Seeing Race in Modern America

6. Hybridity

129 C H A P T E R S I X Hybridity T he hybrid body, as Jean Toomer imagined it, is a racial ensemble, or platoon, in miniature, not easily categorized as a “mulatto” or “mestizo.” With its component features easily viewable, discrete, and engaged productively, this body is an anachronism, out of sync with national time and space, but a useful one, serving as a vehicle for conversations about the new world that is, in these representations , on the verge. It focuses our attention on the steely body— typically but not exclusively male—capable of toggling back and forth between one racial position and another. Born of a disharmonious blending, the racial expressions of this complicated figure sharpen the color lines within the body, allowing for parallel readings. In our conceptions of these supposedly heroic mixed peoples, we historically set aside the white/black dyad, shaped by the onedrop rule and theories of hypodescent, in favor of mixture with the native, the indigenous, and the Asian. Hybridity and blackness are not easily related in racial sight. As a consequence, these figures are often understood positively, as fetishized attractions and not merely as objects of fear. These oversized archetypes of masculinity and mixture beg us to attend to the swirling, minute details on the surface , details that suggest the dynamic tension between the unmixed bloods beneath the skin. Overwhelmingly featured in visual media and often staged heroically, these hypermasculine bodies are, in the end, just as often suffused with a powerful melancholy and loneliness . As living indicators of some great and immediate transformation , they are offered as evidence of the simultaneity of racial problems and proof of racial solutions. In his classic exposé of whiteness in visual culture, White, Richard Dyer suggests that “muscle heroes are not indigenous.” Tarzan, he continues, is “not of the jungle.”1 John Rambo, though of mixed 130 MULTIPLE EXPOSURES parentage, is an “ideal”—one of several a “tanned white male bodies” from Reagan-era muscle movies, “set in colonialist relation” and geared toward the construction of “the white man as physically superior . . . built to do the job of colonial world improvement.”2 For Dyer, the “tanned” white body is not a marker of hybridity but a sign of “everyman” status or class position. “The muscle hero is an everyman : his tan bespeaks his right to intervene anywhere.”3 Dyer lumps when he could also split, for some of these figures are intentionally conceived as indigenous, while others are not. In some cases, that tawny skin stands not as a physical “tell” of the everyman but as a feature of the supposed native—either out of place or in place, either whole or hybrid. In Rambo, Tarzan, and others, we see an interest in the external and internal character of the racially mixed body, and of the white body relocated to racially foreign territory , and transformed as a consequence. Reimagined in this way, the racially hybrid hero is a fixture of the modern American landscape. He is self-consciously “hybrid,” a consequence of one generation’s simple mixture of two different “strains.” We know him by a single name: Hawkeye, Tarzan, Rambo. Capable of extraordinary violence— which is to say, more violence than his unadulterated match—he is a creature of borderlands, of foreign territories, and of peripheries. His partial whiteness is what allows him to serve as an object of romantic desire and public fascination. His status as an indigene is the wellspring of his violent tendencies. His survival—and success, by his measure—in territories that would otherwise be inhospitable to the ordinary and the pure is balanced with his inability to exist within the pale. His role and location are determined by a variety of possibilities, from adoption to birth to tragic circumstance. In the visual economy of race, the hybrid hero does not merely mark the limits of whiteness or the cutting edge of domination. Having “gone native,” he is an uneasy, incomplete metaphor—his body’s racial components working together—best seen against the backdrop of empire’s cutting edge. European settlers and their descendants have long adored Indian blood in small amounts, routinely claiming an Indian grandparent or great-grandparent. Laws governing racially mixed marriages famously included exceptions for those who were distantly related to Pocahontas—exceptions that were entirely absent from the emerging “one-drop rule” governing white/black relations. As significantly, Hybridity 131 these...