Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck's Part Asian•100% Hapa

Abstract

In response to perceived invisibility within a black/white racial paradigm governed by hypodescent, various multiracial people have begun to speak out against a lack of recognition of their multiplicitous identities. Along with state recognition (i.e., the 2000 census), many of these multiracial identity activists desire a sense of community built around racial multiplicity. In an attempt to develop a community, various methods have been employed, and this article focuses on one such implementation of community building. Using a semiotic approach combined with the literary method of close reading, this article will explore and analyze the photographic book project, Part Asian^• 100% Hapa, by Kip Fulbeck. The article will examine how an “imagined community” of Hapas is created through the project and photographs themselves, but also how the photos work to homogenize the very multiplicity they seek to represent. I will look at the use of photographs as a means of subverting the common usage of the body as a racial signifier and thereby show the limitations of racial language. Finally, I will explore the linguistic elements of representation: how do the Hapa subjects’ self-descriptions work against or with the photograph and the project as a whole? Thinking about how those photographed in the book respond to the book's central focus of a stabilized Hapa identity is a critical approach that has the benefit of disrupting the limitations of our racial language, our need for stabilized racial identities, and any homogenization that occurs through the aesthetic project itself. I hope to question the photographic project so that multiracial people can avoid becoming complicit in a new form of racial domination and/or racialization, while also respecting the work that this project has done for Hapas’ visibility.

Keywords:

• Multiracial
• Hapa
• Mixed-race

Acknowledgments

She'd also like to thank Stuart Gaffney and Laura Kina for sharing their insights on and personal experiences in the The Hapa Project.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was originally presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University in Chicago (2010).

2. I use the term Hapa to refer to the community of mixed-heritage Asian Americans and its members, who have adopted the term from its original usage in the Native Hawaiian language. In this article, Hapa is distinguished from the term hapa, which is the term used in the Native Hawaiian language to refer to a person of partial Native Hawaiian descent.

3. The term mixed-race is still being debated within the academic field of mixed Race Studies. My understanding of the term is not based on a biological understanding of race, but on a sociopolitical understanding of groups that have been differentiated using the notion of “race.” Similarly, the term multiracial has been contested in the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. Like mixed-race, my use of the term is not based in a biological understanding of race. Its usage in this essay is interchanged with mixed-race, people of mixed-heritage, people of mixed-race in order to destabilize its meaning as a stable category of identity. However, at times it is also employed to designate a newly stabilized identity category, multiracial, that is being critiques through this paper.

4. Early mixed race anthologies such as Maria P.P. Root's Racially mixed people in America (1992) and The multiracial experience: Racial borders as the new frontier (1996), as well as Naomi Zack's American mixed race: The culture of microdiversity (1995) contain articles from various disciplines that call attention to the ways in which the dominant racial schema in the US based on “monoracial” categories fails to recognize or legitimate people of mixed race. Within media studies, collections such ase Mary Beltran's Mixed race Hollywood (2008) demonstrate a growing concern with images of mixed race individuals, families, and communities within popular culture. In this journal, articles such as Ralina Joseph's “‘Tyra Banks is fat’: Reading (post-)racism and (post-)feminism in the new millennium” and Leilani Nishime's (2011) Aliens: Narrating US global identity through transnational adoption and interracial marriage in Battlestar Galactica deal with issues of mixed- and post-race reflecting how issues of mixed race are becoming increasingly important in critical examinations of media.

5. I realize that these categories, even as the “five major racial groups,” are highly contested. For example, in the past few decades, there have been numerous debates about the pan-ethnic conflation of these categories, as well as how axes of class, gender, and sexuality may intersect with and trouble these categories. The use of the categories in this essay is not meant to reflect my own personal belief in them or a claim to their facticity; it is merely meant to demonstrate that early multiracial activism often used these categories as a point of contestation, claiming the census and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive 15 as defining guidelines. See Maria P.P. Root's “Introduction” (1996).

6. Unlike Streeter, who in The hazards of visibility (2002) is concerned with the mixed-race body, Ralina L. Joseph in “‘Tyra Banks is fat’: Reading (post-)racism and (post-)feminism in the new millennium” (2009) is specifically concerned with the black female body and the history of racist images that have accompanied this particular racialization.

7. For examples of websites dedicated to Hapas see the following: mixedasians.com, WeAreHapa.com, halfkorean.com, eurasiannation.com, or Halvsie.com.

8. See note 1.

9. Through an uncritical creation and naming of a new identity category, multiraciality can be celebrated as the means to postraciality and racial equality, which are not givens just by mere recognition of multiracials. Furthermore, without a critical approach the category of multiraciality can be placed in a position above either parent group in the racial hierarchy without actually challenging the racial order. Thus, multiraciality becomes a sought after and celebrated identity and dominates other racial groups.

10. For a better understanding of “doing” race see Butler (2004) and her arguments about the mechanisms of gender construction and performance.

11. For more on debunking the biological basis of race see Ono (1998).

12. For more information regarding the conundrum of creating a self-identity in a language that already contains sets of norms surrounding intelligible identities see Butler (2004), especially the “Introduction” and Chapter 3.

13. Paul Spickard (2006) argues against what he perceives as misinterpretations of Fulbeck's project. One of these misinterpretations has to do with drawing a comparison between Fulbeck's photos and the pseudoscience pictures of “races” from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—where fractions of race where measured by physical features (p. 260).

14. Barthes (2004) explains the way in which the linguistic message of an image serves as both an anchorage and a relay. Barthes argues that if all images are polysemous, then the linguistic message is used to “fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs” (p. 37). Thus, the linguistic message not only “holds the connotated meanings from proliferating” (p. 37), but steers the viewer towards a specific meaning (p. 38). The linguistic message also acts as a “relay,” which Barthes defines as “not simply as elucidation [like anchorage is] but really does advance the action by setting out, in the sequence of messages, meanings that are not to be found in the image itself” (p. 38).

15. This is a point Fulbeck recognizes and applauds within the “Introduction” (p.17).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Miyoshi Rabin

Nicole Miyoshi Rabin is a PhD student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is deeply grateful to Kent A. Ono, PhD, Cristina Bacchilega, PhD, Aaron Allen, and Alexander Cho for their guidance and generous comments on earlier drafts