Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity

Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity. 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. This volume expands our understandings of how individuals and ethnic groups identify themselves within their own sociohistorical contexts.

The essays in Shape Shifters explore different historical eras and reach across the globe, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, the Native peoples of the missions of Spanish California, and racial shape shifting among 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. This is not racial, ethnic, or religious imposture. It is simply the way that people's lives unfold in fluid sociohistorical circumstances.

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.

Author: Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 01/01/2020
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.73lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9781496206633

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2020

About the Author
Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University Channel Islands. Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly is a professor of history at University of LaVerne-Point Mugu, and the author of The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862-1916 (Nebraska, 2019). Paul Spickard is a professor of history, Black studies, and Asian American studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity and Race in Mind: Critical Essays.