The State of War and the State of Hybridization - Nestor Garcia Canclini
What is the patrimony of humanity (or cultural heritage) in an age of globalization? Canclini explores this question and examines the tension between globalization and interculturality, starting with two narratives of global homogenization:
The first narrative proposes “globalization as a process of world integration, in which ethnic and national differences would dissolve” (ex: Yukinory Yanagi’s sand flags and migrating ants metaphor- the dissolution of borders, nationalisms, imperialisms, and markers of identity. (39)
The second narrative (primarily disseminated in the political field) recognizes the complexity of globalization and encounters between the West and East, yet it reduces these confrontations to “wars between cultures,” (ex: Gulf War interpreted by Arabs as the West against Islam and the tension between Catholics and Muslims in former Yugoslavia). Canclini explains that not all cultural encounters from globalization lead to division and conflict, but changes, mixings, and hybridization of cultures is possible.
The Process of Hybridization
The terms diversity, heterogeneity, mestizaje (mixed race) and syncretism (fusions of religion and symbolic movements) cannot fully account for the mixing of cultures via globalization. Hybridization is also not a new process, many modern nations emerged through the mixing of cultures. This term can “embrace these 'classical' mixings and also include interlacings of the traditional and the modem, of elite, popular and mass culture” and it is most useful when articulated with other concepts and structural relationships, such as modernity/modernization/modernism, social integration/segregation, difference/inequality and reconversion (41).
Hybridization as a social process - Canclini acknowledges that this concept derives from the field of biological sciences and argues that its explanatory power can still be productive in its linguistic and social construction of the concept, which moves “beyond biologistic and essentialist discourses of identity authenticity and cultural purity” (43). Hybridization is more than a fusion of social structures or practices, but the generation of new structures created by migration, tourism, economic or social exchange and individual and collective creativity (arts, technology, etc.). The process of hybridization then leads to a reconversion of patrimony where both individuals and structures have to adapt to new knowledges, skills, and social practices and the new conditions of production and the market (ex: farm workers adapt their knowledges to work in a city setting).
Three types of hybridization:
Migration: The theory of modernity views nations as homogenous communities with a single history, language, and market. Modernity fails to account for the large migration movements, multicultural encounters, and the hybridization that emerged between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Canclini notes that one quarter of the European population migrated between 1846-1930 and produced “interethnic synthesis” and hybrid products like jazz, tango, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian music (45).
Cultural Politics: Using different strategies, many nations absorbed migrant national identities on their own terms with the occasional “impure” process of hybridization. Canclini insists that despite efforts where countries use cultural politics to constitute identities, there are no “pure or authentic identities: “Hybridization proceeds in different ways according to how the migratory movements succeeded in expressing themselves in either a homogenizing institutionality (Argentina), one that favours heterogeneity (US) or one more prone to fusion (Brazil)” (46).
Markets of communication & the production of interculturality: It is much easier for migrants and travelers to stay connected with their places of origin via newspapers, television, email, market goods, etc. Therefore, these audiovisual and electronic communications produce interculturality and hybridization much more than physical, migratory movements. This hybridization is also tied to market competition, which perceives diverse peoples as potential consumers and creates the illusion that “the cultural repertory of the world is at our disposal,” which Canclini describes as “reconciliation and intercultural equalization” (46). This “tranquilizing of hybridization” conceals differences and covers up “the inequalities of access to the production, circulation and consumption of culture (48).
Cultural Politics Based on Hybridization?
Hybridization does not guarantee democratic multicultural politics, but it does allow people to recognize the productivity of exchanges and crossings, the histories sedimented in market products, and the importance and negotiation of difference. Global and local hybridizations and the reworking of these difference and inequalities helps “discover how the old patrimonies of humanity and the new patrimonies of globalization are at the same time specific modes through which local cultures found themselves and had to decide if they would enter into war or into hybridization” (50).
