Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenating the Discourse: Mixed Race Asian American Art and Literature

Jessica Hagedorn In Conversation with Wei Ming and Laura Kina
As part of The President’s Signature Series 2009-2010

2009-10-22 at 18:00 CDT (Local Time)
DePaul University Art Museum
2350 N Kenmore

This event is co-sponsored by Asian American Studies, The Cultural Center, English, The President’s Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, OMSA, and The Women’s Center.

What does it mean to be a Mixed Asian American Writer/Artist?

Mixed Race Studies scholar Wei Ming Dariotis, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies San Francisco State University, and Laura Kina, DePaul University Associate Professor Art, Media, & Design, Vincent dePaul Professor & Director Asian American Studies, will take on identity, categorization, and issues specific to Asian American mixed heritage populations in their dialogue with award winning writer, screenwriter and performer, Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, Danger And Beauty, and editor of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. Her next novel, Toxicology, will be published by Viking Penguin in 2011.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Social Process of Racial Identity Development Across Adolescence: Monoracial vs. Multiracial Pathways

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
Philadelphia, PA
2005-08-12

33 pages

Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

J. Scott Brown
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Glen H. Elder, Jr.
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research on multiracial individuals has been increasing recently, partly due to the advent of a new racial measurement convention in the 2000 Census. However, the cross-sectional nature of this work obscures a vital aspect of multiracial identity; multiracial identity appears much more fluid than monoracial identity. Using a longitudinal, nationally representative sample of adolescents, we find that a significant percentage of American adolescents demonstrate fluidity in racial self-reports as they make the transition to adulthood. We identify six possible pathways of multiracial identity development and find that significant numbers of adolescents report racial identification consistent with each pathway. Importantly, over time many more adolescents add a racial identity (Diversify) or subtract one (Consolidate) than remain consistently multiracial. We then turn to exploring mean differences between pathways along a number of psychological and social characteristics. Finally, we attempt to predict developmental pathways of racial identification within a multinomial framework. Ultimately, our study attempts to re-frame a developmental perspective by focusing on the demonstrated fluidity inherent in multiracial identity development. 

Read the entire paper here.

The Formation of Multiracial Identities

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting,
Sheraton Boston and the Boston Marriott Copley Place
Boston, MA
2008-07-31

Crystal Bedley
Rutgers University

Since the 1970s, research on the multiracial population has been largely theoretically driven without substantial empirical investigation into how mixed-race people form a multiracial identity. This project articulates the historical, political, and cultural contexts that multiracial people experience living in the United States in order to build a foundation for exploring the particular social and cultural factors that influence multiracial identity development in mixed-race persons. In addition, this project bridges the psychological and sociological literatures on the multiracial population through its discussion of social/ecological influences on identity and identity theory.  The author will conduct in-depth interviews (starting this spring) with 30-50 mixed-race respondents to better understand not only the multiracial identity formation process, but also to grasp the ways in which Hispanic/Latino identities complicate the formation of a multiracial identity, as well as exploring how context influences the expression of this identity.

Read the entire paper here.

Political Discourse on Racial Mixture: American Newspapers, 1865 to 1970

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference
Palmer House Hotel
Hilton, Chicago, IL
2008-04-03

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Brenna Marea Powell
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

We trace American political discourse around multiracialism, race-mixing, and mixed-race people from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights era. We use two new sources of data: counts of keywords such as “mulatto” and “multiracial” in two black and four white newspapers over 150 years, and a content analysis of themes and assumptions in almost 2,100 articles from the same newspapers, also using keywords that indicate racial mixture.

These datasets provide evidence on two analytic and two substantive points: First, the press’s treatment of mixture permits us to analyze “racial meaning,” defined as the varied ways in which Americans construe, practice, and judge group-based identities and identifications. Second, the datasets enable us to trace the timing of changes in ideas about racial meaning, and to map these changes onto a new periodization of distinct institutional treatments of racial mixture. Substantively, the dataset show vividly how much Americans argued over what counted as a race, how people were to be allocated to and across races, and what implications racial groupings should have. The contemporary racial order, which looks inevitable and orderly in hindsight, was not at all clear while it was being created. Most importantly, the language of the newspaper articles shows vividly that Americans’ debates over racial mixture and racially mixed people were (and continue to be) a critical site for contestation over racial hierarchy, advance, and equality.

Read the entire paper here.

Global Bodies: Narratives of Gendered ‘Mixed-race’

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Hilton San Francisco & Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel
San Francisco, CA
2004-08-14

Suki Ali, Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths College, University of London

‘Mixed-race’ bodies are a source of endless fascination in the popular imagination.  They may encompass a range of racialised types but are determined by what they are not.  Falling between the feared predatory ‘black’ body and the safe, unsexed ‘white’ body, the ‘exotic’ global body radiates subtle but powerful sexuality, it is the source of desire and unease, something to be admired and owned. How do those who are ‘mixed-race’ manage this discursive space which is constituted as a site of instability and uncertainty? For these people backgrounds it is a site of ambivalence, the source of strength and inauthenticity, a paradox which provides insights into the problematic nature of visible raciality. In this paper I use narrative and memory work to show how the revisioning of embodied experience operates as a form of recuperation of the indeteminability of the ‘mixed-race’ global body.

Read the entire paper here.