Mixed Race Studies

Deconstructing the Visual: The Diasporic Hybridity of Asian and Eurasian Female Images

Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context
Australian National University
Issue 8, October 2002
45 paragraphs
ISSN 1440 9151

Julie Matthews, Associate Professor and Director of Research Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Introduction

Being long accustomed to the absence of images resembling myself in magazines and on TV, I find the few images I do encounter quite fascinating. Commenting on the absence of media images and representations of Asian women, Catherine Padmore notes that pale-skinned, wide-eyed Eurasian features are more likely to appear than Asian faces. As she arguesof the three hundred images appearing on the cover of the Australian publication Cleo since its inception in 1972, ‘under ten did not fit the Caucasian stereotype of wide-eyes, pale skin, and (surprisingly often) blonde hair’. My analysis of Asian and Eurasian female images is interested in the small but growing number of stylish young Eurasian and Asian fashion models appearing in Australian magazines and catalogues and Asian-female images associated with finance. The latter category links Asian women to commerce, computing and technology in a globally interconnected world. Interestingly, these images rarely feature Eurasian women.

The presence of Eurasian images in fashion representations and their absence from finance representations draw attention to the historical origins, cultural trajectories and ambivalence of meaning associated with ‘raced’ and sexed representations. Although the inclusion of Asian and Eurasian women may be intended to offset their previous absence and secure a wider multicultural appeal, they inadvertently replay processes of racialisation and sexualization. This is because they incite desires for, and identifications with, White/Western/Anglo identities authorised by essentialist and quasi-biological discourses of racialisation and sexualization.

The situation is further complicated by the diasporic hybridity of Asian and Eurasian female images. Distinguishing fashion from finance images highlights the ways these are worked out through various forms of colonialism, patriarchy, orientalism and commodification. Fashion representations commodify traditional stereotypes of Asian women and hyper-feminise Asian and Eurasian women. They model desirable ideals of youthful sexualised femininity and offer a rebuke to those who fail to meet these standards in a White/Western/Anglo-dominated global market. Finance representations take their cue from contemporary social and economic conditions where Asian ‘Tiger’ economies have come to stand for development potential and high-tech economic success under global capitalism. In these images Eurasian women are absent because Asian women more effectively represent the desirable ideals of commerce and information technology and ‘gently’ rebuke those who fail to succeed under these terms and conditions.

This paper is organised into two sections. The first section analyses Asian and Eurasian images and the latter section uses insights from this analysis to challenge current cultural studies understandings of hybridity and diaspora. This paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive semiotic analysis of media representations. Rather, it undertakes a deconstructive analysis of various images I have recently encountered. Deconstruction challenges the apparent and obvious ‘facts’ of a representation or image. It acknowledges that representations and readings are an effect of standpoint, belief and value, and support multiple and often contradictory understandings. A deconstructive analysis of visual representations highlights the interaction of images with one another as well as accentuating associations that operate beyond the text and beyond the intentions of image producers. The deconstruction of visual representations undertaken here focuses on shared and dissimilar trajectories of mobility and hybridity and the fissures and breaks in authoritative and universalising explanations and theories. Visual images work a terrain of identity and identification that defy the demarcation of primary structural or systemic forms of subordination and clear-cut lines of resistance desired by Floya Anthias. They thereby enable us to trace the contours of new forms of subjugation and struggle.

The second section of this paper explores conventional cultural studies’ understandings of diaspora and hybridity though a gender analysis which highlights the interconnected significance of economic, political, historical and contemporary conditions. My analysis of Asian and Eurasian images highlights ambivalent processes of collaboration and contestation that are an effect of diasporic hybridity and the commodification of ‘racialised’ and sexualised images. This focus illuminates how representations, intended to offset the absence of minority women in the media and thus achieve inclusion or wider multicultural appeal, may have unintended effects. New representations may be politically generative and challenge established orders but they may also incite desires for, and identifications with, White/Western/Anglo identities authorised by essentialist and quasi-biological discourses—they risk inadvertently replaying traditional processes of racialisation and sexualisation.