“A Sociography of Diaspora” - Kobena Mercer
While by no means an exhaustive account of Mercer’s sociography, there are four primary articulations that are the focus of much of Mercer’s dialogue which serve to encode a conceptual framework for interrogating Hybridity Theory, multiculturalism, and diaspora.
It is time to revisit notions of hybridity, multiculturalism, diaspora, and ethnicity as a potential essentializing problematic within cultural studies.
“The close articulation of aesthetics and politics in earlier debates about representation and cultural difference has been reconfigured” (218).
“…there has been a significant alteration in the commonsense terms available to liberal democracies as they try to apprehend the social, cultural, and political dynamics of multiculturalism” (218).
“To the extent that the postcolonial vocabulary, characterized by such terms as ‘diaspora,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘hybridity,’ has displaced an earlier discourse of assimilation, adaption, and interrogation, we have witnessed a massive transformation which has generated, in the Western metropolis, what could now be called a condition of multicultural normalization” (218).
To what extent could multicultural normalization and post-racism be seen in dialogue with one another as an essentializing and problematic method of thinkers from liberal and conservative spheres?
Hall’s conceptual movement between disparate national sites offers a framework, within cultural studies, for thinking sociographically about changing identities and national politics as they relate to lived experience of diasporic communities, especially those of successive generations.
“...Hall’s conceptual movement back and forth across disparate national sites and cultural locations is a vivid example of the sociological imagination thinking diasporically…” (220).
“Stuart Hall’s approach to the subject of diaspora is indirect or even circuitous, rather than programmatic or goal oriented… what is distinctive of Hall’s perspective is how his conjunctural approach touches on all aspects of the cultural studies repertoire” (217).
“...the challenge implicit in rethinking hybridity as socially and culturally normative can be met by refusing the seductive attraction of simplistic polarities and turning to a historically specific account of the more messy and ambivalent intermezzo worlds between the local and global…” (219).
“...it will be as hard for adult West Indians, Indians or Pakistanis to accept the fact that their children and grand-children will be progressively ‘at home’ in a different country, as it will be for white people to accept that the presence…of second and third generation black people will irreversibly alter their culture and social patterns” (Hall, “Black Britons”).
The link between race and class is a site where the impasse between economic determinism and cultural reductionism can interrogate the social relations of race and ethnicity.
“The vicissitudes of the ethnic signifier, which illuminates the ways ‘race is the modality in which class is lived’ in a formerly colonized setting, also shed light on the structural convolutions whereby Britain ‘became a multicultural society’” (221).
“...an account both of the ‘differentiated specificity/complex unity’ that articulated the populist and neonationalist unities sought by and secured for neoconservative hegemony and of the cultural construction of those counterhegemonic unities, found in symbolic and imagined practices of community…” (222).
“...’in its popularity hybridity risks becoming an essentialist opposite to the now denigrated ‘cultural purity” (Maharaj, 1994, 29). The idea that ‘two discrete entities combine to produce a third which is capable of resolving its parents’ contradictions’ is…‘fraught with connotations of origin and redemption [which] do not extricate us from a self/other dualism’ (1996, 36)” (224).
The language of cultural studies may actually now be a problem as global capitalism eagerly seeks to profit from the high marketability of visible differences.
“…the language of cultural studies is now actually part of the problem in a global art world where visible difference is highly marketable…This makes the art world’s demand for difference an institutional fetish in a regime of visuality more or less continuous with the ethnocentric ideology it sought to modify” (223).
“...the normative presence of hybridization, as the articulation of sameness and difference together, may actually have already happened in the cultural studies story itself” (225).
“To conceptualize hybridization as socially normative for Western liberal democracies is to open up a dialogue with the cultural study of the plural modernities of mixed times and places in which the process of cultural mixing is more or less repressed or acknowledged, more or less disavowed or incorporated, as a general feature in the routines of everyday life” (225).
Kobena Mercer argues that a study and articulation of cultural identity formation and hybrid identities was already done by the likes of Hall within cultural studies, and the conjuncture between race and class may be a novel site of marketability as the result of multicultural normalization. Yet, Mercer points to Hall's work as remaining useful for avoiding the problematic essentialization and reductionism of multiculturalism as an articulation of identity.
