Multiraciality, Haunting, and “People Like Us”

Academic and popular interest in multiracial or mixed-race identities has grown immensely over the past two decades in both European and North American contexts. In part, this interest is in response to the increased number of mixed-race people visible in public spheres and their efforts to achieve formal recognition of mixed-race status. The interest also reflects persistent racial anxieties and concerns over racial definitions as well as the lingering though reinvented eugenicist discourses that haunt racial understandings in the Western world. Jinthana Haritaworn's recent book, The Biopolitics of Mixing, helps to make sense of the complex ways in which discourses of multiraciality operate through the lens of Thai multiracialities in Germany and Britain, two countries often regarded as having different racialized histories and presents. Based primarily on empirical data from interviews with people of part-Thai parentage, interwoven with analysis of media texts, policy debates, and scientific discourse, Haritaworn's book...