Mixed Race Studies

Instead of advocating for an endless slide of identities, Cablinasian works effectively as a marker of a racialized identity if its users momentarily stop its movement and claim identities, while retaining their original reflexivity. In two parallel arguments, cultural critics Stuart Hall (1996) and Candice Chuh (2003) advocate for an understanding of race as fiction, while simultaneously accepting the strategic “closure” of identity for political projects. This approach differs from conventional identity politics in its temporality. Rather than claim an essential, stable, and unitary community identity, these identities are contingent, flexible, and porous. Certainly, this transforms traditional notions of racial politics based on an unwavering allegiance to a particular racial identification, but it also makes for a more inclusive and descriptive rather than prescriptive politics.

LeiLani Nishime, “The Case for Cablinasian: Multiracial Naming From Plessy to Tiger Woods,” Communication Theory, Volume 22, Issue 1 (February 2012): 105.

Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

University of Washington
Department of Communications
2010-11-15

Amanda Weber

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.

The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future

Cinema Journal
Volume 44, Number 2 (Winter, 2005)
pages 34-49

Leilani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Applying the literature of passing to cyborg cinema makes visible the politics of cyborg representations and illuminates contemporary conceptions of mixed-race subjectivity and interpolations of mixed-race bodies. The passing narrative also reveals the constitutive role of melancholy and nostalgia both in creating cyborg cinema and in undermining its subversive potential.

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
Volume 39, No. 3/4

Guest Editors:

Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
University of Washington

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

Table of Contents

• Introduction to “The Politics of Biracialism” / Laura Chrisman
• Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism / Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Review Essay: Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobioraphy of Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker / Ralina Joseph
• Toward Black and Multiracial “Kinship” After 1997, or How a Race Man Became “Cablinasian” / Habiba Ibrahim
• Poetry: “The Art of Loving” / Madeleine Clifford
• Baby janay and Naomi Pabst: Negotiating Race Mixing, Adoption, and Transnationality / Naomi Pabst
• Reframing the National Family: Race Mixing and Re-telling American History / Catherine Squires
• Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union? / G. Reginald Daniel
• Books Reviews
  • Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton / LeiLani Nishime
  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America  by Catherine R. Squires / Manoucheka Celeste
  • Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon by Jane Rhodes / Madhavi Murty
  • Mixed Race Hollywood Edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas / Sarita Cannon