Mixed Race Studies

Re-Mix: Rethinking the use of ‘Hapa’ in Mixedrace Asian/Pacific Islander American Community Organizing

McNair Journal
Fall 2005

Angela S. Taniguchi, McNair Scholar
Washington State University

Linda Heidenreich, Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Women’s Studies
Washington State University

The term Hapa is Hawaiian in origin and roughly means ‘half’. Recently, many mixedrace Asian/Pacific Islanders on the mainland began identifying with and using the term Hapa to create organizations specific to their needs.  Largely recognized as a “California phenomenon,” the number of Asian-descent multiracials identifying as Hapa is ever increasing.  Here I investigate the use of the term Hapa historically, as well as its current use in California.  I then discuss the potential political implications of Mixedrace Asian/Pacific Islanders coalescing under the term.

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‘Canadian’ and ‘Being Indian’: Subject Positions and Discourses Used in South Asian-Canadian Women’s Talk about Ethnic Identity

Culture & Psychology
Volume 15, Number 2 (2009)
pages 255-283
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X09102893

Rebecca L. Malhi
University of Calgary, Canada, rmalhi@ucalgary.ca

Susan D. Boon
University of Calgary, Canada, sdboon@ucalgary.ca

Timothy B. Rogers
University of Calgary, Canada

Ethnic identity descriptions can be viewed as ‘subject positions’ (Davies and Harré, 1990) that are dynamically adopted and discarded for pragmatic purposes through the medium of socialinteraction.  Inthe present paper, we use positioning theory to explore the multiple ways our participants—South Asian-Canadian women—positioned themselves and others in conversations about their ethnic identity.  A discourse analysis of participants’ talk revealed a tendency to privilege a ‘hybrid’ Canadian/South Asian identity over a unicultural one.  Moreover, in the rare instances when participants positioned themselves with a unicultural identity, subtle social pressure from conversational partners seemed to induce them to reposition themselves (or others) with a hybrid identity. We conclude by giving possible reasons for such a preference and by discussing the ways in which the current study corroborates and expands on the extant literature.

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`Caucasian and Thai make a good mix’

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 12, Number 1 (February 2009)
pages 59-78
DOI: 10.1177/1367549408098705

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

This article examines the current celebration of Eur/Asianness in the media and popular culture. It traces representations of the `mixed race’ body, from colonial discourses of degeneracy and monstrosity to capitalist discourses of commercialized exoticism and `beauty’.  It then examines how people of Thai and non-Thai parentage interviewed in Britain and Germany in 2001 and 2002 negotiated gendered and racialized readings of their bodies. Narratives of multi-racialized embodiment brim with racism, as the `valuable’ or `pathological’, `good’ or `bad mixes’, of unlike body parts grafted onto each other. This necessitates a critical re-evaluation of `hybridity’ debates, which treat biological racism as a past phenomenon that can be metaphorized for cultural processes of identification.

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