Critical Mixed Race Studies: Research and Teaching on the Margins in the Mainstream

Critical Mixed Race Studies: Research and Teaching on the Margins in the Mainstream

University of California, Los Angeles
Haines Hall 279
Friday, 2013-02-15, 12:00-13:30 PST (Local Time)

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

In the early 1980s, there emerged several important unpublished doctoral dissertations on multiraciality and the mixed race experience in the United States. Numerous scholarly works were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They composed part of the emerging field of Mixed Race Studies although that scholarship did not yet encompass a formally defined area of inquiry. What has changed is that there is now recognition that there is an entire field specifically devoted to the study of multiracial identity and the mixed race experience. Rather than being an abrupt shift or change in the field, that field, Mixed Race Studies, is now being formally defined at a time that beckons scholars to be more critical. That is, this moment calls upon scholars to look back and assess the merit of arguments over the last twenty years and their relevance for future research. This talk seeks to map out this critical turn in Mixed Race Studies and discusses to what extent Critical Mixed Race Studies diverges from previous explorations of the topic, thereby leading to the discovery of new terrain in the field.

Dr. Daniel is Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. He teaches courses exploring comparative race and ethnic relations and he has numerous publications that explore this topic. Some of his publications include the books entitled More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2002) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006), and Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (2012).

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