Page 206 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CONCLUSION: TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE

observes, ‘anxiety about hybridity reflected the desire to keep races separate’, to
maintain a clear-cut racial hierarchy which would be disturbed by the mixed-race
offspring resulting from inter-racial sexual intercourse. In nineteenth-century
Western racial theory the proliferation of ‘half-castes’ was accompanied by
forewarnings about the degeneration and decay which would be the result of an
emerging ‘raceless chaos’. Young describes these hybrids as the ‘living legacies that
abrupt, casual, often coerced, unions had left behind’ (ibid.), a description which
implicitly connects hybridity with rape (mostly, of coloured, colonized women by
white, colonizing men) and conjures up the deeply exploitative and hierarchical
colonial context in which nineteenth-century miscegenation generally took place.
This situation, of course, differs considerably from the relative commonness of
voluntary cross-racial or cross-ethnic marital unions in the globalized, transnational
and multicultural world of the late twentieth century. Does this mean then that
hybridity has now become normalized, and that as a result old racist divisions have
been overcome?
According to The Bulletin, ‘intermarriage is by definition a force of social cohe-
sion’ (Kyriakopoulos 1996: 17). It becomes clear then that hybridity is constructed
here as the imaginary solution for the real and potential interethnic friction
within the boundaries of the multiracial and multicultural nation–state. That is,
if keeping non-white others out (as in the White Australia policy) can no longer
be pursued, and if managerial multiculturalism threatens to keep ethnic groups
apart in their separate boxes, then, so it seems, the opposite strategy becomes
attractive: intermixture and amalgamation. So hybridity operates in this discourse
as a promise for multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic harmony: hybridity as, in
Nicholas Thomas’s (1996: 11) words, ‘a smooth process of synthesis or fusion’.
In this model, differences may not be completely erased, but made harmless,
domesticated, amalgamated into a variegated yet comfortable whole. To be sure,
promoting and popularizing the image of Australia as a ‘hybrid nation’ – as a nation
of endlessly mixed-up differences and samenesses, does seem like an exceedingly
progressive alternative in the face of resurgent exclusionary white nationalisms
of the Pauline Hanson kind. The problem is, however, that the very equation of
hybridity with harmonious fusion or synthesis – which we may characterize as
‘liberal hybridism’, simplifies matters significantly and produces power effects of
its own, which reveal some of the problems with an uncritical use of the idea
of hybridity.
To illuminate the stakes in this conceptual tussle, we can contrast the rosy
melting-pot vision of liberal hybridism with that of Ian Anderson’s (1995) militant
refusal to call himself a ‘hybrid’. Anderson, a Tasmanian Aboriginal descendant
of Truganini and thus one of the living legacies of enforced miscegenation which
1
has littered Australian colonial history, stresses the political and psychological
importance of affirming his indigenous identity in a context in which non-
indigenous Australians often pressure people like him to acknowledge their white
ancestry. In response, Anderson articulates his resistance against the disempower-
ment ensuing from being categorized as ‘hybrids’ who ‘have lost their culture, and

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