Multiraciality, Haunting, and “People Like Us”

Abstract

Academic and popular interest in multiracial or mixed-race identities has grown immensely over the past two decades in both European and North American contexts. In part, this interest is in response to the increased number of mixed-race people visible in public spheres and their efforts to achieve formal recognition of mixed-race status. The interest also reflects persistent racial anxieties and concerns over racial definitions as well as the lingering though reinvented eugenicist discourses that haunt racial understandings in the Western world. Jinthana Haritaworn's recent book, The Biopolitics of Mixing, helps to make sense of the complex ways in which discourses of multiraciality operate through the lens of Thai multiracialities in Germany and Britain, two countries often regarded as having different racialized histories and presents. Based primarily on empirical data from interviews with people of part-Thai parentage, interwoven with analysis of media texts, policy debates, and scientific discourse, Haritaworn's book packs a dense and invigorating theoretical punch. Specifically, Haritaworn draws upon and contributes to queer theories, theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, intersectionality and whiteness, and disability studies, among others. Proposing the figure of the “multiracial subject” who has been imagined as “an ideal candidate to usher in the post-race future, simply by virtue of hir ‘mixed’ parentage” (1), Haritaworn carefully investigates how the promise of multiracial inclusion often escapes the reach of multiracial people while it simultaneously justifies the exceptional, multicultural, and tolerant status of imperial nation-states. Still, the promise is alluring, as many of the people Haritaworn interviewed seemed, at least partially, to feel compelled by or drawn into inclusionary discourses even as they often recognized inclusion's tenuousness and slipperiness.The Biopolitics of Mixing begins with the familiar question, “Where are you from?”—a question often directed toward multiracial people who phenotypically appear as racially ambiguous in order to place their origins. In chapter two, the first analysis chapter, interviewees recount several of these encounters where their multiracial bodies were subject to this racializing gaze. The interviewees had a variety of methods for responding to or subverting these instances of what Frantz Fanon called “dissection,” some of which justified the question and others that confronted it. Against common thinking, Haritaworn argues that it is important to shift from seeing racial ambiguity as a property of particular bodies and from putting multiracial people in charge of subverting the entire race project; instead, these instances of dissection should compel us to view multiracialization as a “set of practices, technologies and power relations” that are produced and able to be altered (28).Many of Haritaworn's interviewees did not experience these instances of dissection as especially violent. In fact, some of them claimed that their multiracial identities were viewed in positive and celebratory ways. This paradox comprises the subject of chapter 3, as Haritaworn traces the transition from the historical eugenicist assumption that mixed-race people were degenerate to the present lauding of multiraciality as a sign of beauty, health, and intelligence, a mobilization of what Haritaworn calls “bioracial discourses” (54). Haritaworn shows how the ghosts of eugenics haunt this contemporary celebration, as the newly validated are uplifted at the expense of those whose “differences” render them invalidated. The fourth chapter picks up directly on this point as Haritaworn argues, “bioracial knowledges and the identities that draw on them are centrally about disability” (71). Haritaworn shifts from a discussion of the interviews to an exploration of popular science and the British program, Is It Better to Be Mixed Race? Through a careful analysis of this media text of popular science journalism hosted by a British South Asian scientist, Aarathi Prasad, and featuring the work of many scientists and doctors, Haritaworn lays out the ways in which the arguments about mixed-race superiority are profoundly ableist. The purported benefits of the multiracial subject's “genetic diversity” include physical, artistic, and intellectual aptitude. Further, it is not merely racial polarities that are desirable but sexual ones, as only certain respectable (and married) interracial heterosexuals can reproduce this highly abled, happy, multiracialized child, who becomes the central character in this narrative.The ascendancy of the happy multiracial subject has another constitutive outside: those people of color who refuse mixing altogether, especially “Muslims.” In the fifth chapter, Haritaworn invokes the haunting figure of the “marginal man” from early twentieth-century sociology: a product of miscegenation who belongs nowhere and is confused about his own identity (92). Even as multiraciality is celebrated, the pathologization of the trauma experienced by the unhappy mixed-race person remains present in “psy discourses”—the sciences pertaining to emotion and conduct. Within such discourses, happiness is best assured through conformity, and often academics and activists have sought to be counted by the state as one way to conform, be included, and orient toward the tolerant, hybrid nation. The problem is that this ascendancy and the fantasy of the hybrid nation depend on the isolation and exclusion of those who are not mixed enough or in the right ways, namely, black people in countries like the United States and Muslims across the Western world.Further, and as is seen in chapter 6, the select ones who approximate assimilated happy subjects may still be recognized as traumatized subjects, a tension difficult to negotiate. To address this tension, this chapter returns to the interview subjects, starting with a consideration of the way in which their happy stories