No Halvsies!

There has been an unexpected resurgence of hybridity. Just when the raging debates of the 1980s and 1990s had cooled, and those guilty of "uncritically celebrating" hybridity had been forced to sharply qualify their more dazzling pronouncements, the age of cybernetic warfare and biopolitical terror has augured the concept's return with a vengeance. The transgressive symmetries and uncanny mimicries once dismissed by some as the delusions of cosmopolitan academia now confront us as the concrete fantasies of both empire and multitude. The imperial hybrid lurks in what Jasbir Puar calls terrorist queer assemblages.¹ "Sleeper cells" and "shoe bombers" form postmodern networks, with cell phones and a direct line to Marin County, California, home of Hamza Walker Lindh (née John Walker Lindh). The "American Taliban" became the perfect hybrid foil for imperial hysteria: a baby-faced renegade from the liberal, gay environment of his upbringing, turning first to the "starter drug" of hip-hop and from there falling precipitously into a much more fatal attraction to the kohl-lined eyes of the enemy Afghani other. José Padilla, the Nuyorican "dirty bomber" held in solitary confinement and possibly driven out of his mind, and James Yee, the Chinese American army chaplain charged with sedition and espionage and later exonerated, have elicited markedly less pathos, despite their shared U.S. natality.

Less obvious than the monstrous hybrid conjured by empire, perhaps, are popular culture's hybrid surrogates. From action heroes such as Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, Vin Diesel, or even a bulked-up Wentworth Miller on television's Prison Break, to more subcultural figures such as gay porn star Dred Scott, whose chest is tattooed with the words "black" and "white," spectacularly mongrel masculinities proliferate in the popular imaginary. Hortense Spiller's comment that the mulatto serves as a phallus has proved prescient, as these alluring hybrids indeed crisscross our screens like projectiles, doubling and redoubling race in the era of its debunking.² The distinction Homi Bhabha once drew between hybridity and fetishism now appears to have blurred, as the hybrid body itself becomes a fetish object of advanced capital.³

Mass fetishism of hybridity refuses to relinquish fantasies of racial difference.⁴ Old worries that "mixed race" would only further reify "race" by insisting upon the reality of its "mixture" now appear confirmed as the mulatto-as-African-American (Barack Obama, Alicia Keys) and the mulatto-as-Cablinasian (Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey) alike proliferate in uneasy proximity with each other. Such avatars may be paving the wave for a Brazil-ification of the U.S. racial imaginary, with an official racial democracy hiding an oppressed black underclass in plain sight. Alternatively, as Paul Gilroy warns, it may also mark a process of South-Africanization, as gated communities and armored SUVs protect a globally mobile ruling class from mongrel hordes of the dispossessed. Either way, race is powerfully rearticulated by popular ideologies of hybridity, with anxiety in the face of the protean resolving itself with ever-growing fervor into new forms of suspicious and guarded identities.⁵

New hybridities have thus mutated beyond the happy metaphors of fusion, variety, and vigor. Instead, popular narratives of the dangerous classes eroticize their incarceration and exclusion by constructing mediating figures such as the blue-eyed African American double agent on television's Sleeper Cell, a patriotic black American infiltrating the "Islamofascists." Similarly, on Prison Break, a multiracial actor plays an engineer who becomes imprisoned to free his brother. Wentworth Miller broke a Hollywood color line for that role, as a person of African descent playing a white character. When his character is warned by white inmates that the races have to stick together, the knowing viewer can only reel in irony. Such nontraditional casting may place us beyond the traditional dynamics of "passing," since Miller is undisguised about his racial background. As legal theorist Kenji Yoshino suggests, identity is now not simply admitted or hidden, but complexly negotiated through grey areas of covering and disattention.⁶ In an era of...