Page 71 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

ULF HANNERZ

African-American scholar and intellectual, from his The Souls of Black Folk
(1903):

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul
by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One
ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength keeps it from being torn asunder.
(1903: 5)

And a recurrent theme in the book was the continuous interweaving in black
life between meanings and symbolic forms which are shared by most Ameri-
cans and those which are more particularly linked with the black experience.
As I came around to writing about Kafanchan, about West African urban life,
and about globalization as I understood it from a Kafanchan vantage point, the
central theme was the overall mixing of cultures and the growth of new culture
which came about as people combined and merged ideas, expressions, and
organizational forms from sources which had not come together before in
history. In a reaction both to the assumption of a cultural mosaic and to the
scenario of global homogenization, I borrowed the concept of ‘creolization’
from sociolinguistics, to refer to a process whereby new culture is born on a
significant scale, in the confluence of two or more cultural currents historically
2
separate from one another. What I liked about the metaphor, in relation to my
Nigerian experience, was not only its suggestion that mixing and mingling can
be creative, but also that a creole culture, like a creole language, can become an
elaborate phenomenon which with time acquires its own historical depth, and
also that it points toward a more open cultural organization. I saw an internally
diverse cultural continuum stretching from European or American metropoles
to West African ‘bush’, where different individuals and groups could engage
with partly different ensembles of culture, and yet be in communication with
one another through their overlaps.
The use of a creolist vocabulary to conceptualize contemporary cultural
phenomena emerging through global interconnectedness has not been mine
alone, although it appears I have had a part in drawing attention to it. Mean-
while, in recent years, some number of related notions – ‘hybridity’, for
example, or ‘cultural synergy’ – have also come into circulation to refer to the
innovative force of cultural mixture and recombination. Sometimes they seem
to be understood as simply synonymous, although I would argue that creoliza-
tion entails a more specific, complex relationship between social structure and
cultural forms, not just any cultural mixing. This also relates to the broad ques-
tion of what kind of evaluative stance we take towards cultural entanglements
and their results. In the quotation from W. E. B. DuBois above, there is a
rather tragic, if at the same time heroic, tone. In recent times, again in response

60