Page 209 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

For postcolonial cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Trinh Minh-
ha, Homi Bhabha and others, hybridity has an explicitly critical political purchase.
They see the hybrid as a critical force that undermines or subverts, from inside out,
dominant formations through the interstitial insinuation of the ‘different’, the
‘other’ or the ‘marginalized’ into the very fabric of the dominant. Hall and Gilroy,
for example, insist on enunciating a hybrid speaking position they call ‘Black British’
– a mode of self-representation designed to interrogate hegemonic ‘white’ defini-
tions of British national identity by interjecting it with blackness (see Ang and
Stratton 1995b). This procedure results, in Hall’s words, in ‘a kind of hybridisation’
of the English, ‘whether they like it or not’ (quoted in Mercer 1994: 24). The
politics of hybridity here, then, is one of active intervention, involving both
a disarticulation of exclusionary conceptions of Britishness as essentially ‘white’ and
its rearticulation as a necessarily impure and plural formation which can no longer
suppress the black other within. In this sense, hybridity is, as Coombes (1994: 90)
puts it, ‘an important cultural strategy for the political project of decolonisation’.
It destabilizes established cultural power relations between white and black,
colonizer and colonized, centre and periphery, the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’, not through
a mere inversion of these hierarchical dualisms, but by throwing into question these
very binaries through a process of boundary-blurring transculturation.
Here we have a positive valuation, if not celebration of hybridity, but for reasons
virtually opposed to that of liberal hybridism. While the latter, as we have seen, is
fuelled by hybridity’s perceived potential to absorb difference into a new consensual
culture of fusion and synthesis, for postcolonial migrants such as Hall and Gilroy
no such consensual culture comes out of hybridity. Indeed, for them any apparent
consensus or fusion can be revealed as partial, incomplete, and ultimately impos-
sible, because the ideological closure on which it depends will always be destabilized
by that difference that is too difficult to absorb or assimilate. In other words,
any intercultural exchange will always face its moment of incommensurability,
which disrupts the smooth creation of a wholesome synthesis (see Ang 1997).
‘Consensus’, as David Scott has argued in his essay ‘The permanence of pluralism’:

has now to be seen not as a final destination, a distant horizon, but as one
moment in a larger relation permanently open to contestation, open to
the moment when difference contests sites of normalized identity and
demands a rearrangement of the terms, and perhaps even the very idiom,
of consensus.
(2000: 298)

Hybridity here has interrogative effects, it is a sign of challenge and altercation, not
of congenial amalgamation or merger. To refer to the Australian context, the vision
of an ‘Asianization’ of Australia provides a clear example of how uncomfortable and
threatening the idea of a hybrid future can be for some: hybridity, in this case, does
not stand for a new national harmony but for cross-cultural anxiety, fear of the
undigestible difference – ‘Asianness’ – which would transform Australia as a whole.

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