One of the fastest growing ethnic populations in many Western societies is that of people of mixed descent. However, when talking about multicultural societies or ‘mixed race’, the discussion usually focuses on people of black and white heritage. The contributors to this collection rectify this with a broad and pluralistic approach to the experiences of ‘mixed race’ people in Britain and the USA.
The contributors argue that people of mixed descent reveal the arbitrary and contested logic of categorisation underpinning racial divisions. Falling outside the prevailing definitions of racialised identities, their histories and experiences illuminate the complexities of identity formation in the contemporary multicultural context. The authors examine a range of issues. These include gender; transracial and intercountry adoptions in Britain and the US; interracial partnering and marriage; ‘mixed race’ and family in the English-African diaspora; theorising of ‘mixed race’ that transcends the black/white binary and includes explorations of ‘mixtures’ among non-white minority groups; and the social and political evolution of multiracial panethnicity.
Table des matières
Introduction: Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’ David Parker and Miri Song
1. How Sociology Imagined Mixed Race
Frank Furedi
2. Re-Membering ‘Race’: On Gender, ‘Mixed Race’, and Family in the English-African Diaspora
Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe
3. Same Difference: Towards a More Unified Discourse in Mixed Race Theory
Minelle Mahtani and April Moreno
4. The Subject is Mixed Race: The Boom in Biracial Biography
Paul Spickard
5. Triples: The Social Evolution of a Multiracial Panethnicity: An Asian American Perspective1
Laurie M. Mengel
6. Color, culture and class: interrogating inter-racial marriage and people of mixed racial descent in the United States
Stephen Small
7. ‘Mixed Race’ In Official Statistics
Charlie Owen
8. Learning To Do Ethnic Identity: The Transracial/Transethnic Adoptive Family As Site And Context
Barbara Ballis Lal
9. ‘I’m A Blonde Haired Blue Eyed Black Girl’: Mapping Mobile Paradoxical Spaces among Multiethnic Women in Toronto, Canada
Minelle Mahtani
Notes On Contributors
Index
A propos de l’auteur
Miri Song is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Kent at Canterbury.