Mixed-race Children Research Articles

Comitant Horizontal Strabismus in South African Black and Mixed Race Children—A Clinic-based Study

Purpose: To examine the types of comitant horizontal strabismus in children belonging to the two largest ethnic groups of the Western Cape, South Africa.Methods: Retrospective review of 2371 children presenting with comitant horizontal strabismus to a single, large, pediatric tertiary referral center in Cape Town, South Africa, between 1997 and 2007.Results: 81% of children were of mixed race and 19% were black. The overall esotropia:exotropia ratio was 73:27. For black children this was 85:15 and for mixed race, 71:29. The overwhelming majority of black children had congenital esotropias (74%), whereas accommodative esotropia was rare (9%). In mixed race children, esotopias were more equally divided between congenital (46%) and accommodative types (35%). Exotropias were uncommon in black children, and were mainly constant (61%). Intermittent exotropias predominated in mixed race children (55%).Conclusion: Congenital esotropia remains common in South African black children, and of the few who presented with exotropia, most had constant type. Accommodative esotropias were more prevalent in South African mixed race children, but in smaller proportions than in other studies. Exotropias were mostly intermittent in this ethnic group, and showed a similar profile to that in white American children.

White teachers, diverse classrooms: creating inclusive schools, building on students' diversity, and providing true educational equity

The point of departure for this new edition, as it was for the first, is the unacceptable reality that, for students of color, school is often not a place to learn but a place of low expectations and failure. In urban schools with concentrations of poverty, often fewer than half the ninth graders leave with a high school diploma. This second edition has been considerably expanded with chapters that illuminate the Asian American, Native American, and Latina/o experience, including that of undocumented students, in our schools. These chapters offer insights into the concerns and issues students bring to the classroom. They also convey the importance for teachers, as they accept difference and develop cultural sensitivity, to see their students as individuals, and avoid generalizations. This need to go beneath the surface is reinforced by a chapter on adopted children, children of mixed race, and hidden minorities .White and Black teachers, and teachers of different races and ethnicities, here provide the essential theoretical background, and share their experiences and the approaches they have developed, to create the conditions in both urban and suburban settings that enable minority students to succeed. This book encourages reflection and self-examination, and calls for recognizing and reinforcing students ability to achieve. It also calls for high expectations for both teachers and students. It demonstrates what it means to recognize often-unconscious biases, confront institutional racism where it occurs, surmount stereotyping, adopt culturally relevant teaching, connect with parents and the community, and integrate diversity in all activities. This book is replete with examples from practice and telling insights that will engage teachers in practice or in service. It should have a place in every classroom in colleges of education and K-12 schools. Its empowering message applies to every teacher working in an educational setting that recognizes the empowerment that comes in celebrating diversity. Each chapter concludes with a set of questions for personal reflection or group discussion.

Sex, Religion, and the New Woman in China: A Comparative Reading of Sarah Grand and Alicia Little

Sex, Religion, and the New Woman in China:A Comparative Reading of Sarah Grand and Alicia Little Ann Heilmann (bio) Victorian Feminists often invoked such tropes as the Chinese woman’s bound feet, the Arab woman’s veiled seclusion, or the American slave as metaphors of women’s social and legal confinement in Britain. In this essay, I explore how two British New Woman writers with personal experience of China, the doyenne of British New Womanhood in the 1890s, Sarah Grand (1854–1943), and the lesser-known Alicia (Mrs. Archibald) Little (1845–1926), drew on and transformed the first of these tropes to universalize feminist concerns and relativize the Western claim to moral, religious, and political supremacy. As Elizabeth Chang and Shanyn Fiske have illustrated, China, as a “field of imagined visual possibility” (Chang 1), had a considerable “spectral presence” in Victorian literature and frequently served as a “mirror for Western projection” (Fiske, “Orientalism” 222, 219). The complexities of this projection hold particular significance for the work of New Woman writers who were familiar with Chinese culture and indigenous reform movements and at the same time had an investment in representing the Western feminist project as a quasi-religious mission for moral and social advancement. Grand spent her apprenticeship years as the wife of a British army surgeon in China and southeast Asia in the 1870s (Kersley 37), utilizing this experience in her journalism (“The Great Typhoon,” 1881; “Ah Man,” 1893), her first novel-tract, Two Dear Little Feet (1873), and her feminist “coming-out” novel, Ideala (1888), in which the heroine takes up social purity activism after encountering Chinese women reformers. While Grand dramatized the New Woman’s rejection of marriage and Little depicted her effort to reform marriage from within, both writers explored the sexual double standard and became suffrage supporters. Born nine years before Grand, Little authored a spate of society novels, cautiously exploring women’s desire for an object in life and the legal plight of wives and mothers in the late 1870s to mid-1880s, including Margery Travers (1878) and Mother Darling (1885) (Fiske, “Asian” 16–17). Her move to China in 1886, where she joined her businessman husband, shifted her attention to Chinese culture and indigenous women’s condition, inspiring A Marriage in China (1896), two further novels, and nine travelogues and factual accounts of [End Page 61] Chinese society. Relatives thought her eccentric in her “ardent enthusiasms. The rights of married women to their own money, Women’s Suffrage and … the unbinding of Chinese girl children’s feet.… We never quite knew what to expect” (Bewicke 19–20). As the founder of the Natural Feet Society (Tien Tsu Hui), Little engaged in a form of feminist activism comparable to Grand’s social purism (Fiske, “Asian” 12, 19; Thurin 164, 182–87; Young ii–vi; Little, Blue Gown 253–304 and Intimate China 134–63). The reformist spirit of both writers had its conceptual roots in Christianity. If social purity feminism developed from the earlier nineteenth-century evangelical movements of temperance, moral reform, and abolitionism (see Banks 11–27), the notion of “natural” as “heavenly” feet (the Chinese word tianzu encompasses both) was, as Dorothy Ko notes, grounded in “Christian doctrines while appealing to native belief and terminology” (16). Ideala and A Marriage in China correlate the personal with the political and the sexual with the religious, embedding Victorian social reform concerns within an examination of Anglo-Chinese relations. Both tender quasi-utopian resolutions that posit female authority in the regulation of the family (Little) and society (Grand) as the linchpin of (inter)national renovation and exalt the heroines as figures of Christian salvation. While Grand’s Ideala finds spiritual purification in China and becomes a “saintly” woman who combines Eastern wisdom with a Western sociopolitical mission inspired by indigenous women, Little’s Lilian travels to China in search of companionship, missionary humanitarianism, and romantic love, only to discover the human sacrifice of religious, cultural, and sexual imperialism. Like Ideala, Lilian returns with a mission, here individualized rather than collectivized; her adoption of her husband’s mixed-race children born to his Chinese mistress gestures toward the creation of a multiracial society. Both writers...

Gwenn A. Miller . Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America . Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2010. Pp. xxi, 216. $55.00.

Conceived as a case study of North American colonialism, this book uses the island of Kodiak, under Russian rule between 1784 and 1818, to explore gender, ethnic intermixing, and empire. Trained as a historian in early American history, Gwenn A. Miller also draws extensively on the booming literature on Russian imperial borderlands to illuminate what social interaction on this island off the coast of Alaska, where the cohabitation of Russian men with indigenous Alutiiq women resulted in mixed-race children whom colonial officials later called kreoly (usually rendered as creoles in English), can tell us about colonialism more broadly. Because it is a period of so few sources on the creoles, the author's choice of temporal frame seems surprising, but it is justified by her concern with origins, specifically the formation of the creoles as a distinct group. Recognizing the problem of source limitations (p. xi), Miller proposes to compensate through “careful interpretation and judicious inference” (p. xv). Inspired by the methodologies of Sylvia Van Kirk, Ann Laura Stoler, and Greg Dening and incorporating historiography on colonial interactions around the world, this book aims to interrogate “tense and tender ties,” “beach crossings,” and mutual dependence between Russians and indigenous people and to situate Russia's overseas colonial experience within the larger framework of North American colonial history.

South African Mixed‐race Children's and Mothers' Judgments and Reasoning about Children's Nurturance and Self‐determination Rights

AbstractThis study examined the understanding of children's rights in 63 (9‐, 11‐, and 13‐year‐olds) mixed‐race South African children and their mothers. In individual semi‐structured interviews participants responded to hypothetical vignettes in which children's nurturance and self‐determination rights conflicted with parental authority in the home. Participants were required to decide whether they should support the story characters' rights and provide justifications for their responses. Findings indicated that both children and mothers were more likely to endorse children's nurturance than self‐determination rights. In contrast to previous research, no significant differences were found between children and mothers in terms of support for either type of right. In terms of reasoning, both children's and mothers' responses revealed distinct patterns of thinking influenced by the type of right under consideration. The findings are discussed with reference to the available western and non‐western literature on children's understanding of rights. Limitations, implications, and directions for future research are considered.

Introduction

Introduction Shoshana Keller (bio) Historians have paid a great deal of attention to the dialectical dance between imperial metropole and colonial periphery, during which colonized peoples formed into nations and in turn shaped the national identity of the colonizers. The mingling of cultures, especially at the level of everyday life, was beyond the control of any government or political movement. Children were among the unanticipated results of this mingling. The existence of mixed-race children was a minor embarrassment to imperial powers and nationalists alike, and their lives have attracted little scholarly attention. Kumari Jayawardena argues that, in the case of Sri Lanka and other British colonial territories, these "Euro-Asians" (Jayawardena's coinage) played a central role in bringing modern, and occasionally radical, ideas into South Asian societies. She wrote this book as a celebration of their progressive influence. I would argue, however, that the very modernity these Euro-Asians fostered in Sri Lanka, Calcutta/Kolkata, and Singapore (the areas that Jayawardena discusses) is as much responsible for the "erasure" of Euro-Asians from the historical record as is national prejudice. It is a commonplace that nations are a product of modern methods of ordering society. Benedict Anderson's famous trio of census, map and museum are tools for defining, counting, locating, and categorizing groups of people so that the state can control and manipulate them more easily.1 Unintentionally on the part of the colonial powers, these tools also aided the development of local national movements that eventually took control over their own states. The Soviet Union, which tried to establish itself as the mirror image of European colonialism, pursued the paradoxical policy of creating nations as a necessary first step toward international proletarian class unity. Whether capitalist or communist in form, whether imposed by the politics of national liberation or imperial governance, the building of modern social structures meant defining clear boundaries between groups, so that [End Page 244] everyone knew what group they belonged to. This process also defined out of existence cultural ambiguity, overlap, and local self-definitions that did not conform to state needs. Historian Kate Brown examines this aspect of nation-making in her delicate study of the complex borderland region between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, where nationalists, communists, and fascists modernized backwardness until they had physically eliminated the "polluting element" of ambiguous people and replaced intricately mixed cultures with a Ukrainian heartland.2 Given the need for nations to define themselves as unified against something else, it is not so surprising that mixed-race people tend to get "erased" from the triumphant post-colonial nationalist narrative. Jayawardena's book itself is a hybrid, being partly a history, partly a cultural study, and partly a work of recovery in the tradition of feminist scholarship of the 1970s. The author, who is herself a Sri Lankan Euro-Asian, sets forth her agenda very clearly: "This book does not claim … to be a history of the Euro-Asians … It is rather an attempt to highlight the radical achievements of the Euro-Asians and the reasons why these have not been recognized." Her statement suggests that the concepts of marginality, modernization, and national purity are central to understanding the contributions of Euro-Asians and the reasons why they have been so little acknowledged, although Jayawardena does not structure her analysis around these concepts. Indeed, while she acknowledges that "Many Euro-Asians had a sense of angst about not being fully accepted by either the colonial power or local society" (12), she also denies that they were marginal in the sense of being of little importance to their societies. Instead she focuses on the centrality of radical Euro-Asians as pioneering transmitters of progressive political ideas to all of South Asia. Jayawardena organizes her material thematically within a rough chronological structure. Sri Lanka was first colonized in the early sixteenth century by the Portuguese, who were pushed out by the Dutch in 1656. Both groups left behind mixed-race communities, the Portuguese by deliberate policy (to create a loyal client population) and the Dutch because the Dutch East India Company did not allow employees' wives to accompany their men. By the time the British took over in...

Nevos melanocíticos numa comunidade de origem predominantemente holandesa no Brasil (1999-2007)

Epidemiological studies have shown a significant relationship between melanocytic nevi and cutaneous melanoma. To evaluate the development of melanocytic nevi in the pupils of a school composed primarily of children of Dutch descent and to assess the effect of environmental factors on these individuals whose phenotypic characteristics were similar to those of their ancestors. In 1999 a cohort study was initiated to count the number of melanocytic nevi in 282 pupils of 3 to 17 years of age, 53.9% of whom were boys. Five years later a repeat exam was conducted in 148 students of 8 to 22 years of age, 49.3% of whom were males. The association between the age, skin phototype, eye color, hair color and ethnic group of the pupils and their parents and the presence of melanocytic nevi was analyzed at the beginning and at the end of the study. There was a significant increase in cases of melanocytic nevi and dysplastic nevi at the follow-up examination. The number of melanocytic nevi was greater in boys than in girls in both covered and exposed areas of skin. Likelihood analysis calculated using the odds ratio showed that boys were more likely to develop melanocytic nevi than girls and that the children of non-mixed and mixed race with lighter hair were more likely to develop melanocytic nevi than those of other ethnic groups and those with dark hair. Children with skin phototype I were more likely to develop melanocytic nevi in covered areas of skin compared to those with skin types II or III. These data show that individuals of Dutch descent were more likely to develop melanocytic nevi than individuals of other ethnic origins.

Disparities in Children's Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke in the United States, 2007

This study examined racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities in children's exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or secondhand smoke in the home. The 2007 National Survey of Children's Health (N = 90,853) was used to calculate the prevalence of children's exposure to ETS. State-level data on home smoking ban from the 2006-2007 Current Population Survey-Tobacco Use Supplement were used to supplement analyses. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds of exposure. In 2007, 7.6% of US children, or 5.5 million children, lived in households where someone smoked inside the home. The prevalence varied from a low of 1.1% for Utah and 1.9% for California to a high of 17.9% for West Virginia and 17.6% in Kentucky. After adjustment for sociodemographic factors, children in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania had 12 times higher odds and those in Wisconsin, Missouri, Delaware, and the District of Columbia had 10 times higher odds of being exposed to ETS than children in Utah. Compared with children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, Hispanic ethnicity, and non-English-speaking households, children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds had 7.3 to 10.6 times higher adjusted odds; non-Hispanic white, black, American Indian, and mixed-race children had 2.0 to 2.6 times higher odds; and children from English-speaking households had 4.1 times higher odds of ETS exposure. Considerable disparities exist in children's exposure to ETS, with geographic pattern strongly related to home smoking ban. Greater exposure to ETS among children in several states and disadvantaged socioeconomic groups is likely to exacerbate existing health disparities.

