Mixed Race Studies

Deconstructing the Mixed-Race Experience of Passing

California State University, San Marcos
May 2006
172 pages

Victoria Baldo Segall

A Thesis Submitted for Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Literature and Writing Studies

In “Beauty and the Beast: On Racial Ambiguity” Carla Bradshaw describes passing as an attempt to achieve acceptability by claiming membership in some desired group while denying other racial elements in oneself thought to be undesirable (79). In literature on passing, the mixed-race individual may, as Bradshaw suggests, become a “chameleon” if s/he desires; s/he may choose to pass as one race over another and blend with one race for reasons such as self-preservation. Bradshaw’s description of passing as gaining “false access” to a particular group or identity aides in setting thetone for passing as a harmful experience for the mixed-race individual. Specifically, this thesis will show that, as we’ll see with Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, not only does passing present the instability of race, but it emotionally and physically destroys the mixed-race individual; the characters have the power and ability to perform and live within different racial worlds, but through their passing they ultimately disempower the non-dominant race of which they are a part and empower the dominant race.

To support this argument, Chapters One through Three will explore how, imbedded within all three texts, there are four themes in particular that play influential roles in the discussion of mixed-race identity and its relation to passing:

• fixed identity vs. unfixed identity
• performance of identity
• displacement
• racial consciousness

Table of Contents

• I. Introduction
• II. Chapter One: The Fall of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”
• III. Chapter Two: The Supposed Super Hybrid Birdie of Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• IV. Chapter Three: The Problem with Hybrid Vigor in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
• V. Conclusion

Read the entire thesis here.

Liminality in the works: The novels of Charles Chesnutt

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 1996
154 pages
Publication Number: AAT 9709591
ISBN: 9780591169812

Susan Jane Doyle

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt’s work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt’s own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels.

I draw on Victor Turner’s definition of liminality, which comes from Turner’s rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt’s characters frequently attain liminal status in his work—they take on the “betwixt and between” characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt’s characters end up as marginals—Turner’s term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19th century in America.

Chesnutt’s novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel. The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. CLOTHING THE EMPEROR: THE ABSENCE OF TEXT IN “BAXTER’S PROCRUSTES“
• 3. FINDING THE COST OF FREEDOM: THE LIMTNAL QUALITY OF PASSING IN THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
• 4. LOST IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS: THE RACIAL SPACES IN THE MARROW OF TRADITION
• 5. PAST THE RUBICON: THE MERE ABSTRACTIONS OF THE COLONEL’S DREAM
• 6. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

“Japanese in the Samba”: Japanese Brazilian Musical Citizenship, Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Migration

University of Pittsburgh
2008
213 pages

Shanna Lorenz, Assistant Professor of Music
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

his doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study of musical culture among Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo, Brazil. Specifically, the study explores how the musical culture of this community has changed in recent years as a result of the dekasegui movement, the migration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Brazilians who have traveled to Japan since 1990 in search of work. In order to explore these questions, I conducted fieldwork between May and November of 2003 on three musical groups, Zhen Brasil, Ton Ton Mi, and Wadaiko Sho, each of which have found different ways to invoke, contest, and reinvent their Brazilian and Japanese musical heritages. By exploring these groups’ musical practices, texts, dance, costumes, and discourses of self-definition, this study offers insight into shifts in the ethnic self-definition and racial consciousness of the Japanese Brazilian community that have taken place as the result of face-to-face contact between Japanese Brazilians and Japanese under the conditions of contiguous globalization. This study contributes to our current understandings of the impact of circular forms of migration on the musical culture and ethnic identity of diasporic communities in the contemporary world.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Cuban Color Classification and Identity Negotiation: Old Terms in a New World

University of Pittsburgh
2004
246 pages

Shawn Alfonso Wells

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis analyzes how the Cuban Revolution’s transnational discourse on blackness positively affected social attitudes, allowing color identity to be negotiated using color classification terms previously devalued.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, most systems of social stratification based on color privilege “whiteness” both socially and culturally; therefore, individuals negotiate their identities with whiteness as the core element to be expressed. This dissertation examines how this paradigm has been overturned in Cuba so that “blackness” is now the featured aspect of identity. This is due in part to the popular response to the government’s rhetoric which engages in an international political discourse of national identity designed to situate Cuba contextually in opposition to the United States in the global politics of color. This shift has occurred in a dialectic environment of continued negative essentialized images of Blacks although blackness itself is now en vogue. The dialogue that exists between state and popular forms of racial categorization serves to recontextualize the meanings of “blackness” and the values attached to it so that color classification terms which indicate blackness are assumed with facility in identity negotiation.

