Mixed Race Studies

ASNAMST 173S: Transcultural and Multiethnic Lives: Contexts, Controversies, and Challenges (AFRICAAM 173S, CSRE 173S)

Stanford University
Spring 2011

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Lived experience of people who dwell in the border world of race and nation where they negotiate transcultural and multiethnic identities and politics. Comparative, historical, and global contexts such as family and class. Controversies, such as representations of mixed race people in media and multicultural communities. What the lives of people like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama reveal about how the marginal is becoming mainstream.

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Addressing Issues of Biracial Asian Americans

Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies
Washington State University Press
1988
Chapter 15, pages 111-116

Edited by: G. Y. Okihiro, S. Hune, A. A. Hansen, and J. M. Liu

Stephen L. Murphy-Shigematsu

Revising the Asian American Studies curriculum

One of the more dramatic changes in the post-World War II Asian American population is the increase in those of biracial ancestry. Over the past forty years large numbers of Asian women have married Americans and come to the United States. [n 1] During this period, too, thousands of Asian American men and women have married outside their ethnic group. [n 2] The burgeoning population of biracial youth that has resulted from these developments, represents a significant change in the face of Asian America.

In the light of the above situation, one of the challenges confronting Asian American Studies is to adapt and revise a curriculum created in the early 1970s that was designed primarily for American born Chinese and Japanese. It has become necessary to redesign courses to better accommodate the needs, interests, and backgrounds of the more diverse group of Asian Americans who are presently underrepresented in the curriculum, and increasingly in Asian American Studies classes and in the general population. Those of biracial ancestry are one emerging group whose experiences and needs must be addressed in curriculum development…

Read the entire chapter here.

‘Celtic Samurai’ Tells Story of Hapa Family Life

Hokubei.com – North America’s Japanese Newsource
2010-06-18

“Celtic Samurai,” a storytelling program by Dr. Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu on the family life of a Japanese mother and American-born Irish father, will be presented by the Japanese American National Library and the Nichi Bei Weekly on Saturday, June 19, [2010] at 1:30 p.m. in the Union Bank Hospitality Room, located in the Japan Center’s East Mall, Post and Buchanan streets in San Francisco.

The subtitle, “A Boy’s Transcultural Journey Searching for Shamrocks in Zen Gardens,” expresses the playful nature of the stories that illuminate how political, legal and ideological forces influence the lives of families and individual identities

Read the entire article here.

The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-Heritage Asian Americans

Temple University Press
June 2001
296 pages
7×10
2 tables 4 figures 3 halftones
paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-847-3 (ISBN: 1-56639-847-9)

edited by Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima, foreword by Michael Omi

Largely as a result of multiracial activism, the US Census for 2000 offers people the unprecedented opportunity to officially identify themselves with more than one racial group. Among Asian-heritage people in this country and elsewhere, racial and ethnic mixing has a long but unacknowledged history. According to the last US Census, nearly one-third of all interracial marriages included an Asian-descent spouse, and intermarriage rates are accelerating. This unique collection of essays focuses on the construction of identity among people of Asian descent who claim multiple heritages.

In the U.S., discussions of race generally center on matters of black and white; mixed heritage Asian Americans usually figure in conversations about race as an undifferentiated ethnic group or as exotic Eurasians. The contributors to this book disrupt the standard discussions by considering people of mixed Asian ethnicities. They also pay particular attention to non-white multiracial identities to decenter whiteness and reflect the experience of individuals or communities who are considered a minority within a minority. With an entire section devoted to the Asian diaspora, The Sum of Our Parts suggests that questions of multiracial and multiethnic identity are surfacing around the globe. This timely and provocative collection articulates them for social scientists and students.

Table of Contents

• Foreword – Michael Omi
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reconfiguring Race, Rearticulating Ethnicity – Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima
• Part I: Multiraciality and Asian America: Bridging the Hybrid Past to the Multiracial Present
  • 1. Who Is an Asian? Who Is a Pacific Islander? Monoracialism, Multiracial People, and Asian American Communities – Paul Spickard
  • 2. Possibilities of a Multiracial Asian America – Yen Le Espiritu
  • 3. Servants of Culture: The Symbolic Role of Mixed-Race Asians in American Discourse – Cynthia L. Nakashima
  • 4. “The Coming of the Neo-Hawaiian American Race”: Nationalism and Metaphors of the Melting Pot in Popular Accounts of Mixed-Race Individuals – John Chock Rosa
• Part II: Navigating Sociocultural Terrains of Family and Identity
  • 5. Factors Influencing the Variation in Racial and Ethnic Identity of Mixed-Heritage Persons of Asian Ancestry – Maria P. P. Root
  • 6. Alaska’s Multiracial Asian American Families: Not Just at the Margins – Curtiss Takada Rooks
  • 7. The Diversity of Biracial Individuals: Asian-White and Asian-Minority Biracial Identity – Christine C. Iikima Hall and Trude I. Cooke Turner
  • 8. Black, Japanese, and American: An Asian American Identity Yesterday and Today – Michael C. Thornton and Harold Gates
• Part III: Remapping Political Landscapes and Communities
  • 9. A Rose by Any Other Name: Names, Multiracial/Multiethnic People, and the Politics of Identity – Daniel A. Nakashima
  • 10. Multiracial Comedy as a Commodity in Hawaii – Darby Li Po Price
  • 11. Doing the Mixed-Race Dance: Negotiating Social Spaces Within the Multiracial Vietnamese American Class Typology – Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde
  • 12. The Convergence of Passing Zones: Multiracial Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals of Asian Descent – Teresa Williams-León
  • 13. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Mapping Discussions of Feminism, Race, and Beauty in Japanese American Beauty Pageants – Rebecca Chiyoko King
  • 14. Mixed but Not Matched: Multiracial People and the Organization of Health Knowledge – Cathy J. Tashiro
• Part IV: Asian-Descent Multiraciality in Global Perspective
  • 15. “We Paved the Way”: Exemplary Spaces and Mixed Race in Britain – David Parker
  • 16. A Dutch Eurasian Revival? – Mark Taylor Brinsfield
  • 17. Multiethnic Lives and Monoethnic Myths: American-Japanese Amerasians in Japan – Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
  • 18. The Racial Politics of Being Dogla and of “Asian” Descent in Suriname – Loraine Y. Van Tuyl
  • 19. The Tiger and His Stripes: Thai and American Reactions to Tiger Woods’s (Multi-) “Racial Self” – Loraine Y. Van Tuyl
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors