The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans (review)

Michael Omi begins his forward to The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans, edited by Teresa Williams-Leon and Cynthia L. Nakashima, by noting that multiraciality is fascinating precisely because it "renders suspect and throws into question deeply held notions of race, racial classification, and racial identity" (ix). This book does much more than just put such notions into question. In moving beyond the black/white racial binary, it interrogates issues of culture and ethnicity and their influence on the mixed race self from interior as well as exterior spaces. This first book focused exclusively on multiracials of Asian descent is interesting for both what it articulates about mixed heritage Asians and for what it leaves unstated.

Mixed race Asians, as many of the included articles make clear, are nothing new to the world stage. From European colonization and American wars, to the stunning changes in 1965 to U.S. immigration laws, the socio-historical conditions that led to Asian multiracials have made it surprising, if anything, that a collection like this did not appear earlier. This volume's most important contribution is its expansion in terms of depth and breadth of the canon of mixed race study that already includes work on black/white intermarriage and its thematics in literature, law, and history by critics such as Werner Sollers, and socio-psychological studies of mixed race, like work produced by Maria Root and the authors in her two edited volumes. In bringing to the scholarly arena international and domestic perspectives regarding mixed heritage Asians, The Sum of Our Parts is undoubtedly a benchmark collection.

Sum of Our Parts goes on, moreover, to offer—by direct argument and tacit consensus—a number of very important points that move the study of Asian descent multiracials to a new plateau. Every essay stands firm on understanding race as socially-produced, and by the end of the book, it is very clear that the idea of "mixed race" is also not only socially determined, but is also produced as an accumulation of micro-moments, as in "passing," and macro-moments, formed by group-specific historical, cultural, regional, and familial conditions. In moving beyond the continental United States to Alaska, Hawai'i, and overseas, this collection offers valuable comparisons of like groups (Japanese-descent Americans, for example) to draw into relief the importance of class, sexuality, war, family, ethnicity, generational status, and minority/minority versus minority/majority multiracialism to the shaping of the mixed race Asian subject. Heterogeneity rather than homogeneity; matriarchalism rather than patriarchalism; separatism rather than assimilationism; and centrality rather than marginality are thematic motifs that, according to this volume, have fundamentally shaped and defined the experience of mixed heritage Asians.

Organized into four sections, The Sum of Our Parts first situates Asian multiraciality in its historical moment. By establishing (Asian Pacific) American historical trends and consequent mixed race stereotypes (for example, the tragic mulatto, the "best of both worlds," the "cosmopolitan every-person"), these essays demonstrate the need and relevance of research concerning mixed race. They lay the groundwork for studies that disrupt, challenge, and problematize a history filled with anti-miscegenation laws, intra-Asian discrimination, and sexual exotification. Section Two interrogates the psychological dimensions of mixed race Asian subjectivity, especially in relation to the power of family influence. Through survey instruments and personal interviews, the authors of the articles included in this section propose new paradigms of identity formation, including "symbolic ethnicity," for the mixed heritage Asian largely isolated from ethnic sources, and "color coding" in which parental behavior is potentially collapsed with race-specific stereotypes. Section Three collectively analyzes public perceptions of mixed raciality from the discourses of naming to the intersections of class or sexuality with mixed heritage ancestry. By implication, this part of the book dispenses with the naïve but often presumed assumption of the ability of mixed race individuals completely to self-identify by discussing the reception of the...