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AT: COOLITUDE ***CASE DEBATE***
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- Coolitude’s depoliticized cultural approach denies the historical agency of the coolie body and fails to reveal the silences of colonial history.
- Displacing Eurocentrism is impossible within academic spaces-only recognizing this can create a productive politics outside the university
- Diasporic politics presumes a united people that replicates exclusionary nationalism
- Transculturation doesn’t resist power – it assimilates into global and neo-colonial forces
- Transculturation infiltration and consumption of the periphery
- Focus on transculturation ignores the efficiency of dominant cultures – risks appropriation
- The search for transculturation creates losses, shifts, and blurs in meaning
- The aff is ethnocentric, transculturalism cannot be limited to one specific instance
- The aff misinterprets where cultural hybridity originates from. It was not just to recreate European cultural, it was also to maintain Native culture
- Hybridity fails to engage the political
- The Mestizaje movement fails to unite the people and instead reinforces the already separated identites
- The mestizaje movement leads to the erasure of natives
AT: COOLITUDE***CASE DEBATE***Coolitude SpecificCoolitude depoliticizes approaches by focusing on a nostalgia for cultural affirmation and ignoring the political contexts identities are placed in.Ravi 2008 [Srilata Ravi. Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of Edmonton. “Cultivating Indianness: The Indian Labourer in Mauritian Imaginary.” ‘L’ici et l’ailleurs’: Postcolonial Literatures of the Francophone Indian Ocean e-France : an on-line Journal of French Studies, vol. 2, 2008 ISSN 1756-0535 ] In effect, as a composite identity that privileges survival over suffering, Torabully defines ‘coolitude’ as being both the reconstitution of the memory of the Creole-coolie conflict and the establishment of a poetics of racial and cultural mixing based on an ‘Indian element.’10 He argues that the coolie’s initial ‘repli identitaire’ was a reaction to the group’s rejection by the island’s Creole society. Therefore, the coolie’s only way to negate the traumatic sea voyage was to construct his ‘Indianité’ by using mythical India as the ultimate referent. Torabully’s poetry, on the other hand, establishes a poetic reaffirmation of the voyage and he perceives the figure of the coolie as ‘in-between’ in an ongoing process of exchange across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions. ‘Coolitude’ posits ‘an encounter, an exchange of histories, of poetics of visions of the world, between those of African and of Indian descent, without excluding other sources.’11 This vision appears powerful and liberating in its attempt to transcend racial and ethnic categorisation in plural societies. However, as Brinda Mehta in Diasporic (Dis)locations points out, Torabully’s vision which privileges the ‘personal is poetical’ approach becomes easily transformed into a ‘displaced imaginary construction of nostalgia’.12 His concept of ‘coolitude’ as a hybrid identity perceived from an ‘Indian’ angle is not very different from the romanticised Mauritian identity as reflected in Camille de Rauville’s13 indianocéanisme, Jean-Georges Prosper’s créolie indienocéaniste14 and Edouard Maunick’s métis royaume. 15 Furthermore, the cultural Indianisation that Torabully seeks to re-conceptualise begs the theorisation of a cultural Africanisation of the island that scholars like William Miles feelis inadequately carved out in Mauritius.16 Either way, depoliticised agendas of cultural affirmation in contemporary society that do not take into account specific socio-historical and geo-political contexts of the formation of ‘hybrid identities’ can only lead to further ethnicisation of individuals in plural societies. In fact, Torabully’s coolitude is premised both on the politics of Creole-coolie conflict and on the emblematic interchangeability of the two terms17. Actually speaking, the two terms are not interchangeable as historian Vinesh Hookoomsing is quick to point out. In Mauritius the term ‘creole’ has different linguistic, cultural and ethnic trajectories and therefore the coolie and the Creole cannot be considered as interchangeable emblematic figures.18 He considers the coolie as a historical persona, a culturally specific figure of the past and disagrees with Torabully’s choice of coolie as an ahistorical emblem of a culturally composite present. ‘Coolie’ was a generic term used for any contracted colonial labour as there were also African and Chinese coolies on the island of Mauritius. Coolitude’s depoliticized cultural approach denies the historical agency of the coolie body and fails to reveal the silences of colonial history.Mehta 2004 [Brinda Mehta. Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mills College. Diasporic (Dis)Locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Kingston, Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies, 2004), pg. 56] Khal Torabully coins the term coolitude in the Indo-Mauritian context as a nativistic reaffirmation of Indian literary and cultural identity in the second half of this century. Associating coolitude with a kaleidoscopic identity that mirrors internal fragmentation and cultural displacement, Torabully posits it as a cultural compensation, a celebration of difference that goes beyond ethnicity to embrace creolization and a cultural métissage of experiences. 39 However, Torabully's attempts to create an Indianized version of Negritude by stressing a cultural positivity that distances itself from racialized positivity (unlike Negritude)negates the temporality of political agency. A depoliticized agenda of cultural affirmation reinscribes coolitude within a historical lack of agency that does not lead to the inscription of ancestral memory or give voice to the silences created by colonial history. 40 By advocating the “personal is poetical” approach, coolitude becomes a displaced imaginary construction of nostalgia and not an agent of political self-control, as promulgated by Negritude. University BadDisplacing Eurocentrism is impossible within academic spaces-only recognizing this can create a productive politics outside the universityChakrabarty 1992 [Dipesh. Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?” Representations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter, 1992), pp. 1-26. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928652] And, finally-since "Europe" cannot after all be provincialized within the institutional site of the university whose knowledge protocols will always take us back to the terrain where all contours follow that of my hyperreal Europe-the project of provincializing Europe must realize within itself its own impossibility. It therefore looks to a history that embodies this politics of despair. It will have been clear by now that this is not a call for cultural relativism or for atavistic, nativist histories. Nor is this a program for a simple rejection of modernity, which would be, in many situations, politically suicidal. I ask for a history that deliber ately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repres sive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibili ties of human solidarity. The politics of despair will require of such history that it lays bare to its readers the reasons why such a predicament is necessarily ines capable. This is a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at transla tion across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossible within the knowledge protocols of academic history, for the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has created. To attempt to provincialize this "Europe" is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where col lectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of "tradition" that "modernity" creates. There are of course no (infra)structural sites where such dreams could lodge themselves. Yet they will recur so long as the themes of citizenship and the nation state dominate our narratives of historical transition, for these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be. Nationalism TurnThe 1AC’s attempt to articulate Indian history remains within nationalistic frames which can only define India in a subordinate relationship to Europe and separates theoretical discussions from the experiences of the subaltern in a move of speaking for the otherChakrabarty 1992 [Dipesh. Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?” Representations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter, 1992), pp. 1-26. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928652] There is then this double bind through which the subject of "Indian" history articulates itself. On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed unity called the "Indian people" that is always split into two-a modernizing elite and a yet-to-be-modernized peasantry. As such a split subject, however, it speaks from within a metanarrative that cele brates the nation state; and of this metanarrative the theoretical subject can only be a hyperreal "Europe," a "Europe" constructed by the tales that both imperi alism and nationalism have told the colonized. The mode of self-representation that the "Indian" can adopt here is what Homi Bhabha has justly called "mimetic."51 Indian history, even in the most dedicated socialist or nationalist hands, remains a mimicry of a certain "modern" subject of "European" history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and failure. The transition narrative will always remain "grievously incomplete." On the other hand, maneuvers are made within the space of the mimetic- and therefore within the project called "Indian" history-to represent the "dif ference" and the "originality" of the "Indian," and it is in this cause that the anti historical devices of memory and the antihistorical "histories" of the subaltern classes are appropriated. Thus peasant/worker constructions of "mythical" king doms and "mythical" pasts/futures find a place in texts designated "Indian" his tory precisely through a procedure that subordinates these narratives to the rules of evidence and to the secular, linear calendar that the writing of "history" must follow. The antihistorical, antimodern subject, therefore, cannot speak itself as "theory" within the knowledge procedures of the university even when these knowledge procedures acknowledge and "document" its existence. Much like Spi vak's "subaltern" (or the anthropologist's peasant who can only have a quoted existence in a larger statement that belongs to the anthropologist alone), this sub ject can only be spoken for and spoken of by the transition narrative that will always ultimately privilege the modern (i.e., "Europe").52 Diasporic politics presumes a united people that replicates exclusionary nationalismAng 2003 [Ien. Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. “2003, ‘Together-in-difference: Beyond Diaspora, into Hybridity’, Asian Studies Review, 27(2): 141-154. ] While the transnationalism of diasporas is often taken as an implicit point of critique of the territorial boundedness and internally homogenising perspective of the nation-state, the limits of diaspora lie precisely in its own assumed boundedness, its inevitable tendency to stress its internal coherence and unity, logically set apart from “others”. Diasporic formations transgress the boundaries of the nation-state on behalf of a globally dispersed “people”—for example, “the Chinese”—but paradoxically this transgression can only be achieved by drawing a boundary around the diaspora, “the Chinese people” themselves. It is therefore important, in my view, to recognise the double-edgedness of diasporic identity: it can be the site of both support and oppression, emancipation and confinement, solidarity and division. Let me first pause at the increasing popularity of the term diaspora itself. While this term was once reserved as a descriptor for the historical dispersion of Jewish, Greek and Armenian peoples, today it tends to be used much more generically to refer to almost any group living outside its country of origin, be it Italians outside Italy, Africans in the Caribbean, North America or Western Europe, Cubans in Miami and Madrid, Koreans in Japan, or Chinese all over the world. Indeed, as Kachig Tololyan remarks, “the significant transformation of the last few decades is the move towards re-naming as diasporas ... communities of dispersion ... which were known by other names until the late 1960s: as exile groups, overseas communities, ethnic and racial minorities, and so forth” (Tololyan 1996, 3). To put it differently, the burgeoning language and consciousness of diaspora is itself a manifestation and effect of intensifying cultural globalisation. While migrations of people have taken place for centuries and have been a major force in the creation of the modern world of nation-states since the nineteenth century, it is only in the past few decades—with the increased possibilities of keeping in touch with the old homeland and with coethnics in other parts of the world through faster and cheaper jet transport, mass media and electronic telecommunications—that migrant groups have become collectively more inclined to see themselves not as minorities within nation- states, but as members of global diasporas that span national boundaries. For example, while “overseas Chinese” used to be the common English term to describe the dispersed migrant Chinese communities around the world that were usually referred to in local terms, in the past decade or so they have been increasingly frequently described collectively and unifyingly, in global terms, as “Chinese diaspora”. The focus on diaspora creates new forms of exclusionary and nationalist politics oriented around particular identities and can’t take into account the positions of diasporic subjects who do not identify with fully with the diaspora.Ang 2003 [Ien. Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. “2003, ‘Together-in-difference: Beyond Diaspora, into Hybridity’, Asian Studies Review, 27(2): 141-154. ] However, there is something deeply problematic about such celebrations of diaspora. A narrow focus on diaspora will not help but hinder a more truly transnational, cosmopolitan imagination of what it means to live in the world “as a single place”, to use Roland Robertson’s characterisation of the globalised world (1992). My theoretical starting point is that just like nations, diasporas are not natural entities but “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983). As such, I will conclude that the transnationalism of diaspora is actually proto-nationalist in its outlook, because no matter how global its reach, its imaginary orbit is demarcated ultimately by the closure effected by the category of the diasporic identity itself. In this sense, the politics of diaspora is exclusionary as much as it is inclusionary, just like that of the nation. Let’s look then at the Chinese diaspora. In the economic realm, the rising power of what Ong and Nonini (1997) call “modern Chinese transnationalism”—whose subjects are jetsetting businessmen crisscrossing the Asia-Pacific to enhance their commercial empires—has received much attention. This transnational Chinese capitalist class, mythically held together by supposedly unique Chinese cultural characteristics such as guanxi, has grown substantially since the opening up of