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Ralina L. Joseph , Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2013, £16.99). Pp. 238. ISBN 082 2 3529 23 .
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Ralina Joseph's book is concerned with representations of the mixed-race (black/white) American subject in the period from 1998 to 2008. As such, it contributes to larger scholarly discussions regarding mixed-race identity in the 1990s and beyond, discussions that have typically revolved around the infamous Time magazine "New Face of America" cover of 1993, the campaign to have the category "multiracial" added to the US Census in 2000, Tiger Woods's self-proclaimed "Cablinasian" identity, and the vogue for mixed-race memoirs beginning in the 1990s. Several monographs have engaged with these phenomena over the last ten years and Joseph is certainly in august company here. I am thinking specifically of Eve Allegra Raimon's The "Tragic Mulatta" Revisited (2004) and, especially, Suzanne Bost's excellent Mulattas and Mestizas (2003), a comparative analysis of mixed identities in the US and Latin America from 1850 to 2000.
What, then, does Joseph have to contribute to this conversation? Joseph argues that the mixed-race subject in contemporary American culture is characterized by either "pain"...