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Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 7 (2005) Issue 3 Article 4 Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural Heather Latimer Simon Fraser University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Latimer, Heather. "Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.3 (2005): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1270> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 2483 times as of 11/ 07/19. Note: the download counts of the journal's material are since Issue 9.1 (March 2007), since the journal's format in pdf (instead of in html 1999-2007). This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. This is an Open Access journal. This means that it uses a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Readers may freely read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles. This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu > CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 < http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb > Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture , the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: < [email protected] > CLCWeb Volume 7 Issue 3 (September 2005) Article 4 Heather Latimer, "Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural " <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss3/4> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.3(2005) <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss3/ > Abstract: In her paper, "Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural ," Heather Latimer examines the autobiographical collection Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural assembled and edited by Claudine C. O'Hearn. Latimer's analysis reveals how current models of hybridity theory are performed, articu- lated, and exemplified in the texts of O'Hearn's volume. In her analysis, Latimer explores the anxi- ety and tension about whiteness within hybridity theory, often reflected in the performance of hy- brid aesthetics. Latimer argues that while some authors in Half and Half avoid talking about white- ness as a way to establish legitimate hybrid identities, this avoidance actually resinscribes an au- thenticity to their identities which in turn replicates the very oppressive processes of identity for- mation they are attempting to write against. Latimer sees other authors in the volume, however, as disrupting the stability and invisibility of whiteness by performing a type of hybridity that makes visible the made-up and constructed nature of all racial identities. Heather Latimer, "Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half " page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.3 (2005): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss3/4> Heather LATIMER Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural In an increasingly globalized and culturally "mixed" world it is becoming impossible to define our- selves under any stable category of cultural purity or authenticity, either nationally or internation- ally. As traditional categories and binaries of racial and cultural identity are blurred, more people are defining themselves as "hyphenated" and/or within the discourse of hybridity, and cultural crit- ics and theorists have begun to examine how this so-called new hybridity is performed and articu- lated. In these attempts, critics such Robert Young, Rita de Grandis, and Sneja Gunew have noted that although hybridity theory often focuses on poststructuralist notions of fluid identities and limi- nal spaces, concepts around "the hybrid" are actually linked to and arise out of historical legacies of racism, colonization, and imperialism. The theory, therefore, finds itself in the middle of (and pushing against) age-old debates surrounding monocultural identities and "embedded in older ten- sions between nationalist sentiments and articulations of world citizenship that have operated globally through one of the earliest ideologies of internationalism, that of empire" (Joseph 1). From this tenuous spot, hybridity theorists and hybrid groups attempt to establish a third space — aes- thetically, geographically and psychologically — that gestures beyond traditional oppositions and identity categories as a way to interrupt "the seamless narrative of oppressed and oppressor, colo- nized and colonizer" (Joseph 9). In defining themselves against current binary structures, howev- er, those who seek to create this third space often have no choice but to produce themselves as legitimate, unique and (purely) different in order to be taken seriously and politically. This has lead to a certain level of anxiety and tension within hybridity theory which is often visible and reflected in the performance of hybrid aesthetics. For instance, in the autobiographical collection Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural (Ed. Claudine C. O'Hearn) the authors attempt to write this third space and assert hybrid mixed-race identities. In these assertions, however, the authors also struggle with how to incorporate whiteness into their identities and even actively ig- nore and abject their whiteness to the point it becomes a noticeable site of anxiety within their work. The topic of whiteness has been theorized extensively by feminist and cultural critics such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Robert Young, Richard Dyer, and Ruth Frankenberg. These theorists posit that race shapes white and non-white people's lives in several ways and that whiteness is not only a "location of structural advantage" but more importantly "a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed" (Frankenberg 1). For instance, in White , Richard Dyer reflects on the tendency to leave whiteness unmarked by examining how work on race and racism often leaves whiteness invisible. In assuming that whites are "non-raced" (2), Dyer states that many people and scholars actually end up configuring white people as "just people," which actually states implicitly that "whites are people whereas other colors are something else" (2). This config- uring stops anti-racism work from reaching its ultimate goal of "a situation in which white people and white cultural agendas are no longer in the ascendant" (3); not only does white supremacy currently rely on whiteness being left unseen, it is actually only maintained through this invisibility. This reliance, in turn, creates a situation where racial identity is mistakenly seen as not as im- portant to white people's lives as those who are racialized, which reinforces a binary where "black- ness [for instance] is conflated with being oppressed, and whiteness is conflated with the privilege of 'normalcy'" (Twine 228). Whiteness is often left as the (invisible)
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