I use the term ‘Eurasian’ to refer to images evoking Anglo, European and Asian ‘racial’ and cultural iconography. Unlike the term ‘Asian’, which has ‘racial’ and cultural connotations, the term ‘Eurasian’ is mainly used as a ‘racial’ category to denote people of mixed European and Asian descent. I extend the category here to encompass ‘racial’ and cultural connotations including: a) those of identifiably ‘mixed race’ heritage; b) the transposition of ‘Asian’ signs and symbols into predominantly Anglo-European settings; and c) the transposition of ‘Anglo-European’ signs and symbols into ‘Asian’ settings. A focus on Eurasian and Asian female images in these terms illuminates the diasporic hybridity of visual forms. I argue that diaspora theory need not contain itself to accounts of dislocation, relocation and disembodied longings for exilic roots, but may facilitate new understandings of the role of images, signs and symbols in the achievement of collaboration and contestation…

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Grave endings: the representation of passing

Austrailian Humanities Review
Issue 23 (September 2001)

Monique Rooney, Lecturer and Honours Convenor
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Austrailian National University

At the 2000 Academy Awards, Hilary Swank won the award of “Best Actress” for her role as Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena in Kimberley Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (2000). Based on the true story of Teena Brandon who was murdered in Nebraska in 1993 after she passed as a boy (Brandon Teena), Boys Don’t Cry depicts scenes of crossdressing. Like most passing stories, the film ends with the brutal exposure of the passing girl, with her rape and finally her murder. Even though Swank, dressed in ultra feminine gown and jewels, had just been awarded “Best Actress” in the role, she found it necessary to refer to Teena Brandon, repeatedly, as “he” and as “Brandon Teena”. Further, Swank’s acceptance speech—beginning with the words, “We have come a long way”—intimated that the film’s overt and explicit (rather than censored) coverage of sexual violence and gender passing was somehow more politically radical and progressive.

Defining truth through identity, Swank’s self-congratulatory exposure of the passer’s authentic, because visible, identity, in fact contrasted with film’s representation of this identity. The liberal humanistic and nationalist values affirmed in Swank’s speech and paraded at the Academy Awards are, moreover and ironically, critiqued in the film. Asserting the film’s “acceptance” of “difference” and “diversity”, Swank thanked Brandon Teena for “teaching us” to “always be ourselves” and to “follow our hearts” and “not conform”. This sentimental flagging of the passer’s transformative potential and hypervisible presence (as a boy) simplifies the film’s more complex treatment in which Teena, the passer, is exposed and murdered because he/she represents indeterminacy. Swank’s celebration of the passer’s role in Boys Don’t Cry thus misreads but also re-presents the film’s characterisation of passing as an inexpressible presence, as a crisis at the heart of representation itself. The liminality of the passing role is unable to be articulated; but it emerges in Swank’s ambiguous appearance both on screen and off.

Swank’s performance on Awards night stresses the passer’s political and rhetorical efficacy, as the passer functions in Swank’s discourse as a vehicle for propaganda. Through an analysis of this and various other narratives of passing, this essay will interrogate ways in which the passer both represents, and is an effect of, the mobility of discourse. This is to say, the representation of passing facilitates critical discourses about essentialist categories such as race, gender and sexuality. At the same time, the passer is deployed as a device of this rhetoric who signifies the unstable ground of representation. Beginning with the practice of passing for white in late nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction and non-fiction, the discussion here will first identify the importance of the topic to the emergence of critical discourses about race as well as gender and sexuality. I will then go on to analyse recent critical receptions to this theme and its current relevance to debates not only about minority group politics and deconstruction but about how the critic is positioned in relation to this debate…

…The many black Americans who have allegedly crossed the colour line to live as whites suggests that passing is a desire to flee the constricting condition of belonging to a racial minority. Not that passing for white is purely about escape from racial heritage. The black American author, Walter White, passed in order to travel to the South to investigate lynching and other crimes against blacks. White’s autobiographical self-portrait articulates the challenge the passer poses to racial classifications:

I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blonde. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.

