ABSTRACT
Stories of property inheritance can be troubling in multicultural and multiracial families. In this chapter, the authors contribute to communication inquiries of race, ethnicity, materiality, and narrative inheritance in multicultural families, focusing on the role of property—matter attained and lost, granted and given, seized and dispossessed—in the making of stories and histories in families. Building upon narrative and critical theory of family communication, the authors draw from family accounts and archival data to explore how family storytelling of property constructs personal and relational histories that hide oppressing sociopolitical histories and entangled relations of ownership. The storied understanding of property in their own multicultural family follows along three phases that highlight the contestability of identity in families: settled stories that sanitize family histories, unsettling encounters in multicultural family that disrupt sanitized histories, and the reckoning that brings painful legacies into the present moment.
