Rewriting the history of Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia.

The nineteenth-century Chinese population in Australia was made up mostly of men, drawing many commentators to the conclusion these men faced an absence of family life, resulting in prostitution, gambling, opium use and other so-called vices. Recent research has, however, expanded and complicated our knowledge of Chinese families in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly concerning the extent to which Chinese men and white Australian women formed intimate relationships. This article traces the origins of the misconceptions about Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia, and considers how new directions in scholarship over the past decade are providing methods for enlarging our knowledge. It argues that instead of being oddities or exceptions, Chinese-European families were integral to the story of Australia's early Chinese communities.

The two worlds of race revisited: a meditation on race in the age of Obama.

Nearly fifty years ago, the American Academy organized a conference and two issues of its journal "Daedalus" on the topic of "The Negro American." The project engaged top intellectuals and policy-makers around the conflicts and limitations of mid-1960s liberalism in dealing with race. Specifically, they grappled with the persistent question of how to integrate a forced-worker population that had been needed but that was socially undesirable once its original purpose no longer existed. Today, racism has been discredited as an idea and legally sanctioned segregation belongs to the past, yet the question the conference participants explored -- in essence, how to make the unwanted wanted -- still remains. Recent political developments and anticipated demographic shifts, however, have recast the terms of the debate. Gerald Early, guest editor for the present volume, uses Barack Obama's election to the presidency as a pretext for returning to the central question of "The Negro American" project and, in turn, asking how white liberalism will fare in the context of a growing minority population in the United States. Placing his observations alongside those made by John Hope Franklin in 1965, Early positions his essay, and this issue overall, as a meditation on how far we have come in America to reach "the age of Obama" and at the same time how far we have to go before we can overcome "the two worlds of race."

Terra Australis to Oceania: racial geography in the "fifth part of the world".

This paper is a synoptic history of racial geography in the 'fifth part of the world' or Oceania - an extended region embracing what are now Australia, Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, to focus on the consolidation of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the early 19th century. The paper investigates the naming of places by Europeans and its ultimate entanglement with their racial classifications of people. The formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge is located at the interface of metropolitan discourses and local experience. This necessitates unpacking the relationships between, on the one hand, the deductive reasoning of metropolitan savants, and, on the other hand, the empirical logic of voyagers and settlers who had visited or lived in particular places, encountered their inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to indigenous agency and knowledge.

Something black in the American Psyche: formal innovation and Freudian imagery in the comics of Winsor McCay and Robert Crumb.

Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland anticipates Robert Crumb's work. McCay's innocent dreamscapes seem antithetical to the sexually explicit work of anti-capitalist Crumb, but Nemo looks forward to Crumb in subject and form. Nemo's presentation of class, gender, and race, and its pre-Freudian sensibility are ironic counterpoints to Crumb's political, Freudian comix.

The mistress, the midwife, and the medical doctor: pregnancy and childbirth on the plantations of the antebellum American South, 1800-1860.

This article represents a step towards examining the relationship between three key figures in the antebellum American South: the plantation mistress, the slave-midwife, and the professional male physician. It elucidates how the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, which brought women close to death, formed the basis of a deeper, positive relationship between the black and white women of the antebellum South, and assesses the ways in which the professionalization of medicine affected this reproductive bond. Evaluating such a complicated network of relationships necessitates dissecting numerous layers of social interaction, including black and white women's shared cultural experiences and solidarity as reproductive beings; the role, power, and significance of slave-midwives and other enslaved caretakers in white plantation births; the cooperation between pregnant bondswomen and plantation mistresses; and the impact that the burgeoning profession of medicine had on the procreative union between antebellum black and white women.

Towards a holistic review of Pan-Africanism: linking the idea and the movement.