mainland China in the mid-1980s (see, for example, Chan 2000). The creation of new overseas Chinese business networks operating on a global scale has accelerated in the 1990s as traditional overseas Chinese voluntary associations, in the past organised mainly under principles of native place, kinship and dialect and dedicated to traditional obligations such as ancestor worship, have been transformed into modern, globally operating organisations specifically committed to expanding economic opportunities for overseas Chinese business people across national boundaries (Liu 1998). But the strengthening of global Chinese identification goes far beyond the level of economic cooperation and trade connections: it is a transnational cultural movement involving many ethnic Chinese whose concerns are mainly of a personal- political nature, dealing with basic issues of identity and belonging. An example of this is one of the most well-known popular Chinese diaspora institutions in recent years, the website Huaren (http://www.huaren.org). The site’s main stated objective is “to promote kinship and understanding among all Overseas Chinese”—a task hugely facilitated by the quintessential technology of contemporary transnationalism: the Internet. The site’s homepage depicts the Chinese diasporic experience specifically in terms of loss of identity, and stresses the need and opportunity to restore it through the electronic assertion of a pro to familial, ethnic/racial community: Chinese are estimated to be living in over 136 different countries, making it perhaps the most widespread ethnic group in the world. Such diversity is indeed awe-inspiring. Yet, it is the same diversity which creates gulfs among peoples. We often encounter ChineseAmericans or Chinese-Canadians who know or care little of their counterparts elsewhere. Such ignorance and indifference should be corrected (http://www.huaren.org, About Us). Put briefly, then, Huaren’s activist desire is to unite the Chinese Diaspora (it is not insignificant that the word diaspora is generally capitalised in Huaren’s editorial statements). It wishes to counter the fragmenting effects of centuries-long spatial scattering through a reaffirmation of historical continuity and the perpetuity of a proto-familial blood connection that crosses the geographical borders and dividing lines imposed by nation-states. Unlike the business networks, which can be said to have instrumental reasons to capitalise on co-ethnic identification (i.e., economic opportunity), for Huaren the affirmation of diasporic Chinese identity is an end in itself: in this sense, it practises pure identity politics on a global scale. In his book Global Diasporas Robin Cohen notes that “a member’s adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of an inescapable link with their past migration history and a sense of co ethnicity with others of a similar background” (Cohen 1997, ix). It is precisely this acceptance of one’s primordial Chineseness that Huaren wishes to strengthen or instil in anyone who has some Chinese ancestry. From this point of view, any Chinese American or Chinese Canadian would do well, to all intents and purposes, to be Chinese first, and American or Canadian only second, and so help bolster the internal cohesion and solidarity of the global Chinese diasporic community. It is clear what is involved in such diaspora politics. First of all, it is based on the premise that ancestry is ultimately more important than present place of living in determining one’s contemporary identity and sense of belonging. It is also premised on the notion that the signifier “Chinese” alone, whatever its meaning, is sufficient to differentiate between people who do and do not belong to this massive diasporic community, and to somehow seal the shared identity of all those who do belong. One perhaps unintended effect of this is the inevitable hardening of the boundary between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese”. It is in this sense that the language of diaspora is fundamentally proto-nationalist: it feeds into a transnational nationalismbased on the presumption of internal ethnic sameness and external ethnic distinctiveness. Unlike the nationalism of the nationstate, which premises itself on a national community which is territorially bound, diasporic nationalism produces an imagined community that is deterritorialised, but that is symbolically bounded nevertheless. Its borders are clearly denned, at least in the imagination, and its actual and potential membership is finite: only certain people, notionally “Chinese” people, can belong to the “Chinese diaspora”. It is this particularist vision inherent in the diasporic imagination that Benedict Anderson has scathingly criticised as lacking in “universal grounding”. In his view, it “represents a certain contemporary vision of cosmopolitanism based on a quasi-planetary dispersion of bounded identities”, attractive to some, Anderson suggests, because it makes them feel “entitled to belong to ancient bounded communities that nonetheless stretch impressively across the planet in the age of ‘globalization’” (Anderson 1998, 131). According to Anderson, this vision distorts the way real social subjectivities are historically formed and transformed by global migrations, because it assigns particular people a priori to particular diasporic groupings: “Wherever the ‘Chinese’ happen to end up—Jamaica, Hungary, or South Africa— they remain countable Chinese, and it matters little if they also happen to be citizens of those nation-states” (Anderson 1998, 131). In short, the discourse of diaspora is authorised in principle by a fundamental notion of closure: it postulates the existence of closed and limited, mutually exclusive universes of ethnic sameness. Difference is absolutized. Transculturation BadTransculturation doesn’t resist power – it assimilates into global and neo-colonial forcesMillington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark “Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26.2 EBSCOhost In the light of some recent commentaries on transculturation, which have linked it with autonomy and resistance to global and neo-colonial forces, it seems important to ask how feasible in fact such autonomy and resistance are in a globalised world. A degree of scepticism seems to me to be in order about how much autonomy might be achievable, and about the extent to which the idea of a resistant self-identification might be mystificatory. These questions are about where transculturation might take a society or culture, and about the political efficacy of neoculturation. In his discussion of Ortiz and Angel Rama, 11 John Beverley argues that they both conceive of transculturation as a teleology connected to modernity and the nation-state: ‘ For both Rama and Ortiz transculturation functions as a teleology, not without marks of violence and loss, but necessary in the last instance for the formation of the modern nation-state and a national (or continental) identity that would be something other than the sum of its parts, since the original identities are sublated in the process of transculturation itself ’ ( Beverley, 1999: 45 ). He goes on to be even more explicit in relation to Rama: ‘ For Rama, transculturation is above all an instrument for achieving Latin American cultural and economic modernity in the face of the obstacles to that modernity created by colonial and then neo-colonial forms of dependency ’ ( Beverley, 1999: 45 ). Alberto Moreiras says something similar when he argues that, for Rama, successful transculturation is about assimilation to modernisation as unavoidable reality, as world destiny ( Moreiras, 2001: 188 ). On these readings, Rama and Ortiz saw transculturation as a necessary negotiation with and therefore acceptance of powerful global forces, presumably via local adjustments (though neither Beverley nor Moreiras mentions the neoculturation that was central in Ortiz). Beverley ’ s and Moreiras ’ readings identify effectively Latin America’s ambivalence, as it is caught between the desire for assimilation to global trends and the desire for the (relative) autonomy which the condition of the nation-state implies. But Beverley goes beyond a critical view of this way of positioning Latin America in external realities, and also underlines the shortcomings of the notion that the internal effects of transculturation might be to further the ‘ “ incomplete ” project of Latin American modernity ’ ( Beverley, 1999: 46 ) by increasing social integration. He is utterly dismissive when he says: ‘ The idea of transculturation expresses in both Ortiz and Rama a fantasy of class, gender, and racial reconciliation [ … ] ’( Beverley, 1999: 47 ). The fundamental question that writers like Beverley and Moreiras raise is whether transculturation in the contemporary world can challenge the hold of global modernisation. Now, perhaps even more than in Ortiz ’ s time, this is the framework which must be addressed. And the answer to that fundamental question may depend on the location and nature of the transculturation that occurs. 12 But it may also be that the notion of ‘ challenging the hold of global modernisation ’ is simply overambitious. Much of the time, transculturation is local, a tactical adaptation to external forms, though nonetheless significant at that level. But this limitation reveals what is the core of the question about the effectiveness of transculturation: namely whether it is conceivable that it might operate strategically. The negative view would be that, current political and economic structures being what they are, transculturation is and can aspire to be no more than a survival technique. On this view, transculturation localizes and partially mitigates dominant political and economic realities. The positive view would be that, such is the creativity and diversity of cultural practices, transcultural forms will constantly emerge to open up new spaces and possibilities, including elements of critique and self-determination. 13 There are at least two ways in which the positive view might be argued, one being via a conscious attempt to create a variant cultural logic or autonomy and the other via an emphasis on the potential impact of subaltern cultures. I have doubts about both kinds of affirmative argument. In the case of creating a variant cultural logic, while the will to creativity is revealing and may cast light on the oppressive logic of modernisation, the attempt to create a local specificity may be no more than a reaction to dominant practices and as such may leave them in place or effectively reinforce them, thereby changing nothing fundamental. In the case of emphasising subaltern cultures, there may be a danger of assuming that those cultures embody some absolute difference or are the repository of some ‘ untarnished truth ’ . Beyond these issues, there are ethical concerns to do with presuming to represent subaltern points of view and to mobilise them for a broader emancipatory cause. Nonetheless, both lines of argument serve the useful purpose of reminding us of the need to question global cultural homogenisation and may enable the examination from a new perspective of the impact of global economic and political realities. Transculturation infiltration and consumption of the peripheryMillington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark “Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26.2 EBSCOhost A sceptical approach might lead one to the view that transculturation is no more than an angle on the basic process of conforming with modernisation, a process in which the effects of neoculturation are at best relatively minor. One way of putting the claims for the reach of neoculturation to the test is to ask whether there is evidence in the contemporary world that current examples of transculturation have any impact beyond Latin American borders, in other words whether there is any real reciprocity in the cultural dynamic, and I would hazard a guess that a deep impact is only felt where there is also migration. In asking whether transculturation can aspire to any fundamental impact, the point is to uncover the relative positions of power of the cultures involved in any encounter. Such is the flexibility and strength of metropolitan cultures that it is conceivable that, when they are not simply appropriating other cultures to turn their products into consumer commodities, they could indeed absorb elements from the periphery, adapt them, thereby strengthen themselves and return with a renewed capacity to infiltrate or manipulate the periphery. Focus on transculturation ignores the efficiency of dominant cultures – risks appropriationMillington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark “Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26.2 EBSCOhost Certain recent commentators (notably, Beverley, Moreiras, Larsen and Cornejo-Polar) have raised doubts about how transculturation affects ways of thinking about and perceiving Latin America. Few, I imagine, would argue against the notion that a world in which acculturation (as cultural take-over) was less routine and accepted would be a better place, but one needs to be equally careful about a rush to invest in the idea of transculturation as a panacea, given that it does not occur in a vacuum and, as I have been at pains to underline, needs to be seen in its interweaving with structures of power and the range of mutual influences between North and South. There are diverse and uncontrollable flows of information and networks of cultural interaction in operation today, but the questions are how those flows and networks operate, how information is moving, where and how the influences are absorbed, how cultures institute and disseminate value, what degree of deculturation is occurring and what kinds of neoculturation are emerging. There has been some emphasis in recent discussions of transculturation on interaction, but I think that we need to be clear about what we take that term to mean, because interaction may not imply equality and mutuality. Influences may operate back and forth between cultures but be asymmetrical in quantity and quality, be highly imbalanced and still take place with well oiled efficiency. Above all, therefore, and recalling elements in Ortiz, we need to try to understand how these processes affect people ’ s lives and the social relations in which they live. Moreover, that leaves us with the vital issue of what can be done about the imbalanced, asymmetrical influences where they impact negatively on the lives of those in one of the cultures involved. In the Latin American context, I am not optimistic in the short term about the prospects for a far-reaching challenge. It seems to me overly optimistic to look to indigenous or marginalised cultures as a basis for resistance – the experiences of the indigenous and the marginalised are at best urgent reminders of what needs to be done. Any moves to oppose dominant cultures need to find ways to go beyond a refl exive reaction to them: simple opposition easily solidifies cultural relations into polarisations which ultimately reconfirm the dominant as the driving force, without isolating the latter ’ s own heterogeneity and internal contradictions. One needs to stress and stress again that all cultures are heterogeneous, potentially contradictory and constantly in transformation, however slowly. Dominance is often partial and reliant on processes of transculturation which are reciprocally, if differentially, transformative ( Coronil, 1996 ).
Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Birmingham In Search of Hybridity: Inculturation, Interculturation and Transculturation in Contemporary Religious Art in Britain _ The search for inculturation, interculturation and transculturation also raises¶ issues. While inculturation as part of its defi nition consciously overrides the¶ ‘other’, intercultural compositions and transcultural symbols accept ‘losses’: In_ e Nativity — Wonder (Fig. 3) the ox is explicitly sexualised and also shown¶ without the donkey52 and in _ ree Women and an Angel Inside the Empty¶ Tomb — Love (Resurrection) (Fig. 4) the multiple hands, with which Shiva is¶ usually represented, have been abandoned.¶ In addition to pictorial ‘losses’, shifts and blurs in meaning occur. A shift,¶ for example, is that despite its own place in Christian iconography, _ e Grievers¶ (Fig. 5) represents ‘the crucifi xion’ for the artist.53 An example for a blur is¶ the inclusion of Nataraja, the dancing Shiva, in _ ree Women and an Angel¶ Inside the Empty Tomb (Fig. 4). While the angel announces the resurrection,¶ a historical event in Christian theology, Shiva conventionally rather symbolizes¶ ‘the cosmic energy that fl ows through and sustains the world and the¶ universe.’54¶ _ The pictorial absences and denotative shifts and blurs prove what Bhabha¶ testifi es theoretically for cultural signifi cation, namely that it is in process,55 and¶ thus allows for or even presupposes such ‘losses’, shifts and blurs. In a similar¶ way, one can say that iconographies are constantly changing. _ e analysis of¶ the hybridity in Mackenzie’s work, has shown that, in visual representations it¶ is possible, to some extent, to go beyond a mere description of hybridity by¶ distinguishing varying forms, which are in our case, inculturation, interculturation¶ and transculturation. _ ese instigate changes in iconographies, contributing¶ to a dialogue of cultures, which, as I would argue, is not solely typical¶ of the contemporary (resulting from a claimed distinct globalisation), but has¶ been inherent part of any iconography. However, in this sense, hybridity is a¶ tautology: Jan Nederveen Pieterse would call it the ‘hybridisation of hybrid¶ iconographies’,56 which actually question the existence of distinct cultures as¶ such. Pieterse argues that therefore ‘the hybridisation perspective remains¶ meaningful only as a critique of essentialism’ and only as long as essentialism¶ as a strategic force exists.57 And this is how this article would like to be understood:¶ as a discourse to unsettle essentialist understandings of iconographies.
The GIRA essentially places its research under the aegis of a reflection on transculturation and cultural hybridity processes. From this viewpoint, the GIRA aims to think out the Americas using concepts trying to account for the consequences of the first encounter on this continent between Europeans and Native Peoples, between masters from Europe and slaves from Africa. (Date accessed – 7/16/14) file:///C:/Users/camer_000/Desktop/Transculturation%20and%20Cultural%20Hybridity.htm When talking about culture or cultural identities, the term transculturation is more suited than any other to the American context since the idea of a mere phenomenon of "deculturation-acculturation" (still possible or thinkable within the national integration models of modern societies) is practically inapplicable in the various societies of the continent, given the continental scope of the situations and issues surrounding demographic and migratory movements, the shattering of national borders, and the flow of media information and international as well as local cultural products. Transculturation then becomes truly essential to the understanding of an American continental specificity. It is through transculturation that cultural hybridity (understood as the result of an ongoing process of transculturation), which is made out of "DIY creations", constructions, "negotiations", re-appropriations of identity as well as of new cultural synthesis, becomes a central element of the developing imaginary of the Americas. In this context, identity is therefore a matter of a plurality typical of the continental cultural uniqueness, as it was based on history. It can be thought out as a whole, and this without negating "ethnic", political and cultural distinctive features. Hybridity BadHybridization presupposes the false purity of the originary cultures-results in an ahistorical perspective that reinforces the western model of static and otherized civilizations which are excluded from their strategy. Wolf 2008 [Michaela. April 2008. Associate Professor at the Department of Translation Studies, University of Graz. Translated by Kate Sturge. “Translation – Transculturation. Measuring the perspectives of transcultural political action.” European institute for progressive cultural politics. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/wolf/en]
As we see from the contribution of postcolonial theory to the study of the translation phenomenon as an emancipatory force (Homi Bhabha here presented as a case in point), translation can be viewed as a reinterpretation, as a constant repositioning of transferred signs which casts existing orders into question and leaves open many different possible contextualizations. Instead of arbitrary attributions of meaning, context-dependent interpretations are made which break open previously fixed assumptions and, in their continual creation of uncertainties, produce things that have never existed and that cannot be brought back to an original state. But do these observations really stand up to critical scrutiny? Does cultural hybridity help us reach a point where we “now all understand each other” and “can successfully translate each other”?[12] Or is Jan Nederveen Pieterse right to ask: “Hybridity, so what?”[13] To what degree can Bhabha’s concepts really be applied to the translation-related questions I have raised here? With regard to the political relevance of what Bhabha says, a first step will be to note that he sees difference as a category with a clear claim to power: “The concept of cultural difference focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authority: the attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in the moment of differentiation”.[14] This means that the positing of difference itself is what produces the attribution of superiority and inferiority, while the current public debate on ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ perpetuates this pattern of western superiority. For Bhabha, accepting these premises allows us to locate potential for change at the peripheries, where the ‘new arrivals’ marked by hybridity are able to use subversion or mimicry to undermine the strategies of the powerful.[15] However, does that not in fact imply interpreting the world from a central perspective, one that ignores or has lost sight of the periphery? And does it not lead to hybridity itself being ‘liquefied’? Hybridity as the result of cultural translation claims to defeat western ethnocentrism: yet it is precisely here that the danger arises of a western world striving towards uniformity, an anti-ethnocentric model that threatens to become universalized and that, despite all its sympathy for subversive strategies, rather fixes the western model than uncovers its discursive contradictions. Not for nothing has the concept of hybridity been repeatedly criticized in recent years. Hybridity, the arguments run, is rootless, serves only the elite, does not reflect deeper social realities[16] and implies pure origins. Nikos Papastergiadis even goes as far as to say that in optimistic ways of viewing hybridity, “hybrids were conceived as lubricants in the clashes of culture; they were the negotiators who would secure a future free of xenophobia”.