Page 207 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

have no past other than being the dupes of white Australian history’. ‘I am no
hybrid’, Anderson says:

I do not experience my body as a fragmented entity of black and white
compartments. Even though I sense its transformative potential, and
its internal contradictions and conflicts, it is one entity. My body is an
Aboriginal body, and could not be otherwise – unless someone cared to
dismember my historical consciousness, my experience of family, my
experience of being treated as an Aboriginal, and acting in a particular
manner because of who I am.
(1995: 38)

The strategic essentialism – or rather, strategic anti-anti-essentialism – involved
in this assertion of a coherent, unambiguously Aboriginal identity is founded on a
political claim of historical continuity and memory, not on biology. For Anderson,
the traumatic history of indigenous dispossession and genocide in Tasmania is more
important in shaping his sense of identity than his biological origins as a mixed-
race child born of that very violent colonial encounter. So when queried, ‘Why do
you people deny your white ancestry?’, Anderson (1995: 35) replies:

Our families have been born out of horrific violence. Some of our white
ancestors were direct perpetrators to that. ...I do see the evidence
of British colonialism – every day. But Britain may as well be on the moon.
... How can Britain as a place or society hold any special significance? I fail
to feel positive about this British cultural tradition. Nor do I see it as mine.
I simply acknowledge its impact.
(italics in original)

Anderson’s active disidentification with the ‘white’ contribution to his existence
enables the construction of an Aboriginal identity that counters the dominant
denomination of Truganini’s descendants as the ‘hybrid children of a dead race’.
It is clear, then, that for Anderson, hybridity does not stand for happy fusion
but for ‘racial’ disappearance, for the fatal completeness of genocide and the
impossibility of Aboriginal survival. In other words, Anderson’s determination
to essentialize Aboriginality stems from a desire to maintain an indubitable position
of resistance through the radical affirmation of an insurgent counter-identity.
From the progressivist perspective of white liberal hybridism Anderson’s militant
refusal of hybridity in favour of an affirmation of an unambigously oppositional
identity can only be dismissed as a retrograde clinging to the past. As Nicholas
Thomas (1996: 10–11) remarks in his critique of the popularity of the concept of
hybridity in contemporary art and cultural theory, ‘[i]f fusion is [conceived as] the
highest stage of cultural evolution, those still preoccupied with anticolonialism
or nativism . . . can only be disparaged’. In other words, while in an earlier period
hybridity (in the sense of miscegenation) served as a sign of degeneration and,

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