Postcolonialism (3): Diaspora, Hybridity & the Other Postcolonial Questions

1. Colonialism and Racism 1. Colonialism and Racism 2. (Post-)Colonial Identities 2. (Post-)Colonial Identities

Outline The Other Postcolonial Questions Authenticity vs. Cultural Translation Starting Questions Contemporary Contradictions: Nation vs.

Globalization and Hybridity; Hybridity defined. How do we identify ourselves?

Different Identity Strategies

Conclusion: End of Essentialism Summary and Preview

The Other Postcolonial Questions

How do we psychoanalyze (post)colonial mentalities while also considering the socio-historical factors for their formation?

Where is the line between colonial mimicry on the one hand, and, on the other, our education, our interest in English/Western cultures?

Cultural translation: Rey Chow’s Questions[textbook chap 5

509]: (1) can we theorize translation between cultures without somehow valorizing some 'original'? (2) can we theorize translation between cultures in a manner that does not implicitly turn translation into an interpretation toward depth, toward 'profound meaning'?

(textbook chap 5 463-64) Qs re. power & representation, colonial history & identity, political independence vs. global powers

The Problems of “Authenticity” Claims Limiting (blind to cultural interchanges)

because “contamination” among different cultures are inevitable,

False (biased) Because there are inevitably the interconnected

fields of representation, structured by capitalism, its power relations and permeated by the ideologies it supports.

E.g. The Fast Runner –contradiction between cultural/rhetorical autonomy and actual dependency on Canadian politics

E.g. Monsoon Wedding – the “authentic”

patriarchal culture displacing the homosexual possibilities. The sangeet scene

Cultural Translation Positions between Orientalism and “Authenticity”

claims – negotiation, translation and syncreticism. Translation –

1) [504-504] Benjamin – as “putting together,” or the process of ‘literalness’ that display the way the original itself was put together. (The ‘literal’ area is what lacks and/or exceeds the clear boundary …between the ‘proper’ and the figural/metaphorical.’)

2) [506] 'A translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel' (78).

Cultural Translation (2)

3) [512-14] The greater language – culture, or coevalness ( 同時性 ) of cultures, or “the active force of life” as the act of transmission

4) 514 “the 'literalness' … can be further defined as a transmissibility oriented toward a here and now—that is, a simultaneity rather than an alterity in place and time. Rather than a properly anchored 'truth', 'literalness' signifies mobility, proximity, approximation. Thus 'literalness' is, as Benjamin writes, an arcade, a passageway.“

5) Translator as traitor, and yet he pays his debt by giving the translated an afterlife.

Examples of Translation

The use of Indian cultures by Deepa Mehta’s Toronto films: music The Republic of Love Bollywood sing-song

Bollywood/Hollywood

Diaspora & Hybridity: Starting Questions What is essentialism? And constructionism? Of all the possible categories of identity—

nation, race, gender, class, generation, educational background, job, Online nicknames—which do you find important?

Culturally, how do you identify yourself? Do you know anyone who is or is not a cultural hybrid?

Diaspora (1):

Nation vs. Immigrants

Nation = national race “The nation is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” (or in terms of “family” and “people”)

The Cultural Minorities on the margins Hybrid Identities

Diaspora (2):

Nation vs. Globalization Hybridity caused by the Global flows: “We live in a confusing world, a world of criss-crossed

economies, intersecting systems of meaning, and fragmented identities. Suddenly, the comforting modern imagery of nation-states and national languages, of coherent communities and consistent subjectivities, of dominant centers and distant margins no longer seems adequate” (Roger Rouse 8)

1. Diaspora (and their flexible citizenship) challenges National Identity (Taiwan,

Canada)2. Diaspora in support of nationalism (Hindu nationalism and , Palestinian)

Diaspora (3)

Nation vs. Traveling Culture

Traveling cultures + people spaces of diaspora and hybridity (e.g. 西門町 : Taipei Walker 擬東京台北 )

Nationalist Constructions of Culture and History

Diaspora (4)

Disapora Identities vs. Home Hall – Migration is a One-Way road with no return diasporic cultures and identities are hybrid: "these hybrids retain strong links to and identifications

with the traditions and places of their ‘origin.’ But they are without the illusion of any return to the past… They are not and never will be unified in the old sense, because they are inevitably the products of several interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at the same time to several ‘homes’- and thus to no particular home" (Hall, 362).

