Sex, Race Mixing, and Empire

These four monographs represent necessary and sophisticated analyses of the ways in which mixed-race children born of colonial and quasi-colonial encounters contended with and challenged racial representations and hierarchies. We also find in their pages insight into the mechanisms employed by occupational forces, be they imperial or otherwise, to impose or reinforce notions of race, class, and gender. Each of these studies situate hybridity within specific political, geographic, and cultural environments and circumstances while also allowing us to find common threads pertaining to the exercise of power and the definition of identity and culture. Rich in historiographical and historical context and in analysis of theories of empire, race, gender, and culture, the arguments and the hypotheses set forth in all four books are enhanced by case studies and personal narratives that clearly illustrate the impact of such processes as racialization, rationalization, and exclusion upon métis children, their mothers, fathers, and families. Although the children born of relations between men and women of China, French Indochina, the Pacific, and Ghana with those of European or American descent may be perceived as the embodiment and the complexity of colonial and imperial encounters, these studies illustrate that they also often defied such notions through their own diverse ways of navigating through difficult social, cultural, and political waters.

Christina Firpo's The Uprooted provides a masterful study examining the French colonial policies in Vietnam of "uprooting" or removing métis children from social settings perceived as threats to the welfare of these children but, significantly, also as potential dangers to the colonial enterprise. The removal of métis children, by both French colonial authorities and "protection" societies, argues Firpo, was consistent with nineteenth-century imperial notions of statecraft. Equally clear in this study is the reality that definitions of mixed-race children either as "indigenous" or as "French" shifted over time and according to place, interest, and circumstance.

The defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1871 weighed heavily on France as it attempted to consolidate the Third Republic. French leaders bemoaned the loss of prestige and the defeat of a once grande nation and attributed this to the notion of dégénerescence (degeneration), a concept that became a leitmotif for national uplift (the relèvement de la nation). Renewed imperial ambitions became synonymous with national strength. In Vietnam, French colonial authorities attempted to uphold a fiction of imperial prestige and French supremacy. Notions of French vigor and power were embedded in racialized and gendered hierarchies. Firpo reveals in her study that when we scratch away the veneer of colonial rule, persistent fears of rebellion over even the most minor contestations of French supremacy emerge. There was, alongside the often-violent exercise of power, a recognized, if seldom stated, understanding of the fragile ground upon which stood the occupation and the exploitation of the Vietnamese kingdom in France's colonial rule. Métis children were considered not only problematic in terms of racial and cultural classification, but those who were not recognized by their fathers and who were not deemed and treated as French were considered a potential threat to French colonial rule. Their liminal status—the very result of colonial policies intended to buttress...