Eurasian Persuasions: Mixed Race, Performativity and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Eurasians are ‘in’. We are the poster children of globalisation. In Asia, and increasingly in the West, mixed-race Eurasian models charm us with their cosmopolitan chic. Terms previously used to demarcate impure outsiders such as Eurasian mixed-race, hybridity, mestiza, hapa, haafu, Euro-Asian and Anglo-Asian have recently been given an affirmative spin. This essay argues that the appeal, allure and persuasions of Eurasian/mixed-race are as much an effect of its commodified production as a cosmopolitan figure with automatic racial, cultural and national border crossing attributes, as its capacity and potential to claim for itself a location and space of visibility. Framed as a performative, the visual aesthetics and cosmopolitan attributes of Eurasian/mixed-race are explored in relation to postcolonial practices of racialisation and sexualisation under globalisation. Factors evoked in the constitution of Eurasian/mixed race delimit rather than preclude its promise of an expansive transnational/transcultural cosmopolitan future.

Keywords:

• Eurasian
• Performativity
• Cosmopolitanism
• Hybridity

Acknowledgments

Thanks as always to Vikki Crowley and David Hollinsworth for their longstanding support and discerning interrogations of my work.

Notes

1. See Parker and Song's 2001 edited collection in the UK context, and Zack's 1995 work in America.

2. Interpellation refers to a general iterative process of self-recognition that hails subjects into discourse. Subjects are propelled into a symbolic order where they come to recognise their own and other others’ location. Butler (1993) argues that to be effective interpellation must repeat references and prior subjectifying norms over and over again so that performed variations of systematic repetitions construct, constrain and proliferate seemingly natural categories.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Matthews

Julie Matthews is Associate Professor and Director of Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her research is interdisciplinary and spans education, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and gender studies, her research interests include feminism, postcolonial theory, ethnography and visual sociology. Currently she holds two Australian Research Council Discovery grants, one in cultural studies focusing on Reconciliation and one in education focusing on refugee education