Abstract

128 BOOK REVIEWS Mixed race cinemas: multiracial dynamic in America and France, by Zélie Asva, New York and London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 216 pp., First Edition, Hardback, £96.00 (Ebook), ISBN 9781501312458, £103.68, ISBN 9781501312465 While one could perceive Zélie Asva’s monograph as a thorough sociocultural analysis of the mixed-race figure in film history, this would minimize the importance of such work beyond critical readings of the film. The book successfully argues the potential social change and the importance of mixed race cinema as a progressive agent of the politics of difference. In contrast to multicultural dictums regarding the politics of racial equity and dignity that often flatten the lived experience of mixed race individuals, mixed race cinema or ‘mixed films’, go past the simplified approaches of colour-blindness with specific potencies –‘to illuminate the injustices of white centrism, the plethora of trans identities, and the value of non-white cultures’(169). Similar to the helpfulness of Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg to move beyond gender essentialist frameworks or Gloria Anzaldua’s new mestiza that contests borderlands and thrives beyond binary identifications, the specificity of the mixed race character disrupts historical judgements on racial inferiority. In other words, the mixed-race figure is well