Identities of contingency, indeterminacy, and conflict, in terms of routes rather than roots (Barker 256)

Diaspora (5)

Diaspora Identity vs. Nation

Diaspora identities –crosses national boundaries Possible situations: 1) in flight and dispersal,

trying to forget, 2) voluntary multiple migration, even embracing diaspora identity

– both local and global; -- encompassing both ‘imagined’ and

encountered’ communities

Dispora space – “where the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is a native” (Brash 209, qtd in Barker104). (e.g. internet, airport, and postmodern city)

Nation vs. Hybridity A Brief Summary

Elements of hybridization –

1. Colonialism + transnational capitalism + technological globalization

2. Immigration + diaspora

Hybridity: meanings

Original: A plant of mixed origins; a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions

Literal Meaning: something heterogeneous in origin or composition

History: 19th-century fear of miscegenation

Contemporary Interpretation: Homi Bhabha: necessarily ‘ambivalent’

encounter between colonial authority and the colonized; destabilizing forces on cultural or epistemological levels;

Hybridity (2) : as Poetics, Identity Strategy and Politics

Disapora aesthetic; (e.g. rap, Hip-Hop, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, 平路 《何日君再來 ? 》

Identity Strategy: against essentialist or purist definitions of identity.

From the fear of miscegenation to the celebration of contamination.

Controversies: Aesthetics over politics; the political and

socio-logical struggles of minorities can be downplayed;

Exotic representation of the ‘Imaginary Homelands.’

Review: Postcolonial Identities —

Identity and Strategies (Barker 202)

Identity Policy (Stance)

Separatism (Nativism),

Assimilation. Integration, Active

participation

Strategies Essentialism ( 生為中

國人，死為中國魂 ) Mimicry (Self-Denial) Conscious Mimicry Re-Creation, Cultural Syncreticism,

Duality and Hybridity

Not Always a Choice

Immigrants’ Identity Strategies as Influenced by Dominant Cultural Policies

Host /Colonial Society

Possible Choices Identity Mode

Discriminatory Separatism

Claiming one’s national identity

Self-Denial (e.g. White Mask, Black Skin) Separatism (e.g. sojourner)

Identity Politics

Assimilationist Assimilation

Active Integration of different cultures

De-hyphenated or

Hyphenated Identity

Multiculturalist Integration

translation and adoption/mixing different cultures

National identity

Diaspora, Transnationalism and hybridityStrategic fixing of identities

Immigrants’ Identity (1) –essentialist and political 龍的傳人 - 侯德健 vs. 宋楚瑜Orig: --ambiguous

national identity百年前寧靜的一個夜巨變前夕的深夜裡 槍砲聲敲碎了寧靜四面楚歌是姑息的劍多少年砲聲仍隆隆多少年又是多少年 巨龍巨龍你擦亮眼 永永遠遠地擦亮眼

宋： ROC百年來屈辱的一場夢巨龍酣睡在深夜裡 自強鐘敲醒了民族魂臥薪嘗膽是雪恥的劍爭一時也要爭千秋挑重擔才是龍的傳人巨龍巨龍你快夢醒 永永遠遠是東方的龍

Source: 張釗維

1839- 18421856-1860,

Opium wars?

