Routledge Studies in Anthropology, no. 33. New York: Routledge, 2017. xii, 246 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$140.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-67770-8.
Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands is an important contribution to understanding how people with mixed ancestry have been and continue to be defined and navigated in relationship to Oceania’s colonial history, and through discourses surrounding what it means to “authentically” belong to an Indigenous community. It explores how ideas about belonging in the Pacific are tied in complex and multifaceted ways to land and water rights and resources, political recognition, and sovereignty.
The different chapters in the book consider the various ways in which cultural belonging and competence are ascribed to people of mixed race by communities across the Pacific region, and importantly it also considers some of the diverse ways in which these issues have been navigated by individuals and their families. It is clear that notions of mixed-race identity involve endlessly shifting and diverse imagined communities of belonging. These manifest in different ways depending on specific historical, socio-political, and environmental conditions. Ultimately, and in sum, the diverse chapters in this book communicate the understanding that ideas of mixed race are socio-culturally constructed, slippery, fluid, and historically contingent.
This book includes perspectives from locations across Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, and West Papua. It is the diversity of this book that makes it so engaging, allowing the reader to glimpse how mixed-race identities have been historically constructed by colonial powers and nation states, but also to learn from more intimate ethnographic and auto-ethnographically situated accounts of how identity is constructed, challenged, and renegotiated in the present, within families who understand and navigate both the challenges and the value of mixed-ness.
The diverse understandings of what it means to be of mixed race in this book include accounts from: Aboriginal communities, migrant families in Australia, white Australian parents of mixed race children, East Asian mixed-race people in Australia, Indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea, the metis (mixed race) community in New Caledonia, German Pacific Islanders in Samoa and Papua New Guinea, Indonesian Papuans in West Papua, fathers of mixed-race children in Aotearoa/New Zealand, mixed-race Māori-Pakeha high school students, and people with Chinese European identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
“‘A Mini United Nations’: Being Mixed in Multicultural Australia” (49–66) by Maki Meyer and Fariza Fozdar is a surprising and inspiring chapter. It debunks notions of race as being culturally constructed and without biological foundation, whilst simultaneously recognizing that ideas about race continue to have “real structural and interactional effects” (49) which powerfully influence lived experiences. The authors challenge and complicate simplistic associations between Australia’s high levels of migration and assumptions that racial diversity within the nation is a consequence of this movement of peoples by pointing out that most migrants living in Australia are in fact from “Anglo-Celtic and European backgrounds” (51). They point out however that “younger generations of Australians are far more ethnically and racially diverse than previous generations and more likely to be in mixed marriages that at any other time in Australia’s history” (51). Meyer and Fozdar point out that young Australians are increasingly likely to openly claim “mixed or multiple ancestries” as an important part of how they self-identify (52).
Meyer and Fozdar argue that mixed identities within contemporary multicultural Western Australia can be seen primarily as sites of opportunity that are multiple and fluid. Some respondents described within Meyer and Fozdar’s research had chosen to migrate to Australia specifically because of their perceptions of Australia as a place where diversity is commonplace and accepted. Families with mixed cultural heritage saw Australia as a place where they could fit, because “being and looking different is ‘normal’” (52) and therefore race becomes a non-issue. For young people from mixed race backgrounds growing up in Western Australia mixed-ness is not a site of contention or conflict, but instead it is perceived as “ordinary.”
Both parents and children who were part of this research perceived mixed-ness primarily as a positive. Respondents focused on the advantages that their mixed-ness gave them, such as having a broad understanding of different cultural aspects and expressions, and being open to and accepting of difference. Rather than belonging nowhere, respondents felt that they were able to fit in everywhere (57). They subverted and played with racial stereotypes within and across different communities, using these notions playfully and to their advantage, claiming different aspects of their identity in different situations and according to need. Participants argued that being mixed is a “privileged identity” which involved a sense of uniqueness that intrigued other people in the wider community, and in which they took pride.
Meyer and Fozdar acknowledge that their research paints a “more ‘rosy’ narrative of the impact of race and cultural difference in Australia than is common” (60). Although there is no doubt that experiences of racism and institutional discrimination co-exist, I have focussed on an outline of this chapter in this review as it contributes an important hope orientation to the literature on mixed-race identities in the Pacific region. This chapter challenges the dominant idea that mixed race needs to be seen or experienced negatively as a “pathological condition”; instead it can be viewed as “an asset or simply as normality” (60).
Tui Nicola Clery
Independent Researcher, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom