Introduction

In the autumn of 1993 I was living in Berkeley, California, where I was putting the finishing touches to my Ph.D. dissertation, which was later published as Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of ‘Race’, Nation and Gender (Ifekwunigwe 1999). Late one evening, I made my usual run to the local 7–11 convenience store for a fix of a vice I had acquired while writing: forty-four ounces of a healthy cocktail of aspartame-laced diet sodas – caffeine-free Diet Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi. Before leaving the shop I completed my second ritual, which entailed perusing the news-stand for any relevant headlines. Staring back at me was a special issue of Time magazine. It had a red cover. In the foreground was a head shot of a very attractive woman. By her face, the copy read: ‘Take a good look at this woman. She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable preview of. …’ Underneath her face and the title of the special issue were the words: ‘The New Face of America: How Immigrants are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.’ In the background, and in a fashion eerily reminiscent of photographs of ranked ‘races’ found in turn-of-the-twentieth-century books on ‘race’ science (Günther 1927), was a portion of a photographic grid. In its entirety, the photographic grid represented the forty-nine computer-generated recombinant images, or ‘morphies’ as they are called based on the name of the software package Morph 2.0 used, and depicted probable facial features of the seven women and seven men’s potential offspring. Those of you who have been tracking the surgical ‘morphing’ of Michael Jackson will be interested to know that the application of an earlier version of this program was responsible for the special effects in his Black or White video (1991).