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CAROLINE A. STREETER Faking the Funk? Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and (Hybrid) Black Celebrity In this essay I read the careers of performers Mariah Carey and Alicia Keys as barometric indicators of how “blackness” is rendered intelligible in an American popular cultural landscape that is fragmented, yet less segregated than in the past, and replete with “white” Americans who idolize “black” American celebrities. The term blackness is used here in the sense in which Herman Gray has de‹ned it, “as a way to examine various positions and claims on it both from within the African American community and from outside of it.”1 I look at the representation of Carey and Keys in black media—magazines such as Vibe and television broadcasts such as the NAACP Image Awards—as well as how they are depicted in the mainstream media. The notion of racial authenticity to which the title of this essay implicitly refers is germane to an American cultural environment in which individuals are racially classi‹ed and commodities are marketed with an eye toward racialized groups. The notion of “race” itself is complicated by the tendency in American culture to regard whiteness as a deracialized norm—rendering those who are not white as racially marked “others.” American jurisprudence has tended to identify those of mixed racial descent not as white but as either wholly a part of, or as a subset of, the racialized group to which they are also related.2 There is a doubleness inherent in the notion of the racial hybrid that both troubles the ways in which distinctions are made between groups and has the potential to undermine the stable sense of identity within a group. While the hybrid is a sign of difference, he/she is also a reminder that the races are not successfully segregated and there are not always clear physical distinctions between them. Whereas the hybrid may move with relative ease across boundaries and up hierarchies, he/she is also marginalized for being frag185 mented and multiple. Thus the hybrid occupies a complex node of privilege and stigma in the American racial imaginary. The anxiety that arises over racial mixing is matched by the sexual desire that provokes “miscegenation” in the ‹rst place. Hazel Carby has theorized the mulatto character in literature as “a vehicle for an exploration of the relationship between the races and, at the same time, an expression of the relationship between the races.”3 I am arguing here that contemporary images of people of mixed descent still function in this symbolic fashion—a fact complicated by the ways in which their representations have been appropriated by discourses of multiracialism and multiculturalism . Biracial women such as Carey and Keys are not only the embodied result of sex between the races but also function as a symbolic fetish object from more than one point of view: for white males intrigued by the idea of sex with a woman who is racially taboo but not so different from a white woman, for black males intrigued by the idea of sex with a woman who approximates the physical aesthetic of whiteness that is the feminine beauty ideal. Carey and Keys are ‹gures that help to illuminate how the marketing of hybrid bodies as popular cultural icons becomes synonymous with the commodi‹cation of miscegenation—a conceptual negotiation of racial difference through sexual desire. The idea of race mixing implies both miscegenation and heterosexuality, and thereby operationalizes the inherent con›ict between the taboo against interracial sex and the imperative of normative heterosexuality. In the U.S. cultural framework, then, the racially mixed female body becomes symbolic of both illicit sex and the incitement to an apparently transgressive heterosexuality that is quickly recuperated and normalized through processes of desire, spectacle, and commodi‹cation. The careers of Carey and Keys have also bene‹ted from what seems to be an emerging role for multiracial celebrities in the post-civil-rights era as enablers of the consumption of black popular culture without sacri‹cing the appeal of what Homi Bhabha might call a “not quite white” female body.4 The pejorative roots of terms like hybrid and mulatto remain implicit despite the increasing frequency with which the term hybridity ‹gures in postcolonial theory5 and mulatto can be appropriated by people of mixed descent as a badge of identi‹cation.6 Carey and Keys are part of a generation of post-civil-rights “rainbow babies”—young adults born in the 1970s and 1980s—whose...

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