Colonial Peoples Research Articles

Postcolonial Liquidation of Residues of Unfinished Decolonization ‒ Review of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 ‒

In the 21st century, the right of peoples to self-determination is firmly established as a norm of jus cogens under customary international law. Can the colonial rule be tolerated from the standpoint of the right of peoples to self-determination when a colonial ruler continues to exercise its administration of a part of the colonial territories by detaching it from the rest right before their independence in the 20th century of decolonization despite the world already is in the era of post-colonization? In international politics, this question may be interpreted as international liquidation of past that resolves, after a long time, a failed task due to the incomplete implementation of decolonization. In international law, it may be a matter of transitional justice, where development of history and changes in law are interrelated. In the Chagos Archipelago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) reviewed the lawfulness of the continued administration by the United Kingdom of the Chagos Archipelago. The challenge facing the Court in this case is to choose between two conflicting values: the value of legal stability, which is the application of rules with definitive content at a given time; and the value of legal rationality to accommodate structural changes to legal issues of historical character. In this case, the Court could be understood to take the legal reasoning of applying the findings and holdings of applicable law, which appears to take the latter approach. First, the Court adopted an evolutionary approach that embraces the “evolution of the law” in determining applicable law. Second, the Court deduced the obligation to respect territorial integrity of a colonial country from the concept of the right to self-determination that is easier to prove general practice. The Court has identified and applied customary international law in a manner appropriate to derive the rights of colonial peoples to self-determination and the obligation of territorial integrity by colonial rulers as its corollary. First it interpreted State’s act of adopting resolution as State practice so that the type of State practice that underlies the general practice of self-determination can be expanded. Second, in finding established general practice of the States, the Court took multilateral approach which is more appropriate in making the majority countries obligate minorities, instead of the traditional State-centered consensus-based approach. Third, it avoided officially dealing with the rule of persistent objector, which is a safeguard for minority countries against the majority-generated customary international law. The Court s approach in this case has resulted in the identification and application of laws at the international level to realizing transitional justice. At the same time, however, it caused partial lessening of the standards and procedures in confirming customary international law.

Population history of southern Italy during Greek colonization inferred from dental remains.

We are testing competing scenarios regarding the population history of the ancient Greek colonization of southern Italy using dental phenotypic evidence. We collected dental metric and nonmetric trait data for 481 human skeletons from six archaeological sites along the Gulf of Taranto, dating to pre-colonial (900-700 BC) and post-colonial periods (700-200 BC). We are evaluating scenarios through an individual-level biodistance analysis using a three-pronged approach: (a) by analyzing levels of mobility in pre- and post-colonial periods under a model of isolation-by-distance; (b) by quantifying differences in group means and variances in pre- and post-colonial periods utilizing permutational multivariate analysis of variance and Betadisper analyses; and (c) by identifying ancestries of post-colonial individuals using naïve Bayes classification. Southern Italy during pre-colonial times was characterized by low levels of mobility and marked differences in group means and variances. During post-colonial times, mobility increased and there were no differences in group means and variances. About 18% of the people in post-colonial times were of Greek ancestry and lived equally distributed across Greek colonies and indigenous villages. Nevertheless, the overall biological composition and variability of southern Italy remained relatively unchanged across pre- and post-colonial periods. Our results support a scenario in which only few Greek colonists migrated to southern Italy and lived in smaller numbers alongside indigenous people in Greek colonies as well as in indigenous villages. Our results contradict a scenario in which large numbers of Greek invaders founded biologically isolated and substantially homogeneous colonial enclaves within conquered territories.

근대 서양 국제법의 ‘자결권’과 1919년 파리강화회의의 ‘민족자결’

Colonial peoples’ ambition for national independence was stimulated by the fact that Paris Peace Conference was held based on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points which included ‘self-determination of peoples’. But national self-determination at Paris Peace Conference did not receive a full consideration by the imperial international power politics and neglected. Nevertheless, Peace treaty combined with Covenant of the League of Nations made the article no 22 stipulate that the ultimate purpose of mandatory rule was to lead territories of mandatorily ruled be self-determinate in the name of ‘sacred trust of civilization.’ This is the reason that the declaration of self-determination of peoples during World War I and Paris Peace Conference have important meaning in the history of national self-determination. Mandatory rule at Paris Peace Conference was to defer self-determination and self-determination of peoples for the colonialized people. But the acknowledgement in the Covenant of the League of Nations that non-annexation was a general rule of the mandatory rule and self-determination was a ultimate goal of the mandatory rule system meant that Western advanced countries (“Family of Nations”) could not neglect self-determination of peoples any more. This shows a change in viewpoint about self-determination before and after the World War, which became a basis for colonial peoples to claim self-determination.