Political Rhetoric 越

王勾踐

王力宏 ( 龍的傳人 ) 

Orig: 百年前寧靜的一個夜巨變前夕的深夜裡 槍砲聲敲碎了寧靜四面楚歌是姑息的劍多少年砲聲仍隆隆多少年又是多少年 巨龍巨龍你擦亮眼 永遠遠的擦亮眼

多年前寧靜的一個夜我們全家人到紐約 野火呀燒不盡在心每夜每天對家的思別人土地上我成長 長成以後是龍的傳人巨龍巨龍你擦亮眼 ？永永遠遠的擦亮眼

transnational Chinese-

ness

王力宏 ( 龍的傳人 )  Rap: 

now here's a story that'll make u cry straight from Taiwan they came just a girl & a homeboy in no $ no job no speak no English nobody gonna give'im the time of day in a city so cold they made a wish & then they had the strength 2 graduate w/honor & borrowed 50 just 2 consummate a marriage under GOD who never left their side gave their children pride raise your voices high will never die never die……. The video

糯米團：「多年前寧靜的一個夜，我媽媽帶我來到紐

約，現在要回來出唱片，麻煩大家賞個臉 … ，巨龍、巨龍有近視眼、還是你已經瞎了眼，巨龍、巨龍你擦亮眼、永遠永遠給我擦亮眼」 (video lyrics)

Three Imaginary Spaces of Sex and Kung-fu

“If” –” 龍的傳人” –”跆拳道”

The Social Factors influencing Identity Strategies: examples Immigration Policy of the Dominant Culture; Political Events (e.g. the Gulf Crisis, the 911

terrorist attack); Education Policy Influences of Mother culture

Generation and class (i.e. time length of acculturation and the difficulties involved).

Personal Experience: including that of love and childhood trauma

Access to two cultural codes

Conclusion

The End of Essentialism means – (Barker 206) Identity is a process of identification (through

story telling, sense-making, but also through radical changes and contingent choices).

The issue of race (or culture, nation) always appear historically in articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions and are constantly crosses and recrossed by the categories of class, gender and ethnicity.” (Hall 1996b:444)

We are “a weave of multiple beliefs, attitudes and language” (207)

Conclusion (2)

The End of Essentialism means – (Barker 206)

In Identity politics, we can choose to ‘fix’ our identities “strategically.”

Identity politics, however, can be replaced by politics of place (“where I am”), or even travel (“place even further pluralized as sites of travel and encounters”).

You have learned: General Definition of Identity

Body, Desire, Work, Experience, Memory/TraumaBody, Desire, Work, Experience, Memory/Trauma

Identity= who I am

Collective Forces --The World,

Nation, Society

(its History,

Ideology, RacismCulture,

and Economy)

Personal –

Cultural,Racial,

Gender, National,

and Others

Communal Forces: Family, Class,

Race and Genderother social units影

響影響

影響

包括

You have learned . . . Cultural, Racial and National Identities are far

from being natural, essential or stable. Rather, they are constructed by colonial, political

and social institutions, and we are placed in different ‘subject positions’ by discourses.

Also, they are destabilized by the conflicts among these forces, as well as the flows of capital, commodities, images, technologies and people in this world of globalization.

In those positions which form a network (or a weave), we are both conditioned to perform in certain ways, and get to choose various strategies of identification.

You have learned . . . Examples

Of colonial identities and strategies in loafer as colonizers: “The Man Who Would be King” The colonized, their histories and voices: Obasan, The Piano and 《太平．

天國》 Of Identity politics and Ebonics in

“My Man Bovanne”

Next unit: How Identity gets influenced/re-defined by Postmodernity, Postmodernism and trauma

1. Post-Fordism, Multinational Capitalism and Consumer Culture; 2. In Country in the Vietnam War discourses

Postmodern Identity? Modern Chimera 「嵌合體動物」

Half Man - Half Animal Mask, by INUIT (Eskimo) Alaska, Washington

State Museum http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~rwj1/ESK/esk18g.html

References

Barker, Christopher. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. Sage: 2000.

Hall, Stuart. “Culture, Community, Nation.” Cultural Studies 7.3(Oct 1993): 349-63.