Blasian Invasion


Book Description

Myra S. Washington probes the social construction of race through the mixed-race identity of Blasians, people of Black and Asian ancestry. She looks at the construction of the identifier Blasian and how this term went from being undefined to forming a significant role in popular media. Today Blasian has emerged as not just an identity Black/Asian mixed-race people can claim, but also a popular brand within the industry and a signifier in the culture at large. Washington tracks the transformation of Blasian from being an unmentioned category to a recognized status applied to other Blasian figures in media. Blasians have been neglected as a meaningful category of people in research, despite an extensive history of Black and Asian interactions within the United States and abroad. Washington explains that even though Americans have mixed in every way possible, racial mixing is framed in certain ways, which almost always seem to involve Whiteness. Unsurprisingly, media discourses about Blasians mostly conform to usual scripts already created, reproduced, and familiar to audiences about monoracial Blacks and Asians. In the first book on this subject, Washington regards Blasians as belonging to more than one community, given their multiple histories and experiences. Moving beyond dominant rhetoric, she does not harp on defining or categorizing mixed race, but instead recognizes the multiplicities of Blasians and the process by which they obtain meaning. Washington uses celebrities, including Kimora Lee, Dwayne Johnson, Hines Ward, and Tiger Woods, to highlight how they challenge and destabilize current racial debate, create spaces for themselves, and change the narratives that frame multiracial people. Finally, Washington asserts Blasians as evidence not only for the fluidity of identities, but also for the limitations of reductive racial binaries.




Between Black and Brown


Book Description

Between Black and Brown explores the experiences of Blaxicans, individuals with African American and Mexican American heritage, as they navigate American culture, which often clings to monoracial categorizations.




Generation Mixed Goes to School


Book Description

"The authors examine the stories and experience of mixed-race children and their families, in order to better understand how crossing racial boundaries within their own skin opens a world of difference and (often) difficulty that requires examination and response"--




Mixed-Race in the US and UK


Book Description

Contributing to the emerging literature on mixed-race people in the United States and United Kingdom, this book draws on racial formation theory and the performativity (i.e., "doing") of race to explore the social construction of mixedness on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.




Perceptions of East Asian and Asian North American Athletics


Book Description

This book highlights inconsistencies within the field of sports scholarship and provides an opportunity to open up and extend conversations about the intersection of sports media and race — particularly surrounding athletes of East Asian descent. Despite the growing influence of East Asian and Asian American/Canadian athletes, they are still underrepresented in Western media and in scholarship. This anthology adds much-needed literature to sports, popular culture, East Asian, and Asian American studies. The prominence of sports in global popular culture makes the intersections explored in this collection a crucial addition to existing conversations about both sports and East Asian/Asian American/Canadian studies.




Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South


Book Description

This volume examines the Africa-Asia relationship from a transregional perspective, namely as a set of emergent social, political and economic practices spanning a number of analytical and spatial scales. Drawing on a host of countries from both regions, the contributions illustrate how encounters increasingly transcend fixed territorial categories at local, national and regional levels. While large-scale political and economic considerations tend to dominate in Asia-Africa related literature—for instance, in China-Africa, BRICS and South-South discourses—the current volume seeks to foster dialogue between these broader levels of analyses and more localized social practices and experiences, including the role of civil society, cultural production and migration. With an emphasis on the “trans” aspects of inter-regional exchange, the volume contributes to a better understanding of new forms of space-making between these two increasingly important regions.




Structural Influence on Biracial Identification


Book Description

Stemming from the 2000 Census when respondents could indicate more than one racial category for the first time in history, Structural Influence on Biracial Identification is the first study of its kind to explore how urban environmental dynamics influence biracial identification in the United States. Several different biracial pairings are incorporated into the analysis. Rachel Butts uses relative model differences to quantify the standing of each racial group on a multi-tiered racial hierarchy. Notably, Butts uses non-White biracial groups to contrast “minority” defined numerically or oppressively. The analysis successfully extends macrostructural theory from the context of interracial marriage to the context of interracial identification. Much like interracial marriage has been used as evidence of racial integration in the past, Structural Influence on Biracial Identification presents a compelling argument for using interracial identification for measuring interracial integration in contemporary times.




Athletic Activism


Book Description

Rooted in a global, transnational perspective, Athletic Activism: Global Perspectives on Social Transformation demonstrates how athletic activism can not only impact global discourse about inequity across various social location, but foster institutional change that advances social justice.




Fixing American Politics


Book Description

Fixing American Politics: Solutions for the Media Age brings together original chapters from 34 noted scholars from two disciplines – political science and communication – asked to identify the most pressing problems facing the American people and how they can be solved. Authors address the questions succinctly and directly, with their favored solutions featured in chapter titles that exhort and inspire. The book gives the reader much to think about and debate. Should news outlets be funded with public money rather than by private enterprise? Are the new social media a boon or a bane to political elections? Is the American past dead, or is it living once again? Do churchgoers and environmentalists have anything to discuss? Is the FCC doing its job? Can political ads be made less toxic? Should Fox News be "cancelled?" Should cancel cultures be cancelled? Can we become more civil to one another and, if so, how? Fixing American Politics poses all the best questions ... and offers some concrete answers as well. This book is perfect for students, citizens, the media, and anyone concerned with contemporary challenges to civic life and discourse today.