Abstract:
This article argues that historical issues that shaped racial relations
in Kenya continue to undermine mixed-raceness in social imaginaries. It links the Kenyan public’s stigmatisation of mixed-race couples and mixed-race individuals to colonial histories of oppression
and dispossession of subordinated races. The subconscious colonial memories ventilate through anxieties against mixed raceness
in the media, music, and novelistic representations. In the representations, one notices mixed persons’ struggles to belong in a
society that links them to oppressors. The article further nuances
representations that exhibit delusions of racial purity of communities traceable to ‘distant’ mixed raceness and their ironical contempt of those whose mixed raceness is traceable to a recent
past. Thus, memories of racial injustices and imbalances can have
lasting effects on mixed raceness whereby anxieties again