Representation of reciprocal and cultural conflict in J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country: A Study in Post-Colonial Context

This paper is proposed to throw light on reciprocal and cultural conflict in the novel In the Heart of the Country, particularly in post-colonial context. As Coetzee is a linguist and Nobel laureate who has done great efforts to present the concrete and condensed reality of colonial people of South Africa. He has raised issues of colonial oppression and conflict among colonizers and colonized. Coetzee has been recognised as writer of marginalized and apartheid as well as a curtain raiser for presenting the harsh reality of sufferings of colonized. We cannot ignore the fact that post-colonial era has brought great reforms and improvements in the socio-economic conditions of colonized, yet there are various obstacles and challenges which have been inherited in minds of African aboriginal people who were earlier colonized by ''white people''.

Landscapes of Refuge and Resiliency: Native Californian Persistence at Tomales Bay, California, 1770s–1870s

Abstract Research on Native American interactions with colonial institutions increasingly stresses the persistence of indigenous places and identities despite the challenges wrought by missionary, mercantile, and settler colonialism. This article expands on the theme of persistence through a case study investigating the various ways indigenous people, including Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo individuals, worked against and within colonial systems to maintain residency and autonomy in their ancestral homelands in central California. Focusing on the Tomales Bay area in what is now western Marin County as a refuge, the article examines the ethnohistorical evidence for long-term histories of indigenous persistence and strategic engagement with colonial peoples and processes.

식민지 박물관의 역사 만들기 : 조선총독부박물관 상설전시의 변천

This study reconstructed the change of the permanent exhibitions of the Museum of Japanese Government-General of Korea and examined how the colonial museum represented the history through the display. <BR> First, new research material, 『Joseonseohwagogimulmoglog(The List of Paintings and Calligraphic works and Antiques in Joseon)』 that could restore the first permanent exhibition in 1915 and the exhibitions until 1918 was introduced. In the first permanent exhibition of 1915 when the museum opened, the exhibits were displayed according to the material of the artifacts and a history reference gallery was established with a new concept. As the excavated artifacts were increased, the ancient history gallery was installed in 1921, and finally the exhibition according to period division of colonial history was completed in 1926.<BR> It has undergone a gradational and dynamic process based on the accumulation of colonial history studies by Japanese scholars and the expansion of the museum collections. In this process, the representation of colonialism through the display by the colonial museum has been advanced more sophisticatedly. In addition, the exhibitions of the Museum of Japanese Government-General of Korea established the gallery of historical reference in 1915 and the exhibitions according to historical periods in 1921 and 1926 under the influence of the Tokyo Imperial Museum in Japan.<BR> In the exhibitions, the colonial museum was constantly pursuing the representation of the colonial view of history to make the colonial people aware of the heteronomy and the backwardness of the history of Joseon.

“The Triumph of the West”: American Education and the Narrative of Decolonization, 1930–1965

This article examines representations of imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and decolonization in US textbooks for American and World History courses between 1930 and 1965. Broadly speaking, 1930s and early 1940s texts lauded imperialism and associated European colonialism with American imperialist activities. Authors extolled the benefits for colonial peoples, including literacy, good government, and peace, and anti-colonial nationalists were caricatured as irrational and ungrateful. US global engagement during and after World War II gradually changed the narrative, particularly following Philippine independence in 1946, as texts subsequently portrayed the US as an enlightened decolonizer. Postwar textbooks tended to argue that nationalism was a product of Western ideas and that anti-colonial nationalism was a triumph for Western civilization. While constructing this narrative of the spread of Western values, textbook authors largely marginalized colonial actors, promoted unflattering and stereotyped views of Africans and Asians, and de-emphasized the extreme violence inherent in the decolonization process.