This article explores two general approaches to defining Pan-Africanism. Traditional Pan-Africanism reflects definitions of Pan-Africanism that begin with the assumption that distinctions must be made between early "ideas" of group identification with Africa versus modern organizational activities. However, holistic approaches emphasize the interconnectivity of Pan-African ideas and concrete activities. This discussion explores these approaches and their implications for contemporary analyses of Pan-Africanism. The essay concludes that the holistic line is best suited for developing a new model in Pan-Africanism.

Reversing the gaze: constructing European race discourse as modern witchcraft practice.

In keeping with the challenge of (African American) historian of religions Charles Long to develop a mode of postcolonial encounter that is a process of mutual hermeneusis, I am proposing in this article to think "race" in terms of "indigenous ritual." At the very least it is an effort to relativize the western scientific paradigm and the universalizing humanities discourses that have nestled close to that paradigm. It is not an attempt to repudiate such an episteme but, rather-to borrow a jazz term-to "swing" it, to put it in antiphonal and improvisational circulation. More specifically, this article will trace a thought experiment, probing the historical emergence of white supremacist practice as a kind of modernist embodiment of "witchcraft discourse," which functions-in the institutional grammar it has left on deposit in contemporary social practice and the "intention to consume" (the substance of others) that it "rationalizes"-very much like the "primitive superstitions" it seeks to name and repudiate in positing its own rationalizing superiority. In such an enterprise, witchcraft, I am arguing, can be "good to think with" as a mode of communicative action, signifying with a kind of "boomerang effect" in the intercultural space of rupture between the West and the rest.

In pursuit of empowerment: Sensei Nellie Kleinsmidt, race and gender challenges in South Africa.

This chapter traces the way in which Nellie Kleinsmidt, known as the grandmother of karate in Africa, has negotiated discriminatory practices and overcome race and gender-related struggles, including the struggle to free the female body, in pursuit of empowerment. It explores her expectations and the constraints and frustrations she experienced, as well as the many contributions she has made to women's karate in South Africa. Nellie Kleinsmidt's karate career, which began in 1965, coincided with the early developments of South African karate. As a woman of colour her life and karate career were significantly shaped by apartheid legislation. It divided the country into areas of occupancy and residency according to race and was designed to prevent contact between the people of the government defined race groups. Black karate-kas were prohibited by law from practising karate in white designated areas. Lack of facilities and qualified instructors in areas allocated to Kleinsmidt's race group meant that she received very little formal karate instruction between 1966 and 1973. Soon after, she met Johan Roux, a white male. He was to become her chief karate instructor and life-long companion. They defied the apartheid legislation and in 1978 set up home together. They organized defiance campaigns, resisting the pressures from government to close their dojo because of its non-racial policies. Freeing her body at the broader political level involved the abolition of the race categories and all other apartheid legislation which impacted on her life choices and experiences. Initially this struggle and that of freeing her body occurred simultaneously. In her ongoing struggle against gender discrimination in the sport, it was in karate that Nellie Kleinsmidt could strive for the personal empowerment she sought. She could however not translate this into freedom in South African society itself. The impact of apartheid legislation together with the imposition of a sports moratorium by the South African Council on Sports (SACOS), hindered the growth of Nellie Kleinsmidt's karate career, yet she managed to obtain her sixth Dan Black Belt in 1998. This was a remarkable achievement given the constraints she had to overcome. In karate, Kleinsmidt was often viewed as a female first. The problem of female access is exacerbated by the overwhelming number of male instructors perpetuating the notion that the martial arts are inherently male sports. Accessing the various levels of karate has involved claiming physical and symbolic space on the dojo floor as well as involvement in the decision-making arenas of karate. In 1992 with the unification of karate in South Africa, Sensei Nellie began to extend her involvement with the refereeing arena and jointly established a Women's Karate Forum in her province. She has subsequently become a South African national referee and has earned the status of continental judge with the Union of African Karate Federation (UFAK). Nellie Kleinsmidt is the first and only woman of colour to have been appointed to the Referee's Board of South Africa and the only woman of colour in Africa to have obtained a sixth Dan Black belt.