"Citizen Sure Thing" or "Jus' Foreigner"?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna's Orientalist Fiction

"Citizen Sure Thing" or "Jus' Foreigner"?Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna's Orientalist Fiction Jolie A. Sheffer (bio) In "a contract" (1902), one of Winnifred Eaton's popular orientalist romances published under the pen name Onoto Watanna, O-Kiku-san, a young Japanese woman, explains to her suitor, the Japanese-born but racially white businessman Masters, the difference between citizenship and belonging. She tells him, "You Japanese citizen sure thing . . . all the same you jus' foreigner, all the same."1 Masters protests, insisting, "You are trying to rob me of my birthright. Am I or am I not Japanese?" (56). Kiku's answer is unwavering: "Japanese citizen, yes. . . . Japanese man? No, naever" (56). Speaking as a full-blooded Japanese woman in Japan, Kiku articulates the vast gap between legal rights and social recognition, between being a "sure" citizen under the law while nevertheless ("all the same") being perceived as "jus' foreigner," one who is virtually indistinguishable from all other foreigners (as indicated by the repetition of "all the same"). In this scene, Masters wants to be recognized as Japanese, and the most effective means by which he imagines achieving recognition is to marry a Japanese woman, with the hope that "the next of our line possibly may be partly Japanese, and the next" (56). In this story, as throughout Eaton's body of work, those who look different on account of race—whether as a white man in Japan or a biracial woman in the United States—are perpetually seen as "jus'" foreigners. The white man's status as perpetual foreigner in Japan neatly reverses the far more common experience of Asians in early-twentieth-century America, particularly since Kiku's judgment of [End Page 81] Masters's foreignness is also based on his apparent failure to assimilate: he was educated in the West and lives in the English colony within Japan. Here, as throughout Eaton's fiction, mixed blood is the primary measure of and means to cultural acceptance, more powerful than the legal rights granted by citizenship and more persuasive than residency. Eaton's formulation of the "citizen sure thing" who is nonetheless a perpetual foreigner complicates Lisa Lowe's now-paradigmatic account of the ways that "the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally."2 Again and again in Eaton's fiction, the route to recognition is imagined through romance, breeding, and familial ties, embodied by the figure of the "half-caste," the offspring of a white man and a Japanese woman. With her focus on the plight of the biracial figure born of the West's previous encounters with the East, Eaton's stories should be read as aggressive dramas of national belonging in which white men desire mixed-race women, and mixed-race children demand recognition in the U.S. family. In the story "A Half Caste" (1899) in particular, Eaton merges the interracial love story with a familial reunification plot in order to make the controversial claim that the threat of incest may be productive, serving as the means by which the half-caste can secure her rights as daughter and citizen. In Eaton's fiction, the moment of incestuous desire and its disclosure occasions recognition of the half-caste's rights as a member of the family and, by extension, as a citizen of the American "fatherland." The term "half-caste," which was invented to define the mixed-race children of European fathers and Indian mothers on the subcontinent, relies upon the entrenched gendering of raced bodies and the racialization of women.3 In America as in Europe, masculinity and fatherhood have long been associated with the West, while femininity and motherhood have been aligned with racial and cultural Otherness. In the United States, ever since Commodore Matthew Perry "opened" Japan to American trade in 1853, American audiences have responded enthusiastically to the image of an American captain penetrating the mystical, oriental East via military and economic might—symbolized by the cannons extending from Commodore Perry's ships when he entered Tokyo Bay. This "scenario" of Western political-sexual conquest, to use Diana Taylor's term for the "predictable, formulaic, hence...

Fathers of conscience: mixed-race inheritance in the antebellum South

This book offers a new look at the legal and cultural implications of bequests that crossed the color line. Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.Bernie D. Jones argues that these will contests indicated a struggle within the elite over race, gender, and class issues - over questions of social mores and who was truly family. Judges thus acted as umpires after a man's death, deciding whether to permit his attempts to provide for his slave partner and family. Her analysis of these differing judicial opinions on inheritance rights for slave partners makes an important contribution to the literature on the law of slavery in the United States.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy

Teaching and Learning Guide for: <i>Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy</i>

“That Little Incandescence”: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

