Page 81 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

This message, entitled ‘I am going to keep my mouth (partially) shut from now
on’, was by no means representative of what was going on in the discussion. On
the contrary, it represented a voice that, in the drift towards ethnic absolutism and
diasporic Chinese tribalism, tended to be silenced on the site. Here we have a
dramatic case of the imposition of the global dynamic of diaspora on local
understanding: it illuminates, as Arjun Appadurai puts it, how ‘large-scale identities
forcibly enter the local imagination and become dominant voice-overs in the traffic
of ordinary life’ (1996a:152–3). But it is precisely the expression of this local
imagination – enunciated from within Indonesia – that brings me to the importance
of hybridity.

The necessity of hybridity

Hybridity is a fashionable term in contemporary cultural theory, and its use is often
associated with the celebration of transgressive triumph, innovative creativity and
audacious cultural fusion. Indeed, it is this celebratory stance that has irked many
anti-hybridity critics (e.g. Dirlik 1994b; Friedman 1997; Hutnyk 1997; Cheah
1998). In their view the celebration of hybridity is an elitist posture promoted by
privileged diasporic and postcolonial intellectuals located in the West (such as Stuart
Hall, Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha) who can afford the postmodern cosmopolitan
ideology of mixture, transcultural exchange, etc. Friedman (1997: 75) dismisses
‘hybridisation [as] a politically correct solution for this group’, while for Hutnyk
(1997: 122) hybridity is ‘a rhetorical cul-de-sac which trivialises . . . political
activity’. As he asks, ‘Why talk hybridity now rather than a more explicitly radical
language?’ My answer would be that hybridity matters because it is precisely the
more explicitly radical language that may be the rhetorical cul-de-sac!
Tejaswini Niranjana (1992: 46) has made the astute remark that ‘[t]o restrict
‘hybridity’ . . . to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however hetero-
geneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and
neocolonial domination’. In other words, the history of colonization has left
indelible marks on the social, cultural and symbolic worlds of the colonized, which
no formal process of decolonization can ever fully erase. In this context, conflating
hybridity with the privileged celebration of first-world postmodern flux and
cosmopolitan freedom – as many critics tend to do – is particularly misleading.
Instead, I will argue here that a critical validation of hybridity is an urgent necessity
in a postcolonial context such as Indonesia.
According to James Clifford (1998: 367), one does not ‘have to leave home to
be confronted with the concrete challenges of hybrid agency’. In other words, not
only the diasporic migrant in the ‘First World’ is faced with the necessity of hybridity,
but also those who have no choice but to stay put in the ‘Third World’. Indeed,
despite the exodus reported in the media, particularly of more well-off Chinese
Indonesians who took their capital with them to safer places such as Singapore,
most Indonesians of Chinese descent are likely to remain in Indonesia, no matter
how uncomfortable, and they cannot wait until a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Chinese

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