Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation’s ‘dusky human consequences’

Postcolonial Studies
Volume 5, Issue 3, 2002
pages 297-307
DOI: 10.1080/1368879022000032801

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

Race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

In recent years there has been a surge in academic endeavours to claim hybridity as a site of transgression, subversion and liberation. In particular, hybridity has been deployed as a strategy for the negotiating of difference which, according to Homi Bhabha, is ‘neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between‘. Within this transformative ‘third space’, boundaries are remade and fixities destabilised. In the hands of less careful scholars, however, hybridity runs the risk of being idealised and dehistoricised as the only ‘enlightened’ response to oppression. Despite the evidence for reading the colonial process as one of mutual transculturation. affecting both coloniser and colonised cultures, the celebratory discourses of hybridity tend to foreground the destabilising of the latter. The danger of this notion of  ‘enlightened hybridity’ as Anne McClintock points out, is that it rehearses the myth of colonialism as the progress and liberation of humanity from a state of deprivation to enlightened reason. Other critics including Jean Fisher have argued that hybridity as a concept is too deeply embedded within a discourse of biology, and as such cannot extricate us from an original dualism of self and other.’ While this does not preclude the potential for the concept to be liberated from its origins and strategically transformed,  there is a need to be more attentive to the ways in which this transformation is mobilised.

Hybridity has its origins in nineteenth-century racial science; whether used to describe physiological 0r cultural difference, hybridity has served as the primary metaphor for the dangerous consequences of cross-racial contact. This essay focuses on the ambivalent figure of the Eurasian within the Australian national imaginary in order to elaborate on the thorny issue of hybridity as a source of both desire and anxiety. The term ‘race’ is commonly associated with hereditary qualities that manifest in visible, phenotypical markers. The emphasis on somatic signifiers is important since the living product of cross-racial heterosexuality is primarily identified with and through the body. As my discussion goes on to demonstrate, the body of the racial hybrid is both the physical manifestation of cross-racial desire and the source of repulsion and fear. While race as a scientific category has long been disproven, it remains one of the most insidious aspects of our colonial heritage. The idea of race survives because the most consistent arguments about it have always been framed within cultural and aesthetic terms. Hence, in looking at the discourse of cross-racial desire. I am less interested in…

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