Mixing race, nation, and ethnicity in Asia and Australasia

Visions of a cosmopolitan, melting pot world, where races and cultures are blended and intermixed to produce hybrid cultures and ‘coffee coloured people’, are common in both popular culture and academic theorizing. Despite the theoretical messiness of the concept of race, ‘mixed race’ itself is an increasingly popular area of study in the social sciences, as evidenced by the growing field of critical mixed race studies (Daniel, Kina, Dariotis, & Fojas, 2014; Parker & Song, 2001). Issues around mixedness and belonging also transcend the fields of ethnic and racial studies, with important implications for wider studies of identity, community, and nation-building. Mixed identities have become more common in some parts of the world, with increasing numbers of people identifying as mixed and seeking or creating forms of belonging to encompass this mixedness. This trend is further seen in the growing interest in DNA testing to determine the global scale of one’s ancestry (Omi, 2010; Spickard, 2015), and the online mixed community, which ranges from sharing academic research to social network building (such as www.mix-d.org; www.intermix.org.uk; mixedrootsstories.com; www.mixedsingle.com; www.mixedracestudies.org). However, such identity construction often remains on the margins of much theory and policy-making, and needs to be addressed both theoretically and practically, to not just acknowledge, but provide space for more complex identities.

Previously, the majority of research has focused on ‘Western’ multicultural societies, particularly in Europe and North America, often overlooking the vast diversities of cultures, ethnicities, languages, and histories of mixing in other parts of the world. This has begun to change in recent years, notably in collections such as Global Mixed Race (King-O’Riain, Small, Mahtani, Song, & Spickard, 2014), and International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing (Edwards, Ali, Caballero, & Song, 2012). However, both volumes lack contributions on mixed race in Asia, and the focus has been on individual identities rather than state frameworks and cultural formations, leaving a significant proportion of the world’s population relatively unexamined. Following on from this, new international research has begun to emerge in Asia and the Pacific, focusing specifically and in more depth on the local and regional experiences and histories of mixedness and cultural exchange (McGavin & Fozdar, 2016; Rocha & Fozdar, 2017). The newly growing literature indicates that while studying mixed race in any context is challenging as it often raises questions about the continued power and recognition of the discredited concept of race, there are region-specific, under-researched issues and puzzles in Asia and Australasia which add particular layers of complexity and urgency to the work.

This special issue aims to take this research further, giving much needed attention to a context where the social construction of race remains an undeniable, if often taken for granted, force in everyday life, both at macro and micro levels. Racial, ethnic and cultural mixing has a long history in both Asia and Australasia, being inextricably linked with national stories of migration, indigeneity, diaspora, colonialism and nation-building. Thus, narratives, experiences, and understandings of mixed race have developed in vastly different ways. From established named identities such as Eurasians in Malaysia and Singapore, to forbidden mixes such as mixed Aboriginal/white children in Australia, individuals of mixed heritage have had diverse experiences across both regions. These experiences have been shaped by a wide range of historical circumstances: histories of forced and/or voluntary migrations, political contexts (monarchies, democracies, colonial, and postcolonial states, authoritarian dynasties), hierarchies of race and culture, and varying emphases on ‘racial purity’ as a desirable, or attainable, trait. This special issue adds important new dimensions to previous research by highlighting new country contexts and drawing out the intersections between personal mixed identities, histories of classification, representations of mixedness, and changing policy frameworks in diverse nation-states. It provides a broader outlook, positioning understandings of mixed race on comparative and transnational scales, and illustrating the richness of research on mixedness in Asia and Australasia.

Mixed race hierarchies and national belonging

As noted, the Asian and Australasian regions, with their significant internal diversity, offer a unique range of case studies where mixing has been historically or contemporaneously privileged or disprivileged. Most countries have had some sort of engagement with the colonial experience, generating, in some cases, historically mixed communities such as the Eurasians in Singapore and the Indos in Indonesia. For others, mixing is a more recent phenomenon, resulting from the international movements of people for work, or specifically for marriage, and signalled by recently coined neologisms such as the Chindians of Malaysia and Singapore, or newly available double-barrelled (hyphenated) racial identities in Singapore.

Collectively, the papers illustrate the continued influence of physical and cultural stereotypes, and how authenticity and belonging are manifested in different ways in different contexts, and can change over time. Key to understanding these differences is a focus on different types of mixing: white/Asian intermixing, Asian/Asian mixes, and the related hierarchies of race. Papers by Fozdar and Chito Childs in their discussions of mixedness in Australia examine the valorization of whiteness, and certain types of mixedness over others, in the construction of hierarchies of mixed identities and intermarriage, demonstrating different levels of acceptance and belonging. Other papers on the postcolonial nation-states of New Zealand and Singapore (Rocha, Yeoh, Acedera, and Rootham) highlight the importance of state-level classification, citizenship, and representation when looking at issues of race and mixed race in the context of increased migrations and mobilities, while Fozdar’s paper on Australia adds the crucial dimension of indigeneity. The diversity of languages and religions in the Asian region is of critical significance for understanding race hierarchies and representations and indeed several papers note how mixedness may inhere in religious and linguistic rather than simply racial difference. Kyaw’s paper on how race has been understood and operationalized in colonial Burma through to postcolonial Myanmar, for example, shows how the political and socio-legal situations of mixed race identities have deteriorated over time particularly for those of Muslim descent in a nation-state context where religious difference has gained ascendancy as a marker of exclusion.

