‘Queer magic’: Performing mixed-race on the Australian stage

Posted in Articles, Arts, Media Archive, Oceania on 2011-08-03 02:50Z by Steven

‘Queer magic’: Performing mixed-race on the Australian stage

Contemporary Theatre Review
Volume 16, Issue 2, 2006
pages 171-188
DOI: 10.1080/10486800600587138

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Half-caste-woman, living a life apart.
What did your story begin?
Half-caste-woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?…

(Noël Coward, Half-caste Woman, 1931)

Used variously to denote fusion, border crossing, miscegenation, transculturation, diaspora, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, hybridity as a term runs the risk of being so stretched that it ceases to have any critical purchase for meaningful analysis. It is my contention that despite the extensive range of analysis of hybridity in contemporary postcolonial studies, the body and processes of embodiment have been largely under explored. The focus of attention tends to be on cultural negotiations and performances of identity, Even when race and racism is invoked, the analysis tends to centre on the power mechanisms that produce specific subjectivities and types of bodies. There is very little attention given to how subjected bodies themselves respond somatically to this will to power, nor of how hybridity itself is embodied and performed The invisibility of the body in hybridity-talk is all the more surprising given the genealogy of the term and its association with miscegenation. In order to explain this lack, it is necessary to briefly trace the history of hybridity.

Robert Young points out in his seminal text, Colonial Desire that the English word ‘hybrid’ stems from the latin term hybrida meaning…

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