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ISSUE NO. 6
Mutt, Monster or Melting-Pot? Mixed-Race Metaphor
and Obama’s Ambivalent Hybridity
Nathan Rambukkana
‘ObamaNation raped & killed 1,000 Christians’
Kenyan citizen Hussein Obama spent $1-million in US campaign funds to massacre
1,000 Christians in British Kenya, after his Communist cousin lost the presidential
election. 800 Christian churches were arsoned [sic], with dozens of people cooked alive.
Men and women were raped by Obama supporters. To stop the violence, the Kenyan
government was extorted by Obama to make his cousin ‘prime minister’, a job that did
not exist.
~ Anonymous, piratenews.org, October 25, 2008
‘Obama’s Brother in China’
If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-
Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. In Kenya, his uncle Sayid,
a Muslim, told me: ‘My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements, including my Christian
schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me.’
Obama’s bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven.
For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance.
~ Roger Cohen, New York Times, March 17, 2008 [1]
The above two textual excerpts from the period between February 10, 2007 when
Obama announced he was running for the Democratic nomination, and November 4,
2008 when he was elected president, are metonymic of the polar opposite ways Barack
Obama’s particular hybrid identity is framed and reflected on in the digital public
sphere. While the sources are divergent in terms of scope and reach—a mainstream
newspaper site and an underground website—the black and white binary of the way
they articulate hybridity marks them as part of the same discursive process: one of
skinning (Ahmed and Stacey 2001) a powerful and prominent mixed-race subject. This
short paper collects some of these varied but linked representations, using a broadly
Foucauldian genealogical discourse analysis (Foucault 1980), working together
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academic and popular discourses and analyzing them in tandem; mixing theory,
memory, reflection, and discovery into an archeology of the present cultural moment
that pries open the layers of meaning inherent to culture itself.[2] This flexible method
allows us to investigate what these prominent representations of mixed-race and
hybrid identities do, situated as they are in such a prominent position: attached to a
figure as he contended for and then assumed the most privileged seat of power in the
US — arguably even world — context.
Drawing on Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s (2001) concept of dermographia, or skin
writing, this paper attempts to read the ways that Obama’s skin, as text, is an effect of
the various and overlapping ways it is ‘surfaced’ in discourse. At once a real and
material organ that wraps and envelops what is currently the world’s most protected of
bodies,[3] Obama’s skin is also ‘dependent on regimes of writing that mark the skin in
different ways or that produce the skin as marked’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 15). As
such, the skin of the ‘leader of the free world’ is at once a private and storied flesh, and
a public text that emerges in the intertextual dermographia of its multiform figurings.
In fact, writing may even be thought of as a form of skin (Ahmed and Stacy 2001, 15), a
second skin that acts as discursive layer between ourselves and the world. The skins of
hybrids of multiple sorts are ones that are ambiguously written or written upon:
fetishized and demonized, worked on and managed from without and within, hybrids
are by nature and nurture hacks of the binaries they straddle, and inherently political
as such—though not always through a progressive politics. Many times a hybrid figure,
Obama’s body is fetishized, demonized and detailed across the political spectrum both
as signifying object and as symbol of multiple politics.
Much has been said about Barack Obama’s body. Even preceding his presidency, Obama
was often discussed in a metaphorical manner in the public sphere. Born in Hawai’i to
a white mother of mostly English decent, and a Black Kenyan father; raised for a time in
Indonesia, and with an Indonesian step-father; and a late-in-life Christian from a family
tree containing both Christian and Muslim roots (“Barrack” 2014), his mixed-race,
mixed-ethnicity and mixed-religious heritage position him as a hybrid figure par
excellence. Coverage on Obama collects the full range of charged metaphor and
imagery that prehends to hybridity generally and multiraciality specifically: that of the
monstrous chimera, insidious half-breed, or untrustworthy mongrel on the one hand,
and of the global-citizen, multiculturalism, bridge, and melting-pot America on the
other. But this dense layering of tropes cannot be divided into ‘good’ hybridity
metaphor and ‘bad’, for in addition to the strong links between the negative tropes,
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structural racism and Islamaphobia, the positive tropes that attach to hybridity
generally, and modern mixed-race identities specifically, are also discursively
implicated with other problematic ideologies such as top-down globalization (Kraidy
2005, 148), the facile ideals of a non-critical post-racial or race-blind society (Sharma
and Sharma 2012), and even colonial narratives such as ‘the American Dream’ (Berlant
1997). Accordingly, both the positive and the negative tropes used to mark his hybridity
are fraught with intertextual meaning, legacies of power, and politics of privilege.
As with many hybrids, the figuring of Obama in discourse is profoundly ambivalent.
Discourse that frames Obama’s hybrid positionalities as positive and desirable aspects
of his bid for political power is as overwhelmingly prevalent in the public sphere as
that which paints the opposite picture. As for which is numerically superior, the
numbers of possible keyword combinations and literally tens of millions of hits for
many search terms make such estimates difficult to gauge – and that is just with respect
to English-language discourse. But what we can do is delve into the textuality of
supportive and condemnatory metaphor to explore the warp and weave of Obama’s
discursive figuring from ‘melting pot’, to ‘monster’ to ‘mutt’.
Obama as Melting Pot
To understand the dermographia that writes Obama as a bridging figure and rhetorical
figure for change, it is useful to delve into the archive of hybridity writing, and to note,
as well, its popular uptake and mythical appropriation. In The Location of Culture
(1994), Homi Bhabha discusses the role that hybridity can—and, indeed, must—take on
with respect to a more positive and constructive mode of postmodern and postcolonial
thinking and action. For Bhabha, the hybrid is a bridge between the status quo and
something else, a not-yet-articulated futurity separated from the now by a definite
boundary, but one that is productive: ‘the place from which something [new] begins its
presencing’ (1994, 7). Quoting Heidegger he says: ‘Always and ever differently the
bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men [sic] to and fro, so that they may
get to other banks…’ (1994, 7). For Bhabha, the hybrid’s role is as translator, and indeed
translation, that embodied location where alterities co-exist and form something new,
some not-yet-known.[4] They are the border as lived experience, a definition which
echoes Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of borderlands identities — though in her figuring,
being sprung between cultures is more fraught and complicated, a mixture of pain and
possibility, loss and community, code-switching and survival (2007). Shirley Ann Tate
discusses Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as a Third Space with respect to lived Black
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identities in Britain. For her, that Third Space is one between essentialism on the one
hand and fragmentation on the other (Tate 2005, 5), and emerges in talk where actual
identities are negotiated, pored over, deconstructed and reconstructed within the space
of everyday discussion.
These more complicated renderings of hybridity as the beginning of something new, as
a space that opens the possibility of negotiation and change, can be contrasted to what
might be thought of as the essentialized or fetishized hybrid. Hybridity in this
rendering is always already a new politics, and it is this figuring that Marwan Kraidy
critiques when he discusses hybridity as “the cultural logic of globalization” (2005, 148).
Rather than touching future history “on its hither side” (Bhabha 1994, 10), the
essentialized hybrid is figured as change embodied, and we can read much of this mode
of discursive investment in supportive discussions of Obama’s hybrid positionalities.[5]
One commentator, for example, refers to Obama’s family and heritage as ‘unusual in
the extent of its continent-crossing, religion-melding, color-fusing richness,’ and speaks
of how his multi-ethnic family connections ‘[mirror] a world in flux’ (Cohen 2008a).
This rhetorical framing marks Obama’s overdetermined embodiment as ‘unusual’, and
outlier. And, perhaps with respect to the higher echelons of the US political class, it is;
yet, as Lauren Berlant notes, mixed identities are becoming the new normal, an
encroaching demographic spectre of diaspora and multiraciality threatening to edge
out White-America—at least in the fears of reactionaries (1997, 175). This framing turns
this feared-difference around and uses his mixed-race, mixed-cultural and mixed-
religious upbringing to position him as a natural ambassador of multiculturalism, a
way to heal the rift between Christianity and Islam, and the embodiment of the end of
racism. Like Tiger Woods, to whom he is often compared, Obama’s mixed-race identity
‘position[s] [him] across old black-white lines in a new hybrid model of multiracialism’
(Starn 2007) that makes him a stand-in for a hybridized America itself.
It should go without saying that this investment of so much de facto change in the
hybrid positionality of a having Black man in the White House[6]—not as an agent of
change, but as change embodied—courts tokenism and becomes an alibi for a
structural racism that, in this argument, no longer exists with Obama as president (e.g.,
McWhorter, 2008). As Arnold Itwaru (a Black Caribbean-Canadian scholar) argued
addressing a critical race studies conference in Toronto shortly before Obama’s
election, that a Black man could become the head of the most destructive and powerful
white supremacist world power in history was hardly a fact to be celebrated (2008); and
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Achille Mbembe, commenting on the Kenyan reaction of both euphoria and ‘great hope’
to Obama’s lead in the polls, said that, in excess of an understandable racial pride,
pinning so much hope on one individual bringing about vast systematic change was
‘irrational, unrealistic and misguided’ (qtd. in Nevin 2008).
The questions about how to navigate the space between the exotification of difference
(e.g., Said 1979) and a sound appraisal of the potential strengths a US leader of non–
ethnically-dominant heritage might actually have are complex ones we return to in the
conclusion. Can, for example, a utopian framing of hybridity allow us to break new
ground in a political system notorious for reifying white male privilege, or do such
simplifications do little but reify the status quo with a slight twist? But it is also useful to
explore the negative portrayals of Obama’s hybridity by those who want to use his
biracial heritage to discredit him, those for whom normalizing the empowerment of the
miscegenated body is threatening. What does the ‘dark side’ of hybridity discourse add
to this intertextual dermographia? How, in particular, does the figure of the ‘monstrous’
and its modern discursive counterparts the alien, terrorist, communist, fag and
Muslim[7] play into Obama’s ambivalent discursive rendering?
Obama as Monster
Obama’s skinning in writing, while certainly drawing on his literal, physical skin and
what it signifies, goes beyond this materiality to shroud him in further layers of
meaning and fix him as an abject other: a monster. In his January 22, 1975 lecture
about ‘The Abnormals’, Michel Foucault calls the monster ‘a principle of intelligibility in
spite of its limit position as both the impossible and the forbidden’ (2003, 57). The
monster is a conceptual figure deployed precisely to make the unthinkable thinkable. In
this way, Obama can be read as hybrid and monster without even needing to consider
his multiracial ethnicity. By embodying an unthinkable positionality (a Black man as
President of the United States) he represents, to some, something both impossible and
forbidden: an abject other who is, beyond reckoning, lodged at the representational
centre of the nation’s self-concept. The only way to resolve such an impasse without a
radical rethinking of this national self-concept is through the category of the monstrous
hybrid. It rationalizes (if not normalizes) the intrusion of the abject as a cancerous
invader, an alien growth that needs to be excised from the body politic.
In fact, this is explicitly the position taken by David Duke, the notorious neo-Nazi and
former head of the Ku Klux Klan. Though in his opinion, along with many in the far-
right, explicitly–White Supremacist community, this would be a good thing, one that
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would shake white Americans out of their complacency. In a prominent article titled ‘A
Black Flag for White America’ (2008), Duke writes:
Obama will be a signal, a clear signal for millions of our people. […] Obama is like
that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some
real medicine. […] Obama is the pain that let’s [sic] your body know that
something is dreadfully wrong. Obama will let the American people know that
there is a real cancer eating away at the heart of our country…
Duke’s writing skins Obama by horrifying his aspect, casting his dark intrusion as an
unwelcome cancer on the nation’s (White) body. Returning to Foucault, the monstrous
— the ‘foreign body’, in the medical sense — is used in discourse to heal fractured
narratives, to act as a conceptual stop-gap solution. It’s inserted into narratives to make
them match up with given world-views: like ‘terrorist’ for discussing the impossible,
forbidden use of violence by non-state actors (and the even more impossible and
forbidden use of such violence against the West or in the West); like ‘fag’ for discussing
impossible, forbidden desires that slip the mould of the heteronormative,[8] of
patriarchal structure, of familiar gendered and sexed kinship; like ‘communist’ for
discussing an impossible, forbidden desire to approach any aspect of culture in a non-
capitalist mode.
As Puar and Rai discuss in ‘Monster, Terrorist, Fag’ (2002), these abject categories often
overlap and reinforce each other in mainstream Western discourse. But more than that,
they constitute each other: for example, the figure of a gay Saddam Hussein with a
demonic Satan as his lover on South Park (Stone 1999). All of these abjected concepts —
alien, monster, terrorist, fag, communist, Muslim — stand in for and constitute each
other, and all are breaks from (or intrusions into) larger, more stable, more understood
(Western) systems. But in their individual particularity, they are inscrutable,
inconceivable. Foucault calls this intelligibility tautological; the concepts are stand-ins
and explanations for the terra incognita of culture, but as such the only things they
cannot properly conceptualize are themselves (57). But we can turn Foucault’s
definition around — not reversing it, but looking at it from its obverse side. Maybe
what these concepts do, in discourse, is conceptualize that very categorical instability,
perhaps their positive definition is rooted in a structure of feeling (Williams 1977, 128):
that of incongruity, ambiguity and abjection, encountered as a non-integratable and
presumed-menacing presence.
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Obama is framed, alternately, using all of these conceptual short-cuts. He is framed as
an alien, for example with the Birthers’ questioning of his US origin (Chancellor 2011);
as a communist, for example in relation to his community organizing in Chicago
(Wolking 2008) and his stance on universal health care (Stewart 2008); as a terrorist and
friend to terrorism, for example as a ‘secret Muslim’ (Rutenberg 2008), as a friend of ex-
Weatherman Bill Ayers (Bahnisch 2008; Wolking 2008), as someone with the middle
name ‘Hussein’ and the last name ‘Obama’ (piratenews.org 2008); as a monster, for
example, in the epithet ‘ObamaNation’ (piratenews.org 2008); and as a ‘fag’ — the
phrase ‘Obama is a fag’ produced approximately 200,000 Google hits in 2011 and over
460,000 hits in 2014, with searches using related terms growing to over 9,720,000 in
2014. Interestingly, at least within the time range I am focusing on, the majority of
comments specifically referring to Obama as a monster were linked (in both articles
and comments threads) to his pro-choice politics (e.g., MacInnes 2008; Morrissey 2008),
further underscoring Foucault’s framing of monstrosity as linked to supposed breaches
of moral and judicial law, as well as Puar and Rai’s insight that ‘monsters and
abnormals have always also been sexual deviants’ (2002, 119) —here framed as a
discursively perverse attitude towards ‘normal’ generative reproduction, one of the
pillars of the heteronormative (Berlant and Warner 554).[9] If Obama’s pro-choice
stance frames him here as monstrous, par excellence, this perhaps more than anything
underscores Foucault’s take on the discursive role of monstrosity: Obama’s political
approach to abortion makes him illegible as a good and moral figure, and the easy
figuring of him as monstrous is the only way legibility can be restored. This skinning
restores a certain semantic stability and the dermographic rendering of his mixed
nature as corruption fulfills a certain ready logic in the public sphere.
But how does such a discursively nebulous figure take part in his own skinning, and
how does this framing interact with the above two vectors of discourse?
Obama as Mutt
The fact that Obama is himself a writer, one not only of political rhetoric but of
autobiographical narrations of his own past, present and future, makes him a party to
his own discursive construction through text, what Ahmed and Stacey might call the
management of his own skinning (2001, 2; 15). Alec MacGillis, who traveled with
Obama during his campaign tour, remarked that this layered upon him a further form
of hybridity, one that placed him between actor and critic, participant and observer
(2008). In writing his own narratives, he contributes to the intertext that surfaces in and
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on his skin — such as when he famously and strategically referred to himself as a ‘mutt’
in his first press conference as President-elect (Silverman 2008; Bone 2008; Washington
2008; Rhee 2008).
One mainstream media source reflects on this seemingly offhand (but no doubt
calculated) use of the term ‘mutt’, drawing on a post by Nina Moon on kimchi mamas, a
blog she runs created for and by Korean-American mothers (Rhee 2008). This critical
reflection highlights how the dermographic qualities of Obama’s skin are multiply
encoded, ambiguously legible, and fraught in their intertextual subtext. Noting Moon’s
post is ‘one of the most thought out’ of those ‘offended by his self-deprecating
description of himself as a “mutt”,’ he quotes her at length:
‘I’ve heard mixed-race people use that term to describe themselves before, usually
in the same ha-ha way Obama did. I’ve also heard it thrown around as an insult, a
pejorative, a slur. I’ve felt the slap of that word across my face and it is not a word
I can “reclaim,”’ she wrote.
‘My fear, however, is that Obama, as the first mixed-race president, will shape the
way most Americans view people of mixed race for at least a generation. And will
Obama calling himself a “mutt”; — with humor, as if the word is nothing, nothing
at all — make it socially acceptable for people to start calling me a mutt? My kids?’
‘Because not only does the word have a history as a slur, but there are reasons that
that word makes such an easy slur. It allows people to rhetorically reduce us to
animals—people “bred” like dogs are bred. For all our “mutts are better!” talk (it is,
as Obama knows, better to adopt a dog from a shelter, right? Rejected, but
nonetheless in need of love), it still comes from a place where “purebreds” are
better.’
(Rhee 2008)
Moon’s grappling with the signifying work Obama is doing to manage his own skinning
activates the deep affect and biopolitics at play. The choice of ‘mutt’ speaks to a playful
reclaiming — as with similar uses of ‘queer’ and ‘slut’ — but, as with those, the response
can be fraught for those with histories in relation to that word and/or for subjects, such
as Moon, who fear possible futures that could see the term’s normalization. Obama’s
jokiness is key to his rhetorical, reclaiming, move here, but also shows it’s the kind of
humour that exists on a knife’s edge: a humour of risk, where behind the laughter and
playfulness are deadly serious issues. In other places, such as his memoir Dreams from
My Father (1995), Obama makes partial, provisional alliances with multiple seemingly
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opposed discourses: Black rage and white civility; race blindness and racial
consciousness; Christianity and Islam; drug culture and anti-drug sentiment (Serrano
2007), in a way that seems to tap affinities across the political and racial spectrum. Such
moves to inscribe his own embodiment and biography with significations fall short of
the ringing and unqualified endorsement that some wanted to read off  him, such as the
facile and oft repeated notion that him becoming President would herald an end to the
US’s legacy of racism (e.g., McWhorter 2008), and is of a more measured sort. Humble,
occasionally edgy (like when he recounts an incident where he bloodied someone’s
nose as a teen for calling him a ‘coon’) (Serrano 2007), but ultimately calculated and
considered, his self-positioning acknowledges both sides of the ambivalent signification
that his hybridities allow him, and works with them attempting to craft a public
narrative for others to use when reading his skin as text.
***
This ambivalence that marks the hybrid in discourse is a second-order binary, one that
calls, perhaps, for a second Third-space, one that acknowledges the wayward
essentializing of hybridity and attempts to read the complex intertext woven between
its polar appropriations.[10] Obama’s dermographia is one of rhetorical self-fashioning,
an autobiodermographia[11] perhaps, a self-writing and -reading of his skin and its
significations, as well as what political work that particular skinning can do for him, his
party, his nation. But how can we articulate this skinning, this skin writing, this skin
reading (both the autobiographical and third person aspects) with Obama’s subsequent
politics: with his slow, rhetorically measured, slide from a troubled and non-supportive
stance on same-sex marriage, to gradual acceptance, to enthusiastic support; with his
introduction and routine use of drone plane bombings and extrajudicial killings; with
his largely status-quo approach to the politics of Israel-Palestine? Dermographic
rhetoric works to surface Obama, but so do his actions and policies. From melting pot to
monster to mutt, to truly read where Obama’s framing in the public sphere situates
him, or to gauge what that situation does (for him as an individual, for the ‘changing
face of America’,[12] for the embodiment of the US on the world stage) we need to move
beyond skin — not to a facile post-racial fantasy, but to a place where skin and our
readings of it are merely one signifying factor among many. This perhaps speaks to the
impossibility of a utopian politics of hybridity,[13] one we should be just as wary of as its
more-easily-dismissed dystopian doppelganger. No single figure or embodiment, no
matter how their hybridities or bodily iconoclasm signify, will completely hack the
structural ills of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. But for a nation and a world coming
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to terms with this shift in the somatic representation of elite power in the Western
context and what it might portend, subtend or allow for post-Obama politics, such an
other ‘other space’ of self-consciously polysemic hybridity—stemming not from such
embodiments alone, but from a critical reflection on how they variously signify—might
be useful to fully unpack just what these shifts mean with respect to publics, power and
privilege.
 
Bio
Nathan Rambukkana is an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Wilfrid
Laurier University, in Canada. His work centres the study of discourse, politics and
identities, and his research addresses topics such as intimacy and privilege, hybridity
and mixed-race identities, digital intimacies and non/monogamy. His book Fraught
Intimacies: Non/Monogamy in the Public Sphere, is forthcoming from UBC Press in
2015. Email: nrambukkana@wlu.ca Blog: complexsingularities.net
(http://complexsingularities.net)
 
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———. 2003. ‘22 January 1975.’ In Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974–
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Endnotes
—CITATION— 
Rambukkana, N. (2015) Mutt, Monster or Melting-Pot? Mixed-Race Metaphor and
Obama’s Ambivalent Hybridity. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology,
No.6. doi:10.7264/N3513WHG (http://dx.doi.org/10.7264/N3513WHG)
This article has been openly peer reviewed at Ada Review
(http://adareview.fembotcollective.org/issue6-hacking/mutt-monster-or-melting-pot-mixed-race-metaphor-
and-obamas-ambivalent-hybridity/) .
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)  
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) .
Footnotes    ( returns to text)
1. This short paper is part of a larger project interrogating how hybridity
tropes are mobilized in both theoretical and popular discourses. I
would like to acknowledge the support of the Fonds Québéquois de la
Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC), whose Bourse de
Recherche Postdoctorale funded this work. Special thanks as well to
Jennifer Musial for introducing me to the concept of ‘dermographia’
when we were planning a panel on ‘Skin as Text’ where an early
version of this paper was first presented in 2011.
2. The methodologies used to gather my texts and data included a Factiva
database search of digitized newspaper and magazine articles of the
period from February 10, 2007 to November 4, 2008; Google searches
and counts of relevant keyword combinations (primarily within the
same delimited range, but also looking at subsequent events) to locate
further articles, blogs and websites; keyword searches within and
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across texts in this archive; tangential searching of found links amassed
through mentions, comment threads and pingbacks; and finally the
excavation of now-defunct blogs and websites through the Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine <https://archive.org/web/
(https://archive.org/web/) >. While Google searches and counts can only be
used provisionally as a metric due to their proprietary and opaque
algorithms, they do indicate possible trends and tendencies that can be
tapped for further study. The everyday microaggressions of racism,
cultural appropriation, and tokenism (as well as their intersectional
modifiers and amplifiers such as sexism, homophobia, Islamaphobia)
can be evanescent, ephemeral, but the archive of the internet and the
stickiness of search metrics can compile such discursive violences
allowing us the ability, as researchers and activists, to surveil and hack
these elusive cultural flows.
3. (Recent Secret Service scandals notwithstanding.)
4. This also has links to Foucault’s conception the discursive function of
monstrous (2003), which I discuss below.
5. One can hear echoes of Obama’s campaign slogan ‘Change’ here. In
many ways this aspect was the essence of Obama’s nomination and
presidential campaigns: after years of misery under Bush Jr. he was
promoting his presidency as a bridge to something different.
6. Black Man in the White House was also the title of E. Frederic Morrow’s
1963 memoir of his time as a Black man working on Eisenhower’s staff.
It was re-released and heavily marketed during Obama’s campaign run,
and in 2014 an edition was published with the subtitle ‘Before
Obama…’.
7. The following section draws heavily on Puar and Rai’s ‘Monster,
Terrorist, Fag’ (2002), as I elaborate below.
8. We could define heteronormativity as the normativity of orthodox
heterosexuality, including, in its broader sense, normative gender
relations, normative sex acts, and normative relationship forms and
narratives (Rambukkana in press). For further information, see (Berlant
and Warner 1998).
9. In one particularly telling quote, he is also likened to Hitler, that trope
of monstrous humanity par excellence: 
He has shown himself by his actions and inactions that he is, in truth and in
deed, something absolutely unconscionable to the civilized mind: he is a radical
proponent and activist for the cause of infanticide. The harsh reality is that
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behind the smiles and lofty rhetoric lurks the real Senator Barak Obama, a man
who is a monster of Hitlerian proportions. (MacInnes 2008)
10. As Consuela Francis pointed out during the review of this paper, we
could also read this ambivalence as stemming from a tension between
those who want to see this binary disappear and those who would wish
to preserve it for various political reasons, an insight that could
provoke an important parallel analysis.
11. I use this term to mark this process as similar to, but different from, Jay
Prosser’s concept of ‘skin autobiographies’, which are more specifically
a life-writing of personal encounters with skin disorders (Prosser 2001).
12. For a discussion of mixed-race identities being the new or changing face
of the US/America, see Berlant (1997).
13. Many thanks to Carol Stabile who provided this apt wording during this
paper’s review.
PEER REVIEWED
Nathan Rambukkana (https://adanewmedia.org/author/nrambukkana@wlu.ca)
My work centres the Study of Discourse, Politics and Identity; I track ows of discourse as
they move in and out of the public sphere inuencing both individual and group identities,
embodiments and politics (both within cultural groupings and between those groups and
the larger structures of society). Specically, my research addresses topics such as digital
intimacies, the relationship of intimacy and privilege, hybridity and mixed-race identities,
the social and cultural aspects new media forms, and non/monogamy in the public sphere.
It is situated disciplinarily at the nexus of communication and cultural studies,
methodologically within discourse analysis, and draws theoretical energy from a wide range
of sources such as feminist, queer, postcolonial and critical race theories; semiotics, affect
theory, event theory and psychoanalysis; and other post-structuralist work. I have recently
completed a two-year FQRSC postdoctoral research project entitled “Postcoloniality and
Privilege in the Hybrid Subject: Mixed-Race Identity and Intimate Privilege in Theory and
Popular Discourse” that explores the discursive investments of gures of “hybridity” in the
public sphere with a particular focus on how mixed-race identities are framed and
discussed in our shared discursive spaces. I am also currently nalizing a book project
prospectively titled Non-Monogamies in the Public Sphere: Intimacy, Privilege and the
Space of Discourse (forthcoming, UBC Press). Based on my dissertation work, but extending
beyond it to discuss ongoing public sphere debates, the book uses discourse analysis to
unpack recent Western conceptions of non-monogamy. By exploring the privileged logics
that frame our conceptions of intimacy, I explore the political and cultural implications of
how we frame non-monogamy broadly in sexual discourse, as well as how the public
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sphere presences of three major forms of non-monogamy (adultery, polygamy and
polyamory) display a complex relationship with “intimate privilege,” an emergent state in
which one’s intimacies are read as viable, ethical or even real. I have recently started work
towards an edited collection about Hashtag Publics.
2 THOUGHTS ON “MUTT, MONSTER OR MELTING-POT? MIXED-RACE
METAPHOR AND OBAMA’S AMBIVALENT HYBRIDITY”
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