Molly Littlewood McKibbin opens Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism by reflecting on the fact that, historically (and erroneously), multiracial US identities have often been discursively framed as “new.” From Charles Chesnutt's “new people” in The House behind the Cedars (1900) to Danzy Senna's “new people” in Symptomatic (2004) – and, indeed, in the title to her most recent novel New People (2017), which likely appeared after McKibbin's book went to press – multiracial US subjects are repeatedly, paradoxically, imagined in terms of novelty. For McKibbin, though, there is something genuinely “new” about what she calls the “new multiracialism.” Notwithstanding justifiable scepticism from several scholars who worry that contemporary discourses of multiracialism “might well duplicate racial caste systems of the past that left white supremacy and the race binary entirely intact” or might “abandon race and in the process abandon social justice struggle,” McKibbin's book asks readers to consider “the possibility that we are witnessing a new era of multiracialism – one in which a genuine and socially sensitive challenge is being posed to American race concepts” (3). A distinguishing feature of the contemporary moment of which McKibbin treats (the late 1990s to the present) is that, compared with earlier periods in US history, multiracialism “has never before been claimed in a society that, in its public discourse at least, values racial equality so highly” (20). Such a shift has generated new creative possibilities for writers concerned with the experience of being a multiracial US subject, a claim that McKibbin explores in relation to five works by women writers: Senna, Rebecca Walker, Emily Raboteau, Rachel Harper and Heidi Durrow.

It ought to be stated, here, that McKibbin is specifically interested in what she calls “black–white multiracialism” (2), rather than in subjects who identify as some other (dual or multiple) combination of the five racial categories listed on the US census. This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate line of enquiry, though it does risk reifying the black–white racial binary as the inviolable racial threshold in the US imaginary. Having said that, one of the most persuasive arguments of the book is that “contemporary writers effectively racialize whiteness by positioning multiracial subjectivity as something that includes and challenges whiteness” (95). McKibbin's discussion of how WASP, Jewish and Latinx identities signify in Senna's novel Caucasia (1998) and Walker's memoir Black White and Jewish (2000) demonstrates how both writers “challenge the normative power of whiteness in ways that diversify, and, consequently, racialize whiteness” (143). The final chapter, on Heidi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010), argues that the novel renders the protagonist's Danish ancestry “other” not because of its “racial whiteness” but because it is a “‘foreign’ ethnic category” (246). As a result, “African Americanness has become the ‘mainstream’ or dominant part of her identity, and her Danishness has become the ‘minority’ or vulnerable part of her identity” (246). This is very interesting analysis with far-reaching implications for reading the complex treatment of racial identity in works such as Zinzi Clemmons's What We Lose (2017), in which the protagonist, Thandi, is the daughter of a “coloured” South African woman and a light-skinned African American man.

While the readings of the primary texts are compelling, the fact that only five works are discussed in the entire book means that those texts bear a disproportionate burden in “speaking for” multiracialism in the contemporary moment. (Other works that might have been considered are Michael Thomas's Man Gone Down (2007) and Mat Johnson's Loving Day (2015)). Moreover, the sheer weight of the interpretive frameworks used (from critical race studies, to ethnic- and racial-formation scholarship) – while expertly mapped out – sometimes threatens to overshadow the primary texts and to undermine McKibbin's claim that she has “allowed contemporary literature to show me what it is doing with multiracialism (rather than tried to find texts to support preconceived notions of multiracialism)” (30).

Ultimately, McKibbin's contention that where prior scholarly works “overlook the fact that multiracialism affects both blackness and whiteness” (28, original emphasis), Shades of Gray addresses “whiteness and blackness in equal measure; by doing so, we can see multiracial identity as a potentially disruptive conceptualization to both categories” (29, original emphasis), is effectively explored in relation to her chosen primary texts. It is unfortunate, therefore, that McKibbin conceives of narratives of US multiracialism of earlier periods as having been written almost exclusively by black-identifying authors. Despite the fact that numerous white-identifying writers – such as Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Fannie Hurst, William Faulkner, Vera Caspary, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, Shirley Ann Grau, John Gregory Brown, Philip Roth and many more besides – have written works devoted to exploring mixed-race subjectivity and/or racial passing, Lydia Maria Child is the only white writer that gets a mention in McKibbin's survey of “representations of mixture” from the nineteenth century to the 1930s (23). Given the attention McKibbin pays to disrupting constructions of whiteness and blackness in Shades of Gray as a whole, this is a regrettable oversight in a book otherwise distinguished by deep historical knowledge and meticulous critical and conceptual thinking.