This article advocates for the interdisciplinary use of critical race theory and critical rhetorical theory in communication to analyze racialized language and to evaluate the cultural and political significance of new racial discourses in the United States. The article examines the dissenting opinion in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) and the congressional hearings on the Tiger Woods Bill (1997), two key instances of public debate over multiracial categories. The article then turns to Tiger Woods' term ''Cablinasian'' and the possibilities of an alternative and contestory multiracial nomenclature, shifting the critique away from Woods' celebrity or politics and toward the legal history and rhetorical potential of the word itself.

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Science fiction rewrites the conflict between self and Other as encounters between human and alien, providing an ideal generic cover for an exploration of the evolving role of the U.S. globally. The sci-fi television series, Battlestar Galactica, depicts the two most familiar tropes of the Asian interracial family, the transnationally adopted Asian girl and the marriage of an Asian woman and a white man, reimagined as an interracial and interspecies family. Both kinds of multiracial families illustrate how metaphorical representations of U.S./Asian relations of have altered over time to rationalize the disjuncture between a celebratory rhetoric of globalization and U.S. multiculturalism and the neo colonial flow of Asian female labor.Although it attempts to show us future worlds, science fiction in mass media has much more to say about our contemporary moment. It would seem to be the quintessential genre of escapist fantasy, yet, along with its close twin of horror, science fiction makes manifest our collective anxieties, transforming and projecting them onto monstrous and alien bodies. A growing body of critical literature explores the association of these fantastic alien bodies with the material construction of contemporary raced bodies. This article extends a particular strain of recent work on race and science fiction which reads the narratives of extra planetary aliens as I would like to thank the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their suggestions for revisions.

Applying the literature of passing to cyborg cinema makes visible the politics of cyborg representations and illuminates contemporary conceptions of mixed-race subjectivity and interpolations of mixed-race bodies. The passing narrative also reveals the constitutive role of melancholy and nostalgia both in creating cyborg cinema and in undermining its subversive potential

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to trace the history and continued significance of multiracial representations, in order to challenge a dominant U.S. cultural narrative that imagines multiracial people as symbols of the declining significance of race. It then turns to a discussion of contemporary multiracial Asian American representations. Multiracial Asian American representations form an especially productive ground to explore the contradictions of racial narratives in the United States. Understanding why Asians, particularly multiracial Asians, have so frequently been held up as examples of the eventual triumph of a colorblind United States can help us see what interlocking racial narratives make this such an alluring story. If we contextualize that story within politics, social hierarchies, and a longer historical trajectory, it becomes clear that leaving Asians out of discussions of color blindness and multiracial meaning in the United States serves only to naturalize and render invisible racial inequalities and power hierarchies.