Mixed Race Studies

Sociohistorical Constructions of Race and Language: Impacting Biracial Identity

A chapter in The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination. By Jean Lau Chin (Editor). (Santa Barbara, California. Praeger Publishers, 2004. 1,000 pages. ISBN: 0-275-98234-3, ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98234-8)

Matthew J. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Historically, race has been constructed within the American psyche as a dichotomous variable–and either-or proposition.  Moreover, our construction and use of language have developed to mirror the is reality, which ultimately aids in its perception.  Has this divergent approach to race outlived its usefulness and applicability?  Is it realistic, given the face of today’s changing demographic landscape?  At present, there remain cultural and linguistic disconnects between the phenomenological experience of the biracial individual and the expectations of the dualistic society within whichthey reside.  On the individual level, there are implications for psychosocial development (Hall, 2001; Root, 1995).  More broadly speaking, what will develop from the resolution of the dilemma is a new paradigm impacting how the citizens of this country view race and racial identity.  This paper explores the impact that the sociohistorical constructions to race and language have on the lives of biracial individuals.  To this end, the author, who is biracial, will blend sociohistorical conceptions of race and linguistic philosophy with personal narrative components and conclude with implications for multiracial identity development…

Read the entire chapter here.

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993) In: Martin McLoone & Kevin Rockett, eds. Irish Films, Global Cinema, Studies in Irish Film 4.

Four Courts Press
2007
176 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84682-081-6

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

The chapter analyses the positionalities of the mixed-race female protagonists of each film and the visualisation of their mixed-race identity.  It considers aspects of their struggle for self-definition against the director’s visual clues about their ‘true’ racial space.  It also explores the possibility in these films for a representation of mixed identity that surpasses the stereotypes of the ‘tragic mulatto’ torn between black and white worlds (as represented by mothers in the American films and lovers/parents in the French film).  Finally the article – as with my thesis – considers the limitations of American cinema in transcending binaried representations of race and the alternatives which French cinema offers, in order to consider the possibility for a mixed-race representative model which would visualise the multiplicity and ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha put it, of mixed-race identity.

The Historical Problematization of ‘Mixed Race’ in Psychological and Human-Scientific Discourses

Defining difference: Race and Racism in the History of Psychology
2004
Edited by Andrew Winston
pages pp. 79-108
American Psychological Association

Thomas Teo, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
York University

This paper reconstructs techniques of problematization regarding “mixed race” from Enlightenment inspired anthropological discourses to the North-American psychological discourses of the present time. Two central techniques of problematization are discussed. The conceptual technique of problematization, used in bio-psychological discourse at the beginning of the 20th century, transformed a lack of evidence into invoking metaphysical concepts such as disharmony. Sociological and social-psychological discourses changed problems of society with hybridity into problems of individuals. The empirical technique of problematization refers to the repeated testing of the inferiority of hybrid groups, for example of the “mulatto hypothesis.” Finally, it is shown how multiracial academics in the contemporary discourse shifted the discourse by focusing on problems that biracial people experience within society. It is suggested that the reconstruction of hybridity illustrates the epistemological and ethical shortcomings of a paradigm that considers humans as objects and not as subjects of research.

Read the entire chapter here.