Mixed Race Studies

…There is a lot to unpack and a lot of mistruths around this historical concept of mixed race.  I’m 40 years of age and some young people ask me if there are any people that are older than me who are mixed race. Because in their minds people who are mixed race are usually, you know, under 40 years of age. So historically they haven’t got any context to see that people have been mixing for hundreds and hundreds of years.  And that kind of scares me…

Bradley Lincoln of (mix-d:), Interview on Mixed Chicks Chat. January 27, 2010.

Filling in the Chasm Between Black and White

The Siskiyou
Southern Oregon University
2006-02-27

Shannon Luders-Manuel

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the lecture by James McBride, having read his memoir a few years ago when I was at my most-heightened search for identity. Without retaining much of the details of his life story, what has remained with me is the knowledge that someone else had experiences similar to my own. To know that he too struggled with feelings of shame over his white mother and questions over whether he, as a black child, had been adopted, brought down the wall of alienation I felt was between me and the rest of the world…

Read the entire article here.

Diverse Identities in Interracial Relationships: A Multiethnic Interpretation of “Mississippi Masala” and “The Wedding Banquet”

Xchanges
Volume 4, Number 1 (September 2004)

Lan Dong, Assistant Professor of English
University of Illinois, Springfield

In their introduction to the collection Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out “much of the work on race within the United States has tended to emphasize a discussion of particular ethnicities. There has not been much engagement with the interrelations among such communities, nor with how the multicultural debates cross various national borders” (Shohat and Stam 3). In the past decade, nevertheless, discussions of ethnicity and identity among U.S. critics frequently note the prominent multiethnic and interethnic relations among racial groups [1].

In this paper, I build upon theories of multiethnicity and interethnicity in my examination of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity within the body we label “Asian diaspora.” In particular, my argument is focused on the realization and construction of the diverse identities of Asian diaspora living in contemporary America in the context of interracial relationships. I choose to analyze Mississippi Masala (1991) directed by Mira Nair and The Wedding Banquet 喜宴(1993) directed by Ang Lee since interracial romance in both films functions as the primary plot. The struggle for love and individuality is intertwined with the protagonists’ complicated identities by way of negotiation between personal, familial, communal, and social concerns. I use this film analysis to suggest the intersection of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism in Asian diaspora’s pursuit of their reconstructed, rather than prescribed, identities…

Read the entire article here.