In the past, the concepts of whitening and mestizaje (race mixture) were employed by the state with the goal of whitening the Cuban population so that Cuba would be perceived as a majority white country. Since the 1959 Revolution, however, the state has publicly claimed that Cuba is an Afro-Latin nation. This pronouncement has resulted in brown/mestizo/mulatto and not white as being the national ideal. The symbolic use of mestizaje in Cuban society and the fluidity inherent in the color classification system leaves space for manipulation from both ends of the color spectrum and permits Cubans from disparate groups to come together under a shared sense of identity. The ideology of the state and the popular perceptions of the symbolism that the mulatto represents were mediated by a color continuum, which in turn was used both by the state and the populace to construct, negotiate, maintain, and manipulate color identities. This study demonstrates that although color classification was not targeted by the government as an agent to convey blackness, it nevertheless does, and the shift in how identity is negotiated using racial categories can be viewed as the response of the populace to the state’s otherwise silent dialogue on “race” and identity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: Mulatas del Caribe
• Chapter One: The problem of race
  • Problematizing Race
  • Field Setting
  • Conducting Fieldwork in Cuba
  • Methodology
• Chapter Two: Historical Context of Color Classification in Latin America and the Caribbean
  • History of racial/color categorization in Cuba
  • The Era of Conquest and Colonization
  • The Plantation Era
    • Color classes
    • Pigmentocracy/Whitening
  • The Era of Capitalism
  • The Era of Socialism and Castro
• Chapter Three: Terms of Classification
  • Settings
    • The Census
    • The Carnet
    • The Medical Establishment
  • Cognitive Categories of Color Classification
  • Features of Classification
  • Constructing Identity
    • Blancos
    • Mestizos, Mulatos and Mestizaje
    • Negros
    • Chinos
• Chapter Four: The social significance of classification
  • Contested classifications
  • Stereotypes and Social Status
  • Shifts in meaning and preference of terms
• Chapter Five: Mulatizaje and Cubanidad
  • Mestizaje, Mulattoization and Cubanidad
    • The typical Cuban
  • Claiming Identity and Negotiating Mulatizaje
    • Extended Case Study #1
    • Case study #2
    • Case study #3
    • Case study #4
    • Case study #5
    • Case study #6
    • Case study #7
    • Case study #8
    • Case study #9
    • Case study #10
    • Case study #11
• Conclusions
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Glosses of Color Terms.
  • Appendix B: Census Enumeration of Writs of Freedom
  • Appendix C: Racial Categories of 1827 and 1841 Censuses
  • Appendix D: Census with Conflicting Terminology
• Bibliography

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1: Chronological Table of Data Collection Techniques
• Table 2: Census Terms.
• Table 3: Formal Labels on Documents
• Table 4: Descriptive Color Terms
• Table 5: Cognitive Map of Terminology
• Table 6: Labels of Pilesorting Groups.
• Table 7: Percentages of Informants Employing Particular Classification Terms
• Table 8: Johnson’s Hierarchial Clustering.
• Table 9: Color Continuum.
• Table 10: Informal Descriptors
• Table 11: Common Descriptors for Hair Texture
• Table 12: Common Descriptors for Facial Features.
• Table 13: Common Modifying Descriptors
• Table 14: Common Compound Terms
• Table 15: Descriptive Labels

Read the entire dissertation here.

“Not Tainted by the Past”: Re-Constructions and Negotiations of Coloured Identities Among University Coloured Students in Post- Apartheid South Africa

