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Wed 24 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Thu 25 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Fri 26 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Sat 27 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.00

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Wednesday 24 March 2021 16.00 - 17.15
F-4 ETH04 Regulating Mixed Intimacies in Europe
F
Networks: Ethnicity and Migration , Family and Demography , Sexuality Chair: Christoph Lorke
Organizer: Betty De Hart Discussant: Christoph Lorke
Betty De Hart : Exploring the Legal Archive on Mixed Intimacies: Nothing but Trouble?
This paper uses the concept of ‘legal archive’ to explore the meanings of ‘race’ and ‘mixture’ in law: legal documents, acts, court cases, legal scholarship, regulations et cetera. The concept legal archive is inspired by Edward Said’s concept of cultural archive, that was used by Gloria Wekker in her book ... (Show more)
This paper uses the concept of ‘legal archive’ to explore the meanings of ‘race’ and ‘mixture’ in law: legal documents, acts, court cases, legal scholarship, regulations et cetera. The concept legal archive is inspired by Edward Said’s concept of cultural archive, that was used by Gloria Wekker in her book White Innocence. In the paper, I provide a theoretical discussion of the concept legal archive. I will then analyse a court case on marriage annulment on grounds of ‘race deception’, from the Netherlands interbellum period. I will conduct a contextual analysis of the cases, their reception by legal doctrine as well as public discourse. In other words, I look at what historical actors believed ‘race’ was, what they believed ‘mixture’ was, and at how this was translated into legal practice. Subsequently, I will address the difficulties that I face in exploring the legal archive, as well as its chances. (Show less)

Rebecca Franco : ‘Interracialized Intimacies’ and Racial Boundaries in the French Postcolonial Archive
‘Interracialized intimacies’ and racial boundaries in the French postcolonial archive
This paper will look at the regulation of ‘interracialized intimacies’ during decolonization until the stricter immigration policies in France (1955-1980), in order to understand whether and how regulation of intimacy played a role in crafting racial boundaries in postcolonial France. Specifically, ... (Show more)
‘Interracialized intimacies’ and racial boundaries in the French postcolonial archive
This paper will look at the regulation of ‘interracialized intimacies’ during decolonization until the stricter immigration policies in France (1955-1980), in order to understand whether and how regulation of intimacy played a role in crafting racial boundaries in postcolonial France. Specifically, it will look at the regulation of intimacy of (post)colonial immigrants from the African continent with the (white) French population. Research in colonial studies have argued that the regulation of intimacy was integral to the creation, protection, and contestation of racial boundaries. In the same vein, the regulation of ‘interracialized intimacies’ reveals concerns about racial categories. Hence, exploring whether and how intimacy of (post)colonial immigrants and the French population was regulated can help understand processes of racialization. Given the French commitment to Republican universalism, ‘race’ is usually not enunciated explicitly in government archives, yet, seems present through covert signifiers and racialized logics. With the use of archival material pertaining to the regulation of intimacy, this paper will discuss the challenges in doing archival work on racialization in France, as this demands a critical reading of the archives that pays close attention to the archival form, silences, hypervisibilities, and inconsistencies. (Show less)

Guno Jones : Dutch Racial Colonial Economies of ‘Mixed-ness’ and ‘Pureness’ and their Afterlives
In this contribution I will highlight how categories of ‘mixed-ness’ and myths of ‘pure-ness’ have shaped the hierarchical ordering of humans during Dutch colonialism and in the present. Drawing attention to ‘the Dutch East Indies’ and the former Dutch Caribbean colonies of Suriname and Curaçao, I will discuss how ‘inter-racialized’ ... (Show more)
In this contribution I will highlight how categories of ‘mixed-ness’ and myths of ‘pure-ness’ have shaped the hierarchical ordering of humans during Dutch colonialism and in the present. Drawing attention to ‘the Dutch East Indies’ and the former Dutch Caribbean colonies of Suriname and Curaçao, I will discuss how ‘inter-racialized’ relationships and ‘multi-racialized’ bodies were constructed and regulated. I will discuss how the regulation of intimate life is connected with racialized hierarchical opportunity structures, and how people have both reproduced and transgressed these structures. These are not phenomena of the past, as the social dynamics involved in present day ‘pigmentocracies’ in the Dutch Caribbean and Indonesia illustrate. I will look at the legal, social and symbolic dimensions of these processes and how they are mapped onto spatial segregation. Colony and metropole are intertwined in these politics. While regulations of intimate life in contemporary Dutch society, which are embedded in the postwar European legal context, utilize a different set of signifiers than the ones in the colonial territories, the social grammar of colonial politics is nonetheless still noticeable in the Netherlands and other European countries. (Show less)