“That Little Incandescence”: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Christopher Leise My intention, my hope, is to revive interest in Jean Cauvin, the sixteenth-century French humanist and theologian—he died in 1564, the year Shakespeare was born—known to us by the name John Calvin. If I had been forthright about my subject, I doubt the average reader would have read this far. —Marilynne Robinson (The Death of Adam 174) We ought not to rack our brains about God; but rather, we should contemplate him in his works. —John Calvin (I.v.9) Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead takes the form of a letter, written by the Rev. John Ames to his six-year-old son. Ames is in his seventies and his heart is failing, so the epistle has the strange effect both of looking back as well as looking forward: while recounting his past, he is writing to his not-yet-adult son, for a time when the boy will be mature enough to understand the dying minister’s more poignant observations on the world around him. At its outset, the letter seems somewhat directionless. It begins with a series of more-or-less unrelated fragments that are highly evocative, but confined largely to description. A characteristic meditation: I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity....Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to [End Page 348] see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world. (9) Such passages abound in Gilead, and might merely register as an attentive man’s attempt to capture the beauty of the world in prose. But they also emphasize a third aspect of temporality that the letter’s purpose might otherwise leave overlooked: past and future given due consideration, Ames is also deeply concerned with representing his most immediately present moments. While telling the story of his life to his son, Ames’s letter eventually crystallizes around the narrative of the Reverend’s best friend Robert Boughton, and the scandalous birth of a mixed-race child to Boughton’s ne’re-do-well son, Jack. (Jack, incidentally, is named for Ames.) It becomes, at times, a melodrama; at others, it is a morality tale about the need to forgive, lest one should forget how crucial a role family plays in a person’s happiness. And while that storyline serves as more than just an occasion for philosophizing, the irruptions of aesthetic appreciation nevertheless register as somehow more essential to the novel’s overall meaning than the plotted sequence of events making up the small-town scandal ever could be. These tableaus—these interruptions of the narrative characterized by rich, vivid imagery—are most concerned with immediacy. Though they occasionally appear within flashbacks, they are nevertheless intrusions on the Boughton narrative, and frequently disrupt the development of the story’s progress toward resolution. I offer that Gilead promotes the kind of aesthetic attention to the world that Ames exhibits in these digressions, as a vehicle to an experience of the divine in the immediate and the immanent: an experience that stops short of knowing through reason and is content with simply living the experience of the miraculous in the everyday. Despite the relatively small amount of scholarly attention that Gilead has garnered to date (as compared to Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel), at least one critic has seen fit to seize on these moments as crucial to unpacking the novel’s overall effect. Laura E. Tanner sees Ames’s vignettes as the source of the novel’s “cultural force,” which she argues: “stems not only from [their] lyrical rendering of quotidian experience but from [their] powerful unveiling of...

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (review)

Reviewed by: Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense Danilyn Rutherford Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. By Ann Laura Stoler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. By page 51 of her long-awaited Along the Archival Grain, Ann Laura Stoler has used no fewer than four metaphors to describe her topic. The colonial archive is wood, to be read along or against the grain. The colonial archive is a river, flowing silently through rapids and eddies of interest, enthusiasm, anxiety, and concern. The colonial archive is a body with a pulse that races in response to colonial fantasies and fears. The colonial archive is a palimpsest, inscribed, scratched out, and scratched over. The colonial archive is a leaf of stationary with a watermark, an indelible structure that determines the very shape of empire yet is only visible when turned to the right angle and placed in the right light. In less expert hands, this rhetorical exuberance might seem like overkill. But Stoler manages to fire this beautiful shower of figural arrows without losing sight of her mark. This combination of elegance, energy, and perspicuity has long been a hallmark of Stoler's scholarship, but in this book, Stoler's aim is particularly true. If her metaphors proliferate, this simply reflects the fertility of the insights that Stoler has arrived at through the teaching and research that led to this book. These insights are at once historical and methodological. Here as elsewhere, Stoler makes a case for attending to the affective dimensions of colonial governance. Stoler focuses in particular on the anxieties that gave rise to efforts to control the passions, not of the colonized, but of those who ruled. Stoler documents the concerns that swirled around the Netherlands Indies' so-called "Indies children" – a protean, elastic category encompassing locally born Europeans ranging from Indo-European paupers to Batavia's city fathers. "Father love" and other excessive family attachments, insolence, indolence, resentment of their superiors: these imputed passions fueled reform schemes, from the founding of agricultural colonies to the removal of mixed race children from overly "native" homes. Stoler carefully tracks the sentiments of those who initiated and engaged in these projects. In chapter 3, she analyzes documents concerning an unprecedented demonstration held in May 1848 at the Harmonie Club in Batavia. Hundreds of "Indies Children" gathered to protest a new policy that required prospective civil servants to earn a degree only available in Delft if they wanted to advance beyond the lowest ranks. Stoler traces the growing discomfort of the colony's leading bureaucrats as they tried to determine who was at work and what was at stake in this disturbing protest. Natives? Socialists? Parental love and loss? Revolutionary change? Later in the century, when other top officials organized commissions to investigate the "problem" of Indo European paupers, similar anxieties surfaced. Could the investigators trust the statistics? Did their surveys penetrate to the heart of Indo European yearnings and desires? How many impoverished Europeans were there in the colony? Were they "really" Europeans or merely "faux" Europeans – mixed race natives living above their station and means? Stoler's historical insights, while fascinating, are anticipated in her previous work. Equally striking are her methodological insights, which break new ground. In far more detail than in the past, Stoler explains the epistemological premises underlying her investigation, which have directed her to a novel object of analysis: what Stoler calls "archival form." By "archival form" I allude to several things: prose style, repetitive refrain, categories of confidentiality and classification, and not least, genres of documentation. The book's focus is on archiving-as-process rather than archives-as-things. Most importantly, it looks to archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources. These colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves (20). The intricate composition of archival files proves significant: the fact that a file included not only texts penned by officials, but also press clippings, letters, flyers, pamphlets, and interview transcripts that went beyond the pronouncements supposedly based on these data; the fact that writings could circulate...

