ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Black mixed-race people engage with, and draw from, their immediate environments to understand and construct their racial identities. Whilst conceptualisations of place in mixed-race studies can often be related to racial heritage, ancestral homelands, and nation state formations of mixedness, this chapter conceptualises place at a more granular level. Using the city as the entry point to the analysis, the chapter shows how conceptualisations of neighbourhood and locality are entangled with expressions of racial identity and belonging. Internal city borders and personalised cartographies are articulated by the participants, which are used to carve the city up into zones and areas that are given racial definition. I show that the social histories and ‘character’ of different places in the city are used in self-identifications and consider how key features of these personal maps, such as schools and youth clubs, have been significant sites of socialisation and racialisation. Overall, the chapter provides an alternative contextual analysis of mixedness that shifts the focus away from the personal micro-politics of mixed-race experiences, and place-making is shown to be an affective and relational process that holds multiple meanings in Black mixed-race lives.