Passing not only problematises classifications of the visible body, thereby challenging the meaning of racial belonging, but also the possibility of accurate representation.

The passer’s abstraction of self from too legible identifiers such as race, nationality, sexual orientation—margins that define the invisible centre of subjectivity—suggests that classificatory boundaries are more arbitrary for some individuals than others. Yet these margins continue to define individuals, like the white-skinned “Negro”, who experience both the possibility of freedom from and the restrictions of being a marginalised identity. The attraction of passing lies in the hope of reaching a destination at which the previously illegitimate body may become legitimate, the marked body may become discreet, the socially and culturally determined body may become an abstract, free body. The desire to pass is the desire to make less visible a stigmatised identity…

Read the entire article here.

In Their Own Words with Michele Elam

The Human Experience: inside the humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-15

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

 In this installment of “In Their Own Words” English professor Michele Elam discusses her latest research, which explores how representations of mixed race in literature and the arts are redefining new millennial aesthetics and politics.

Elam’s latest publication is entitled, “The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium.”

True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology

Journal of Dracula Studies
Number 12 (2010)
19 pages

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In the Western consciousness there has been a long tradition of the associations between race and evil.  According to Celia R. Daileader, in her Introduction to Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, “Before black men were lynched for alleged sex with white women, white women were burned alive for alleged sex with a devil described as black”.  Daileader calls attention to the historical relationship between blackness, sex, and evil that predates the literal transmission of this discourse into “race relations.” Over time this relationship has found its way into many racist fantasies, particularly those manifested within the stories of the horror genre—including vampire tales.  Although race has only begun to be theorized in relation to Dracula, one of the most well known vampire novels published in 1897, there has been some important recent work theorizing the Count within Homi Bhabha’s category of the “not quite/not white” (Daileader 97).  As John Allen Stevenson notes, “the novel [Dracula] insistently—indeed, obsessively—defines the vampire not as a monstrous father but as a foreigner, as someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an outsider” (139).  Dracula, the Romanian Count, is seen in opposition to the rest of the British characters—including the main object of his desire, Mina.  The predatory sexual threat of Dracula is a common racist fantasy where racialized men exude “predatory sexual desire” that “endangers white womanhood and consequently threatens the racial purity of white [American] society” (Hamako).  In most instances, this threat to racial purity manifests itself in the fear of clear racial miscegenation and a necessary drive to eradicate the one attempting to perform this racial contamination—the vampire.

Over the past two years there has been a resurgence of vampire stories in U.S. popular culture. These new vampire stories conveyed on-screen —True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight—promote specific ideologies about race, class, and gender that are specific to our cultural moment. In “Color Blindness: An Obstacle to Racial Justice?” Charles A. Gallagher states that: “since the mid-1990s there has been a change in the way race, race relations, and racial hierarchy have been depicted in the mass media…the media now provides Americans with an almost endless supply of overt and coded depictions of a multiracial, multicultural society that has finally transcended the problem of race” (109).  As examples of contemporary media, these new vampire shows also promote a society “beyond” race; so, with the historical tradition between race and vampires, what happens when the victims of vampires—in these new vampire tales—are no longer racially homogenous?  Can the vampire still be read as racially other?  I argue that the vampire of these contemporary stories actually becomes a symbol of multiracial identity as it is seen within the multicultural discourse that pervades American popular consciousness.  For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing specifically on issues of race and sexuality (only as they are concerned with racial purity) in the first season of HBO’s series True Blood—encapsulated within the first two episodes, “Strange Love” and “The First Taste.”  While the series deals with a greater range of issues—gay rights, American slavery, terrorism, war, religion, etc.—these issues remain outside the scope of this particular paper.  I hope that these issues will be theorized in subsequent work on the series, but for this paper I will have to limit my consideration to the ways in which these beginning episodes of True Blood portrays a multicultural society on screen that undercuts the reality of still pervasive racist currents in our own society; how the show creates a multiracial identity that is at once feared and championed within the American society; and, how the show while depicting multiculturalism actually works to subtly critique this ideology…

Read the entire article here. (Rich Text Format)

Transcending Blackness in the 21st Century, or How Can I Be Like Barack Obama?

