Ethnic Positioning in Southwestern Mixed Heritage Writing explores how Southwestern writers and visual artists provide an opportunity to turn a stigmatized identity into a self-conscious holder of valuable assets, cultural attitudes, and memories. The problem of mixed ethno-cultural heritage is a relevant feature of North American populations, faced by millions. Narratives on blended heritage show how mixed-race authors utilize their multiple ethnic experiences, knowledge archives, and sensibilities. They explore how individuals attempt to cope with the cognitive anxiety, stigmas, and perceptions that are intertwined in their blended ethnic heritage, family and social dynamics, and the renegotiation of their ethnic identity. The Southwest is a region riddled by Eurocentric and Colonial concepts of identity, yet at the same time highly treasured in the Frontier experiences of physical mobility and mental and spiritual journeys and transformations. Judit Ágnes Kádár argues that the process of ethnic positioning is a choice made by mixed heritage people that results in renegotiated identities, leading to more complex and engaging concepts of themselves.

Judit Ágnes Kádár is Director of International Relations at the Hungarian University of Sport Science.

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2 Multiracial Identity and the Southwest

2.1 Core and Confluence: The Geo-Cultural Context of Mixedblood Writing

2.2 From Halfbreed to Crossblood

2.3 Southwestern Authors and Artists of Mixed Heritage: An Overview

Chapter 3: Identity Negotiation in Southwestern Mixedblood Poetry: A Complementary Scope

Chapter 4: Blood Trails, Hidden Histories

4.1 The Beginning of Mixed Heritage Fictional Biographies: From Memoir to Postcolonial Storytelling

4.2 Laguna Pueblo Postcolonial Life-Writing andThe Followers: Southwestern Mixed Heritage Autobiographies

Chapter 5: Multiracial Identity and its Narrative Formulation

5.1 Four Decades of Mixed-Race Writing: Altering Visions in Selected Prose Texts

5.2 A Psychological Insight into Blended Heritage Identity Construction

5.3 Cultural Identity Formulation in Multiracial Narratives

5.4 Narrative Identity: From Object to Subject

5.5 Nanabushs Pandora's Box of Possibilities: Humor in Contemporary Multiracial Writing

Chapter 6: Some Interesting Cognitive Patterns

6.1 Grave Concerns and Nightwalkers

6.2 Sharpening Sights

6.3 Restore me!

6.4Indigenous Shapes of Water in Mixedblood Writing

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Bibliography

8.1 Primary Sources

8.2 Secondary Sources