Postcolonialism%20(4):%20Identity%20and%20Hybridity

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Postcolonialism (4) Identity and Hybridity

1. Colonialism and Racism 2. (Post-)Colonial
Identities 3. Nation and Narration Identity
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Outline

• Starting Questions
• Contemporary Contradictions Nation vs.
  Globalization and Hybridity
• Hybridity defined.
• How do we identify ourselves?
• Different Identity Strategies

• Conclusion End of Essentialism
• Summary and Preview

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Starting Questions

• What is essentialism? And constructionism?
• Of all the possible categories of
  identitynation, race, gender, class, generation,
  educational background, job, Online
  nicknameswhich do you identify with?

• Culturally, how do you identify yourself? Do you
  know anyone who is or is not a cultural hybrid?

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Contemporary Contradictions Nation vs.
Immigrants

• The nation is imagined as a community because,
  regardless of the actual inequality and
  exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation
  is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
  comradeship. (16 or in terms of family and
  people)

The Cultural Minorities on the margins ?
Hybrid Identities
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Contemporary Contradictions Nation vs.
Globalization

• Hybridity caused by the Global flows
• We live in a confusing world, a world of
  criss-crossed economies, intersecting systems of
  meaning, and fragmented identities. Suddenly,
  the comforting modern imagery of nation-states
  and national languages, of coherent communities
  and consistent subjectivities, of dominant
  centers and distant margins no longer seems
  adequate (Roger Rouse 8)

1. Nationalist Movements as Unfinished Project
of Modernity (Taiwan, Canada, Palestinian) 2.
Racial conflicts within national boundaries
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Contemporary Contradictions Nation vs.
Traveling Culture and Disapora

• Culture travels ? Hybridity (textbook chap 4 200)
• Diaspora identities crosses national boundaries

Nationalist Constructions of Culture and History
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Contemporary Contradictions Disapora Identities
as Hybrid (2)

• Hall Migration is a One-Way road with no return
• diasporic cultures and identities are hybrid
• "these hybrids retain strong links to and
  identifications with the traditions and places of
  their origin. But they are without the illusion
  of any return to the past They are not and never
  will be unified in the old sense, because they
  are inevitably the products of several
  interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at
  the same time to several homes- and thus to no
  particular home" (Hall, 1993, 362, cited in
  Gordon, 286).

Identities of contingency, indeterminacy, and
conflict, in terms of routes rather than roots
(201)
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Contemporary Contradictions Disapora (3)

• Diaspora identities crosses national boundaries
• Possible situations 1) in flight and dispersal,
  trying to forget, 2) voluntary multiple
  migration, even embracing diaspora identity
• both local and global
• -- encompassing both imagined and encountered
  communities

Dispora space where the native is as much a
diasporian as the diasporian is a native
(Brash 209, textbook chap 4 104). (e.g.
internet, airport)
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Nation vs. Hybridity A Brief Summary

• Elements of hybridization
• Colonialism to economic and technological
  globalization
• Immigration to diaspora

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Hybridity meanings

• Original A plant of mixed origins a person
  whose background is a blend of two diverse
  cultures or traditions ?
• Literal Meaning something heterogeneous in
  origin or composition
• History 19th-century fear of miscegenation

• Contemporary Interpretation
• Homi Bhabha necessarily ambivalent encounter
  between colonial authority and the colonized
  destabilizing forces on cultural or
  epistemological levels

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Hybridity (2) as Poetics, Identity Strategy and
Politics

• Disapora aesthetic (e.g. rap, Hip-Hop, Michael
  Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, ?? ??????
• Identity Strategy against essentialist or purist
  definitions of identity.
• From the fear of miscegenation to the celebration
  of contamination.

• Controversies
• Aesthetics over politics the political and
  socio-logical struggles of minorities can be
  downplayed
• Representation of the Imaginary Homelands.

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Postcolonial Identities Identity and Strategies
(textbook 202)

• Strategies
• Essentialism (?????,?????)
• Mimicry (Self-Denial)
• Conscious Mimicry
• Re-Creation,
• Cultural Syncreticism,

• Identity Policy (Stance)
• Separatism (Nativism),
• Assimilation.
• Integration, Active participation,

Duality and Hybridity
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Immigrants Identity Strategies as Influenced by
Dominant Cultural Policies
Strategic Adoption of Identities Trans- National
Hyphenated Identity Acculturation Process Active Integration Discrimination Assimilation Separatism, Sojourner
Fusion and recreation of Cultures Acculturation Process Active Integration Discrimination Assimilation Assimilation
Strategic Mixing of Cultures Self-Denial White Mask, Black Skin
Identities
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
fragmentation
Translation and combination
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The Other Factors influencing Identity Strategies

• Immigration Policy of the Dominant Culture
• Political Events (e.g. the Gulf Crisis, the 911
  terrorist attack)
• Education Policy
• Influences of Mother culture

Access to two cultural codes

• Generation and class (i.e. time length of
  acculturation and the difficulties involved).
• Personal Experience including that of love and
  childhood trauma

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Conclusion

• The End of Essentialism means (206)
• Identity is a process of identification (through
  story telling, sense-making, but also through
  radical changes and contingent choices).
• The issue of race (or culture, nation) always
  appear historically in articulation, in
  formation, with other categories and divisions
  and are constantly crosses and recrossed by the
  categories of class, gender and ethnicity. (Hall
  1996b444)
• We are a weave of multiple beliefs, attitudes
  and language (207)

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Conclusion (2)

• The End of Essentialism means (206)
• In Identity politics, we can choose to fix our
  identities strategically.
• Identity politics, however, can be replaced by
  politics of place (where I am), or even travel
  (place even further pluralized as sites of
  travel and encounters).

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You have learned General Definition of Identity
??
??
??
??
Body, Desire, Work, Experience, Memory/Trauma
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You have learned . . .

• Cultural, Racial and National Identities are far
  from being natural, essential or stable.
• Rather, they are constructed by colonial,
  political and social institutions, and we are
  placed in different subject positions.
• Also, they are destabilized by the conflicts
  among these forces, as well as the flows of
  capital, commodities, images, technologies and
  people in this world of globalization.

• In those positions which form a network (or a
  weave), we are both conditioned to perform in
  certain ways, and get to choose various
  strategies of identification.

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What Next?

• How Identity gets influenced/re-defined by
  Postmodernity, Postmodernism and trauma
• Next Week
• 1. Post-Fordism, Multinational Capitalism and
  Consumer Culture
• 2. In Country in the Vietnam War discourses

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Postmodern Identity? Modern Chimera ???????

• Half Man - Half Animal Mask, by INUIT (Eskimo)
  Alaska, Washington State Museum
  http//sorrel.humboldt.edu/rwj1/ESK/esk18g.html