[17] It is not possible to address all these points in detail here. For now I would like to pick out the question of ‘pure origins’, in the process also returning to translation. Terry Eagleton picks up the view – put forward also by Edward Said – that all cultures are hybrid, that none is pure or constitutes a homogeneous fabric,[18] pointing out that “hybridization presupposes purity. Strictly speaking one can only hybridize a culture which is pure”. He does, citing Said, concede that “all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic”.[19] Let us not forget, though, that precisely from a historical perspective notions of so-called ‘pure origins’ and cultural affiliations claiming homogeneity have been predominant for centuries: patriarchal attitudes have postulated sharply drawn borders between genders; the aristocratic view postulated ‘blue blood’, while the nationalist philologists around Herder saw language as a vessel for the genius of the nations, quite apart from the ‘racial’ perspective which postulated a clearly delineated hierarchy of ‘races’. The appropriation of language and cultural artefacts for national and nationalist projects is familiar enough from the very recent past and our immediate neighbourhood as well.[20] The processes of hybridization that are largely visible and perceptible (and to a great extent also recognized) today can, in contrast, be interpreted as the result of enhanced awareness arising from massive changes in social and economic structures. If we ask ourselves how far these processes of transformation imply cultural translation, here understood as largely congruent with hybrid processes, or whether cultural translation is what makes these changes possible in the first place, then the historical component must first be discussed. Historically, does cultural translation only occur at a particular moment – the moment when an ‘imagined purity’ has to be overcome? Mixing and porosity between cultures is not a monopoly of the modern era, as is sometimes claimed; the adoption of symbols and practices is a historically observable fact, and engenders hybrid conditions of different kinds. More relevant here is the question of the tension between the assertion, or construction, of western uniqueness – in the formations I have set out – and the notion that “every society is ‘complex’, every culture is ‘polyphonic’ and ‘heteroglossic’, and every subject is entangled in an internal dialogue of interacting voices”.[21] Here, detailed attention is required in each case to the power relations that condition the specific situation, helping determine the interpretations and the selection mechanisms within these processes of cultural translation. Hybridity is constructed in opposition to an ethnically identified and static other-this maintains white racialized constructions of identity and progress which exclude racially marked other which are unable to adopt a hybrid position.Sharma 2007 [Sanjay. Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, UK. “East is East and the pitfalls of Hybridity.” Darkmatter: Ruins of Imperial Culture. 10 Feb 2007. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/02/10/east-is-east-and-the-pitfalls-of-hybridity/] However, you know that things aren’t so comfortable. We should never forget that the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the abysmal institutional response explodes any liberal discourse of cultural harmony or racial justice in Britain. Nevertheless, a new found cosmopolitanism which confidentially celebrates ‘the Curry’ as the national dish has been endorsed by New Labour and other cultural commentators seeking to embrace diversity. We live in an age of the recognition of multi-culture. For example, the critical success and celebration of musicians such as Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney rightly acknowledges the creative talents of young British Asians. A cynical stance would situate these developments in terms of the demands of expanding global capitalist markets. Let’s face it, ethnicity, diversity and difference have become commodified. Popstar Madonna donning a bindi and embracing all things Eastern captures an increasing appetite for exotica in the West. But there’s rather more to it than that. The idea of multiculturalism, or more specifically ‘hybridity’ is fast becoming a desired cultural condition of the West. And in stark contradiction, this exists alongside a seemingly incessant xenophobia which has been formative of white Western culture and identity. Moreover, the creative condition of cultural hybridity is offered as an antidote to cultural misunderstanding, conflict and even racism. ‘Hybridity’ is another of those contested terms finding favour in both liberal and radical (academic) circles, and has entered into popular cultural commentary. The term is used to describe and categorize contemporary British Asian and black cultural productions such as art, film and music. Hybridity marks a cultural state of mixing or syncretism. The future is one of fusion, different cultural elements coming together and producing something novel. Ossified cultures are being left behind, boundaries are fractured as new cultural practices, identities and ways of being enter into the world. A radical condition? It does seem to have the potential to challenge the invention of an exclusively white Britain, and racist ideas of cultural origins and national belonging. Cultural movements which transgress fixed boundaries and have the potential to re-draw a nationalist and exclusionary Englishness do need to be embraced. The disruption of cultural fixity allows us ethnically defined Others into the game of the politics of presence as well as recognition. Hybridity, nevertheless, has more than one politics and trajectory, and it is the hegemonic project of liberal cultural diversity which renders its utopian gestures rather suspect. Hybridity can be considered to be the master signifier of East is East. It provides the means through which we comprehend and empathize with the cultural anxieties of the Khan family. In particular, hybridity is the representational strategy which encodes the cultural condition of the miscegenated Khan children. How do they deal with their father’s Pakistani Muslim cultural background in relation to their own white ‘cultural heritage’? The film’s dramatic ending shows the children physically defending the mother from their father’s rage, and demanding that they should have individual freedom which is not be governed by the dictates of an alien traditional Muslim culture. George Khan concedes and returns to working in his chip shop with his wife once again at his side. Things return to normal, but no longer is there any room for his Muslim cultural background to be articulated. The fact that in the final analysis his children ostensibly reject ‘Muslim culture’ isn’t really the problem, but on what basis does this rejection take place is. The cultural premise of East is East embodies a form of hybridity which fails to address the grounds on which the dissonances of cultural difference are played out in Britain. More disturbingly, through the figure of George Khan, it sets up a dichotomy which can only but represent and situate Asian (Muslim) culture as something traditional, ossified and pre-modern. George Khan played by the talented Om Puri is characterized as affectionate, yet a tyrannical flawed man unable to reconcile his own marriage to a white woman while insisting his children are brought up as proper Muslims. Puri’s wavering northern working-class Pakistani-inflected accent indicates his discomfiture. While running a chip shop – ironically a central site of working-class northern culture – he is unable to negotiate his cultural background with the demands of white Britain. Constantly seeking advice from the local Mosque – undoubtedly the site of a preserved Islamic culture – he tragically tries to instill and reproduce a Muslim way of life which is oblivious to dominant cultural conditions. More significantly, it fails to be negotiated with the hybrid lives of his children. Most of his children secretly eat pork sausages in his absence and Tariq, one of the brothers set up to have an arranged marriage, possesses a white girlfriend and covertly sneaks off to go to the local disco where he is known as ‘Tony’ by racist bouncers. The children’s condition of their hybridity doesn’t mean there is an intentional or outright rejection of Asian culture. One scene shows all the family enjoying watching an Indian film during a trip to Bradford, and in another, the tough football playing daughter, Meenah dances exquisitely to the music of the classic South Asian film Pakeezah whilst sweeping up fish bones. These few scenes do capture something of the nuances and negotiations of being British working-class Asians. Nevertheless, the film’s hybridity is founded upon a dichotomy which constructs that which is mixed, fused and dynamic as culturally progressive, and in contrast, that which is ethnically fixed, authentic and bounded as culturally backward and almost primordial. You can guess where Muslim culture fits in. The hybridity on offer means those Asians which cling to their ossified cultures cannot seek entry into the modern world, being unable to negotiate the spaces of progressive multi-culture. The hybridity on offer means those Asians which cling to their ossified cultures cannot seek entry into the modern world, being unable to negotiate the spaces of progressive multi-culture. To put it another way, the only good Asian is a ‘hybrid Asian’. Note that there’s still no room for ‘hybrid Pakis’. It is an insidious liberal notion of cultural diversity which is increasingly becoming pervasive in representations of hybridity. As the cultural critic Homi Bhabha highlights, in this construction of diversity, an invisible white centre still persists which measures and locates other ‘minority’ cultures. Asian or Muslim culture has no grounds to be hybrid in itself, (as it comes ready formed by thousands of years of primitivism and religion). We could say that the hybridity of East is East is ultimately one of cultural assimilation which leaves whiteness intact. At best the Khan children are ‘caught between two cultures’ in which there is little space for negotiating elements of Asian culture, or exploring how this ‘culture’ historically emerges and changes. Just think about the title of the film, East is East – it gives the game away. It’s only those transferable and translatable Asian elements which are acceptable to this form of assimilative hybridity. To elaborate, we can turn to the example of the style media created ‘2nd Generation’ Asians, those represented as fashionably and effortlessly fusing all that is best from the East with the modern Western way of being. They represent a kind of (usually middle-class) avant-garde, at the cutting edge of cultural innovation while leaving elements of their traditional and unassimilatable parental culture behind. How ever much they may resist, talented folk such as Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Meera Sayal and Hanif Kureshi are caught up in this discourse of hybridity. (The uncool and unknowable ethnic ‘Otherness’ of the rest of Asian culture is jettisoned and left to the anthropologists to decipher). Perhaps I’m burdening East is East too much with a demand for a politically correct form of hybridity. This however misses the point. My problem with the film is not with its content or negative depictions of Asian culture. In fact, there is a need to develop artistic languages which explore the constant negotiations and ambivalences of British Asian culture. The cleavages of class, gender and ethnicity have only really begun to be addressed over the last decade in Asian cultural productions. These explorations haven’t been carried out in isolation from a dominant racist culture, but nor has it prevented our cultural conditions of emergence from being interrogated. Nevertheless, if we embrace the language of a liberal hybridity, one that fails to address its own hegemonic formation and assimilative trajectory, cultural Otherness will remain marginalized. East is East is symptomatic of a hybridity that seeks to make knowable and representable elements of Asian culture and ethnic difference in a form which remains selective and exclusionary. A new racism – same old story. The aff misinterprets where cultural hybridity originates from. It was not just to recreate European cultural, it was also to maintain Native cultureGIRA, ‘13 The GIRA essentially places its research under the aegis of a reflection on transculturation and cultural hybridity processes. From this viewpoint, the GIRA aims to think out the Americas using concepts trying to account for the consequences of the first encounter on this continent between Europeans and Native Peoples, between masters from Europe and slaves from Africa. (Date accessed – 7/16/14) file:///C:/Users/camer_000/Desktop/Transculturation%20and%20Cultural%20Hybridity.htm It is also, naturally, from this standpoint that it is essential to focus on the theme of the cultural encounter between cultures of European origin and Indigenous populations while insisting on the fact that the societies of the Americas have been established through a fundamental process of transculturation resulting in cultural hybridity. This cultural hybridity comes not only from the impossibility to reproduce exactly European cultures and their later borrowings (implicit and/or explicit) from Native cultures in American soil, but also from the impossibility of keeping these Native cultures intact. The signs of this fundamental cultural hybridity, which can be found very easily, among other places, at the symbolic level within the toponymy and nomenclature of various territories, are also more or less pronounced depending on the contexts in other phenomenon such as the mixed composition of populations, the dietary practices, the material culture, the later migratory phenomenon, the transformations in gender relations, the recognition of supra-ethnic and supra-national Native affiliations and interests extending beyond traditionally recognized borders. Hybridity fails to engage the politicalCoombes and Brah Director of Gradute Studies in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media Education at Birkbeck College, University of London; Director of Social Studies in the Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck College, University of London 2000 Annie E. and Avtar “Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, science, culture” Hybridity is often discussed within the frame of debates on multiculturalism. One of the differences between the ways hybridity and multiculturalism are addressed is that multiculturalism always contains a policy dimension missing in the hybridity debates, where the term masquerades as a solely cultural descriptor, and where, crucially, culture is often represented as autonomous from any political or social determinations. Indeed one of the difficulties of the