Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power

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Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power

"Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities....it is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discrimatory identity effects." Homi. K. Bhabha

The way power and domination are theorized has been irrevocably altered by Post-Structuralist and Post-Marxist insights. No longer is repression viewed purely in negative and material terms, but a far more complex array of ideological relationships are introduced. Under the triple-aegis of Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault, modern theories couple the naked exercise of power with a productive idea of discourse, ideology and identity: insidious and pervasive; it structures the domain of individual consciousness itself. The intercasual dialectic between material manifestation of power and its ideological effects is central.

However, this has raised a troubling question for those who encounter power not in books, but barrios, not in academies, but in army brutality. Like all politicised others, the postcolonial radicals need to balance the more complex theories of discourse and identity with the need to maintain their own project which aims at articulating an authentic voice. The question is how they are supposed to detach themselves from colonial discourses? How are they to recover the histories from the years of subjugation, those of the subaltern subjects? Moreover, how are they going to progress to forge some kind of modern identity which is positively inscribed in the postcolonial era? Hence, there has been increased interest in the fissures and margins of colonial discourse which may - if not providing the authentic voice of the subaltern - allow the uniform presence of the dominant ideology to be breached. This concept, reflecting the diverse racial mix in the postcolonial world, has been labelled hybridity.

Hybridity grows out a prior concept relating to the mutuality of the crucial 'latent' (to use Said's[1] term) binary which underlies so much colonial discourse. This is based around the notion of self and other: the hardening of a basic conceptual strategy (arranging the world into the familiar and strange) into an elaborate and often damaging ideology. For example, Europeans counterpointed what they saw as the qualities of civilisation with various formulations of 'other' based around the other continents. The stereotype, as Bhabha[2] notes, is much like a fetish, simultaneously gathering the identity of a whole race into a single sign, which then enables it to be disavowed. Literary texts, especially travelogues, were a particularly potent mechanism through which to express such binaries. The Orient was conceptualised as inscrutable and decadent, whilst Africa figured as barbaric and uncivilised. These forms found a graphic expression in maps, where one can contrast the stately, classical figure of Britannia with symbols of American and Africa as half-naked, vulnerable women; ripe for plunder and exploitation.

Yet the binary was also based on interpenetration. Foucault once analysed Enlightenment justice as a normalising force: whilst superficially excluding and erasing the mad, criminal and corrupt, these very classifications helped to define exactly what the dominant ideology's qualities were supposed to be. The elaborate classification of criminals (into mentally incapable or aristocratically corrupt eg. the 'gentleman murderer') finds a counterpart in the differing stereotypes of colonial discourse. It is indeed paradoxical that a disavowed 'other' should find itself structured and restructured. This, perhaps, is symptomatic of the interpenetrative aspect mentioned above. There is something strange and yet familiar about the colonial stereotype: familiar because it has been partially assimilated into the dominant ideology and indeed helped to define it; strange because the dominant ideology needs to emphasise its very distance and strangeness. This curious doubleness is not a unique instance. Colonial stereotypes also represented a site of both derision and desire. This is particularly evidenced in portrayals of women: they find themselves the target of all the West's moral scorn; accused of wanton lust, lesbianism, decadence and unrefinement. Yet they also stand in as the realisation of some of the West's fantasies - that of a submissive and yet exotic, sensuous sexual partner. Indian scholars have noted a recurrent 'colonial fantasy' which appears in Victorian literature (eg.Around the World in Eighty Days) is that of a Western man saving an Indian widow from the pyre. This combines civilised morality and ideals of courage with a dark undercurrent of sexual longing which sums up the contradictions of the stereotype.
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Another crucial incidence of doubleness is perhaps the opening to hybridity itself. It concerns the paradox at the heart of the civilising mission. On the one hand, imperialism must take its moral justification from the ethical, social and religious inferiority of the colonised. For example, pro-slavery rhetoric included the idea that the slaves were actually being delivered from the godlessness of their 'dark continent.' And yet, this project undermines its own foundations. If the 'other' can be normalised, can be civilised, then it appears the inferiority is nothing more than a cultural construct and not an inner inevitability. ...

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