Battling on a different front: World War One and the rhetoric of citizenship for service

ABSTRACTWorld War One brought large numbers of people of color into contact in the relatively short period of four years. During this time communities of colonial subjects and of African Americans were drawn into the war. They actively observed the war, its impact on their own communities, and its impact on other people of color. Throughout the world the war intensified the growing scrutiny of racial oppression in the nascent anti-colonial and pan-African movement. Confronted with a global war, leaders of the African American community, along with leaders of various colonial peoples, persuaded men and women in their communities to support the Allied war effort. They encountered opposition in doing so but also support. And they encountered each other’s struggles. In each of their own national contexts they employed a rhetoric of citizenship for service. Exploring their rhetoric illustrates the global and entangled nature of the histories of people of color during the war. It shows how the war forged new connections between them and laid the foundations for the vibrant pan-African and anti-colonial movements after the war. The following article traces the speech and writing of leaders and of the pro-war press from India, New Zealand, America and French West Africa. During the war colonized and racially oppressed people around the globe acted upon the reasoned and reasonable hope that their contributions to the war effort in the war would win them political rights. Each group was engaged in a war against racial oppression alongside their battles in global World War One fronts. Their struggles were entangled but not one and the same. That had been true before the war but the experience of recruitment and the deferred promises of citizenship for service intensified both the forces of solidarity and of local struggle and identification. That tension was to continue long after the war.

Intensification of the education of public health, hygiene, and martial arts during the Japanese colonial period (1937-1945).

This study intended to examine the process of development and intensification of martial arts education in schools of Chosun as courses of health, hygiene, and physical education implemented by the Japanese colonial government that ruled Chosun during the period of ‘Second Sino-Japanese War’ from 1937 to 1945. During this period, the Japanese colonial government established the ‘Imperial Subjects’ Gymnastics,’ elaborated on the education of health and hygiene in order to lay the foundations for the strengthening of war potential, and intensified the theoretical education and practice of martial arts as an effective means therefore. The education of health, hygiene, and martial arts, implemented by the Japanese colonial power with the catchphrase of constructing robust body, was nothing but a means to construct and control the body of colonial people at its discretion. The thoughts of health, hygiene, and martial arts, which were presented to students, were rather intended for the cultivation of the subjects devoted to Japanese Empire than for the promotion of health and psychosomatic development of individuals. In particular, along with contemporary society fell into the turmoil of war, the amusable aspects of martial arts were lost in the education of martial arts and were replaced with the spirit of Japanese Samurai.

Nikolai Marr’s Critique of Indo-European Philology and the Subaltern Critique of Brahman Nationalism in Colonial India

Marr’s critique of Indo-European philology is analysed in the light of contemporary postcolonial theory, showing how Marr considered “Indo-Europeanism” to be something very close to a Foucauldian discourse of power/knowledge. It is suggested that here one finds both the strengths and weakness of Marr’s ideas, which alerts us to certain problems in much postcolonial theory today. Genetic connections between Marr’s ideas and contemporary postcolonial studies are revealed. Marr’s ideas are then compared to the critique of the ideology of the Aryan supremacy developed by the Indian anti-caste intellectuals Phule and Ambedkar, in which the symbiotic relationship between imperial philology and brahman domination over the lower castes were revealed and subjected to critique. Important continuities are identified, and it is suggested that an approach to the interaction between European powers and colonial peoples’ needs to pay particular attention to the social divisions among the latter and the complex modes of dialogue that accompanied colonialism and its aftermath.

A language in common: an approach to teaching the history of English

City University of New York students come from such varied backgrounds that it often seems the English language is the only thing they have in common. This article discusses how a course in the history of English can provide stories with which all such students can identify. The focus is on English speakers through the ages, considered in three main phases: European, Neo-European, and Non-European. The European begins with the ancient Germans and tells how some of them became the English, eventually achieving political dominance in Britain and a strong literary culture; but it also includes stories of subordinated working class and Celtic people. The Neo-European covers English-speaking expansion in North America and Australasia, emphasizing how diverse ordinary people developed new communities and new forms of speech. The Non-European includes indigenous peoples of the Neo-Europes, immigrants who came to the Americas under coercion from Africa, and peoples of the Anglophone colonies of exploitation. All these had to come to terms with English as a language of both oppression and opportunity – as do their modern successors, including our students. This course is designed to help them do so, while helping more “traditional” students understand the linguistic dilemmas their fellow citizens face.

