ABSTRACT
Drawing together a range of sources and ideas, this chapter questions the eventuality of a contemporary mode of representation encompassing diverse people under a single, shared subjective understanding of being “mixed-race.” It highlights inherent ambiguities and troubling continuities with European modernist systems of reasoning whose main ambition was predictability. Situating the analysis in Hawaiʻi in forging specific types of vision, I argue the renewed chatter around “mixed-race” identity must be treated in relation to discourses on race amalgamation and to the problematic of identity/difference. I identify the ironic historical continuities with logics of the colonial state that the “mixed-race” identitarian framework relies on and is intertwined with. I propose more attention to the power dynamics at play in different kinds of identifications to engage more fully what is opened up and what is foreclosed in this strategy and to what extent they loosen or feed into the perpetuation of racial hierarchies.
