| Popis: |
This chapter examines discordant left-wing voices. Whilst Kenneth Wallace subsequently focused on practical problems, like unemployment and demography, intellectually he and Cedric Dover championed pan-Eurasianism--rejecting the 1911 redesignation of the group and seeking to make common cause with other mixed-race peoples of the European empires, thereby laying the imaginative groundwork for a potential mixed-race nation of Eurasia. Dover became famous for his subsequent career in Britain and the United States and what Nico Slate refers to as his "colored cosmopolitanism". However, the main thrust of his interdisciplinary work Half-Caste articulated this vision alongside his efforts to debunk Nazi pure race theory pseudoscience and to establish, "scientifically" (in terms of eugenics), the genetic superiority of people of mixed-race (i.e. heterozygosity). Others argued in favour of racial absorption into whiteness through mate selection. What united the efforts of those of wildly different political viewpoints was their shared desire to build up racial self-respect and a positive sense of group identity. The chapter's other major theme--racial passing--was, by contrast, largely an attempt to dissociate from the group. Primarily an individual strategy, it facilitated access to better employment and marriage prospects within the elaborately gradated socioracial hierarchy of British colonial society. |