Global Studies: A Member of the International Instutute
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Multiracial Tales and Multicultural Discourses
494 Van Hise Hall
2011-04-18, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

As “postrace” is the buzzword of the new century, and Barack Obama has quickly become a poster child of the postrace, the question arises: must multiracial African Americans metaphorically transcend blackness in order to achieve success? This talk will critique the notion that mixed-race black subjects function as bridges offering safe passage to a third, interstitial, or hybridized space. I argue that a two-sided stereotype, comprised in the “new millennium mulatta” and the “exceptional multiracial,” has arisen instead through a variety of mediated discourses.

Ralina Joseph is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. Her forthcoming book from Duke University Press entitled Transcending Blackness: Anti-Black Racism and African American Multiraciality from the New Milennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial investigates 1998-2008 era pop culture representations of multiracial African Americans.

For more information, click here.
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The Family Changes Colour: Interracial Families in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Screen
Volume 43 Issue 3 (Autumn 2002)
pages 271-292
DOI: 10.1093/screen/43.3.271

Nicola J. Evans, Lecturer of Media and Cultural Studies
University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

How profound the hatred, how deep the bigotry… that wakens in this image of black life blooming within white…. It is an image that squeezes racism out from the pores of people who deny they arc racist.
Patricia Williams

In December 1998, DNA tests identified Thomas Jefferson as the father of at least one child with his black slave woman Sally Hemings. The discovery spawned numerous commentaries in the media on the significance of this finding and many large claims were made. Superficially what was at stake was the right of Hemings’s descendants to claim Jefferson as an ancestor and to be buried in the Monticello family plot, a right long contested by some of Jefferson’s white descendants who control the foundation and the graveyard. But there were many who saw the decision as symbolic not just of a past that the USA had erased, but a future towards which it might tend. For Lucian Truscott IV, a white Jeffersonian descendant who supports the Hemings’s claim, the finding affirmed that this Country ‘is a family not only in democratic theory, but in blood’? Allusions to the national family were quickly buttressed by parallels drawn between Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton, another president accused of extramarital liaisons, whose 1992 campaign was attended by rumours that he had fathered a black child. Lisa Jones, writing in the Village Voice, summed up the tenor of many commentaries by declaring ‘I can’t think of a more potent metaphor of American race relations at the millennium than the battle over graveyard space at Monticello’.

The findings of the Monticello committee capped a decade in which a surprising number of films, both mainstream and art-house, began to explore familial ties that cross the colour line. Some of these films, such as Made in America (Richard Benjamin, 1993), Secrets and Lies (Mike Lieigh, 1996) and A Family Thing (Richard Pearee, 1996), have plots reminiscent of abolitionist literature, in which the discovery of an interracial relationship in the past throws the family into melodramatic disarray. Other films, including Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi, 1993), Smoke (Wayne Wang, 1995), Losing Isaiah (Stephen Gyllenhaal, 1995) and Finding Forrester (Gus van Sant, 2000), feature whites who become symbolic parents to black children, often with the suggestion that these metaphorical ties are more rewarding than the relationships the parents have with their own white children. The question this paper considers is whether the growing screen presence of the interracial family is a step forward in the task of imagining more democratic race relations. If our concept of the family changed colour—from white to something more multicoloured—would this strengthen and improve interracial bonds as many activists through history have insisted, or is the fight for inclusion in the family plot indeed a fight for graveyard space?

