Racially mixed people in the global north are often portrayed as the embodiment of an optimistic, post-racial future. In Mixed Race Amnesia, Minelle Mahtani makes the case that this romanticized view of multiraciality governs both public perceptions and personal accounts of the mixed race experience. Drawing on a series of interviews, she explores how, in order to adopt the view that being mixed race is progressive, a strategic forgetting takes place – one that obliterates complex diasporic histories. She argues that a new anti-colonial approach to multiraciality is needed, one that emphasizes how colonialism shapes the experiences of mixed race people today.

Minelle Mahtani is an associate professor in the Department of Human Geography and the Program in Journalism at the University of Toronto-Scarborough. She is past president of the Association for Canadian Studies, 2011 Winner of the Glenda Laws Award from the Association of American Geographers, and a former national television journalist at the CBC.

Minelle Mahtani's profile page