Mixing Up Elvis

Abstract Taking implications of the question, “What color is Elvis?” seriously, this chapter is divided into two interwoven sections: the first will look at the different racial and ethnic markers through which Elvis has been understood; and the second will look at the value placed on fan-owned Elvis possessions that can be seen to be racially and ethnically encoded. Elvis has been variously located as ideally white, “white trash,” a “white Negro,” mixed race, Jewish, and of Native American ancestry—with each of these identity markers used to idolize or denigrate him. Elvis’s mix of racial and ethnic identities enables him to stand for complex and contradictory subject positions within American society. As such, he continues to speak for identity ruptures in American culture today. His simultaneous whiteness and racial mixedness allows Elvis to represent the success myth for any ethnic group who can project themselves into his bloodlines. In relation specifically to whiteness, one can see how Elvis’s blood has been perceived as seemingly able to be both pure and impure: a potent carrier of salvific whiteness, and also yet always drawn from “polluted” waters. Yet while Elvis’s bifurcated racial and ethnic representational streams carry forward a contradictory set of identities, his performative “Blackness” is the one subjectivity that excludes the very people he steals or borrows from. In other words, although Elvis’s image carries embodied signifiers that mix up a number of races, but he does so always from a position of white power that enables him to pass.