University of Pittsburgh
2013
152 pages

Sardana Nikolaeva

The South African coloured identity is a profoundly complex construction that, on the one hand, is interpreted as an ambiguous and ‘in-between’ identity and, on the other hand, its own ambiguity and complexity provides multiple means and strategies of production and articulation within various contexts. This dissertation seeks to examine a production of multiple discourses by post-apartheid coloured youth in order to re-construct and negotiate their identities moving through various social contexts of everyday experiences within diverse university settings. Similarly to other minority and marginalized youth, coloured students produce various discourses and practices as the medium of counter-hegemonic formation and negotiation of their minoritized and marginalized identities. In this sense, coloured students implement produced discourses and practices as instrumental agency to create resistance and challenge the dominant discourses on their marginalized and minoritized identities, simultaneously determining alternate characteristics for the same identities. Turning to the current conceptualizations of coloured identities as heterogeneous, non-static and highly contextual, I analyze two dominant discourses produced by the coloured students: coloured as an ethnic/hybrid cultural identity and an adoption of an inclusive South African national identity, simultaneously rejecting coloured identity as a product of the apartheid social engineering. Additionally, integrating an ecological approach and ecology model of identity development, created and utilized by Renn (1998, 2004) in her work that explores how multiracial students construct their identities in the context of higher education, I develop an ecology model of coloured students’ identity development and present the data to determine what factors and opportunities, provided by microsystems, mesosystem, exosystems and macrosystem of identity development, are significant and how they influence coloured students’ identities production, development and negotiation in and out of the university environments. The dissertation analysis on coloured identities builds on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Cape, South Africa, including limited participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the undergraduate and graduate coloured students of the University of the Western Cape and University of Stellenbosch, the Western Cape, South Africa.

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Schwarzsein, Weißsein, Deutschsein: Racial Narratives and Counter-discourses in German Film After 1950

Duke University
2012
286 pages

Michelle René Eley

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University

This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring Black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a dynamic and flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work—Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003)—provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.

Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films’ depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in a German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany’s history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for using poetic politics and communities of coalition to affect social change.

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“A Very Different Looking Class of People”: Racial Passing, Tragedy, and the Mulatto Citizen in American Literature

University of Southern Mississippi
2013-02-18
81 pages

Stephanie S. Rambo

Honors Prospectus Submitted to the Honors College of The University of Southern Mississippi In Fulfillment Bachelors of Arts In the Department of English

This project explores the mulatto citizen as one who prevails against tragedy, uses passing as an escape route to freedom and equality, and establishes a fixed racial identity in a color struck world. In nineteenth-century American literature, the mulatto penetrates a seemingly solid world of color to reveal racial anxieties of the time. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lonely (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853), Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) and Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted depict these mulatto characters as agents of social change. Each of these texts present the figure of the mulatto in a historical context, as a slave in the South and free/freedman in the antebellum North. Considering these various genres (esp. the blending of fiction and nonfiction at times), this study examines how different authors take a political stance by using the mulatto figure to define U.S. citizenship.

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a foundational text due to the political response during Abraham Lincoln’s administration and from abolitionists worldwide. Stowe represents those minorities excluded from the democratic process, namely African Americans and women who were both disenfranchised. I examine political fiction by Brown, Webb, and Harper due to their depictions of the laws of slavery and African Americans’ civil rights struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Most of these American writers were excluded themselves from the political process. Therefore, I consider these writers most capable to present the voice of the marginal, mulatto citizen.

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Understanding Ethnic-Racial Socialization and Cognition among Multiracial Youth: A Mixed Methods Study

University of Massachusetts, Boston
June 2013

Susan A. Lambe Sarinana

According to the 2010 census report, 9 million people (2.9% of the total population in the United States) identified as multiracial. Of the individuals who identified (or whose parents/guardians identified them) as multiracial, 4.2 million were younger than 18 years of age (www.uscensus.gov). Given that social scientists predict that the multiracial population is increasing so that up to one in five people might identify as multiracial by 2050 (Lee & Bean, 2004), it is critical that researchers examine various aspects of multiracial experiences, including the ways that multiracial youth understand complex concepts such as race, ethnicity, and culture.

This two-part study addresses the gap in literature on intergenerational ethnic-racial socialization processes within interracial families and ethnic cognition among multiracial adolescents. In Study 1, monoracial parents of multiracial children (ages 2-22) completed a survey about ethnic-racial socialization practices, colorblind attitudes, ethnic identity, parent psychological distress, and child psychosocial functioning, and demographic characteristics. Parental ethnic racial socialization beliefs and practices were related to ethnic identity, colorblind attitudes, and parents’ received socialization. In Study 2, multiracial 7th through 12th grade students completed a survey about their perceptions of parental ethnic-racial socialization, ethnic identity, psychosocial functioning, and demographic characteristics. In addition, multiracial adolescents participated in a semi-structured interview to assess Ethnic Perspective Taking Abilities (EPTA; Quintana, 1994). Results support the use of the EPTA model with multiracial youth to assess their understandings of race, ethnicity, and inter-group relations.

Download the entire dissertation here on 2015-06-01.

The Cuban Remix: Rethinking Culture and Political Participation in Contemporary Cuba

University of Michigan
2008
555 pages

Tanya L. Saunders

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

This dissertation examines the post-1959 activism of Cuba’s socially critical artists and intellectuals, and the effects of the Cuban state’s institutionalization of culture. I analyze the Cuban underground hip-hop movement as a case study of the ways in which Black artists and intellectuals in Cuba have employed cultural aesthetics to challenge contemporary inequalities organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. I address the social context in which the Cuban underground hip-hop movement emerged by linking it to Cuba’s revolutionary project and to other counter-cultural social movements in Cuba’s history and from other post-colonial contexts. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic, historical, and interview-based research, the study engages with existing theories of the state, culture, civil society and the public sphere, but also reveals their limitations, particularly when applied to non-European contexts. As such, the dissertation offers significant insights into the relations between politics and culture, hegemony and resistance, history and the imagination of a better future, both in Cuba and beyond.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• Chapter I: Introduction
  • 1.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop
  • 1.2 The Organization of the Dissertation
  • 1.3 Contextual Considerations: Latin American Politics and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.4 Contextual Considerations: The Cuban Revolution and the Aesthetic Debates
• Chapter II: Methodology
  • 2.1 Background
  • 2.2 Developing a Research Agenda
  • 2.3 Phase One
  • 2.4 Phase Two
  • 2.5 Phase Three
  • 2.6 Data Collection
• Section I
  • Chapter III: Public Spaces, Cultural Spheres: Rethinking Theories of Political Participation, Civil Society and Social Change
    • 3.1: Subaltern Critiques of Cold War Politics
    • 3.2 Post-Socialist? Neocolonial? Republican Socialism? Reflections on Cuba‘s State Project
      • Republican Ideals within a Socialist State
    • 3.3 Citizenship, Democracy and Civil Society in the Anglo-American Metanarrative of Citizenship
      • Citizenship and Civic Participation
    • 3.4 Discussion: ‘Non-Western’ Challenges to Social Change, Political Participation and Civil Society
  • Chapter IV: Civil Society and Art Worlds: Rethinking Politics and Political Participation
    • 4.1 Making the Connections: Art and Social Change
    • 4.2 Rethinking Cultural Logics: Culture, Political Participation and Grassroots Activism
    • 4.3 The Base and Superstructure of Culture: The Institutional Structure of Cuban Culture
    • 4.4 The Ministry of Culture
    • 4.5 Discussion
• Section II
  • Chapter V: Art and Revolution: Cuba‟s Artistic Social Movements and Social Change
    • 5.1 The alternative music scene: hip-hop and Anti-Modernist Aesthetics
    • 5.2 The Marginal Existence of Cuban Rock within Cuban Culture
    • 5.3 Nueva Trova: The Cuban Protest Music Movement
    • 5.4 Reflections on My First Nueva Trova Show
  • Chapter VI: Race, Place and Colonial Legacies: Underground hip-hop and a Racialized Social Critique
    • 6.1 Race and Cuba: Historical Considerations
    • 6.2 American Occupation and the Creation of the Cuban Republic 1898-1912
    • 6.3 The Revolutionary State Attempts to Solve the Race Problem in Cuba
    • 6.4. Making the Linkages: Discussion and Some Additional Thoughts
    • 6.5. Ethnographic Notes: Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 6.6. “Everyone Knows That Whites Exist, But No One‘s Sure About The Blacks” Theoretical Perspectives on Art, hip-hop and Transnational Blackness
  • Chapter VII: Racial Identity and Revolution: The (Re-)Emergence of a Black Identity Among Havana‟s Underground Youth
    • 7.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop and Symbols of Blackness
    • 7.1a Raperos, Activistas, Revolutionaries: Underground Hip-Hop and Social Change
    • 7.2 Notes on Language
      • 7.2.1 Underground hip-hop/Comercialización/Institucionalización
    • 7.3 Transmitting Blackness: Graffiti, T-Shirts and the Black Experience
    • Figure 7q. Album cover, Jodido Protagonista, by Randeée Akozta (independently produced, circa 2004).
    • 7.4 Underground Graffiti: NoNo La Grafitera
    • 7.5 Section Summary/Concluding Remarks
• Section III
  • Chapter VIII: Cuba‟s Sexual Revolution? Women, Homosexuality and Cuban Revolutionary Policy
    • 8.1 All the Women Are Straight and All the Homosexuals are Men: Gender and Female (Homo-) Sexuality
    • 8.2. Silent Women, Invisible Lesbians: Researching the Experiences of Lesbians in Cuba
    • 8.3 Notes on Contemporary Lesbian, Gay Life in Cuba
  • Chapter IX: “Siempre Hay Lucha/There Is Always a Struggle”: Black Women, Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.1 (1). ―No Particular Racial Subjectivity‖
    • 9.2 (2). The Racially Conscious Race Rejecters
    • 9.3 (3). The Racially Awakened
    • 9.4 (4). Racially Conscious Actors
    • 9.5 ¿Y Que Paso Con OREMI?/ And What Happened with OREMI? Black Lesbian Subjectivity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.6 Conclusion
  • Chapter X: “No Soy Kruda”: Las Krudas, Cuban Black Feminism and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.1 Who Are Las Krudas?
    • 10.2 Las Krudas: Raperas Underground
    • 10.3 Krudas‘ Black Feminist Discourse
    • 10.4 Como Existe La Heterosexualidad, Existe Homosexualidad/Just As There Is Heterosexuality, There Is Homosexuality
    • 10.5 Krudas and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.6 Reaction to Krudas‘ Work
    • 10.7 Conclusion/Discussion
• Chapter XI: Conclusion
  • The Sociological Implications of My Research
• Appendix
• Discography, Interviews, IRB Forms & Supplementary Materials
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Writing Mixed Race Asian Americans into the Nation: Narratives of National Incorporation in the Bildungsroman and the Multiracial Movement