trumped their sad ones in metronormative narratives of cities “as exceptional places of tolerance and diversity” (114). These happy narratives, however, are not merely about the dissection encounter; instead, they help to indicate the boundaries of belonging within post-race communities. To see those boundaries, Haritaworn puts the narratives in conversation with Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism,” or the idea that the multicultural person is expected to approximate Western culture's preconceptions about them (114). This chapter then shows how the happy narratives are repeated both by those with some privilege (i.e., having one white parent and/or economic stability) and also within a context of cultural pressure and reading to embody certain expectations. The other to this happy narrative that kept returning in Haritaworn's research is the “Thai prostitute,” a figure taken up in chapter 7. In that chapter, Haritaworn addresses the automatic assignment of Thai multiracial subjects to the realm of victim or prostitute, which then impacts sexual and gender negotiations. This leads Haritaworn to insist on paying attention to the Thai prostitute and how she haunts gender and sexuality for feminized subjects in particular in order to restore sexual agency and return the excluded to diasporic, queer, and feminist spaces.Haritaworn ends their1 book on a hopeful note, offering up the idea of “people like us,” “forged by sexually and gender non-conforming people in Malaysia to describe positions that cannot easily be named, and whose likeness is felt rather than classifiable” (147). Recognizing the risks of taking terms from one context into another, Haritaworn still finds it important to offer this phrase so it may “resonate through the imaginary space” of the book—imaginary because there is no material space for all the figures in the book to actually reside (147). Haritaworn invites readers to treat the figures who haunt the positive images of multiracial subjects as people like us, those to whom we should be accountable without fearing the unassimilable difference that haunts us all.This book offers much to appreciate even as some of its claims may make less sense to readers in a North American context. For example, while the “Where are you from?” question can certainly be directed toward multiracialized people in the United States to imply a questioning of national belonging, the same question also has a strong regional component in the United States. The vast geographic distances that separate states and regions lead to different accents and cultural norms among people of all races, making the question “Where are you from?” a familiar one across the United States that may have less to do with race and national belonging than the European contexts of this book. Of course, this is one of the book's great strengths—it decenters the North American context.This book is valuable for many, many additional reasons. First, while debates over the value and utility of intersectionality rage on in cultural studies circles, Haritaworn's book simply evidences, in beautiful fashion, the need for intersectional analysis and what critical intersectional approaches can continue to illuminate about complex social and political processes. If you are a teacher looking to show your students what an intersectional analysis should look like, this is your book. Second, this book provides an exquisite illustration of how to do multisite research without engaging in a comparative approach. The relational approach advocated here (and extended from the work of David Theo Goldberg) offers insight into the similar and different ways in which multiracial discourses operate in Germany as opposed to Britain, but it goes beyond any comparison, drawing also upon North American theoretical frameworks and discourses to reveal the related logics of raciality, ability, and reproduction that undergird these different national contexts. This approach then not only complicates an understanding of nation-states as discrete entities, but it also reveals the deep logics of empire, colonialism, and exceptionalism that manifest in related ways within ostensibly different contexts through the figure of the multiracial subject.Third, Haritaworn's methodological self-reflexivity is stunning. They clearly show how the place in which they began the research and the kinds of questions they wanted to ask led to gaps in the research design, specifically surrounding discourses of transgender or genderqueer subjectivities and also disability. Unlike authors who simply apologize for the absence and move on (and I am indicting myself in this critique), Haritaworn works to fill in the gaps left from the interview portion of the research with analysis of media texts, policy debates, and scientific discourse. The apology would have been an easier route to take. But the admission followed with diligent action makes for a much stronger and more persuasive research study. The actions Haritaworn takes do not negate the fact that transgender and disabled subjects were not present in Haritaworn's thinking when designing the research project, and they also do not serve to entirely center such subjects, which may lead some readers of a transgender studies journal to pause. Yet I think an alternative response is more appropriate. Haritaworn's reflexivity and in-process research modifications indicate one reason why transgender and disability studies are so important: these bodies of knowledge push scholars toward more rigorous and nuanced intersectional research. Haritaworn's research also reveals that it is difficult to ignore the importance of transgender and disabled critiques and subjects when dealing with the logics of multiraciality, which implicate and draw upon abled and gendered discourses. For these reasons, Haritaworn's book is not only on the cutting edge of scholarship on multiraciality, but it will be a crucial addition in many cultural studies courses for both its methodological and its theoretical innovations.