Title: Creating Multiracial Identities in the Work of Rebecca Walker and Kip Fulbeck: A Collective Critique of American Liberal Multiculturalism
Abstract: Though they differ in gender and racial mix, the authors Rebecca Walker and Kip Fulbeck use their respective memoirs, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001) and Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography (2001) to express the sometimes painful, complicated, and confusing experience of growing up racially mixed from the 1970s through the 1990s. This article reads their work side by side to demonstrate their common experience, revealing that both authors create multiracial identities to critique American liberal multiculturalism, which they view as an entrenched response to race and racial hierarchy inadequate in addressing the complexities, sensibilities, and vicissitudes of individual multiracial lives. Further, this article suggests that in the process of writing their respective memoirs, Walker and Fulbeck come to recognize and convey common theoretical insights regarding the contingency of social identities; the interconnectivity of race, class, gender, and sexuality; the historicity of multiracial self-awareness; the precarious status of multiracial bodies; and creative practice as a means to develop multiracial identities that empower the self to shift, evolve, and transgress multicultural designations.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-09-04
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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