ПРИНЦИП ТЕРРИТОРИАЛЬНОЙ ЦЕЛОСТНОСТИ В МЕЖДУНАРОДНО-ПРАВОВОМ ИНСТРУМЕНТАРИИ МИРНОГО РАЗРЕШЕНИЯ ТЕРРИТОРИАЛЬНЫХ СПОРОВ

INTRODUCTION. The research of the conceptual foundations of the principle of territorial integrity of states, taking into account possible conflicts of this principle with the principle of the right of people to self-determination equivalent in their legal force, is actual, especially in the context of contemporary international relations. At the same time, the justification of the need to respect the territorial integrity of states in the process of settling territorial disputes is also demonstrated in the works of the early representatives of international legal doctrine. MATERIALS AND METHODS. On the example of the activities, first of all, of the UN the article shows the effectiveness of the appeal of universal and regional judicial and non-judicial bodies to the principle of territorial integrity in the process of settling territorial disputes arising in the course of realizing the right of peoples to self-determination. The special materials for the research were the decisions of the UN Security Council on territorial disputes, the resolutions of the UN General Assembly on territorial disputes, the Declaration on the Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations of 1970, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960 and doctrinal interpretations of these documents. RESEARCH RESULTS. Based on the results of the analysis, the author notes that the absence in international law of a sufficiently clear legal definition of the principle of territorial integrity and its interdependence with the right of peoples to self-determination leads to double standards in assessing contemporary threats to international stability and security. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. The author emphasized the necessity of progressive development and codification of the norms of international law, aimed at adapting to contemporary realities and the principle of territorial integrity, and the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination, so as to enhance the opportunities for their equivalent action as sources of international law.

Ngân hàng Đông Dương - Tổ chức bí ẩn của một nhóm trùm tài phiệt

The article is to study the organization of Indochina Bank. This is the organization of a very wealthy and powerful “tycoon”. They borrowed Indochina Bank to cover up their status and noble status to mislead the French public. From there, they silently dominated the Indochinese economy, and at the same time, they used the financial and credit privileges given by the French State to steal and colonize the colonial people, and they got rich quickly.

Translating the Queer. Body Politics and Trans-national Conversations by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba

Reviewed by: Translating the Queer. Body Politics and Trans-national Conversations by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor. Translating the Queer. Body Politics and Trans-national Conversations. Zed Books, 2016. 194 pp. Tackling the challenges Latin American and Hispanic studies in general face in regard to the wide and varied field of queer studies that has developed over [End Page 1019] the last decades, Domínguez Ruvalcaba's book is a critical intervention that recovers a transnational itinerary of queer academic production. Seeking to answer questions such as "what is the place of queerness in Latin America culture and politics? … What meanings does queer acquire in its translation into Latin American cultural codes?" (1), the text recovers a history of interventions that critically align queerness as a central object of study in Latin American studies, given its close ties to colonial systems of power, national forms of social organization and neoliberal economies. By understanding queerness as a politics of the body that "implies a criticism of the hegemonic culture, the legal system, and the gender structure" (2), Domínguez Ruvalcaba traces how academics in the field have generated transnational and hemispheric dialogues that allow processes of decolonization to be understood in the spheres of gender and sexuality, providing a methodology of critical thought that questions nation-states and furthermore, is highly engaged with thinking about neoliberal structures of bodily consumption and disposability. Focusing on the "nonhegemonic body, its politics, its aesthetics and its ethos," Latin American(ist) queer studies have focalized a "poetics of normalcy disruption" that reactivates transnational debates and perversely (re)generates archives, both authorized and transgressive (7). Domínguez weaves a series of academic interventions during the last decades and rearticulates them into four incisive facets of the protean field that queer Latin American studies has become, to its political and ideological advantage. With a very strong chapter on queer decolonization that places queerness as starting with the "estrangement and condemnation of native sexual practices" (22), Domínguez (via Michael J. Horswell, Pete Sigal, Zeb Torterici, Noemí Quezada and Miano Borruso, among other historians and anthropologists), signals how close queerness is tied to hegemonic and violent colonial systems of power, and not contained in the native sexualities therein. This astute observation will reappear in later chapters and provides an academic approach that goes beyond the limits of queer studies, offering a critical lens with which to view indigeneity and living indigenous subjects; by historicizing queerness in this way, Domínguez assembles a critical understanding of current indigenous sexualities that have been transformed by and are transforming the coloniality of sex, allowing for approaches to indigenous subjects like the muxe that resist the sex/gender binary while reimposing hierarchical gender structures, as demonstrated in later chapters in the book. Simultaneously, this close reading of historical documents forefronts the silenced nonconforming bodies of colonial peoples, the visceral archives that Torterici proposes, and creates a genealogical assemblage that shines light onto current phenomenon being studied in anthropology, sociology, and literary and cultural studies. In the chapter on the relation between queerness and the nation during the long nineteenth century, Domínguez recovers Antonio Cornejo Polar's (and others') "conflictive, uncomfortable notion of the mestizo" as a way of both troubling the past and connecting it to the current bodies that populate our nations (48). Just as "queer" in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries becomes both a negative marker of cultural colonialism as well as a positive signifier of democracy, [End Page 1020] queerness in the national founding moment, "located in the Europeanized and antinational elites" (56), becomes a mark of modernity as much as something that must be excluded, ejected or silenced through discretion. The study of these differing bodies is an act of queering the nation, revealing its contradictions grounded in the hegemonic understandings of gender and sexuality that place violence at its core. However, while Domínguez signals that during modernity "queerness has had a prominent role in transforming social life" and points towards archival work being currently done (91), his chapter focuses almost exclusively on male and (mostly) elite representations for this period. Studies by authors such...

MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN SOUTHWEST REGION OF CAMEROON: THE GRAFFIE FACTOR, C.1930S-1996

O presente artigo foca nas dinâmicas de migração interna, tomando o caso dos migrantes naturais das Planícies Bamenda no litoral de Camarões, e destaca como tais migrações deram origem ao enigma identitário entre aqueles que vieram a ser chamados graffie e os locais. Questiona como a politização da identidade pode ser compreendida dentro das dinâmicas históricas e políticas de Camarões. O artigo também defende que, no início da colonização britânica, muitos habitantes da região migraram para o complexo industrial do litoral de Camarões como mão de obra para as plantations, além de como auxiliares em outros serviços coloniais. Depois de trabalhar nestes serviços eles se aposentaram e tornaram-se empreendedores, para desgosto dos locais. Eles foram, assim, pejorativamente denominados graffie. Usando o conceito de identidade em migração o artigo questiona por que e como os graffie lidaram com sua identidade em espaços heterogêneos, como a região sudoeste de Camarões.

‘An Alternative to Imperialism’: Leonard Woolf, The Labour Party and Imperial Internationalism, 1915–1922

ABSTRACTThis article examines writings by the British Labour Party theorist Leonard Woolf on international government, imperialism, and the League of Nations. Woolf was a leading member of a group of party officials who supported a deepening commitment to the League of Nations in the immediate post First World War period. Woolf, and his colleagues in the Labour Party, argued that transforming the practice of economic imperialism in European colonies would help to ease tensions between the European powers. The result of such arguments was to present empire as a canvas for displaying an improved sense of European virtue. In particular, abandoning the practice of economic imperialism could instead allow colonial powers to meet their responsibility to ready colonial peoples for self-government and full participation in the global economy. The reforms proposed by Woolf and his Labour Party colleagues could be considered a last gasp of early twentieth century British imperial internationalism.

Feralness: A Sibling of Wilderness

In North America, the classic voice of colonial peoples' connectedness to nature and a wellspring of distinct new identity has been the romantic individualist writing of affinity for wilderness. The truth is, however, that wilderness account makes North Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders culturally blind to an emerging split between wilderness as a land management concept and the state of the wild characteristic of the lands near the cities where 80 percent of us now live. To say land is wilderness, one has to imagine a static systemic context creating conditions that, if it were not for the colonizing project of land conversion, population implantation, mineral exploitation, the land would forever reflect. What about land that runs away from past colonial domestications? What about land that has hybridized with colonial escapee species? Thoroughly worked over lands are fallow on the edges of cities, and new kinds of wilds are emerging upon them. Let me propose that the time is ripe for the sibling of wilderness and for cultural forms exploring and reflecting its stories, for how can you preserve what you cannot name or the culture has never helped you to categorize?

Navigating Christian and Chaozhou identities: the life and career of Lin Zifeng (1892-1971)

PurposeThis paper aims to analyse how both Lin’s birthplace identity and his Christian identity contributed to his fruitful public career and to ascertain which identity became the most significant.Design/methodology/approachArchival research is the main method used in this paper. The most important archives drawn from are the Daniel Tse Collection in the Special Collection and Archives of the Hong Kong Baptist University Library. Oral history has also been used in this paper to uncover more material that has not yet been discussed in existing scholarly works.FindingsThis paper argues that although Lin’s birthplace identity and social networks helped him to start his business career in Nam Pak Hong and develop into a leader in the local Chaozhou communities, these factors were insufficient to his becoming a respectable member of the Chinese elite in post-war Hong Kong. He became well known not because of his leading position in local Chaozhou communities or any great achievement he had obtained in business but because of his contribution to the development of Christian education. These achievements earned him a reputation as a “Christian educator”. Thus Lin’s Christian identity became more important than his birthplace identity in contributing to his successful public career.Originality/valueThis paper has value in showing how Christian influences interacted with various cultural factors in early Hong Kong. It also offers insights into Lin’s life and motivations as well as the history of the institutions he contributed to/founded. It not only furthers our understanding of the Chinese Christian business elite in early Hong Kong but also provides us with insights when further studying this group of people in other British colonies in Asia.

