The Routledge Handbook of Race and Ethnicity in Asia introduces theoretical approaches to the study of race, ethnicity and indigeneity in Asia beyond those commonly grounded in the Western experience.

The volume’s twenty-eight chapters consider not only the relationship between ethnic or racial minorities and the state, but social relations within and between individual and transnational communities. These shape not only the contours of governance, but also the means by which knowledge of national identity, ‘self ’, and ‘other’ have been constructed and reconstructed over time. Divided into four sections, it provides holistic and comparative coverage of South, South East, and East Asia, as well as Australasia and Oceania; an area that extends from Pakistan in the West to Hawai’i in the East.

Contributors to this handbook offer a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, opening a domain of scholarship wherein the relationship between phenotype and racism is less pronounced than European and North American approaches, which have often privileged the so-called ‘colour stigmata’, leading to further exclusions of particular ethnic, racial, and indigenous communities.

This volume seeks to overcome racism and white ideologies embedded in theories of race and ethnicity in Asia, proving a valuable resource to both students and scholars of comparative racial and ethnic studies, international relations and human rights.