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.
Acknowledgments
Thanks as always to Vikki Crowley and David Hollinsworth for their longstanding support and discerning interrogations of my work.
Notes
1. See CitationParker and Song's 2001 edited collection in the UK context, and CitationZack'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.