Promiscuous Signification

This essay assesses clinical photographs of leprosy patients created by the Hawai‘i Board of Health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or what may be the most extensive visual cataloging of indigenous, Asian, and immigrant bodies in America’s Pacific empire. Building on theoretical and methodological approaches to archives as a process rather than a source, I follow the trail of these clinical images through time and space, from their emergence within a photographic practice of medical management and segregation in Hawai‘i to their prolific circulation in transnational political and medical arenas. Offering spectacular evidence of the racialized and sexualized pathology of colonial peoples, these photographs were tightly regulated but increasingly viewed as clinical erotica after the United States incorporated Hawai‘i as a territory in 1900. The essay further suggests the “affective excess” that can disrupt the photograph’s medical surveillance, as social intimacies and care between Hawaiian patients bloom within the frame.

Does Love Know No Borders? Culture-Crossed Lovers in Les amants désunis and Les nuits de Strasbourg

Cross-cultural love has been a contested site of encounter in literature since the colonial period and has met with prejudice and contestation of various forms, both in colonial and postcolonial societies. Despite an uneasy acceptance of love, or even its categorical rejection, the couple is a recurring archetype in the literature produced by writers of both European nations and of those places colonised by Europeans. The stakes involved cut across questions of race, purity and hybridity, as well as nationhood, and bear the historical imprint of the pseudo-scientific understandings of racial hierarchies and miscegenation, especially in the latter's meaning of the mixing of different races through procreation. Even though uncomfortable precursors such as Pierre Loti's Le Mariage de Loti or Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste have staged colonialist figurings of mixed-race couples, a good number of contemporary Francophone writers have penned novels centring on love in both their autobiographies and novels. Through a reading of two novels by Algerians writing in French, this article will trace some of the reasons why love is such an obsessive, recurring archetype and why it should appear in contemporary francophone texts as a site of cultural and political tensions. Both novels present couples struggling to love each other against the backdrop or in the wake of war: the lovers of Assia Djebar's Les nuits de Strasbourg live with the consequences of World War 2 and the Algerian War of Independence, and Anouar Benmalek's Les amants desunis are separated first during the War of Independence and then during the Algerian civil conflict of the 1990s.Cross-cultural love in the colonial imaginaryI use the term cross-cultural in this article so as to account for the many factors that may complicate a loving relationship across cultures, including ethnic differences as well as differences in political and social power, language, religion, family organisation and the status of women. This should not be understood, however, as a desire to downplay the significance of the concept of or colour in social reactions to relationships, since the notion of different human races was vital to justifying and maintaining power over colonised peoples during the period of the second French Colonial Empire (1830-1962). Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, in her essay on metissage in Franco-Algerian relations, highlights precisely this point when she states that colonial societies used skin colour as an organising principle: souvent bien sur, le propre de la societe coloniale etant de s'organiser en fonction de la couleur, c'est la categorie de race qui sert a organiser, a legiferer, a phantasmer les unions mixtes.1The prejudice and condemnation that bi-racial relationships have engendered are most evident in cases where legal jurisdictions outlaw such mixing. Thirty-eight states in the United States, for example, had introduced laws against interracial marriages by the 1930s, and such unions continued to be outlawed by thirteen states until 1967.2 In the French encounter with its colonial peoples, despite an historical colour-blindness - in other words, the political effort to disqualify race as a category on which to claim rights or to interact with the state3 - miscegenation and the children that issued from such unions were sources of moral outrage and attempts to control sexual behaviour through judicial processes. Under Louis XV, for example, an edict of 1731 forbade interracial marriage in order to avoid staining the white race.4 This rejection of racial mixing, which was based on a political and pseudo-scientific - as well as an emotional - fear of the degeneration of the white through the existence of mixed-race children, was strongly voiced in France in the writings of Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who claimed in 1887 that miscegenation within France was resulting in degeneration and depopulation. …