In colonial Southeast Asia during the late 19th and early 20th c., important populations of people of mixed-race background began to develop and assert hybrid identities that superceded identification with either local or European cultures. In this talk, David Del Testa examines the case of one such mixed-race individual, Ms. Claudie Beaucarnot, whose colonial-era diary and contemporary interviews reveal the intimate edges of a creole identity, arguing against stereotypes of “mixed-race” people as universally oppressed, self-hating, and rootless, and for a reconsideration of them and their voices in the context of modern colonialism.