“Representing ‘Globalization’: Notes on the Discursive Orderings of Economic Life” - Paul du Gay
The primary purpose of du Gay’s piece is to examine the ways in which economic globalization has become linked to social and cultural subjects—nations, institutions, and individuals—and to discuss the problematic consequences of these linkages.
Beginning with Hall’s critique of Thatcherism in which “he indicated how the discursive, or meaning, dimension is one of the constitutive conditions for the operation of economic strategies” (113), he begins to represent how economic globalization continues to create discursive systems of meaning for social and cultural subjects.
Defining “economy” in order to discuss its effects on subjects, “‘economic processes and practices…whether we refer to management techniques for restructuring the conduct of business, contemporary strategies for advertising goods and services, or everyday interactions between service employees and their customers, depend upon meaning for their effects and have particular cultural conditions of existence” (114).
Stuart Hall’s work offers a way of critiquing and rejecting the notion that economies and markets somehow exist outside of cultural meaning.
Imagining ‘Economic Globalization’
Lived realities are increasingly perceived to be dominated by global economic factors which has forced nations to seek ways of managing economies and subjects that cross national borders.
“...one effect of the dominance of this representation of contemporary economic life has been the effective paralysis of racial reforming national strategies…” (115).
A problem of economic globalization is how to manage economies, even as some point to “uncontrollable market forces,” “this dominant conception of the problem of globalization has played a crucial role in transforming the character of Western governments’ perceptions of the ways in which their own national economies should be managed…” (115).
The particular discourse of economic globalization du Gay is interested in simultaneously asserts the ability of a global economy to create itself while also doing a lot of work to reflect the problems of globalization back on society, making social subjects responsible for its flaws and solving them.
Globalization and National Economic Security
Economic security is a site at which we see the meaning-making of economic management. Rather than “capitalism without losers,” there is a shift to avoid being a loser by creating national economic efficiency. Pursuit of national economic efficiency is an essential condition of national security under this system of meaning.
“This zero-sum conception has serious implications for the ways in which states are encouraged to view their own security…” (116).
“...this stategety of economic governance undermines existing divisions between the economy and other spheres of existence within the nation-state” (117).
“This shift helps account for the seemingly paradoxical situation in which governmental discourse in the wealthiest nations on earth contains an assumption that social welfare regimes are no longer affordable in the forms we have come to know them. Anything that might seem to have a bearing on economic life…is assessed not only in terms of the availability of resources…but primarily in terms of its consequences for promoting or inhibiting the pursuit of national economic efficiency” (117).
When competition becomes the name of the game, separating the winners from the losers, governmental discourse begins to favor enterprise as the solution to economic inefficiency.
Enterprising up Organizations and Individuals
Enterprise becomes a way of representing the competitiveness—and thus, security—of institutions and individuals which has the effect of making subjects solely responsible for their own enterprise and success.
“...the foremost consideration for national governmental players is the necessity of constructing the legal, institutional, and cultural conditions that will enable the game of entrepreneurial and competitive conduct to be played to best effect” (118).
“The changes…have often involved the reconstituting of institutional roles in terms of contracts strictly defined, and even more frequently have involved a contract-like way of representing relationships between institutions, and between individuals and institutions” (118-119), essentially, creating management structures for how subjects interact with one another.
The rise of homo economicus, “originally conceived as a subject, the wellspring of whose activity were ‘ultimately untouchable by government,’ the subject of enterprise is imagined as an agent ‘who is perpetually responsive to modifications in its environment’” (120).
“This idea of an individual human life as an ‘enterprise’ suggests that, no matter what hand circumstance may have dealt a person, he or she remains always continuously engaged (even if technically ‘unemployed’) in that one enterprise…to make adequate provision for the preservation, reproduction and reconstruction of one’s own human capital” (120). → This leads to the problem of marginalized groups who are ‘outside civility,’ in part, because they are seen as unwilling to conduct themselves appropriately—i.e. in a way the government deems economically efficient.
