Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise) - Softcover

Christopher B. Patterson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478032898 ISBN 13: 9781478032892

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that “brownness” reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter – from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawai’i, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship – Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher B. Patterson is Associate Professor of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Open World Empire and co-editor of Made in Asia/America, the latter of which was published by Duke University Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478032898
• ISBN 13: 9781478032892
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328