{"id":39730,"date":"2015-01-28T20:12:22","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T20:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39730"},"modified":"2017-05-28T18:35:57","modified_gmt":"2017-05-28T18:35:57","slug":"mutt-monster-or-melting-pot-mixed-race-metaphor-and-obamas-ambivalent-hybridity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39730","title":{"rendered":"Mutt, Monster or Melting-Pot? Mixed-Race Metaphor and Obama\u2019s Ambivalent Hybridity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mutt, Monster or Melting-Pot? Mixed-Race Metaphor and Obama\u2019s Ambivalent Hybridity<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Ada: A Journal of Gender New Media & Technology<\/a>
\nIssue #6: Hacking the Black\/White Binary<\/a> (January 2015)<\/p>\n

Nathan Rambukkana<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
\nWilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018ObamaNation raped & killed 1,000 Christians\u2019<\/p>\n

Kenyan citizen Hussein Obama spent $1-million in US campaign funds to massacre 1,000 Christians in British Kenya, after his Communist cousin lost the presidential election. 800 Christian churches were arsoned [sic], with dozens of people cooked alive. Men and women were raped by Obama supporters. To stop the violence, the Kenyan government was extorted by Obama to make his cousin \u2018prime minister\u2019, a job that did not exist.<\/p>\n

\u2014Anonymous, piratenews.org<\/em>, October 25, 2008<\/p>\n

\u2018Obama\u2019s Brother in China\u2019<\/p>\n

If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. In Kenya, his uncle Sayid, a Muslim, told me: \u2018My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements, including my Christian schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me.\u2019<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven. For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance.<\/p>\n

\u2014Roger Cohen<\/a>, New York Times<\/em>, March 17, 2008 [1]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The above two textual excerpts from the period between February 10, 2007 when Obama<\/a> announced he was running for the Democratic nomination, and November 4, 2008 when he was elected president, are metonymic of the polar opposite ways Barack Obama\u2019s particular hybrid identity is framed and reflected on in the digital public sphere. While the sources are divergent in terms of scope and reach\u2014a mainstream newspaper site and an underground website\u2014the black and white binary of the way they articulate hybridity marks them as part of the same discursive process: one of skinning (Ahmed and Stacey 2001) a powerful and prominent mixed-race subject. This short paper collects some of these varied but linked representations, using a broadly Foucauldian<\/a> genealogical discourse analysis (Foucault 1980), working together academic and popular discourses and analyzing them in tandem; mixing theory, memory, reflection, and discovery into an archeology of the present cultural moment that pries open the layers of meaning inherent to culture itself.[2] This flexible method allows us to investigate what these prominent representations of mixed-race and hybrid identities do<\/em>, situated as they are in such a prominent position: attached to a figure as he contended for and then assumed the most privileged seat of power in the US \u2014 arguably even world \u2014 context.<\/p>\n

Drawing on Sara Ahmed<\/a> and Jackie Stacey\u2019s<\/a> (2001) concept of dermographia, or skin writing, this paper attempts to read the ways that Obama\u2019s skin, as text, is an effect of the various and overlapping ways it is \u2018surfaced\u2019 in discourse. At once a real and material organ that wraps and envelops what is currently the world\u2019s most protected of bodies,[3] Obama\u2019s skin is also \u2018dependent on regimes of writing that mark the skin in different ways or that produce the skin as marked\u2019 (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 15). As such, the skin of the \u2018leader of the free world\u2019 is at once a private and storied flesh, and a public text that emerges in the intertextual dermographia of its multiform figurings. In fact, writing may even be thought of as a form of skin (Ahmed and Stacy 2001, 15), a second skin that acts as discursive layer between ourselves and the world. The skins of hybrids of multiple sorts are ones that are ambiguously written or written upon: fetishized and demonized, worked on and managed from without and within, hybrids are by nature and nurture hacks of the binaries they straddle, and inherently political as such\u2014though not always through a progressive politics. Many times a hybrid figure, Obama\u2019s body is fetishized, demonized and detailed across the political spectrum both as signifying object and as symbol of multiple politics.<\/p>\n

Much has been said about Barack Obama\u2019s body. Even preceding his presidency, Obama was often discussed in a metaphorical manner in the public sphere. Born in Hawai\u2019i to a white mother of mostly English decent, and a Black Kenyan father; raised for a time in Indonesia, and with an Indonesian step-father; and a late-in-life Christian from a family tree containing both Christian and Muslim roots (\u201cBarrack\u201d 2014), his mixed-race, mixed-ethnicity and mixed-religious heritage position him as a hybrid figure par excellence<\/em>. Coverage on Obama collects the full range of charged metaphor and imagery that prehends to hybridity generally and multiraciality specifically: that of the monstrous chimera, insidious half-breed, or untrustworthy mongrel on the one hand, and of the global-citizen, multiculturalism, bridge, and melting-pot America on the other. But this dense layering of tropes cannot be divided into \u2018good\u2019 hybridity metaphor and \u2018bad\u2019, for in addition to the strong links between the negative tropes, structural racism and Islamaphobia, the positive tropes that attach to hybridity generally, and modern mixed-race identities specifically, are also discursively implicated with other problematic ideologies such as top-down globalization (Kraidy 2005, 148), the facile ideals of a non-critical post-racial or race-blind society (Sharma and Sharma 2012), and even colonial narratives such as \u2018the American Dream\u2019 (Berlant 1997). Accordingly, both the positive and the negative tropes used to mark his hybridity are fraught with intertextual meaning, legacies of power, and politics of privilege…<\/p>\n

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

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