To conclude: whereas for the bilingual authors de Courtivron analyzes the
“incomplete return” is a return to the land of their birth, a place to confront childhood memories, for the Eurasian authors treated in this essay the
“incomplete return” Home can also be an act of migration, a movement away from the land of their birth and childhood─ there is thus a doubling of their returns. This difference in the construct of “home” is key, and the notion of a
“homeland one has never seen” becomes a major topos of colonial and postcolonial writings on Eurasian identity. The “incomplete return” is further complicated by the ambiguity of “home/Home” as delineated by British colonial racial ideology. Hence, for the biracial subject, the impact of externally imposed racial constructs weighs heavily. In further contrast to de Courtivron’s authors, many Eurasian life narratives reveal the central role of the father in identity
71 See, for example, Blackford, One Hell of a Life.
72 It is interesting to note here that the notion of a “Eurasian homeland” was proposed in several former colonies at the time of decolonization, including Indonesia and India. None of these schemes were successful. See Coralie Younger, Anglo-Indians, Neglected Children of the Raj (Delhi: B. R. Pub. Corp., 1987) and Paul W. van der Veur, “The Eurasians of Indonesia: Castaways of Colonialism,” Pacific Affairs 27.2 (June 1954): 124-137.
construction, as the “homeland” is ideologically defined through paternal descent, rather than through inherited memories of the mother and the mother tongue.73
What distinguishes these Eurasian narratives is thus their particular relation to a racialized notion of a homeland within the context of the ambiguity of the Eurasian’s position under British colonial ideology, which taught them to identify with Great Britain as “Home,” but at times summarily rejected them or denied them mobility because they were not of “pure European descent.” Thus, while the topos of an “unseen homeland” also figures in the writings of/about colonial settlers and diasporic subjects, it is the particular racial “no man’s land”
inhabited by the mixed-race subject that distinguishes this experience. The ambiguity of “home” thereby comes to stand for the liminal position indicative of “half-caste” status. The “incomplete returns” I have described in this essay took place within very specific historical conditions ─ those of British colonialism and the later movements of decolonization and diaspora. They involve the particular dynamics of “race mixing” within British colonial ideology (distinguished from the Portuguese, for example), of gender (paternal versus maternal inheritance), and class (mobility as a function of class).
Nonetheless, as the life narratives of Symons and Moss demonstrate, even within these limited parameters, there was significant variation based on individual responses to historical circumstances ─ as Symons identifies as British, whereas Moss does not.
Despite this difference, both authors reveal the contingent nature of
“mixed-race” identity as a “traveling practice,” constantly in flux and shifting according to location and time. In this, the biracial subject of an earlier age serves as a precursor of the in-betweenness and deterritorialization that many view as emblematic of the current era of globalization, in which the fixedness of identities and the stability of “home” (not to mention the dichotomy of
73 On the distinction between a “racial mother tongue” (what I am calling the “father’s tongue”) and the language of the mother, see Lim, Among the White Moon Faces.
Metropole and margins) can no longer be taken for granted.74 While much of the contemporary discourse on globalization valorizes or celebrates this in-betweenness and indeterminacy, especially as it relates to a type of cosmopolitan mobility, Symons and Moss reveal the private anguish that can also be a symptom of deterritorialization and dislocation, which makes every return and every departure “incomplete.”
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