Full Description
Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, Native peoples of the missions of Spanish California, and African Americans in the post-civil rights era. At different times in their lives or over generations in their families, racial shape shifters have moved from one social context to another. And as new social contexts were imposed on them, identities have even changed from one group to another.
Moving beyond the static either/or categories of racial identification found within typical insular conversations about mixed-race peoples, Shape Shifters explores these mixed-race identities as fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. With contributions by Ryan Abrecht, George J. SÁnchez, Laura Moore, and Margaret Hunter, among others, Shape Shifters explores the forces of migration, borderlands, trade, warfare, occupation, colonial imposition, and the creation and dissolution of states and empires to highlight the historically contingent basis of identification among mixed-race peoples across time and space.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Shape Shifting: Reflections on Racial Plasticity
Paul Spickard
Part 1. Different Context, Different Identity
2. Places of Possibility: Shape Shifting in the Roman and Chinese Borderlands
Ryan R. Abrecht
3. Rabban Ṣauma: A Medieval Eurasian Shape Shifter
Colleen C. Ho
4. From Fan Gui to Friend: American Chinese, Social Identity, and the Quest for Subjectivity
David Torres-Rouff
5. Becoming Mixed Race: Northern California and the Production of Multiracial Identities
Alyssa M. Newman
6. "You Are the Shame of the Race": Dynamics of Pain, Shame, and Violence in Shape Shifting Processes
Angelica Pesarini
Part 2. Choosing Identity
7. William A. Leidesdorff: The Rise of a Shape Shifter and the Posthumous Fall from Grace of a Racial Imposter
Laura Moore
8. Indian, Civilizer, Slaveholder, and Politician: The Many Shapes of Peter Pitchlynn
Paul Barba
9. Half-Butterfly, Half-Caste: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Mixed-Japanese Drama "Osadda's Revenge"
Rena M. Heinrich
10. Shape Shifting in the Transpacific Borderlands: Expressions of Japanese Chicano Culture and Identity
Maria Jose Plascencia and George J. SÁnchez
11. Betwixt and Between: A Personal Odyssey through the Twilight Zone
G. Reginald Daniel
12. Shape Shifting into Blackness in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Margaret Hunter
Part 3. Compelled Identity
13. Mudrooroo: Aboriginal No More?
Paul Spickard
Contributors
Index
