Conceptions of Mixed Race and the Politics of Temporality
Open Access
- Author:
- Valentine, Desiree
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 11, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Robert Lambert Bernasconi, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Robert Lambert Bernasconi, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Nancy A Tuana, Committee Member
Kathryn Sophia Belle, Committee Member
Ariane R Cruz, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Mixed Race
Political Ontology of Race
Racism
White Supremacy
Race
Liberatory Thought
U.S. Racial History
Blackness
Mixedness
Liberatory Politics - Abstract:
- In this dissertation, I critique more celebratory approaches to the politics of mixed race over the past thirty years in the U.S. I am critical of what I call the “Great Multiracial Hope,” or the figuring of mixed race/multiraciality as harbinger of a racially just and liberatory future. In concluding that a liberatory future is not far off given statistical increases of interracial coupling and mixed race persons, the Great Multiracial Hope is problematic to the extent that it substitutes an easy (and in many respects ‘given’) picture of a harmonious future for the difficult work of racial justice. This future is by no means given and discussions that figure the spectacle of mixed race and interraciality as itself or on some level redemptive are at best, a distraction, and at worst, a way of reconsolidating oppressive logics. Therefore, this project employs theorization on race, nation, sexuality, and queerness to offer a critical reassessment of U.S. racial history, the racial nation state, mixed race identity and identification, the intersections of race and sexuality, and notions of temporality operating in liberatory politics.