Review by Choice Review
Christian seeks to explore the ways that mixed-race people both acquire and shape a racial identity as defined by their society's racial parameters. Locating this research project within a social science tradition dating to the Chicago School's preoccupation with the marginal role of the mulatto and extending to the influential works of Paul Spickard, Maria Root, and F. James Davis, the author presents a cross-cultural perspective. The fruits of his efforts are uneven and underdeveloped, the consequence of being too ambitious. The empirical core of the book involves in-depth interviews with 20 mixed-race people in Liverpool. Though insightful, the interviews have a decidedly truncated quality, in part a result of the author's failure to ask the right kinds of follow-up questions. The theoretical discussions fail to do justice to the existing literature. The comparative framework derives from a review of the racial hierarchies of Jamaica and South Africa, without the focus on the way mixed-race actors make sense of their interstitial social locations. Ultimately, the conclusions are as thin as the book itself. General and undergraduate. P. Kivisto; Augustana College (IL)
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
