Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity across a broad swath of space and time to understand the fluid nature of racial identities.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Shape Shifting: Reflections on Racial Plasticity
Paul Spickard
Part 1. Different Context, Different Identity
2. Places of Possibility: Shape Shifting in the Roman and Chinese Borderlands
Ryan R. Abrecht
3. Rabban ¿auma: A Medieval Eurasian Shape Shifter
Colleen C. Ho
4. From Fan Gui to Friend: American Chinese, Social Identity, and the Quest for Subjectivity
David Torres-Rouff
5. Becoming Mixed Race: Northern California and the Production of Multiracial Identities
Alyssa M. Newman
6. “You Are the Shame of the Race”: Dynamics of Pain, Shame, and Violence in Shape Shifting Processes
Angelica Pesarini
Part 2. Choosing Identity
7. William A. Leidesdorff: The Rise of a Shape Shifter and the Posthumous Fall from Grace of a Racial Imposter
Laura Moore
8. Indian, Civilizer, Slaveholder, and Politician: The Many Shapes of Peter Pitchlynn
Paul Barba
9. Half-Butterfly, Half-Caste: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Mixed-Japanese Drama “Osadda’s Revenge”
Rena M. Heinrich
10. Shape Shifting in the Transpacific Borderlands: Expressions of Japanese Chicano Culture and Identity
Maria Jose Plascencia and George J. Sánchez
11. Betwixt and Between: A Personal Odyssey through the Twilight Zone
G. Reginald Daniel
12. Shape Shifting into Blackness in the Post–Civil Rights Era
Margaret Hunter
Part 3. Compelled Identity
13. Mudrooroo: Aboriginal No More?
Paul Spickard
Contributors
Index

Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University Channel Islands. Ingrid Dineen¿Wimberly is a professor of history at University of LaVerne–Point Mugu and the author of The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 (Nebraska, 2019). Paul Spickard is a professor of history, Black studies, and Asian American studies at the University of California–Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity and Race in Mind: Critical Essays.