Hybrid Identities and the ‘One-way Street’ of Assimilation

Abstract

The most remarkable, but frequently taken-for-granted, feature of the politics of hybridity in settler societies is that hybridity is an indigenous ‘problem’ only. Like race — and for related, highly racialized reasons — hybridity is not a problem for the settler. Despite the many sources of hybridity within the settler population (mixed descent and histories of migration and of culture contact with indigenous and other peoples), a century after the eugenist anxieties about white racial purity it seems that white settler identities have become sponges that can typically absorb any amount of cultural difference.¹ As Sara Ahmed (2000: 189, n4) argues, hybridization is typically not a problem for white subjectivities constructed in terms of dynamism and pliability. In the excerpt above from her poem ‘Making Aborigines’, the Australian Aboriginal poet, Anita Heiss, draws attention to this discrepancy in the assignation of hybridity.

Are you a half-caste Australian?

Do you call yourself ‘part-Australian’ because of your mixed heritage?

No, you are wholly your identity. (Heiss, 2007: 5)