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The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity
Drawing on the long and varied history of discourses of cultural hybridity across the caribbean, this book explores the rich and fraught cultural crossings that are often theorized homogeneously in postcolonial studies as 'hybridity'. What is the relationship of cultural hybridity to social equality? Why have some forms of hybridity been enshrined in the caribbean imagination and others disavowed? What is the appeal of cultural hybridity to nationalist and post-nationalist projects alike? What can we learn from the hybridization of Afro-caribbean and Indo-caribbean cultures set in motion by slavery and indentureship? In answering these questions, this book intervenes in several important debates in postcolonial studies about cultural resistance and popular agency, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an age of globalization.
312 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 10, 2011
"My investigation of nationalist projects does not stem from a rejection of transnational alliances, but rather reconsiders whether nationalist projects are necessarily opposed to such alliances or can be an enabling precondition for them. If the latter is the case, as I believe, then the struggle for the construction of egalitarian national communities and identities can, should, and perhaps even must, accompany the struggle for egalitarian local and global communities and identities. Since both nationalist and transnationalist forces shape the cusp moment we inhabit, two questions need to be articulated together: First, how does the national impede and/or asist transational organizing? And second, how do transnational forces help constitute the national?" (p. 10)
"That the fundamental political concerns described here can recede from view is the result of the theoretical construction of hybridity as a principle of difference abstracted from historical specifities. Refusing certain forms of hybridity and border-crossing may have less to do with a modernist nostalgia for secure origins than with struggles for physical survival and political liberation. Against the self-issued invitation to cross borders, against the desire for identification, intimacy, and complete access, the hard lesson that the declared but indisclosed secrets of Rigoberta Mechnu's testimonio teach us, even as the text reaches out for transnational aid, is that there are terrains where the reader- or theorist-in-solidarity is not welcome. So, too, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place unceremoniously tells us to stay home. Perhaps there are harder lessons for theorists to learn than participating imaginatively in the borderlands and seeking welcome there. It should be clear that my argument for attending to the political economy of nationalisms does not privilege 'fact' over 'fiction,' or replace 'rhetoric' with 'materiality.' Rather, it asks that we be more attentive to the interpenetrations, accomodations, and negotiations of the material and the symbolic as well as to the range of hybrid identities. For in failing to distinguish between different discursive interpellations of nationalism and citizenship, we shrug off as epistemologically unchallenging or uninteresting the differences between one form of nationalism and another--differences that can mean the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people. This is to fall prey to the worst kind of formalism--the worst, not just because it ignores 'content,' but because it does not even take into account the variety of forms. Moreover, addressing the tensions between the poetics and politics, the economics and epistemologies, of particular hybridities would enable us to address ways in which the colonized might be able to seize the structures and institutions of modernity, including the nationa, and hybridize them. Such acts of hybridization are conspicuously absent from contemporary theorizations of hybridity." (p. 25)
"Focusing on resistance and heterogeneity 'within' rather than on opposition 'between' becomes a key move enabling the delinking of cultural and political nationalisms. It is also the means by which the thesis of cultural imperialism is transformed from a critique of the ideological machinery of inequality into a defense of purism, essentialism, or nativism. Futhermore, those who argue for the political and analytic relevance of the term 'cultural imperialism' may not desire refuge from modernity but a share in shaping the forms that modernity will take. At stake are not pure origins but eglitarian futures. [...] The trend in Postcolonial and Cultural Studies that treats opposition as epistemologically reductive seems to me to entail some grave errors and misrepresentations. It charges oppositional politics with purism, essentialism, and mystified binaristic notions of Self and Other which, once deconstructed, can be transcended. Identifying ambivalence and the inevitably contradictory consequences of particular social practices seems currently to absolve us of weighing those consequences and making a choice. Moreover, the present move delegitimizing opposition conflates political opposition (more appropriately thought of, perhaps, in terms of 'conflict') with logical opposition in language.... [C]ontrary to the way in which theorists like Anzaldua, Bhabha, and Benitez-Rojo frame binary oppositons, binaries are neither the source of social inequality (since there are unequal societies that do not subscribe to binaristic thinking and more egalitarian ones that do) nor the exclusive provenance of the West. It is only by misunderstanding opposition as a static, rationalist relationship between monolithic, abstracted forces that so much contemporary theory can condemn it wholesale. Political opposition is better thought of as a contingent, conjunctural, and critical action people take after weighing the complexities and contradictions of their particular circumstances. It need not entail simplification of those complexities, nor does it have to essentialize them; one can take an oppositional stance on the basis of a more rather than less complex argument, or on the basis of a critique of essentialism." (p. 38-39)
