Minelle Mahtani – författare

Mixed Race Amnesia is an ambitious and critical look at how multiraciality is experienced in the global north. Drawing on a series of interviews, acclaimed geographer Minelle Mahtani explores some of the assumptions and attitudes people have around multiraciality.She discovers that, in Canada at least, people of mixed race are often romanticized as being the embodiment of a post-racial future – an ideal that is supported by government policy and often internalized by people of mixed race. As Mahtani reveals, this superficial celebration of multiraciality is often done without any acknowledgment of the freight and legacy of historical racisms. Consequently, a strategic and collective amnesia is taking place – one where complex diasporic and family histories are being lost while colonial legacies are being reinforced.Mahtani argues that in response, a new anti-colonial approach to multiraciality is needed, and she equips her readers with the analytical tools to do this.

Mixed Race Amnesia is an ambitious and critical look at how multiraciality is experienced in the global north. Drawing on a series of interviews, acclaimed geographer Minelle Mahtani explores some of the assumptions and attitudes people have around multiraciality.She discovers that, in Canada at least, people of mixed race are often romanticized as being the embodiment of a post-racial future – an ideal that is supported by government policy and often internalized by people of mixed race. As Mahtani reveals, this superficial celebration of multiraciality is often done without any acknowledgment of the freight and legacy of historical racisms. Consequently, a strategic and collective amnesia is taking place – one where complex diasporic and family histories are being lost while colonial legacies are being reinforced.Mahtani argues that in response, a new anti-colonial approach to multiraciality is needed, and she equips her readers with the analytical tools to do this.

Patterns of migration and the forces of globalization have brought the issues of mixed race to the public in far more visible, far more dramatic ways than ever before. Global Mixed Race examines the contemporary experiences of people of mixed descent in nations around the world, moving beyond US borders to explore the dynamics of racial mixing and multiple descent in Zambia, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Okinawa, Australia, and New Zealand. In particular, the volume's editors ask: how have new global flows of ideas, goods, and people affected the lives and social placements of people of mixed descent? Thirteen original chapters address the ways mixed-race individuals defy, bolster, speak, and live racial categorization, paying attention to the ways that these experiences help us think through how we see and engage with social differences. The contributors also highlight how mixed-race people can sometimes be used as emblems of multiculturalism, and how these identities are commodified within global capitalism while still considered by some as not pure or inauthentic. A strikingly original study, Global Mixed Race carefully and comprehensively considers the many different meanings of racial mixedness.