Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’
Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London, London SE14 6NW, UK
Genealogy 2019, 3(2), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020021
Received: 19 November 2018
/
Revised: 6 April 2019
/
Accepted: 6 April 2019
/
Published: 17 April 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories)
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.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
mixed race; interraciality; black history; social history; oral history; ordinariness; people of colour
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Caballero, C. Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’. Genealogy 2019, 3, 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020021
AMA Style
Caballero C. Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’. Genealogy. 2019; 3(2):21. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020021
Chicago/Turabian StyleCaballero, Chamion. 2019. "Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’" Genealogy 3, no. 2: 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020021
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
