Re-imagining mixed race: Explorations of multiracial discourse in Canada

This dissertation analyses discourses of racial mixture, with particular focus on the Canadian context. I suggest that mixed race has been largely under-theorized in current racial and multiracial research and argue that this deficiency, as well as the controversies that mixed race often inspires, is an effect of the limitations in discourses about race, racism and identity. Throughout, I address many of the challenges, questions and controversies surrounding racial mixture (including struggles over identity, classification and the recent multiracial movement), and engage stories depicting experiences of mixed race people in Canada. I focus most closely on Lawrence Hill's Black Berry Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, Carol Camper's anthology Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women , and Shanti Thakur's documentary Domino. I use their stories as a means of commenting on broader struggles around racialization, racial identities, and racial discourse in our present multicultural context - one that is increasingly placing unbalanced focus on ideals of colour-blindness and neo-liberalism. My study is meant to inspire a re-thinking of some key concepts in contemporary theories of race and mixed race and the growing societal claims that we are moving toward a raceless state. The issues and questions I raise in this dissertation are intended to address the problems and concerns that many critical theories of race and mixed race fail to consider. I argue that creolization theory, particularly Edouard Glissant's theory of "Relation", his attention to rhizomatic identity, and his challenge to linearity and fixity, offer a critical challenge that might move complex discussions of mixed race and multiracial theory forward and away from the restrictions of binaries, racial biologism, and essentialist identity politics.