Nawal Mustafa : Footloose Fancy Free and in Flimsy Summer Dresses: Caribbean Nurses that Dated Outside the ‘Race’
This article focuses on the lives of black nurses who in the 1950s-1970s came to the United Kingdom as part of the second wave of black immigrants settling in the metropole after the second World War. It will specifically pay to attention to the historical production of a certain ... (Show more)
This article focuses on the lives of black nurses who in the 1950s-1970s came to the United Kingdom as part of the second wave of black immigrants settling in the metropole after the second World War. It will specifically pay to attention to the historical production of a certain type of desirable ‘black (sexual) women’ in relation to the possibility of fostering intimate relationships with white men. The author is particularly interested in the forms of ‘every day resistance’ and transgressive behavior black nurses deployed in order to transcend the specific position assigned to them. The assumption here is that by focusing on the aforementioned concepts the responses from the government and the wider society evoked by the behavior of the nurses will be revealed. The aim of this article is to shed light on how intimate transgressive relationships of black nurses were regulated. This study will archival materials as well as interviews with black nurses as a method to interrogate and disturb the official narrative of the lives of the black nurses. (Show less)

Andrea Tarchi : Between Annexation and Exclusion in the Italian Empire: Racial Mixture and the Juridical Status of Libyans during the Fascist Colonial Rule
This paper investigates the ways in which the Fascist colonial government in Libya shaped and adjusted the juridical status of the native population accordingly to their national and imperial political plans following the end of the “pacification” of the resistance in 1932. Divided between a faction that promoted the annexation ... (Show more)
This paper investigates the ways in which the Fascist colonial government in Libya shaped and adjusted the juridical status of the native population accordingly to their national and imperial political plans following the end of the “pacification” of the resistance in 1932. Divided between a faction that promoted the annexation of Libya to the metropolitan administrative territory and another one that vouched for spatial and juridical segregation between Italian citizens and Libyan subjects, the Fascist elites in Libya had to problematize the issue of the legal status of Libyan subjects within the broader framework of the definition of the racially-charged Italian national character and their imperial aspirations. Indeed, while Mussolini’s desire to end “racial promiscuity” and “the plague of mixture” in the colonies kept increasing, other main Fascist Party officials tried to push for the integration of Libyans with the aim of strengthening the demographic colonization of the colony. This paper analyzes this debate internal to the Fascist colonial government through the lens of the regulation of interracial intimate relationships, with the aim of inserting the mentioned debate into the process of definition of a normative standard of Italian whiteness through the racialization of the colonial “other”. (Show less)

Elena Zambelli : Mixed’ Couples in Contemporary Europe: Perception of Stasis and Change across Multiple Generations
What can the experiences of historical stasis and change narrated by different generations of ‘mixed’ couples tell us about race relations in contemporary Europe? In this presentation I will address this question drawing from my ongoing multi-sited ethnographic research project in three European countries (Italy, Netherlands, UK). There is extensive ... (Show more)
What can the experiences of historical stasis and change narrated by different generations of ‘mixed’ couples tell us about race relations in contemporary Europe? In this presentation I will address this question drawing from my ongoing multi-sited ethnographic research project in three European countries (Italy, Netherlands, UK). There is extensive scholarship showing Western European countries’ regulation of intimacy during colonialism to reproduce their racialized power over the lands and people they subjugated. Increasing post WWII postcolonial and economic migration flows displaced the focus of these governmentality concerns to the former metropoles, where ‘mixed’ couples became a catalyst of social anxieties over immigration and national identities. Today, in Europe, ‘race’ officially no longer constitutes a legal ground to regulate the occurrence of intimate unions between differently racialised bodies, nor to determine their rights. Yet, the everyday lives of ‘mixed’ couples continues to be moulded at the intersection between European countries’ colonial and imperial histories and their different and evolving legal frameworks. In this presentation I will foreground how these couples narrate themselves in juxtaposition to, or in continuity with, the experience of their parents, focusing on instances of institutional, everyday and casual racisms. (Show less)



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