Multiculturalism's Double-Bind by John Nagle

Author:John Nagle [Nagle, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781317093640
Google: VlYGDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-15T06:02:16+00:00

Hybridity and Multiculturalism: ‘Coalitions of Analogy’

It is worth at this juncture moving from the concept of Heterotopia to another tricky concept which is frequently a part of multicultural discourse and practice: hybridity. Multicultural practitioners and proponents often espouse the idea that not only should cultures meet and learn from each other, but that it is equally good if two or more cultures can actually come together to forge a new form containing the best elements of each. While this sounds an eminently good idea, and one which offers the potential to eradicate or deconstruct cultural boundaries between groups, it is a highly problematical concept. In particular, theorists debate if hybridity represents a novel and radical politics which opens up space for new forms of cultural identity which challenge reification and essentialism. Or, alternatively, does hybridity actually reinforce such forms of containment, a type of ‘tranquillising hybridization’ (Canclini 2000: 48): a panacea for putting up with socio-economic disparities (Hutnyk 2005).

The celebratory rendering of hybridity largely derives from the Russian Marxist theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), who applied the concept to the use of language. For Bahktin there existed two forms of hybridity: the ‘organic’ and the ‘intentional’. ‘Intentional hybridity’ is seen as ‘enabling a contestatory activity’, a politicized setting of cultural differences against each other dialogically’ (1981: 358). An intentional hybrid is thus a ‘conscious hybrid … an encounter, within the area of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor’ (1981: 358) [emphasis original]. In ‘organic hybridity’, on the other hand, the ‘unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of languages … [Yet] such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new “internal forms” for perceiving the world’ (1981: 358).

At its most optimistic application, in terms of multiculturalism and ‘race relations’, hybridity has come to be seen as possessing ‘the capacity to shock through deliberate conflations and subversions of sanctified orderings’ (Werbner 2001: 134). Hybridity is lauded for supposedly being able to ‘subvert categorical and essentialist ideological movements – particularly, ethnicity and nationalism – and to provide, in so doing, a basis for cultural reflexivity and change’ (see May 1999). In the politics of hybridity, it is hoped that ‘ethnic absolutism’ has no place and ‘“race” will no longer be a meaningful device for the categorization of human beings’ (Gilroy 1993: 218). Hybrid cultural practices thus act as a harbinger of a plural society in which no culture or identity dominates. Indeed, some have even seen in ‘hybrid cultural diasporic practices’ the capacity to contribute to the process in which European nations are becoming ‘mestizo, bastard, [and] fecundated by formerly victimized civilizations’ (Goytisolo 1987: 37–38). For others, hybrid cultural practices can suture ‘traditions’ that have hitherto been seen as oppositional or clashing.

Critics of such ‘hybridity talk’ offer a number of reasons to view the concept with scepticism.

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