Examines the ways in which the Melungeon ethnic identity has been socially constructed over time by various regional and national media, plays, and other forms of popular culture. Schrift explores how the social construction of this legend evolved into a fervent movement of a self-identified ethnicity in the 1990s.
Melissa Schrift is an associate professor of anthropology at East Tennessee State University. She is the author of Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult.
