"Mixed Race Hollywood" by Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas

[Source: Media Diversity listserve]
Since the early days of Hollywood film, portrayals of interracial romance and of individuals of mixed racial and ethnic heritage have served to highlight and challenge fault lines within Hollywood and the nation's racial categories and borders.

Mixed Race Hollywood is a pioneering compilation of essays on mixed-race romance, individuals, families, and stars in U.S. film and media culture. Situated at the cutting-edge juncture of ethnic studies and media studies, this collection addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in children's television programming, and the "outing" of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation.

The contributors explore this history and current trends from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in order to better understand the evolving conception of race and ethnicity in contemporary culture. The book is due to be released by NYU Press on August 1, 2008.

Professor Mary C. Beltrán was one of the organizers of the Media Diversity Conference at St. John's in 2006 and a co-author of the Televisions Project funded by the Ford Foundation. She is an assistant professor of Communication Arts And Chicana/o-Latino/a Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Hollywood Latinidad.

Camilla Fojas is Associate Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies and a member of the Asian American studies program at DePaul University, and author of Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier.