10/13-Idea-"Mulatto Cyborg"

In one of my individual meetings Jeff gave me some pdfs to read through. They are really interesting and enlightening. One of them is an excerpt from LeiLani Nishime's The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Figure. It is an essay from Cinema Journal printed in 2005. Jeff had mentioned something about the "mulatto cyborg" in one of my previous meetings and I was not aware of the concept at all.

"Cyborgs are hybrids of humans and machines, a mix of organic and inorganic. They are boundary crossers that inspire fascination and dread" (Nishime 34). We are mostly familiar with the cyborgs we see in films, ie David from A.I.. Nishime juxtaposes the mixed person with the cyborg. She compares the melancholic cyborg to the idea of the "tragic mulatto". Barbara Christian describes the tragic mulatta, "Often she is shown as caught between two worlds, and since she is obviously the result of an illicit relationship, she suffers from a melancholy of the blood that inevitably leads to tragedy." Ive come across this idea of the tragic mullato before. Cyborgs are often seen as monsters. Some critics argue that the monster in horror films is this racial or ethnic "other". She talks about how the cyborg attempts to blur the line between human and machine (other).

"Western culture's long history of equating human with white European suggests that the admixture of human with Other in the cyborg finds its closest racial parallel in the mixed-race body. The same dehumanizing logic that justified slavery and colonialism also fueled the belief that different races constituted entirely different species" (Nishime 35). There was this belief that if the races mixed then it would result in sterile offspring. Mulatto can be a derogatory term and original meant to refer to a mule (sterile offspring of a horse and donkey).

Nishime states that when more cyborg films were made, there was a correlation to amount of interracial relationships and children. She says that biraciality isnt as focused on in films because it is seen not to be an issue anymore. We are more "color-blind". But in these films the cyborg generally struggles to pass as human. Human=white. White is the majority so in racial sense, anything else is the "other".


Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes. -Anzaldua

Title: The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future

Author(s): LeiLani Nishime

Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter, 2005), pp. 34-49

Publisher(s): University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3661093

Abstract: Applying the literature of passing to cyborg cinema makes visible the politics of cyborg representations and illuminates contemporary conceptions of mixed-race subjectivity and interpolations of mixed-race bodies. The passing narrative also reveals the constitutive role of melancholy and nostalgia both in creating cyborg cinema and in undermining its subversive potential.