ways in which hybridity has been mobilized in the cultural sphere is precisely that the institutional frameworks through which it circulates are insufficiently theorized (Garcia (Ianclini 1990; Coombes 1992). The chapters in this volume are particularly attentive to this dimension of the debate. Most importantly, in this volume we felt that it was essential to foreground the ways in which hybridity is constituted and contested through complex hierarchies of power, particularly when used as a term which invokes the mixing of peoples and cultures (Brah 1992 ). Importantly, it is only through recognizing the ways in which these terms have been given different and often conflicting meanings at specific historical moments that we can understand the stakes in the present debates on hybridity versus essentialism. The Mestizaje movement fails to unite the people and instead reinforces the already separated identitesIleana Rodriguez Humanities Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Ohio State University 2001 “The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader” September 24, 2001 p 413 For the second half of this essay I turn to mestizaje and indigenismo in the context of theorizations of Chicana / o identity formations. Chicanos appropriated the discourse of mestizaje in the early 1970s when we claimed Aztlan as an indigenous nation historically anterior to the founding of the United States. Indeed, it is the concept of mestizaje that enabled us to claim a biological tie to this Aztec origin story and to place it in the U.S. Southwest. Aztlan lent a moral and historical legitimacy to our claims for economic and civil rights (Padilla). Aztlan constituted a space outside the U.S. nation, prior to the U.S. nation, from which to launch a critique of a hegemonic and racist system of representation. Aztlan-based Chicano nationalism has been eloquently and exhaustively critiqued by Chicana feminists and Chicana and Chicano poststructuralist scholars. Thus I will not rehash these arguments here. I would like to refocus our attention on the residual effect of this era of nationalism: the continued use of mestizaje as a trope for Chicana / o identity and the presumed access to indigenous subjectivity that this biologized trope offers us. I would like to suggest that mestizaje is incapable of suturing together the heterogeneous positionalities of Mexican, Indian, and Chicana/o that coexist in the United States, or, more importantly, of offering effective political subjectivity to these positionalities. We must recognize that when we appropriate the tropes of mestizaje and indigenismo, we are necessarily operating within the logic of representation to which these tropes belong. We must take seriously the Zapatista movement's critique of mestizaje and indigenismo as parallel ideologies that incorporate the figure of Indian in the consolidation of a nationalist identity in order to effectively exclude contemporary Indians. Thus, in our Chicano reappropriation of the biologized terms of mestizaje and indigenismo, we are also always recuperating the Indian as an ancestral past rather than recognizing contemporary Indians as coinhabitants not only of this continent abstractly conceived, but of the neighborhoods and streets of hundreds of U.S. cities and towns. Why, in other words, do Chicanos in Austin dance to Tejano music in one bar, mestizo Mexican migrants in another, and indigenous Mexican migrants in none at all? In mestizaje, we are reduced to searching for signs of our indigenous past and, more significantly, for a collective political future in some inherent tie to the land - in our "cosmic green thumb," as Guillermo Gomez Pefia, the border brujo, has so ironically put it. To recognize this process is not to deny our indigenous ancestry, rather, to recognize this is to refuse to reduce indigenous subjectivity, and indeed Mexican mestizo identity, to biologistic representation that, in discursive and political terms, always already places the Indian under erasure. The mestizaje movement leads to the erasure of nativesIleana Rodriguez Humanities Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Ohio State University 2001 “The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader” September 24, 2001 pp 414-415 In this passage Anzaldtia's borderlands promises to unsettle the conventional usage of mestizaje for Chicanos as well. For if Anzaldtia's borderland undoes the artificial duality of a border, of the "us" and "them," it does so in the service of recognizing the material violence of such artificial constructs. Thus, at this point in the text. Anzaldtia could proceed to resituate the Chicana /o as mestizo, the Mexican as mestizo, and the Indian as Mexican within a transnational frame that would address the power relations among such positionalities. In other words, whereas the mestizaje of Aztlan in the 1970s allied Mexicanos and Chicanos through a common past-through a dead indigenous ancestry-the mestizaje of Anzaldtia's borderlands could disrupt such assumption and place each of these positionalities in that uneasy and "constant state of transition" within a capitalist world-system that depends on our differences for its own reproduction. Instead of taking up her own provocative challenge to do this, Anzaldtia quickly slips back into the historic usage of mestizaje, constructing Chimna/os in the borderlands as the "us" against the Anglo "them." She rallies mestizaje to access an indigenous ancestry that legitimates a prior claim to the Southwest for Chicanas and Chicanos, "The oldest evidence of humankind in the United States-the Chicanos' ancient Indian ancestors-was found in Texas and has been dated 35,000 BC" (4). Ignoring the contemporary Native American inhabitants of the Southwest and their very different mytho-genealogies, Anzaldtia predictably claims this "oldest evidence of humankind" for Chimnos as evidence of the occupation of the Southwest by the Indian ancestors of the Aztecs. Consequently, a page and a few thousand years later, when the settlement of the Southwest by the Spaniards oceans in her book. She continues: "Our Spanish, Indian and mestizo ancestors explored and settled parts of the United States Southwest as early as the sixteenth century. For every gold hungry conquistador and soulhungry missionary who came north from Mexico, ten or twenty Indians and mestizos went along as porters or in other capacities. For the Indians this constituted a retum to the place of origin, Aztlan. Thus making Chicanos originally and secondarily indigenous to the Southwest" (5). Let us trace the cirmitous route by which mestizaje makes Chicanos "originally and secondarily indigenous to the Southwest." According to Anzaldtia Chicanos are originally indigenous to the area because of our biological tie to the first Indians who inhabited it some 37,000 years ago (her date), that mythical Indian tribe that traveled from Aztlan in the South- west to Mexico City and subsequently formed the Empire. And we are secondarily indigenous through our "tetum" to this homeland with the Span- iards as Indians and mestizos. Once again mestizaje is deployed to produce a biological tie with pte-Aztec Indians rather than a political tie with contemporary U.S. Native American or Mexican Indians. Consequently, in this system of representation, indigenous subjectivity is once again put under erasure. The condition of possibility for Chicana/ o nostalgia over our indigenous subjectivity made evident in this passage is the rarefication of indigenous peoples as past. Download 0.59 Mb. Share with your friends:
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