UC San Diego Undergraduate Library Research Prize

Winner 2025 Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Category, nominated by Andrea Mendoza (Department of Literature).

In this thesis, I analyze the work of Nina Mingya Powles through a critical mixed race lens. Powles is a multiracial author and poet who writes about her experiences navigating multiracial girlhood as she travels to and lives in various locations tied to her heritages. Focusing on Powles’s use of water imagery, I examine how both her prose (Small Bodies of Water) and poetry (Magnolia) illustrate the multiracial body’s fluid nature. I argue that the multiracial body is a fluid entity that permeates racial boundaries via its occupation of peripheries, allowing it to exist beyond the rigid classification of colonial racial categories. Through this occupation, multiraciality exists in and moves through the contested in-between space, deconstructing socially constructed categories of identity that dictate power hierarchies within the colonial framework. Although multiracial fluidity serves as a site of colonial deconstruction, I also argue that this mutability leaves the multiracial body vulnerable to external racial exploitation. I term this multiracial malleability, theorizing that the multiracial body’s racial ambiguity is a source of manipulation on both an individual and institutional level. I argue that this malleability may be the root of multiracial fetishization, as it allows external forces to shape the multiracial body into the desired racial entity. In my theory, the multiracial mythic serves as an embodiment of both multiracial fluidity and malleability by occupying the borders between concretely defined entities, therefore existing within the in-between and blurring discrete categories of identity.