The pursuit of economic security and winning the game of enterprise becomes the chief concern within this framework of viewing economic globalization, effectively ignoring the systems which marginalize nations, organizations, and individuals. Yet, this is why meaning-making and “co-operation between the major economic powers” (121) is so important to critique because “the globalization hypothesis discriminates against modes of economic governance that require public intervention” (122).
Du Gay seems to take the view that we may be stuck with this system for the forseeable future, “As constraints on national economic intervention become more severe, ‘national governments…become dependent on the volunteerism of the market-place, having lost recourse to the ‘hard law’ that used to be the main tool of state intervention” (123).
“On the impossibility of a global cultural studies: ‘British’ cultural studies in an ‘international frame” - Jon Stratton and Ien Ang
Cultural studies transgresses both disciplinary boundaries and cultural-geographical ones. Stratton and Ang focus on the “internationalization” of British cultural studies (“rendez-vous”), its participants, power relations, and politics, and distinguish a strategy to identify:
“speaking positions and discursive trajectories which are both partial and non-exclusive, both transnationally transportable and contextually specific, both open for conversation and negotiation and subject to critique and reflexivity as these positions and trajectories meet and, sometimes, clash with each other in a continuing rendez-vous” (361). → diasporic, postcolonial, and subaltern
Deconstructing the “International”
Stratton and Ang insist that cultural studies is hardly international or global and cite the demographics of the book Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, to show the field’s self-presentation as an English-speaking American hegemony derived from British Cultural Studies. The following question too guides their discussion: “How then can we effectively develop an internationalism in cultural studies that is more than an interchange between already-constituted national constituents?” (365). → CS should problematize both the universal and national and interrogate its politics.
Stuart Hall and ‘British’ Cultural Studies
Stratton and Ang discuss the origin myth of Cultural Studies and Hall’s ambiguous contribution to it, noting that “[Hall] is explicitly self-conscious about his own complicity in the historical production of the myth, describing himself as sometimes feeling like “‘a tableau vivant, a spirit of the past resurrected, laying claim to an authority of an origin’” (368).
Revisit the origin myth of ‘British’ Cultural Studies and argue that CS is a product of a British historical and cultural conjecture → post WWII and the destabilization of neo-feudal structure; leaves out the role of literary criticism (which Perry Anderson argues was “a means of preserving the hegemonic collusion of the old (feudal) and the new (bourgeois) dominant classes” (370); the growth of mass media and a consumer society; etc.
The romanticization of the Birmingham Centre and Hall’s critique of the quick institutionalization of American Cultural Studies shows that cultural studies has multiple histories and variations that cannot be understood exclusively through this single origin myth: “We have to recognize that the intellectual practices which we now bring together under the category of ‘cultural studies’ were developed in many different (but not random) places in the world, and that there were local conditions of existence for these practices which determined their emergence and evolution” (374).
Questioning Britishness
Stratton & Ang challenge the Britishness of cultural studies and assert that this field did not emerge solely out of organic, internal forces – ‘British’ CS emerged at the same time that Britain recognized the loss of colonial power and their subordination to the new western global superpower: America. This might be one reason why CS focuses on the terrain of cultural struggle and on affirming the subordinate, marginalized, and subaltern within Britain (ex: the working class as the privileged subaltern).
“Britain was simply there as the more or less inert, pre-given space within which class relationships took shape and (mainly symbolic) working-class resistances were acted out” (377). → What makes working-class culture distinctively British?
The lack of interrogation of Britishness and British cultural identity creates a neo-colonialist, universalist perspective that becomes the standard for cultural studies elsewhere; a “national” cultural studies.
Three positions for contesting “British” Cultural Studies:
Postcolonial: This position can be used to critique and problematize the universalist tendencies of British CS where cultural struggle and power occurs between and within societies. This position requires situating Britain in a postcolonial world and context.
Diasporic: This position is based on the spatial and cultural displacement of the colonized Other within a nation-state and requires “an acknowledgement and vindication of the ‘coming home’ of the colonized Other” and opens up a transnational space for a post-imperial British identity → Stratton and Ang also tie this position to the introduction of race into CS, which exposed “‘the ethno-historical specificity of the discourse of [British] cultural studies itself’” and the conflation of Britishness as whiteness (382). They also emphasize that Britain, even in the poscolonial age, is not a self-sufficient entity but is entangled and interdependent with national others.
Subaltern: A position that comes from a different geo-political and geo-cultural space. Stratton and Ang cite the 1992 conference “Trajectories: Towards an Internationalist Cultural Studies’, an event organized by Kuan-Hsing Chen, in Taiwan where the discursive self/other positionings within Anglophone cultural studies were put into question. The terms postcolonial and diasporic at this event were embedded in a Tawainese perspective, for example, the Japanese colonization of Taiwan and the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China. This “‘Taiwanese’” cultural studies is subaltern.
Stratton and Ang perfectly sum up the three different positions as: “the diasporic is in but not of the West; the postcolonial is of but not in the West; the subaltern is neither in nor of the West but has been problematically constructed by the West” (386).
Key Terms:
Hybridization: A global and local process that can help us understand the emergence of social formations, identities, and the negotiation of difference. There are three different types of hybridizations: multicultural encounters and products that result from large migration movements; the use of cultural politics to constitute identities (usually happens after migration movements); the role of media, consumerism, and market competition in shaping and creating intercultural encounters.
Rendez-vous: A cultural studies informed by three different positions (postcolonial, diasporic, and subaltern) that helps construct a partial, self-critical, and neither universalist nor particularist approach to the current condition of the new world (dis)order “where the success and failure of European/western modernity (in which British imperialism was a major force) has led to both its globalization and its problematization; where all identities, national or otherwise, are being relativized as a result of their increasing interconnection and interdependence” (388).
Diaspora: A group identity used to refer to a body of people who are both at home and not at home away from the nation of their origin. Stuart Hall’s own experience as a black intellectual with familial roots first in Africa, then colonized Jamaica, then Britain, then post-colonial Jamaica serves as a useful way of illustrating diaspora.
Globalization: The processes by which national and local identities begin to be influenced by the existence of markets that cross national borders.
Globalization Hypothesis: Basically, the notion that economic factors will create markets that cross national borders along with management techniques for overseeing those markets without intervention. In fact, in some discourses, regulation of these forces is either considered impossible or counterproductive.
Discussion Questions:
Canclini briefly discusses how migrant national identities are either absorbed or policed using cultural politics and state apparatuses (ex: colonial Mexico and the introduction of the casta system). How do state apparatuses disrupt the process of hybridization in the contemporary era? Do these disruptions also occur in digital spaces?
What are the major sites of problematic connections between globalization and capitalism? To what extent is it necessary to decouple capitalism from globalization in order to address these problematics? What methods are there to separate late stage capitalism from globalization?
Physical movement used to dominate the notion of diaspora in Hall’s post-colonial frame of reference, and even today, we could say physical movement is important to understanding diaspora, yet how do methods of representation and culture on the internet create a need for a new language of diaspora for communities that reconnect to national origins or entire communities that emerge from digital communication without the need for physical contact or movement? Or, how could the current language of cultural studies be applied to cultural identities which arise, in part, from digital contact?
Can (or does) the internet create new forms of cultural identity that transcend national origin? Think, K-Pop, gaming communities, or internet culture itself as examples of identity hybridization that happen without physical contact. Are we seeing emergent identities which have little to no contact with national identity?
Stratton and Ang offer three different positions for contesting a “British” Cultural Studies, namely, the postcolonial, diasporic, and subaltern. How can the process of hybridization also contest a “national” cultural studies? What does a hybrid cultural studies look like?
Media:
https://youtu.be/rvskMHn0sqQ&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1650736188141847&usg=AOvVaw315Ucx2v3Sgg9T413zrW87
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