Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons

The Women’s Press
2001
336 pages
9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 0704347067; ISBN-13: 978-0704347069

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s new book offers the sharpest and most informed insight yet on mixed-race Britain. Opening with an historical perspective, she traces up to the twenty-first century the reactions – often rabid – to mixed-race relationships, and the influences of imperialism and large-scale immigration. With research drawn from coupls, parents and children, she offers unique insight into the stresses as well as the strengths of links across the racial divide. In a penetrating, constantly questioning text, she asks why social policy makers have been so slow to deal with the particular problems of this growing and significant group.

The influence of race on national identity is a crucial current debate and this book gives voice to the issue, addressing difficult dilemmas but also suggesting positive solutions to the often instinctive reactions aroused by the breaking down of old barriers. An essential report into the future of the nation.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy

Sociology Compass
Volume 3 Issue 5
Pages 847 – 852
2009-07-29
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00231.x

Katharine Tyler, Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity
University of Surrey

Over the last 20 years, there has been a technological advance and commercial boom in genetic technologies and projects. These developments include a renewed scientific interest in the biological status and genetic constitution of race. This aspect of genetic research is of interest to sociologists and others working in the field of race and ethnicity studies. While the consensus among sociologists is that race is a social construction with no biological foundations, innovations in genetic research have pushed sociologists and other social scientists to reflect upon the ways in which ideas of biology mediate everyday understandings of race. Anthropologists, cultural geographers and sociologists have begun to study the complex and ambivalent ways in which laypeople think about the biological and genetic constitution of racial identities. Central to this area of inquiry has been analysis of laypeople’s engagements with the new reproductive technologies, such as IVF. In addition, social scientists have begun to study laypeople’s uses of genealogical technologies that claim to trace family ancestries, including racial descent and ethnic origins. Ultimately, such studies enable a deeper understanding of the social construction of ‘race’, and in the course of so doing provide an important research avenue to challenge racism.

Author recommends
…Wade, Peter (ed.) 2007. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics. Oxford: Berghahn, New York.

This book brings together a collection of essays written by scholars who worked collaboratively for 3 years exploring everyday articulations of race, ethnicity and genetics across Europe in the face of innovations in genetic science. The book draws upon a rich array of anthropological studies of ‘assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed-race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building’ to explore how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation and nature are lived and experienced by people within differing European social contexts….

Post-race: The end of race?

Lecture 10 – Interracial Identities

With a marked rise in the number of children of mixed parentage, there is a growing body of literature that explores the experiences and identities of the members of interracial families. This body of literature challenges simplistic understandings of ‘race’, nation and culture through an interrogation of what it means to be the parent of mixed-race children and/or to grow up and claim a ‘mixed’ identity.

Read more of this abstract here.
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Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture

Routledge
2000-08-24
320 pages
Trim Size: 234×156
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-19402-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-19403-7

Edited by

Avtar Brah, Professor in Sociology
Birbek University of London

Annie Coombes, Professor of Material and Visual Culture
Birkbeck University of London

Hybridity and its Discontents explores the history and experience of ‘hybridity’ – the mixing of peoples and cultures – in North and South America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The contributors trace manifestations of hybridity in debates about miscengenation and racial purity, in scientific notions of genetics and ‘race’, in processes of cultural translation, and in ideas of nation, community and belonging.

The contributors begin by examining the persistence of anxieties about racial ‘contamination’, from nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation to more recent debates about mixed race relationships and parenting. Examining the lived experiences of children of ‘mixed parentage’, contributors ask why such fears still thrive in a supposedly tolerant culture?  The contributors go on to discuss how science, while apparently neutral, is part of cultural discourses, which affect its constructions and classifications of gender and ‘race’.

The contributors examine how new cultural forms emerge from borrowings, exchanges and intersections across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and conclude by investigating the contemporary experience of multiculturalism in an age of contested national borders and identities.

Contributors

Avtar Brah, Annie Coombes, Donna Haraway, Sandra Klopper, John Kraniauskas, Jo Labanyi, Charlie Owen, Anne Phoenix, S. Sayyid, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Anne Stoler, Nicholas Thomas, Amal Treacher, Lola Young

A Premonition of Obama: La Raza Cosmica in America

New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ)
Volume 26 Issue 4
Pages 100 – 110
Published Online: 2009-10-26
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01119.x

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in 2007, was one of the 20th century’s greatest literary journalists. He personally witnessed the dramatic post-World War II upheavals of decolonization and revolution across what we used to call “the Third World” and set down his reflections in such best-selling books as The Emperor, about the fall of Haile Selassie [I] of Ethiopia, and Shah of Shahs, about the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. He served on NPQ’s editorial board until his death.

When I last saw Kapuscinski for coffee at the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw in the summer of 2005 he was busy preparing a lecture on Herodotus, the ancient Greek traveler and historian regarded as “the father of journalism.”

In 1987, NPQ brought Kapuscinski to Los Angeles to roam around and observe North America’s largest “Third World city.” He stayed at the New Seoul Hotel in the heart of Koreatown, venturing from there all the way down to Disneyland, Hispanic East L.A. and the wealthy Westside. At the end of each day, we sat down to gather his impressions.

Kapuscinski saw the United States as the place where the idea of “la raza cosmica”—the cosmic race—would be realized. For him, America was a premonition of the plural, racially mixed, culturally hybrid civilization the whole world would one day become. In a way, his insight was also a premonition of the presidency of Barack Obama, a self-described cultural and racial “mutt.” In a world where the contamination of globalization has sparked troubling yearnings for a return to purity, being a nation of mutts, Kapuscinski understood, is America’s competitive advantage.

Working with multiracial clients in therapy: Bridging theory, research, and practice

Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
Vol 39(2)
Apr 2008
pages 192-201

Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate Professor
California Polytechnic State University

Lisa M. Edwards, Assistant Professor, Director of Child/Adolescent Community Program
Marquette University

Shane J. Lopez

The growing multiracial population has resulted in a need for professional psychologists to become knowledgeable about unique identity issues that may influence therapy with multiracial clients. The overarching goal of this article is to provide clinicians with current theory and research, as well as particular therapeutic strategies that will be useful in their work with multiracial clients. Specifically, this article (a) provides a brief review of some prevalent models of multiracial identity; (b) discusses several common themes derived from theory and research about multiracial identity, which should be taken into account when working with this population; and (c) offers some specific techniques and strategies that may be used in therapy to develop more accurate conceptualizations of multiracial clients.

Read the entire article here.

A content and methodological review of articles concerning multiracial issues in six major counseling journals

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Vol 55(3)
Jul 2008
pages 411-418

Lisa M. Edwards, Assistant Professor, Director of Child/Adolescent Community Program
Marquette University

Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate Professor
California Polytechnic State University

This study describes a comprehensive content and methodological review of articles about multiracial issues in 6 journals related to counseling up to the year 2006. The authors summarize findings about the 18 articles that emerged from this review of the Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Counseling & Development, The Counseling Psychologist, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, and Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. The authors specifically note trends in content and methodology as well as future directions for research.

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