Wesleyan University
May 2013
80 pages

May Lee Watase

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in American Studies

Introduction

In spring 2011, during my sophomore year at Wesleyan, the student group I was a member of, MIX (an acronym for mixed heritage, interracial, cross-cultural), invited Ken Tanabe, a multiracial graphic designer and social activist to host a Loving Day celebration on Wesleyan’s campus. Tanabe is the founder of Loving Day, an event that celebrates interracial love, multiethnic identity, and marks the 1967 anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia case that legalized interracial marriage. At our own event, Tanabe and a few other representatives of the Loving Day organization gave us Loving Day buttons, showed us a power point presentation, and chatted with us about our mixed race identities. At the end of the hour, Tanabe asked to take a picture of the group, snapping the exact moment the ten of us jumped in the air. About a month ago, two years following our celebration with Tanabe, I opened an email from the Loving Day listserv to find the following:

The Loving Day Project is pleased to announce the launch of Loving Day ON CAMPUS… a resource guide and forum to help students across the country connect, share, and inspire…Students have celebrated this important civil rights milestone in a variety of ways…We want every student and organization to have the best events possible, so we have created the Loving Day ON CAMPUS facebook page.

I clicked the link and found the picture of the Wesleyan MIX group on the Facebook page—there we all were, happy and smiling as the unofficial faces of Loving Day ON CAMPUS. I was slightly surprised to see myself there and began scrolling through the rest of the Loving Day website, becoming increasingly aware of the fact that Loving Day’s marketing strategy relied heavily on a celebratory “mixed-race” look…

In this thesis, I examine the relationship between the multiracial movement, the genre of the bildungsroman, or “coming of age novel,” and mixed race Asian American novels that are contextualized in the decade of the 1990s. The three novels I use in this study are Paper Bullets: a Fictional Autobiography, by Kip Fulbeck (2001); American Son: A Novel, by Brian Ascalon Roley (2001); and My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki (1998). I situate each novel within the rhetoric of the multiracial movement of the 1990s, which forwarded the institutionalization and legitimization of mixed race identity in American society both legally and socially, in the government, in education, and in popular culture. Each novel employs different functions of the bildungsroman, narrating the protagonists’ complex relationships with the boundaries of the nation, grappling with the notion of national belonging and validation. The bildungsroman structure and the multiracial movement both construct a progressive, teleological discourse, narrating a trajectory from exclusion and  marginality to an endpoint of inclusion within the nation as a celebratory affirmation of identity. By focusing on the ways in which these three mixed race Asian American texts subvert, manipulate, or are confined by the form of the bildungsroman and the rhetoric of the multiracial movement, I examine the pathways to inclusion in the American body politic and the positionality of the mixed race Asian American subject within and beyond the boundaries of the America. My studies of each text draw from contentious moments in the United States in the 1990s: the rhetoric of Ethnic Studies and cultural nationalism, the Rodney King beating and L.A. Riots, and the ascendancy of Asian economic power—all discourses that intervene in the narrative progress of the mixed race Asian American subject in American public discourse…

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