Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality - Hardcover

Mahtani, Minelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0774827726 ISBN 13: 9780774827720

Publisher: UBC Press, 2014

Synopsis

Racially mixed people in the global north are often portrayed as the embodiment of an optimistic, post-racial future. In Mixed Race Amnesia, Minelle Mahtani makes the case that this romanticized view of multiraciality governs both public perceptions and personal accounts of the mixed race experience. Drawing on a series of interviews, she explores how, in order to adopt the view that being mixed race is progressive, a strategic forgetting takes place – one that obliterates complex diasporic histories. She argues that a new anti-colonial approach to multiraciality is needed, one that emphasizes how colonialism shapes the experiences of mixed race people today.

About this title

Review:

Mixed Race Amnesia draws on theories of race, human geography, and gender studies, as well as interviews and personal diaries, to tease out the ways in which mixed race women defy, bolster, speak, and live racial categorization. Since both the author and her interviewees neither “live” nor ascribe to racial authenticity, readers are shown a way through which we, collectively, might reimagine how we “see” and engage with social differences. Author: Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

From the Author:

Minelle Mahtani is an associate professor in the Department of Human Geography and the Program in Journalism at the University of Toronto-Scarborough. Her research interests include anticolonial approaches toward the study of mixed race theory and practice; exploring the intersections between white supremacy and journalistic representations of race; and documenting and analyzing the experiences of women of colour in the academy. She is past president of the Association for Canadian Studies, 2011 Winner of the Glenda Laws Award from the Association of American Geographers, and a former national television journalist at the CBC.

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0774827726
• ISBN 13: 9780774827720
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288