Raising Chicanos in the Great White North

This article1 explores paradoxes in being the White mother of Mexican American children and discusses how some of its attendant issues contrast one another. The author, an American scholar, believes she is taught to think and to write, not from the heart, but from a detached and “objective,” cerebral cortex, and she sees the places, the prism through which the world is seen, are constantly shifting. The author writes of liminality and simultaneity, “I’m ‘swimming in the sea’ as both the swimmer, struggling, and part of the sea, itself, pulling myself under, drowning in between-ness . . .” The headings, “From the Shore,” provide a detached, theoretical reflection upon the author’s experiences as a White mother of mixed-race children: “I’m standing on the banks, looking into my experiences and speaking from my ’head’,” and the headings, “In the Sea,” provide stories: “I’m immersed in the depths of my experiences and reflecting from my ‘heart’.”

Promoting health in American-occupied Japan. Resistance to allied public health measures, 1945-1952.

As soon as the authority of the Public Health and Welfare Section (PHW) of the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers waned in May 1951, the Japanese government overturned several measures it had implemented. Although the PHW contributed greatly toward improving public health conditions, not all of its activities were models of cooperative success. Many Japanese perceived some measures-terminated pensions for wounded Japanese veterans, lack of support for segregated orphanages for mixed-race children, and suppression of Japanese atomic bomb medical reports-as promoting US national interest at the expense of Japanese public health needs. Similarly, the PHW's upgrade of nursing education and separation of the professions of medicine and pharmacy were reversed because neither professionals nor the public saw these measures as urgent. Their reinstitution toward the end of the twentieth century suggests that the progressive measures were sound, but broke too sharply with Japanese tradition and were enforced prematurely.

Race at the Center: The History of American Cold War Asian Adoption

AbstractIn the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, international and transracial adoption have become more prominent than ever before. Celebrity culture and mainstream television and film—for example, Angelina Jolie's adoption of a Cambodian boy, an Ethiopian girl, and most recently a Vietnamese boy, and the adoption of a Chinese baby girl by Kristin Davis's character Charlotte York at the conclusion of the iconic HBO sitcom “Sex and the City”—have reflected as well as disseminated new racial sensibilities regarding family formation to the general public. But these sensibilities are not as new as they seem. They have a history. This essay challenges the popular notion that international adoption is an unprecedented facet of current American multiculturalism by connecting it to the international adoption by families in the United States during the Cold War 1950s and 1960s of mixed-race children of Asian women and U.S. servicemen. While histories of adoption have located the origins of Asian international adoption in the post–World War II and post–Korean War periods,2 the original contribution of this essay is to emphasize and to critically explore how the analytical category of race is fundamental to understanding the demographics, discourses, and institutions of earlier Asian international adoption history.

Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Atonement

Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Atonement By Allison Varzally “We are well aware that children all over the world need love and care, but our focus is presently on Vietnam due to the horror which is being perpetuated in our name there,” wrote Don and Augusta Sandstrom in a 1967 letter inquiring about opportunities to adopt a Vietnamese child. Fearing that their incentives might be misconstrued, the couple hastened to add “please don’t be concerned that ‘guilt’ is our motivation, it isn’t that simple when you have a great deal of love to share; but when you see an evil war being waged, it is hard to turn your eyes away without helping at least one little soul caught up in it. Unfortunately, the suffering of Vietnamese children continues, perhaps the child with whom we will eventually share our home and love is not even born yet!” The Sandstroms were not alone in their desire to mitigate by caring for a Vietnamese child the destructiveness of a war whose purpose and prosecution they opposed. Having discovered the plight of orphans through the graphic accounts of humanitarian organizations and the media, Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s were determined to act on the youths’ behalf. In professing responsibility and proposing adoptive parenthood as the solution for needy children, they recommended the Americanfamilyasasiteofinclusionandreparation.However,asscholars have long observed, ideas about the appropriate forms of family reveal larger truths about national identity and purpose.1 In the Vietnam era, couples determined to aid Vietnamese children were also commenting on the state of U.S. foreign policy, race relations, and gender roles. In a revision of the rhetoric and reasoning that had governed American adoptions of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children following U.S. interventions in other regions of Asia during earlier stages of the Cold War, American adoptions of Vietnamese children expressed a loss of faith in the containment policy specifically and the United States’ ability to do good in the world generally. Adoptions of the period were more explicitly, heatedly debated as political acts and increasingly represented as an apology for rather than the fulfillment and endorsement of the United States’ expansionist, anti-communist practices. As an interdisciplinary group of scholars has documented, Americans of the late 1960s and early 1970s were hardly the first generation to Adoption & Culture 2 (2009) 160 act upon a sense of obligation for children displaced and damaged by war. Nor were they the first to conflate personal desires for the security, affection and contentment of parenthood with their views of international relations. In her analysis of an article penned by Norman Cousins for a 1949 issue of Saturday Review, Laura Briggs noted the expressions of regret and attempts at compensation made by some Americans in the wake of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cousins declared the United States responsible for the sufferings of the Japanese, especially Japanese children. Since restrictive immigration laws made larger gestures of support, including adoption, impossible, he proposed that Americans make financial donations. This sense of obligation echoed through the statements of concerned Americans excerpted in Cousins’s piece. While one woman offered a “small tax payment for my share in the guilt of belonging to a race which dropped the first atomic bomb,” a former WWII pilot wrote that helping Japanese children financially might “soothe an elusive feeling of collective guilt” (187–88). Even though some Americans made an explicit, causal connection between U.S. military actions and attention to Japanese injured by those actions, most did not specifically blame the United States for Japan’s misfortunes. Such critical pronouncements ran counter to the widely accepted, positive narrative which emerged after World War II in which the United States appeared as a heroic nation whose just strategies had brought the war to a quick end and ensured a lasting peace. Even after the U.S. media, social workers, and high profile celebrities such as Jane Russell had made Americans aware of and demanded help for mixed-race children fathered by American soldiers in the 1950s, this celebratory narrative and a more abstract sense of responsibility persisted.2 Historians such as Arissa Oh, Rachel Winslow...

"I'm Not Here, If This Doesn't Happen": The Korean War and Cold War Epistemologies in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student and Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother

"I'm Not Here, If This Doesn't Happen"The Korean War and Cold War Epistemologies in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student and Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother Jodi Kim (bio) What most Americans know about Korea has been told from the point of view of a U.S. military member or a missionary, about prostitutes, beggars, and orphans, many of them mixed race children, never speaking but always spoken for and about, souls being saved by the civilizing missions of neocolonialism and evangelism. No doubt they would have found it difficult to imagine that one day the voice of the native, having returned to the imperial center, might speak back—in English—from its very different positionality. Elaine H. Kim1 Post-1945 Korean migration has been shaped by the division and militarization of the Korean peninsula. The Korean War in particular has had a dramatic and profound impact. Most, if not all, of Korean migration since 1950 can be traced to the war and its consequences. Ji-Yeon Yuh2 In her poem, "fragments of the forgotten war," Korean American poet Suji Kwock Kim "speak[s] back—in English—" to American empire from a "very different positionality." The positionality expressed by the poem encompasses multiple generations of a Korean family divided and scattered by the Korean War: a Korean American daughter who dedicates the poem to her father and writes in his voice, and the father who in turn addresses in the poem the parent(s) he had to leave behind when fleeing [End Page 279] south during the war. Indeed, the poem opens with his address: "You whom I could not protect/ . . . when will I forget the NKPA soldiers who took you away for questioning,/so we never saw you again?/We three sons fled south in January 1951/without you. . . ."3 As one "note" in a collection entitled Notes from the Divided Country (2003), this poem captures the ironic disjuncture of remembering in graphic detail a war that, as the very title of the poem suggests, has been "forgotten." While the Korean War (1950–1953) has been dubbed the "Forgotten War" or the "Unknown War" by Americans, it remains for Koreans and the global Korean diaspora it engendered a defining moment of family and national history. The interrogative, "when will I forget," which opens Kim's poem transforms itself later into a declarative, "I'll never forget." The subject of the poem declares that he will "never forget" the horrors of war: the smells of burning and still living yet rotting flesh, the sight of a boy biting his arm in order to take his mind off the wound in his stomach. . . .4 Yet this first-hand witnessing, experiencing, and knowledge of such suffering exist in sharp contrast to and cannot fill in for that which he does not know: how the parents he was forced to leave behind must have suffered. In the poem, the recollected horrors produce a simultaneous knowing and unknowing: "I know you suffered, but I'll never know how."5 Similarly "speak[ing] back—in English—from [a] very different positionality," in an "Untitled" multimedia work by artist Ji-Young Yoo, one hundred shallow-relief faces, made of white clay and juxtaposed like tiles, act as a screen for the projection of digitized archival footage of the Korean War as well as textual excerpts from an oral history of Korean American memories of the war. One such remembrance, by second-generation Korean American Orson Moon, reads: "Why hold on to the past? For me, it is not the past. The fear and terror of this time period have carried forward into my dad's life. . . . It's carried forward to my sisters' lives, my life, as a hole, a silence." This piece is part of a unique interactive multimedia exhibit entitled "Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the 'Forgotten War.'" Ramsay Liem, the exhibit's Project Director, sees the exhibit as "a space of Korean American memory" that "lifts the silence shrouding the Korean War."6 Orson Moon speaks to how the silent memories of the Korean War are carried transgenerationally, passed from father to children...

Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema Sang Yee Cheon (bio) Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2007. 314 pp., index, illus. $89.50 cloth; $29.95 paper. Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema explores dynamically changing cultural and societal aspects of Korea through essays about contemporary Korean films. The book contains fourteen articles written by experts in film-related fields and is divided into three main parts following an introduction by Frances Gateward: Industry Trends and Popular Genres (chapters 1–4), Directing New Korean Cinema (chapters 5–9), and Narratives of the National (chapters 10–14). Following a chronological history of government policies in the Korean film industry (chapter 1), the chapters of the book cover most of the usual topics in postmodern Korea: melodrama as a popular film genre as [End Page 205] seen in Christmas in August (chapter 2); the concept of the Korean-style blockbuster and the Shiri Syndrome in Shiri (chapter 3); issues of social hierarchies such as age, class, sex, and education, which are pervasive in Korean youth films (chapter 4); the emergence of the middle class and changing gender roles in the modernizing middle class seen in the combination of two genres—melodrama and horror—in Housemaid (chapter 5); the life of an ordinary man distorted through the historical events of the Kwangju Uprising and the 1980s minjung movement in Peppermint Candy (chapter 6); changing Korean values in Farewell, My Darling (chapter 7); new cinematic spectacle in the action film Nowhere to Hide (chapter 8); the aesthetics of Zen Buddhism and Korean culture in Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East ? (chapter 9); colonial experience through the life of comfort women in the documentary trilogy The Murmuring, Habitual Sadness, and My Own Breathing (chapter 10); humanistic and ideological issues of divided Korea in the post–Cold War era in Spy Li Cheol-jin and Joint Security Area (chapter 11); miscegenation, mixed-race children, and identity in Address Unknown (chapter 12); feminism in Korean society through food and sex and changing gender roles in 301/302 (chapter 13); and the controversial issue of homosexuality in Bungee Jumping of Their Own (chapter 14). Suk-Young Kim’s detailed discussion of Spy Lee Cheol-jin and Joint Security Area hightlights films that can be used by teachers to deal with issues such as the division of Korea, the easing of tension and unification, and the National Security Law or Anti-Communist Law. The seemingly unlikely incidents and secret friendships at the border portrayed in Joint Security Area really happened at the DMZ in 1998 (before the film was shot in 1999 and after the original novel, DMZ, was written by Sangyeon Park in 1996). The incident at the DMZ in 1998 was similar to that in the film in that a First Lieutenant Kim Hoon was killed (or committed suicide) with a gun in a bunker at the DMZ and a soldier at the same military base exposed the secret friendship and contact between North and South Korean soldiers for which Lieutenant Kim was under investigation before he died. The actual situation is said to have differed from the film and novel in that illicit contact between the two sides was wellknown among soldiers at the DMZ. Also of particular interest is Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (2000), “a flashback film without flashbacks,” as Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient describe it in their fine analysis (chapter 6). The film reflects contemporary Korean history through the life over a period of twenty years of an ordinary middle-aged Korean man who has lived through the catastrophes of the 1980s and the 1990s economic crisis. This film illustrates Carole Gerster’s (2006) statement that, “visual media [End Page 206] have become arguably the chief carrier of historical messages in one’s culture.” Exposure to visually authentic Korean film provides readers with rich cultural and sociopolitical information about Korea as well as with opportunities to increase their understanding of Korean culture. Peppermint Candy covers Korean history in reverse-chronological order, and the director and novelist Lee thereby...

Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)

754 Many thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Geoff Eley, Dana Luciano, Nasser Hussain, Roger Rouse, Adam Thurschwell, and Martha Umphrey for their meticulous engagements, as well as to audiences at Amherst, Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, American Political Science Association, American Studies Association, and Cleveland State. Special nostalgic thanks to Virginia Chang, my original collaborator in the Obesity and Poverty conference (2002). 1. See David Harvey, “The Body as Accumulation Strategy,” Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 97–116. To call Harvey polemical is not to devalue his profound contributions to understanding the productive destructiveness of capital; in his work, a polemic is a call for precision, not a way of drowning it out. Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)