"That the fundamental political concerns described here can recede from view is the result of the theoretical construction of hybridity as a principle of difference abstracted from historical specifities. Refusing certain forms of hybridity and border-crossing may have less to do with a modernist nostalgia for secure origins than with struggles for physical survival and political liberation. Against the self-issued invitation to cross borders, against the desire for identification, intimacy, and complete access, the hard lesson that the declared but indisclosed secrets of Rigoberta Mechnu's testimonio teach us, even as the text reaches out for transnational aid, is that there are terrains where the reader- or theorist-in-solidarity is not welcome. So, too, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place unceremoniously tells us to stay home. Perhaps there are harder lessons for theorists to learn than participating imaginatively in the borderlands and seeking welcome there. It should be clear that my argument for attending to the political economy of nationalisms does not privilege 'fact' over 'fiction,' or replace 'rhetoric' with 'materiality.' Rather, it asks that we be more attentive to the interpenetrations, accomodations, and negotiations of the material and the symbolic as well as to the range of hybrid identities. For in failing to distinguish between different discursive interpellations of nationalism and citizenship, we shrug off as epistemologically unchallenging or uninteresting the differences between one form of nationalism and another--differences that can mean the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people. This is to fall prey to the worst kind of formalism--the worst, not just because it ignores 'content,' but because it does not even take into account the variety of forms. Moreover, addressing the tensions between the poetics and politics, the economics and epistemologies, of particular hybridities would enable us to address ways in which the colonized might be able to seize the structures and institutions of modernity, including the nationa, and hybridize them. Such acts of hybridization are conspicuously absent from contemporary theorizations of hybridity." (p. 25)
"Focusing on resistance and heterogeneity 'within' rather than on opposition 'between' becomes a key move enabling the delinking of cultural and political nationalisms. It is also the means by which the thesis of cultural imperialism is transformed from a critique of the ideological machinery of inequality into a defense of purism, essentialism, or nativism. Futhermore, those who argue for the political and analytic relevance of the term 'cultural imperialism' may not desire refuge from modernity but a share in shaping the forms that modernity will take. At stake are not pure origins but eglitarian futures. [...] The trend in Postcolonial and Cultural Studies that treats opposition as epistemologically reductive seems to me to entail some grave errors and misrepresentations. It charges oppositional politics with purism, essentialism, and mystified binaristic notions of Self and Other which, once deconstructed, can be transcended. Identifying ambivalence and the inevitably contradictory consequences of particular social practices seems currently to absolve us of weighing those consequences and making a choice. Moreover, the present move delegitimizing opposition conflates political opposition (more appropriately thought of, perhaps, in terms of 'conflict') with logical opposition in language.... [C]ontrary to the way in which theorists like Anzaldua, Bhabha, and Benitez-Rojo frame binary oppositons, binaries are neither the source of social inequality (since there are unequal societies that do not subscribe to binaristic thinking and more egalitarian ones that do) nor the exclusive provenance of the West. It is only by misunderstanding opposition as a static, rationalist relationship between monolithic, abstracted forces that so much contemporary theory can condemn it wholesale. Political opposition is better thought of as a contingent, conjunctural, and critical action people take after weighing the complexities and contradictions of their particular circumstances. It need not entail simplification of those complexities, nor does it have to essentialize them; one can take an oppositional stance on the basis of a more rather than less complex argument, or on the basis of a critique of essentialism." (p. 38-39)
June 21, 2008
I have to admit that I haven't made it to the end of this text as I'm reading it for research; but, having said that, keeping to the first three chapters and Puri's essential arguments has made for fascinating reading. Puri has a firm grasp of competing discourses of hybridity in postcolonial theory and brings to bear the importance of Caribbean theoretical perspectives to bear on the latter, especially with respect to concepts such as metissage and creolization. Her take on "hybridity" as non-purist is especially useful and convincing.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews