Fulbeck’s book accomplishes its goal of bringing awareness about Hapas to themselves and to the larger society… |
[Kip] Fulbeck’s book accomplishes its goal of bringing awareness about Hapas to themselves and to the larger society. It creates a recognizable space for a particular group of mixed-race people that asserts itself against the traditional racial paradigm dominated by a logic of monoraciality, expands race beyond a black/white racial line, and sutures personal narrative back onto the visual images of mixed-race bodies. Although some elements of the book may work against the very multiplicity it seeks to convey, its most powerful impact is its promotion of a self-identification process through storytelling and narrative, which cannot be accomplished through the current racial language of identity, nor through bodily identification. By permitting the subjects not only to see themselves in the visual images of Hapaness but, more importantly, to speak for themselves and formulate their own sense of identity (whatever that may be), Fulbeck’s project resists simply (re)figuring Hapaness as a stabilized identity or giving into the community-forming demands of horizontal comradeship and hapagenization.
Nicole Miyoshi Rabin, “Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, (Volume 29, Issue 5, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2012.691610.
Tags: Critical Studies in Media Communication, Kip Fulbeck, Nicole M. Rabin, Nicole Miyoshi Rabin, Nicole Rabin