the Indies and Indochina, cultural milieu, represented by both upbringing and education, was seen to demarcate which métis children would turn into revolutionaries, patricides, loyal subjects or full-fledged citizens of the nation-state. As T. H. Marshall has argued, ‘when the State guarantees that all children shall be educated, it has the requirements and the nature of citizenship definitely in mind’.²⁶ Métis education raised issues about retaining colonial boundaries and regenerating the nation. At issue were the means by which European beschaving (civilization or culture) would be disseminated without undercutting the criteria by which European claims to privilege were made.

As such, the discourses about métissage expressed more pervasive, if inchoate, dilemmas of colonial rule and a fundamental contradiction of imperial domination: the tension between a form of domination simultaneously predicated on both incorporation and distancing.²⁷ This tension expressed itself in the so-called métis problem in quintessential form. Some métis were candidates for incorporation, but others were categorically denied. In either case, the decision to grant citizenship or subject status to a métis could not be made on the basis of race alone, because all métis shared some degree of European descent by definition. How then could the state mark some candidates so they would be excluded from the national community while retaining the possibility that other individuals would be granted the rights of inclusion because French and Dutch ‘blood prevailed in their veins’? I explore that question here by working off of a seemingly disparate set of texts and contexts: a criminal court proceeding in Haiphong in 1898; the Hanoi campaign against child abandonment in the early 1900s; the protracted debate on mixed marriage legislation in the Indies between 1887 and 1898; and finally, the confused and failed efforts of the Indo-European movement itself in the Indies to articulate its opposition to ‘pure-blood’ Dutch by calling upon race, place and cultural genealogy to make its demands.

In each of these texts, class, gender and cultural markers deny and designate exclusionary practices at the same time. We cannot determine which of these categories is privileged at any given moment by sorting out the fixed primacy of race over gender or gender over class. On the contrary, I trace an unstable and uneven set of discourses in which different institutional authorities claimed primacy for one over another in relationship to how other authorities attempted to designate how political boundaries were to be protected and assigned. For mid- Victorian England, Mary Poovey argues that discourses about gender identity were gradually displaced in the 1850s by the issue of national identity.²⁸ However, the contestations over métissage suggest nothing linear about these developments. Rather, class distinctions, gender prescriptions, cultural knowledge and racial membership were simultaneously invoked and strategically filled with different meanings for varied projects.

Patriarchal principles were not always applied to shore up government priorities. Colonial authorities with competing agendas agreed on two premises: Children had to be taught both their place and race, and the family was the crucial site in which future subjects and loyal citizens were to be made. These concerns framed the fact that the domestic life of individuals was increasingly subject to public scrutiny by a wide range of private and government organizations that charged themselves with the task of policing the moral borderlands of the European community and the psychological sensibilities of its marginal, as well as supposedly full-fledged, members.

At the heart of this tension between inclusionary rhetorics and exclusionary practices was a search for essences that joined formulations of national and racial identity – what Benedict Anderson has contrasted as the contrary dreams of ‘historical destinies’ and ‘eternal contaminations'.²⁹ Racism is commonly understood as a visual ideology in which somatic features are thought to provide the crucial criteria of membership. But racism is not really a visual ideology at all; physiological attributes only signal the non-visual and more salient distinctions of exclusion on which racism rests. Racism is not to biology as nationalism is to culture. Cultural attributions in both provide the observable conduits, the indices of psychological propensities and moral susceptibilities seen to shape which individuals are suitable for inclusion in the national community and whether those of ambiguous racial membership are to be classified as subjects or citizens within it. If we are to trace the epidemiologies of racist and nationalist thinking, then it is the cultural logics that underwrite the relationship between fixed, visual representations and invisible protean essences to which we must attend. This convergence between national and racial thinking achieves particular clarity when we turn to the legal and social debates in the colonies that linked observable cultural styles of parenting and domestic arrangement to the hidden psychological requirements for access to French and Dutch citizenship in this period.

Cultural competence, national identity and métissage

In 1898 in the French Indochinese city of Haiphong, the nineteen-year-old son of a French minor nava...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: the conundrum of ‘mixing’
• Part I: Miscegenation and racial purity
• Part II: Engineering the future: genetic cartographies and the discourse of science
• Part III: Cultural translation
• Part IV: Reconfiguring nation, community and belonging