Page 208 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CONCLUSION: TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE

ultimately, the extinction of indigenous populations, today an uncritically cele-
bratory endorsement of hybridity serves prematurely to undercut contemporary
indigenous identity politics. In this light, the question, ‘Why do you people deny
your white ancestry?’ thrown at Anderson can be read as an aggressive attempt to
delegitimize the assertion of Aboriginal identity in the name of an appropriative,
assimilatory hybridity, born of impatience with the insistence of indigenous people
on maintaining their distinctive status and their unwillingness to go along with a
benign and convenient model of interracial harmony and ‘reconciliation’, of happy
hybridity.
And yet it has to be said that the political need to mobilize an essentialized
Aboriginal identity, as articulated by Anderson, has arisen precisely in a context in
which the condition of hybridity has become an integral part of social and cultural
life in contemporary society. After all, Aboriginal people’s lives today are on the
whole shaped and moulded, unavoidably and ongoingly, within the economic,
political and ideological parameters set by the European settler nation–state, whose
coming into hegemony has instigated the very construction of ‘the Aborigines’ as
a residual category on the margins of the white Australian nation (Attwood 1989).
In other words, the essentializing strategy of Aboriginal self-identification and
self-representation can be seen as a political corollary of being marginalized in a
thoroughly and irrevocably hybridized world, a world of necessary interdepen-
dencies, interconnections and intercultural entanglements. In this sense, the
postmodern condition of hybridity can ironically be seen as constitutive of
Aboriginality as identification point for indigenous Australians today.
This is to suggest, then, that while the rhetoric of hybridity can easily be put to
political abuse if it is co-opted in a discourse of easy multicultural and multiracial
harmony, we cannot, in fact, escape the predicament of hybridity as a real, powerful
and pervasive force in a world in which togetherness-in-difference is the order of
the day. Indeed, it has become commonplace in contemporary cultural studies to
claim that all cultures in modernity are always-already hybrid, always the impure
products of intersecting influences and flows. But this does not mean that as a
result, all cultures inhabit the same symbolic and historical space and are equivalent
and equal to each other. Indeed, liberal-pluralist calls for harmonious amalgamation
are generally conveniently neglectful of the specific power relations and historical
conditions configuring the interactions and encounters which induce forced and
unforced processes of hybridization. As Ella Shohat (1992: 100) has remarked,
‘[a]s a descriptive catch all term, “hybridity” per se fails to discriminate between
diverse modalities of hybridity, for example, forced assimilation, internalised self-
rejection, political co-optation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative
transcendence’. What we need to question, then, is not so much hybridity as such,
which would be a futile enterprise, but the depoliticization involved in the reduction
of hybridity to happy fusion and synthesis. I would argue that it is the ambivalence
which is immanent to hybridity that needs to be highlighted, as we also need to
examine the specific contexts and conditions in which hybridity operates – in Annie
Coombes’ (1994) words, the how and who of it.

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