For mainstream films to be considering interracial relations at all is a departure. When it comes to race Hollywood has toed the colour line, producing either all-black films, or white-cast films with token representation of African-Americans. The rare instances in which interracial relations occur are designed to be temporary, or to end tragically. Even the black and white buddy movie, the most popular format for including interraciality, typically suppresses or evades racial issues through rousing paeans to the race-transcendent bonds of masculinity. For mainstream films to be exploring interracial families is startling. Both on screen and off, the taboo against race-mixing within the family has seemed particularly strong. In the quotation that heads this paper, Patricia Williams suggests that the image of a mother suckling a child of another race is an idea that sticks in the gullet of even those who are most liberal on race issues. Benetton, a company famous for its taboo-breaking advertisements, appeared to agree when in 1989 they cancelled a campaign that proposed to feature a poster of a black mother breast-feeding a white child.’ What is special about the family that makes the imagination balk at the prospect of race-mixing here, even when cautiously permissive of interracial friendships outside the family?

Until recently, the censorship of interraciality on screen was matched by a paucity of interracial studies in scholarship. Gregory Stephens notes the tendency among scholars to pathologize interraciality, viewing even,’ relationship that crosses racial lines as inevitably exploitative or oppressive. As Stephens points out, such an assumption enforces the colour line by making ‘any interracial relations beyond rape or genocide unimaginable . Citing Frederick Douglass s definition of racism as ‘diseased imagination’, Stephens calls us to begin the task of creating more affirmative scripts for interraciality. It is in the spirit of this work that I examine the representation of interracial families on film. While aiming to stay alert to ways such representations may recycle racist scenarios, my goal is to see whether there is material here with which to envision more equitable relations between blacks and whites across the unnatural chasm ot the racial divide.

Although this essay will focus on film, I begin with the Monticello affair because it suggests why the family is such an explosive site tor the exploration of race issues. Specifically the Monticello case points to three aspects ol the family as an ideological entity: the family as a primary measure of social well-being, the interdependency of family and narrative, and the historical opposition between family values and race values…

Read or purchase the article here.

Representation of Coloured Identity in Selected Visual Texts about Westbury, Johannesburg

University of the Witwatersrand
December 2006
132 pages

Phyllis D. Dannhauser

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Dramatic Art).

In post-apartheid South Africa, Coloured communities are engaged in reconstructing identities and social histories. This study examines the representation of community, identity, culture and historic memory in two films about Westbury, Johannesburg, South Africa. The films are Westbury, Plek van Hoop, a documentary, and Waiting for Valdez, a short fiction piece. The ambiguous nature of Coloured identity, coupled with the absence of recorded histories and unambiguous identification with collective cultural codes, results in the representation of identity becoming contested and marginal. Through constructing narratives of lived experience, hybrid communities can challenge dominant stereotypes and subvert discourses of otherness and difference. Analysis of the films reveals that the Coloured community have reverted to stereotypical documentary forms in representing their communal history. Although the documentary genre lays claim to the representation of reality and authentic experience, documentary is not always an effective vehicle for the representation of lived experience and remembered history. Fiction can reinterpret memory by accessing the emotional textures of past experiences in a more direct way.

Read the entire thesis here.

Race and Mixed Race

University of Michigan
College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
American Culture
AMCULT 311 –  Topics in Ethnic Studies
Section 001
Fall 2011

Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany, Assistant Professor of American Culture

This course examines how conceptions of race and mixed race have been historically shaped through law, science, and popular culture. In addition to examining the ways in which race has been socially constructed and how its meanings have changed over time, the course also explores the politics of interracial marriage, contemporary mixed race identities, and cross-racial adoption. Through an examination of historical, sociological, and autobiographical texts, the course explores a variety of themes including: census classifications, affirmative action, notions of colorblindness, questions of appearance, “authenticity,” community belonging, and the debates around the mixed race movement. Course requirements include posting a weekly discussion question, two in-class exams, and a final group project.

