Marginal Citizens: Interracial intimacies and the incarceration of Japanese Canadians, 1942–1949

Following Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE IN AN INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE: THE CASE OF INDONESIAN FEMALES’ LANGUAGE CHOICE IN CANADA

This study aims to investigate Indonesian females’ language choice in their interracial family in the home domain and factors that contribute to their language choice. Ultimately, the study seeks to describe the influence of language choice on maintaining the Indonesian language amidst multilingual Canada. Semi-structured interviews and observations were employed to collect the data. The participants of this study were three female Indonesians with their Canadian spouses living in Canadian cities. The study revealed that English was chosen as the language spoken at home in each family despite having an Indonesian mother. Although all (Indonesian) mothers code-switch between the Indonesian language and English, the study discovered that the children are passive speakers of Indonesian, some do not even understand their mother language. Social context and motivation are some factors that influence the participants’ language choice. The findings also indicate that language shifts from Indonesian to English were taking place in the participants’ repertoire.

The Story of the Black Family: What It Means to Be Black with an Interracial Family Tree

This paper is using a critical personal narrative and decolonialization theory to share the story of my family. It is the story of my great-grandfather, who was the child of a slave master and a house servant, and his story of survival, using historical documents. Race and racism have been a part of my family from its origin, because of the cultural and social meanings of Blackness, which are discussed in the article.

Alice’s Garden: Imagining Agency in the Natural World in Clare Boylan’s Black Baby

The Irish writer Clare Boylan is something of a forgotten figure, despite enjoying significant literary success in her lifetime. Because of her untimely death, little critical work has been done on her fiction. Her blackly comic sensibility responds sensitively to characters situated in culturally specific environments, with particular attention paid to the vexed and contradictory position of women in their relationship to the natural world, and so this essay conducts a reading of her 1988 novel, Black Baby, using the insights of feminist new materialism and critical posthumanism, especially as articulated by Rosi Braidotti. In every genre, contemporary Irish women’s writing finds space in the natural world to explore alternatives to the status quo. Black Baby imagines an interracial family of women (and cats) in the enchanted environment of a miraculously blooming winter garden. By staging Alice’s most transformative moments, including her final moments of semi-consciousness, in a garden, Boylan makes recourse to the idea of an unending, generative process. Nothing really dies when life is no longer an individualised experience, but an impersonal moment of radical inclusion that exceeds the material limits of any one life span.

Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’

The popular conception of interraciality in Britain is one that frequently casts mixed racial relationships, people and families as being a modern phenomenon. Yet, as scholars are increasingly discussing, interraciality in Britain has much deeper and diverse roots, with racial mixing and mixedness now a substantively documented presence at least as far back as the Tudor era. While much of this history has been told through the perspectives of outsiders and frequently in the negative terms of the assumed ‘orthodoxy of the interracial experience’—marginality, conflict, rejection and confusion—first-hand accounts challenging these perceptions allow a contrasting picture to emerge. This article contributes to the foregrounding of this more complex history through focusing on accounts of interracial ‘ordinariness’—both presence and experiences—throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when official concern about racial mixing featured prominently in public debate. In doing so, a more multidimensional picture of interracial family life than has frequently been assumed is depicted, one which challenges mainstream attitudes about conceptualisations of racial mixing both then and now.

An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling

This article traces the biography of an Afro-German woman born during the 1920s Rhineland occupation to examine the peculiarities of the black German diaspora, as well as potential connections between these peculiarities and larger trends in the history of German colonialism and racism. “Erika Diekmann” was born in Worms in 1920. Her mother was a German citizen, her father a Senegalese French soldier. Separated from her birth mother at a young age, Erika spent her youth and early adulthood in a school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem run by the Protestant order of the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses (KaiserswertherDiakonissen). After World War II, Erika returned to West Germany, but in 1957, she emigrated to the United States, along with her (white) German husband and four children. Erika's story offers unique opportunities for studying Afro-German women's active strategies of making Germany their “home.” It underlines the complicated role of conventional female gender prescriptions in processes of interracial family-building. The centrality of religion to Erika's social relationships significantly enhances our understanding of the complexity of German attitudes toward national belonging and race during the first half of the twentieth century.