Ralina Joseph's book is concerned with representations of the mixed-race (black/white) American subject in the period from 1998 to 2008. As such, it contributes to larger scholarly discussions regarding mixed-race identity in the 1990s and beyond, discussions that have typically revolved around the infamous Time magazine “New Face of America” cover of 1993, the campaign to have the category “multiracial” added to the US Census in 2000, Tiger Woods's self-proclaimed “Cablinasian” identity, and the vogue for mixed-race memoirs beginning in the 1990s. Several monographs have engaged with these phenomena over the last ten years and Joseph is certainly in august company here. I am thinking specifically of Eve Allegra Raimon's The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited (2004) and, especially, Suzanne Bost's excellent Mulattas and Mestizas (2003), a comparative analysis of mixed identities in the US and Latin America from 1850 to 2000.

What, then, does Joseph have to contribute to this conversation? Joseph argues that the mixed-race subject in contemporary American culture is characterized by either “pain” or “progress” (1–2). By this, Joseph means that contemporary representations of the mixed-race subject fall into two categories which work in tandem with one another: those which perpetuate the long and well-travelled mythology of the “tragic mulatto/a” (pain) and those which put forth the mixed-race subject as heralding the glorious utopian future of a multiracial America (progress). Joseph terms this the “problem-special dichotomy” (2). In both iterations, both “positive” and “negative,” “Blackness remains pathological” (2). In other words, for Joseph, representations of mixed-race individuals in contemporary America “continue to be delimited by the racist notion that blackness is a deficit that black and multiracial people must overcome” (7). Blackness must be disavowed or transcended (hence the book's title) if “pain” or “tragedy” is to be overcome and the utopian potential of mixed identity is to be achieved.

In 2003, Bost argued that at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first there was a resurgence of fascination with mixed-race figures that characterized the 1890s. Coded as disquiet and anxiety in the late nineteenth century and as celebration in the late twentieth, Bost argues that in both periods “fear and celebration work in tandem: the fascination with mixture corresponds to (and potentially masks) racist efforts to contain fluidity and to reinstitute categories” (185). Since Joseph's argument is not radically different from Bost's, Joseph's main contribution, here, is her analysis of a series of representations of mixed-race subjects in literature and popular culture from 1998 to 2008.

The four chapters are concerned with, respectively, the representation of Bette Porter (Jennifer Beals, herself a mixed-race individual) in the hit Showtime drama series The L Word (2004–9); Danzy Senna's much-lauded novel Caucasia (1998); Mixing Nia (dir. Alison Swan, 1998) and an episode of America's Next Top Model (2005). In all four cases, Joseph finds the cultural examples with which she engages caught in the double bind elucidated in the introduction. The mixed-race subjects in question are either positioned as exceptional and are punished for it (thus rendering them tragic) or they try desperately to overcome their tragedy by becoming exceptional but, in so doing, they disavow their blackness.

On Bette Porter in The L Word, Joseph contends that the dual encoding of Bette as exceptional (a superwoman) and as tragic (through the show's punishment of her) “ultimately illustrates that while the new millennium mulatta might exhibit racial flexibility and superwoman strength, as blackness muddles her whiteness, her downfall is inevitable” (66). In her discussion of Birdie Lee, the protagonist of Caucasia, Joseph positions her as “a sad race girl” (67) who passes as both white and black. As such, Joseph concludes that, although the novel avoids the problematic idea that Birdie's blackness must be transcended, the protagonist's “slippage into tragedy prevents resistance to the stereotype” (91) of the “tragic mulatta.” In chapter 3, Joseph argues that the first half of Mixing Nia, in which the protagonist's identity is “painfully in question,” gives way to a second half in which Nia becomes “an exceptional multiracial, who leaves behind the troublesome issue of blackness to achieve true freedom” (96). Finally, in America's Next Top Model, the race switching undertaken by the show's models also necessitates the transcendence of blackness.

Taken together, the chapters lend themselves to the drawing of coherent, if not very surprising, conclusions. The book was clearly motivated, in part, by the election of the “exceptional multiracial” Barack Obama to two terms of the US presidency. One of the epigraphs to the introduction, and much of the conclusion, bespeak this motivation. Certainly, Joseph's book is an important and timely reminder that we must question the construction of the “exceptional multiracial” and uncover the ongoing racist mythologies that undergird such representations.