Mixed Race Studies

The Evolution of Mixed-Race Historiography and Theory: Inaugural Sawyer Seminar

University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2013-01-18, 14:00-17:00 PST (Local Time)

Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars Series at the University of Southern California.

How has the study of mixed race been historicized and theorized in Western academia? Has our understanding of mixed race changed in the 21st century, or is our public discourse still bound by past ideology, experience, and debate? Does theorizing mixed race bind or liberate us from the ideological pitfalls of racialist thinking?

Conference Convenors:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Southern California

Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
University of Southern California

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Ariela Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Falguni Sheth, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

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Am I that Race? Punjabi Mexicans and Hybrid Subjectivity, or How To Do Theory So That It Doesn’t Do You

Hastings Women’s Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 2 (Summer 2010)
page 311-332

Falguni A. Sheth, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

I. INTRODUCTION
 
This paper explores the conceptual and racial status of “Punjabi Mexicans” at the turn of the twentieth century. I refer primarily to marriages between East Indian men and Mexican or Mexican-American women on the West Coast and in the Southwestern United States. The scant information available about these alliances has been uncovered by several historians and an anthropologist.  In that literature, this group appears to be a “given,” i.e., it is portrayed as a coherent identity that emerges from a simple set of circumstances.  Yet, it is anything but a given; its existence and its collective and individual consciousness is created out of a complex nexus of legal, political, social, and natural environments that spurred the migration of East Indian men and Mexican women from their homelands and to their adopted lands. I am interested in examining the collective consciousness of individuals who are located in the same moment, but who are living in distinct but overlapping contexts. The structural sources – laws, institutions, explicit and implicit prohibitions, cultural trends, and economic interests – converge to give this population its subjectivity. By subjectivity, I refer to the complex existence of human beings, whose self-understanding is found in the nexus of historical, political, and social circumstances; juridical and social institutions such as laws and government; as well as in their creativity and imagination in negotiating and resisting those circumstances in order to survive or flourish. In other words, as Michel Foucault says, “There are two …

Read or purchase the article here.