In sum, the papers bring to the fore the hierarchies of race and mixedness, both past and present, in the Asian and Australasian regions, and the far-reaching impacts of racial designation and ranking. Race, acknowledged as a social construct, but with real effects, remains particularly salient in these regions, where social, political, and economic opportunities have been, and in many cases, still are, determined by racial heritage and phenotype. Whether race is explicitly acknowledged, as in Singapore, or implicitly understood, as in Australia, hierarchies and histories around race remain powerful. The privileging of certain groups by colonial authorities has carried down through generations, offering greater opportunities for those from some mixed backgrounds, as opposed to others. With the formation of new nation-states in the postcolonial era, new classification systems and the politics of race have both fed into and disrupted this privileging, as illustrated in examples from across the regions. Across the papers, a redefining of belonging and identity is evident, ironically either through the importance of national identity, or mixedness, as transcending race (in reality or merely in rhetoric).

Lived experiences of mixedness amidst multiple diversities

As the reality of multicultural and mixed populations asserts itself in everyday life, the blurred edges of ethnic and racial groups and complex heritages and identities claimed by individuals are becoming increasingly incompatible with both official and implied race classification structures that undergird contemporary nation-states in Asia and Australasia. It is therefore important for critical, analytical explorations of race and mixed race to interrogate lived experiences of mixedness rooted in the everyday, and to move the discursive frames beyond stereotypes of marginal, troubled individuals caught between groups, or post-racial, cosmopolitan beauties who are celebrated as the harbingers of a new age (Edwards et al., 2012). Such simplistic dichotomies ignore the complexities of everyday life and experiences of mixedness. These can range from adopting separate public and private identities, devising forms of ‘passing’, constructing mixed/multiple/multiracial identities, embracing a cultural identity not reflected in one’s physical appearance, or even fighting for an identity which is not socially or politically recognized. The lived experiences of being mixed are inevitably influenced by political and social contexts and histories, and cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons are vital.

Several papers in this special issue give attention to how mixed race individuals negotiate identity and belonging within national policy frameworks, distilling insights from the challenges and opportunities provided in the context of living with and within diversity. In the Japanese context, Seiger argues that both exceptionalism and similarity are highlighted in a context that struggles with the growing reality of multiculturalism. Here, dominant discourses that construct the Japanese nation as monoracial, monoethnic, and monolingual have created the necessity for children of mixed Japanese-Filipino descent to turn to alternative labels like haafu or ‘mixed roots’. In this way, Japanese racial homogeneity is preserved by the twin measures of recognizing diversity while maintaining ethnic boundaries. Focusing on schools as sites of cultural reproduction in Indonesia, Tanu turns attention to the everyday strategies that young people of mixed Japanese-Indonesian descent use to navigate racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. She illustrates the situational dynamics of mixedness, as her young protagonists contend with Japan’s dual positioning as inferior to ‘the West’ but superior to ‘the Rest’. Also basing her research in Indonesia, Hewett explores conceptions of home, belonging, and transnational identities for different groups of ‘return migrants’ of mixed Indonesian-Caucasian descent (usually known as ‘Indos’), whose parents left Indonesia because of political events and later returned. With their diverse family histories featuring connections to multiple locations and nationalities, Indos find themselves to be neither insiders nor outsiders, but caught in the crossfire as boundaries based primarily on appearance inform who can belong to the Indonesian nation and who cannot. In the cases of Malaysia and Singapore – two nation-states founded on comparable but also distinctively different multiracial templates – Reddy shows that those who are conferred fixed monoracial identities (such as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Indian’) tend to abandon these for more inclusive, hybrid and chameleon-like identities (such as ‘Chindian’) in young adulthood. While Eurasian identity has achieved official recognition as a distinct racial category in Singapore’s version of ‘separate-but-equal’ multiracialism, Yeoh, Acedera, and Rootham argue that the increased diversity of immigrants, intermixing and intermarriage have created for the Eurasian community the paradoxical dilemma of whether to strengthen the distinctiveness of Eurasian-ness as a historically derived fusion of races and cultures that is not easily replicated in contemporary times without loss of meaning, or to allow for a degree of porosity so as to keep the culture constantly replenished while risking dilution.

In sum, through ethnographically rich accounts, several papers in this collection have looked at mixedness as everyday experience lived in the interstices of racialized categories, classifications, and representations predicated on powerful state-promulgated and other historically embedded discourses. The articles explore both exclusion and more positive experiences, as well as the taken-for-granted and ‘normal’ in living as mixed, in the context of broader social transformations being wrought in terms of identity and belonging.

Conclusion

In bringing together the vastly different yet comparable contexts of Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Singapore, this special issue investigates what it means to be mixed race across national contexts and borders, unpicking the histories and contemporary experiences of race, belonging, identity, and classification. Giving attention to variations across the vast socio-political canvas of the Asian and Australasian regions is important as there is no ‘singular form of mixed race politics [and instead] we need to be more concerned about the wider, situated politics of mixedness’ (Ali, 2012, 169). While each paper brings a unique, contextualized, and regionally inflected perspective to questions of mixedness, as a collection the papers demonstrate the significance of the journal’s foci of race, nation, and culture as key elements in the generation of and resistance to mixed race categories and experiences. The issue is particularly timely, as research on mixed race around the world is highly relevant against a global background of migration and diversity, where identity claims are increasingly fluid and politicized.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Earlier versions of the papers in this special issue were first presented at an International Workshop on Mixed Race in Asia and Australasia: Migrations, Mobilities and Belonging funded by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Some of the research for the workshop was also supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 [FY2014-FRC2-008].