Mixing It Up
Multiracial Subjects
The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.
From Naomi Zack's "American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues" to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger's "Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance," this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society's discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the "one drop" rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.
Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.
These essays do a wonderful job of blending theory and practice. . . . This collection embraces a number of tensions [that] raise provocative questions about the nature of identity and the relationship between identity and social justice. . . . This collection should have broad appeal.
Sansan Kwan is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Kenneth Speirs is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York.
- Preface (Naomi Zack)
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction (SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs)
- I. Issues and Trends
- 1. American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues (Naomi Zack)
- 2. Misceg-narrations (Raquel Scherr Salgado)
- II. Multiracial Subjects
- 3. A Passionate Occupant of the Transnational Transit Lounge (Adrian Carton)
- 4. Miscegenation and Me (Richard Guzman)
- 5. "What Is She Anyway?": Rearranging Bodily Mythologies (Orathai Northern)
- 6. Resemblance (Alice White)
- 7. "Brown Like Me": Explorations of a Shifting Self (Stefanie Dunning)
- 8. Toward a Multiethnic Cartography: Multiethnic Identity, Monoracial Cultural Logic, and Popular Culture (Evelyn Alsultany)
- 9. Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance (Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger)
- 10. Against Erasure: The Multiracial Voice in Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years (Carole DeSouza)
- About the Contributors
