Böcker av Paul Spickard

Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity across a broad swath of space and time to understand the fluid nature of racial identities.

As the 20th century closes, ethnicity stands out as a powerful force for binding people together in a sense of shared origins and worldview. Regarding identity as a dynamic, on-going, formative and transformative process, this title illustrates how ethnic identity works in the real world.

These essays analyze how race affects people's lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from HawaiE i to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard's trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.