“As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed”: Winnifred Eaton’s Revision of North American Identity

MELUS
Volume 32, Number 2 (Summer 2007)
pages 31-53

Karen E. H. Skinazi, Instructor of English
University of Alberta

At the tum of the twentieth century, Quebec-born Winnifred Eaton, a Chinese British woman who used the pseudonym “Onoto Watanna,” was writing romances in New York, experimenting with the popular genre of Japonisme—the craze for all things Japanese. As Eaton advanced in her career, however, she became disgruntled with her writing, observable both by virtue of her shift in focus and in reading the words of her alter ego, Nora, in her autobiographical novel. Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915). Nora frowns on her own success, “founded upon a cheap and popular device,” and declares, “Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage!” (153-54). As Me reveals, Eaton had a new project, one that was her true birthright. Without specifically identifying her own Chinese heritage, or retuming to her fabricated Japanese identity, she nonetheless created clearly non-white Canadian characters in Me and its spin-off, Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), auto/biographical tales of American immigration and adventure. In doing so, Eaton extended and revised the Canadian American rhetoric—and literature—that focused on the white, Anglo-Saxon bond or “brotherhood” between Canadians and Americans.

Eaton was not a political novelist, and her characters face neither head taxes nor Chinese Exclusion Acts when they cross the Canadian-American border. Yet Eaton made an important innovation in Canadian American immigrant literature by revealing the experience of immigrating as a double outsider: as a racialized figure, and a Canadian. Some critics, knowing Eaton’s background, wonder at the seeming “whiteness” of the characters of Me and Marion. In her study of Eurasian writers, Carol Spaulding, for example, notes: “The . . . narratives [apart from Diary of Delia] written in the first person are Eaton’s autobiography. Me, and her sister’s biography, Marion. All of these are white narrators” (198). Similarly, Dominika Ferens, in her excellent account of the two well-known Eaton sisters, Winnifred and Edith, says Marion, written by both Winnifred Eaton and her sister Sara. Bosse, is “a novel that paradoxically has an all white cast, although we know now that the title character was based on Winnifred’s older sister [Sara]” (141). As Ferens also points out, however, the protagonist of Marion is clearly marginalized because she is not white; both Eaton and Sara/Marion “performed the exotic difference that mainstream society inscribed on their bodies, but they tried to maintain a distance between the role and their sense of self—a distance that allowed them to always keep in sight and occasionally parody the sexist/orientalist frame within which they posed” (142)…

Read the entire article here.

The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of The Frontier Romance

Cambridge University Press
August 2006
256 pages
Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm
Weight: 0.55 kg
Hardback ISBN: 9780521865395
Paperback ISBN: 9780521073042
Adobe eBook Reader ISBN: 9780511239465
Mobipocket eBook ISBN: 9780511247484

Ezra Tawil, Associate Professor of English
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

The frontier romance, an enormously popular genre of American fiction born in the 1820s, helped redefine ‘race’ for an emerging national culture. Ezra Tawil argues that the novel of white-Indian conflict provided authors and readers with an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of the frontier romance, Tawil redraws the lines of influence between the ‘Indian novel’ of the 1820s and the sentimental novel of slavery, demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ought to be reconsidered in this light. This study reveals how American literature of the 1820s helped form modern ideas about racial differences.

Contents

• Introduction: toward a literary history of racial sentiment
• 1. The politics of slavery and the discourse of race, 1787–1840
• 2. Remaking natural rights: race and slavery in James Fenimore Cooper’s early writings
• 3. Domestic frontier romance, or, how the sentimental heroine became white
• 4. ‘Homely legends’: the uses of sentiment in Cooper’s Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish
• 5. Stowe’s vanishing Americans: ‘Negro’ inferiority, captivity, and homecoming in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• 6. Captain Babo’s cabin: racial sentiment and the politics of misreading in Benito Cereno
• Index.