Rethinking Mixed Race (Hardcover)

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-white background. The contributors to this collection rectify this with a broad approach to mixed race. The contributors argue that people of mixed descent reveal the arbitrary, contested and contradictory logic of categorization underpinning racial divisions. Falling outside the prevailing definitions of radicalized identities, their histories and experiences illuminate the complexities of identity formation in the contemporary multicultural context.The authors, themselves from a wide variety of mixed ethnic heritages" such as Iranian-Indian and Chinese-Mexican" examine a range of examples, such as gender, 'mixed race' and family in the English-African diaspora; 'mixed race' and class formation in the Caribbean; rediscovering Eurasian identity; transracial and intercountry adoptions in the US and Britain; the social evolution of a multiracial panethnicity; and inter-racial marriage in the United States. Contributors include Barbara Ballis Lal, Paul Spickard, Laurie Mengel, and Stephen Small.