Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

“I’ve got a piece coming out for Buzzfeed about the word mulatto. I think that’s a good word to start using more often. People don’t like the word, but they can’t point to why, or they think it’s a reference to a mule. But the word is actually an Arabic word referencing people of mixed heritage. It predates the word for mule. Historically, it’s the word we used for people of mixed race in this country. And the thing about words like mixed and biracial is that they’re completely vague. They don’t make much sense. Most black and white people who consider themselves biracial, their race is listed legally and socially as black. Plus bi- doesn’t work because there are other races mixed in there, too. Part of the thing that worries me about the biracial movement is that it can be ahistoric. And as I said the vast majority of African-Americans are of mixed racial descent. So by the definitions they’re using, every African-American is pretty much biracial. It would be a miracle if they did a test and there weren’t some European poking in. In my view, mulatto acknowledges that there’s a larger history. And for me, the black and white mixed experience is part of my African-American experience. I still consider myself African-American, just mixed African-American. It’s like, if you have a Dad whose Irish, you’d be Irish, and nobody would debate that just because your Mom was Italian. But for African-Americans, we have these rigid ways of looking at the issue. We’ve inherited these preconceived notions.” —Mat Johnson

Dwyer Murphy, “Pitching Chaos, an interview with Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day,” Electric Lit, May 26, 2015. http://electricliterature.com/pitching-chaos-an-interview-with-mat-johnson-author-of-loving-day/.

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921

University of British Columbia Press
2009-05-15
288 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780774816335
Paperback ISBN: 9780774816342

Renisa Mawani, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia

Contemporary discussions of multiculturalism and pluralism remain politically charged in former settler societies. Colonial Proximities historicizes these contestations by illustrating how crossracial encounters in one colonial contact zone — late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Columbia—inspired juridical racial truths and forms of governance that continue to inform contemporary politics, albeit in different ways.

Drawing from a wide range of legal cases, archival materials, and commissions of inquiry, this book charts the racial encounters between aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations. By exploring the real and imagined anxieties that informed contact in salmon canneries, the illicit liquor trade, and the (white) slavery scare, this book reveals the legal and spatial strategies of rule deployed by Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who, in the interests of racial purity and European resettlement, aspired to restrict, and ultimately prevent, crossracial interactions. Linking histories of aboriginal-European contact and Chinese migration, this book demonstrates that the dispossession of aboriginal peoples and Chinese exclusion were never distinct projects, but part of the same colonial processes of racialization that underwrote the formation of the settler regime.

Colonial Proximities shows us that British Columbia’s contact zone was marked by a racial heterogeneity that not only produced anxieties about crossracial contacts but also distinct modes of exclusion including the territorial dispossession of aboriginal peoples and legal restrictions on Chinese immigration. It is essential reading for students and scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, colonial/ postcolonial studies, and critical race and legal studies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Heterogeneity and Interraciality in British Columbia’s Colonial “Contact Zone”
2. The Racial Impurities of Global Capitalism: The Politics of Labour, Interraciality, and Lawlessness in the Salmon Canneries
3. (White) Slavery, Colonial Knowledges, and the Rise of State Racisms
4. National Formations and Racial Selves: Chinese Traffickers and Aboriginal Victims in British Columbia’s Illicit Liquor Trade
5. “The Most Disreputable Characters”: Mixed-Bloods, Internal Enemies, and Imperial Futures
Conclusion: Colonial Pasts, Entangled Presents, and Promising Futures
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Read the front matter and chapter 1 here.

Tags: British Columbia, Renisa Mawani, University of British Columbia Press

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Mixed Race Studies

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921

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