Mixed Race Capital: Cultural Producers and Asian American Mixed Race Identity from the Late Nineteenth to Twentieth Century
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2018-05
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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This dissertation traces and connects the contemporary scholarship of Asian American racial mixing to a longer historical story or genealogy, thematizing the stories of racial negotiation and mixed race capital by focusing on four Asian American mixed race cultural producers from the late nineteenth to twentieth century—bohemian poet and lecturer Sadakichi Hartmann, writer Winnifred Eaton, actress Merle Oberon, and musician Bardu Ali. Against the grain of discourses that proclaim the “birth” of multiraciality in the 1990s, this dissertation demonstrates that being racially mixed was an identity, a career, and an economic survival tactic that was stitched into the United States cultural fabric beginning as early as the late nineteenth century. This was a time of increased Asian immigration and parallel rise in legal restrictions, anti-immigration laws, and discourses of scientific racism used to restrict “undesirable” races from entering and becoming citizens in the United States. These cultural producers strategically capitalized on their racial ambivalence, re-packaging and marketing their racial identities in ways that enabled economic success and cultural legitimacy.
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Asian Americans--Race identity, Hartmann, Sadakichi, 1867-1944, Oberon, Merle, 1911-1979, Eaton, Winnifred, 1875-1954, Ali, Bardu
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