{"id":37191,"date":"2014-08-28T19:00:44","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T19:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37191"},"modified":"2016-10-24T18:14:03","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T18:14:03","slug":"the-biopolitics-of-mixing-thai-multiracialities-and-haunted-ascendancies-england-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37191","title":{"rendered":"The biopolitics of mixing: Thai multiracialities and haunted ascendancies [England Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

The biopolitics of mixing: Thai multiracialities and haunted ascendancies [England Review]<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Ethnic and Racial Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 37, Issue 10, 2014<\/a>
\nSpecial Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
\npages 1923-1926
\nDOI: 10.1080\/01419870.2014.925129<\/a><\/p>\n

Sara England<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of Anthropology
\nSoka University of America, Aliso Viejo, California<\/em><\/p>\n

The biopolitics of mixing: Thai multiracialities and haunted ascendancies<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, by Jinthana Haritaworn, Surrey, UK, Ashgate, 2012, vii + 187 pp., \u00a349.50 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-7680-5<\/p>\n

The Biopolitics of Mixing<\/em> falls within a large and growing literature that questions the claim that many nations in the world are now post-racial. This claim is often backed up by the observation that there are a growing number of multiracial subjects who are accepted and celebrated as beautiful, desirable and maybe even genetically superior members of society. It is further bolstered by the claim that race itself has been discredited as a category that has any biological meaning, that through mixing racial categories are blending and creatively transgressed and that multiracial subjects are the products of the ultimate sign of racial tolerance: love, marriage and family-making. Through interviews with peoples of Thai multiracial heritage and analysis of public narratives of multiraciality in England and Germany, Haritaworn <\/a>argues that this new discourse that celebrates multiracial subjects may appear to be more progressive, having done away with prior narratives of the degenerate hybrid and the marginal man; however, there are also ways that this celebratory discourse ignores what she calls the ghosts of eugenics, the Thai prostitute and other less positive images of multiraciality. She also argues that the celebration of multiraciality marginalizes other subjects who do not fit the narrative of the happy multiracial subject and the love story that produced them, and that it celebrates certain kinds of mixing and multiculturalism over others. In the end, despite its seemingly progressive nature, new discourses of multiraciality still draw on conceptions of biopolitics and biological citizenship that continue to silence certain subjects and reinforce heteronormative, liberal, white subjectivity.<\/p>\n

In chapter 2, Haritiworn enters into the debate about the \u2018what are you\u2019 question. She notes that, like researchers before her, she designed her interviews with this question in mind. However, she came to the conclusion that the question itself is problematic, both as encountered in the daily lives of multiracial people and as posed by researchers because in both cases it assumes in advance that the multiracial body is \u2018naturally\u2019 or \u2018obviously\u2019 ambiguous and in need of \u2018dissection\u2019 and explanation. Through her interviews she shows that often the ambiguity is created in the encounter itself as the subject is misrecognized as some other \u2018monoracial\u2019 category and only through the interrogation is the multiraciality revealed and its \u2018signs\u2019 searched for in the body of the interrogated. She further argues that though her interviewees did not see these questions as particularly offensive, they did come to assume an almost ritualistic character in which the interviewee knew in advance how the interrogation was going to proceed and what assumptions underlie it. Some therefore compliantly responded to what the interrogator wanted to hear, others delighted in shocking them, while others played along with their racial assumptions and misrecognitions. While none of these strategies serve to dismantle the racial assumptions behind the interrogation, they could sometimes turn the power of \u2018surveillance\u2019 back onto the interrogator whose racial assumptions were revealed.<\/p>\n

Unlike their varied strategies of resistance to the \u2018what are you\u2019 question, Haritaworn\u2019s interviewees were more consistent in their celebration of the \u2018beautiful Eurasian\u2019, a discourse that she argues appears to turn the tables on the bioracial logic of eugenics in which mixes were assumed to produce degenerations of the \u2018pure\u2019 racial stocks, but that upon inspection actually shares some of its logic. For example, interviewees talked of themselves as superior breeds that are more beautiful and healthy than monoracial individuals, a belief grounded in the long-standing racial logic that equates phenotype with other \u2018non-racial\u2019 characteristics. But even within this celebration of mixing as producing bodies with \u2018the best of both worlds\u2019, some mixes were seen as more beautiful or seamless, than others, particularly Asian plus white which produces a browned white body or a diluted Thai body, in contrast to those who are a \u2018dually minoritized mix\u2019 whose bodies were seen as a more problematic clashing of disparate racialized body parts (Arab nose with Thai eyes, etc.). Haritaworn further shows that this \u2018ghost of eugenics\u2019 in the celebration of the biological superiority of the multiracial body is not simply a discourse among multiracial peoples themselves but is also present in the public sphere and given the legitimization of scientific \u2018truth\u2019 through research that seeks to locate race at the genetic level and has made the argument that multiracial peoples exhibit more \u2018heterozygosity\u2019 and are therefore physically and mentally superior to those who do not mix. She demonstrates this in chapter 4 through an analysis of the British documentary Is it Better to be Mixed Race? which aired on Channel 4 in 2009. The documentary follows Araathi Prasad, a British South Asian scientist, as she interviews largely white male scientists and happy heterosexual multiracial families with their beautiful children. Haritaworn argues that \u2018While superficially reversing the old racial purity doctrine on national reproduction, the new bioracial knowledge repeats its heteronormativity and preserves and diversifies its ableism\u2019 (89). In contrast to the racial logic of eugenics, \u2018Interraciality is foregrounded as the transgressive, cutting-edge practice of the future\u2019; however, like eugenics \u2018heterosexuality remains its unspoken, taken for granted backdrop\u2019 (90). Thus, rather than dismantling the idea of race as a biological fiction, this new line of research reifies it into the body at the genetic level and reproduces ideas of superior and inferior \u2018biological citizens.\u2019…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The biopolitics of mixing: Thai multiracialities and haunted ascendancies [England Review] Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 37, Issue 10, 2014 Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review pages 1923-1926 DOI: 10.1080\/01419870.2014.925129 Sara England, Associate Professor of Anthropology Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, California The biopolitics of mixing: Thai multiracialities and haunted ascendancies, by Jinthana […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,16,5,28,8,394,10],"tags":[461,12295,17814],"class_list":["post-37191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-asia","category-book-reviews","category-europe","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-uk","tag-ethnic-and-racial-studies","tag-jinthana-haritaworn","tag-sara-england"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49592,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37191\/revisions\/49592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}