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This volume contains nine life narratives by Australians who reflect on the experience of being categorised on the basis of their facial appearance. The introduction by the editor provides the theoretical framework to these narratives. It discusses the relevance to notions of belonging and identity of the term 'mixed race', and concludes that we are all mixed race, whether we look white, black or 'ethnic'.
Notes
Contents: Maureen Perkins: Visibly Different: Face, Place and Race in Australia - Jan Teagle Kapetas: Lubra
Lips, Lubra Lips: Reflections on my Face - Jean Boladeras: The Desolate Loneliness of Racial Passing - Lynette
Rodriguez: But Who Are You Really? - Wendy Holland: Rehearsing Multiple Identities - Christine
Choo/Antoinette Carrier/Clarissa Choo/Simon Choo: Being Eurasian - Glenn D'Cruz: 'Where Are You Coming
From, Sir?' - Farida Tilbury: Hyphenated Realities: Growing up in an Indian-American-Bruneian Baha'i in
'Multicultural'Australia - Hsu-Ming Teo: Alien Asian in the Australian Nation - Ien Ang: Between Asia and the
West.
'A new direction in Australian life writing, of interest not only to those of 'mixed race' descent, but also to those interested in connections between identity, culture and power more generally. [...] The Introduction is enormously valuable, succinct and provocative, offering a terrific summation of the field. An important contribution to the wider field of mixed race studies.' (Jacqueline Lo, Australian National University) - From publisher's webpage.
Epigraph: 'When did you come to Australia?' - Prime Minister John Howard, on meeting Professor Terence Chi-Shen Tao at the pre-ceremony reception for Australian of the Year award in January 2007. Professor Tao, winner of the 2006 Fields Medal, the 'Nobel prize of mathematics', was born in Adelaide.
Contents
* Contents derived from the Berne,
c
Switzerland,
c
Western Europe,Europe,:Peter Lang,2007 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
'In this chapter, I contest the accepted view that there is such a thing as race and that identity is based on it. I make visible the ways of seeing that have positioned me as 'not quite not white'. I demonstrate through a number of stories the way the construct of race permeates our education practices and cultural representations, influencing the construction of racially classified positions for all Australians.
'The authors of this paper are all members of the same family ... [their] story is a reflection on the intergenerational continuity and discontinuity of the transcultural experiences of ...[their] Eurasian family, in which the boundaries ofculture, language, social hierarchies and geography are crossed and recrossed,