The mulatto cyborg: Imagining a multiracial future

Cinema Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 34-49

  Nishime, LeiLani ^a  

^a SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949980326     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2005.0011     Document Type: Review

References (41)

1. Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Mark Poster, ed., Selected Writings (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 168
2. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)
3. Jennifer González, "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research," in Chris Hables Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1995), 540-51
4. Isabel C. Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 111
5. I use the term "mulatto" advisedly. "Mulatto" was, and sometimes still is, a derogatory term, deriving from an unflattering comparison to a mule, the sterile offspring of a horse and a donkey. By calling this article "The Mulatto Cyborg," I wish to invoke the use of the term in early American fictions of passing. Furthermore, I want to yoke together a term that recalls the highly technical posthuman and one that retains the sense of a physical, racialized, politicized body
6. J. P. Telotte, Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)
7. Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987)
8. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2000), 103
9. Forest Pyle makes the case for a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on the cyborg. He characterizes the films as "distinctly dystopian in tone and premise. They are unsettled and unsettling speculations on the border that separate the humans and non-humans." Pyle, "Making Cyborgs, Making Humans," in David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, eds., The Cybercultures Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), 124
10. Early in Carey's career, she was plagued by unconfirmed rumors of a mixed-race heritage; these reports were never confirmed or denied. Once Carey divorced Svengali producer/husband Tommy Mottola, she began recording with African American artists. This fueled more rumors until the Los Angeles Times reported that her long-absent father was indeed African American
11. See Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998)
12. Annette Kuhn, ed., Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (New York: Verso, 1990)
13. and Michael Shapiro, "'Manning' the Frontiers: The Politics of (Human) Nature in Blade Runner," in Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka, eds., The Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 65-84
14. I refer here to the notion of "racial formation" formulated by Michael Omi and Howard Winant. They assert that race is not a biological fact but an ideology that arises at the intersection of social, economic, and political forces. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s through the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986)
15. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
16. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 17
17. Although the term "posthumanism" was in use before Katherine Hayles's writing on the topic (see Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], I am most indebted to Hayles's discussions. She writes, My dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity
18. Hayles, How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatrics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5
19. Pyle, "Making Cyborgs, Making Humans," 129
20. La Malinche is a quasihistorical figure similar to the mythical version of Pocahantas made popular through children's stories. La Malinche is a woman who entered into a romantic relationship with a conquistador and helped him in his colonial project. She is alternately viewed as a romantic or a race traitor
21. Constance Penley, "Time, Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia," in John Tagg, ed., The Cultural Politics of " Postmodernism" (Binghamton: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York: 1989), 33-49
22. and Penley "Introduction," in Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom, eds., Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
23. Pyle, "Making Humans," 128
24. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 15
25. Elaine Ginsberg, ed., "Introduction," Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 3
26. Brian Carr, "At the Threshold of the 'Human': Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of Imperial Memory," Cultural Critique 39 (1998): 119-50
27. and Kaja Silverman, "Back to the Future," Camera Obscura 27 (1991): 109-32
28. There is a great deal of writing on Blade Runner's blurring of boundaries. See Bukatman, Terminal Identity
29. Shapiro, "'Manning' the Frontiers"
30. and Kuhn, Alien Zone
31. Valerie Rohy, "Displacing Desire: Passing, Nostalgia, and Giovanni's Room," in Ginsberg, ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity, 228, 229
32. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 23
33. Rohy, "Displacing Desire," 226
34. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 181
35. David's "realness" is called into question even in this scene, since his day with his mother is made possible through genetic engineering, mind scans, and a fair amount of scientific mumbo-jumbo on the part of the scriptwriter. Nevertheless, these moments provide emotional closure for the film and give it an ending that is not within the larger reality of the movie
36. and Cynthia Fuchs, "'Death Is Irrelevant': Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future Male Hysteria," in Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook, 281-99
37. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987)
38. Fuchs, "'Death Is Irrelevant,'" 284, 285
39. Anzaladúa, Borderlands, 37
40. Telotte, Replications, 155, 156; emphasis added
41. Stewart, On Longing, 24