ITYC Interview: Multicultural Psychologist and Author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture. This article explains the history of hybridity and its major theoretical discussion amongst the discourses of race, post-colonialism, Identity (social science), anti-racism & multiculturalism, and globalization. This article illustrates the development of hybridity rhetoric from biological to cultural discussions.

Hybridity as racial mixing

Hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used to classify the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture. As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century. Scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans and Asians were racially inferior to Europeans. The fear of miscegenation that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race. Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation. Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit…

Wikipedia

ITYC Interview: Multicultural Psychologist and Author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

ITYC Interview: Multicultural Psychologist and Author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color
2013-02-11

Michelle Clark-McCrary, Host

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

ITYC had the great pleasure of talking with multicultural psychologist and author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu about his latest book When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian Identities. Through deeply personal, raw storytelling, When Half Is Whole explores the complex journey of identity formation in a world where social and economic realities of race affect every facet of human life both here in the United States and abroad in countries like Japan…

Listen to the interview here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 at 02:56Z and is filed under Asian Diaspora, Audio, Interviews, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

ITYC Interview: Multicultural Psychologist and Author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

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