Leilani Nishime, "Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2014)

Summary

Leilani Nishime's Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014) challenges the dominant U.S. cultural narrative that imagines multiracial people as symbols of a future United States where race has ceased to function as a viable category. Nishime considers how representations of mixed race people often negate the significance of race by seeing racial mixture as an unprecedented social development that can promise a future free of race. By reading an archive of visual pop-culture that includes the celebrity of Tiger Woods, the film series "The Matrix" and reality television, Nishime considers how various narratives of multiracial Asian Americans can rupture naturalized notions of racial difference.

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Christopher Patterson

Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia.

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