Post colonialism (4): Identity and Hybridity

1. Postcolonialism (4): Identity and Hybridity 1. Colonialism and Racism 2. (Post-)Colonial Identities 3. Nation and Narration Identity

2. 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

3. Starting Questions • What is essentialism? And constructionism? • Of all the possible categories of identity—nation, race, gender, class, generation, educational background, job, Online nicknames—which do you identify with? • Culturally, how do you identify yourself? Do you know anyone who is or is not a cultural hybrid?

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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)

9. Nation vs. Hybridity A Brief Summary • Elements of hybridization – • Colonialism to economic and technological globalization • Immigration to diaspora

10. 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;

11. Hybridity (2) : as Poetics, Identity Strategy and Politics • Disapora aesthetic; (e.g. rap, Hip-Hop, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, 平路 《何日君再來?》 • 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.’

12. Identity Policy (Stance) Separatism (Nativism), Assimilation. Integration, Active participation, Strategies Essentialism (生為中國人，死為中國魂) Mimicry (Self-Denial) Conscious Mimicry Re-Creation, Cultural Syncreticism, Postcolonial Identities —Identity and Strategies (textbook 202) Duality and Hybridity

13. Immigrants’ Identity Strategies as Influenced by Dominant Cultural Policies Identities 結 構 、 社 會 、 文 化 fragmentation Translation and combination

14. 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 • Generation and class (i.e. time length of acculturation and the difficulties involved). • Personal Experience: including that of love and childhood trauma Access to two cultural codes

15. Conclusion • The End of Essentialismmeans – (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 1996b:444) • We are “a weave of multiple beliefs, attitudes and language” (207)

16. Conclusion (2) • The End of Essentialismmeans – (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”).

17. You have learned: General Definition of Identity 包括 影響 影響 影響 Body, Desire, Work, Experience, Memory/Trauma

18. 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.

19. 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

20. Postmodern Identity? Modern Chimera 「嵌合體動物」 • Half Man - Half Animal Mask, by INUIT (Eskimo) Alaska, Washington State Museumhttp://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~rwj1/ESK/esk18g.html