ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter foregrounds the conceptual framework for the book – place, time, and identity. It will show why the city is a useful framework for thinking through Black mixed-race identities, given that these urban centres, and increasingly their satellite towns, are the places where people have tended to mix in Britain. The chapter goes on to locate mixed-race historically, to explore how it becomes coded into broader discourses of race, when it slips out of sight, and importantly, how dominant ideas about mixed-race travel through time. It charts mixed-race as a colonial formation in the British West Indies and traces how it transferred from these colonial contexts to the metropole, with a particular focus on the early- to mid-twentieth-century period. A lengthy lull in mixed-race studies in the decades following the Second World War is identified, before its eventual re-emergence as a topic of enquiry circa 1990, referred to as the ‘missing wave’ of mixed-race studies, a gap which the book seeks to fill. The chapter also reflects on some of the critiques of mixed-race literature that emerged circa 1990 onwards and considers how the book is guided by, and builds on these, in its approach.
