ABSTRACT

People from a ‘mixed’ or ‘inter’ racial and ethnic background, and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, are of increasing political, public and intellectual interest internationally. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection interrogate notions of mixedness and mixing, and challenge stereotypical assumptions. They advance debates in the field through illuminating the complexity of specific historical trajectories, administrative practices and lived experience.

Recurrent themes woven throughout the chapters include:

  • boundaries and categorisation in terms of administration and government, and also of lived experience
  • the explicit and implicit politics of mixedness and mixing in terms of nation state interests, agenda and policies, as well as ‘on the ground’ social relations
  • the ways that mixedness and mixing shift in meaning and implications across time and place, shaped by different national, regional and or local contexts.

This volume shows that who is and is not ‘mixed’ is contested and understandings of mixedness and mixing, however conceived, need to be situated in the larger complex of ideas about race and its classification. International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing is an invaluable book for students and scholars of race and ethnicity.

chapter 1|9 pages

Introduction

Approaches to racial and ethnic mixedness and mixing

chapter 3|13 pages

Mixed race across time and place

Contrasting Australia with the UK

chapter 4|21 pages

From ‘Draughtboard Alley' to ‘Brown Britain'

The ‘ordinariness' of racial mixing and mixedness in British society 1

chapter 5|16 pages

When ethnicity became an important family issue

The case of Slovenian Istria

chapter 7|16 pages

Finding value on a council estate

Voices of white mothers with mixed-race children in St Anns, Nottingham

chapter 10|15 pages

How national context shapes international comparison of ‘mixed' people

The example of German, French and British large-scale survey datasets

chapter 11|13 pages

Not the same difference

Notes on mixed-race methodologies

chapter 12|15 pages

Situating mixed race politics