Shape Shifters

Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity

Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Paul Spickard

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496206633
• eBook ISBN: 9781496216984
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Shape Shifting
• Part 1
• 2. Places of Possibility
• 3. Rabban Ṣauma
• 4. From Fan Gui to Friend
• 5. Becoming Mixed Race
• 6. “You Are the Shame of the Race”
• Part 2
• 7. William A. Leidesdorff
• 8. Indian, Civilizer, Slaveholder, and Politician
• 9. Half-Butterfly, Half-Caste
• 10. Shape Shifting in the Transpacific Borderlands
• 11. Betwixt and Between: A Personal Odyssey through the Twilight Zone
• 12. Shape Shifting into Blackness in the Post–Civil Rights Era
• Part 3
• 13. Mudrooroo
• Contributors
• Index
• About Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai
• About Ingrid Dineen‑Wimberly
• About Paul Spickard
• Series List