Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization A. Acheraïou ISBN: 9780230305243 DOI: 10.1057/9780230305243 Pal...

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Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization A. Acheraïou ISBN: 9780230305243 DOI: 10.1057/9780230305243 Palgrave Macmillan

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Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

ALSO BY AMAR ACHERAIOU RETHINKING POSTCOLONIALISM: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE READER: Questioning Modern Theories of Narrative and Readership JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE ORIENT (edited with Nursel Içoz)


Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization Amar Acheraïou


© Amar Acheraïou 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29828–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 20

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne


To Louise, Aline and Etienne


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Contents Introduction

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PART I Hybridity: A Historical Overview from Antiquity to Modern Times 1 Métissage, Ideology, and Politics in Ancient Discourses

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1.1 Cultural, political, and scientific métissage in antiquity

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1.2 Reflexive and strategic hybridism

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1.3 Ancient literary, political, and philosophical perceptions of hybridity

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2 Myths of Purity and Mixed Marriages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

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3 Interracial Relationships and the Economy of Power in Modern Empires

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3.1 Syncretism in modern colonial politics and ideology

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3.2 Métissage: a double-edged colonial weapon

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3.3 Sexual politics, from tolerance to abjuration: the case of the British East India Company

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3.4 Hybridity as the space of the impossible: the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean

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PART II Hybridity in Contemporary Theory: A Critical Assessment 4 The Ethos of Hybridity Discourse

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5 Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space

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6 Class, Race, and Postcolonial Hybridity Discourse

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7 Postcolonial Discourse, Postmodernist Ethos: Neocolonial Complicities

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8 Hybridity Discourse and Binarism

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9 The Global and the Postcolonial: Uneasy Alliance

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9.1 An overview of globalization: hegemony and resistance

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9.2 Empirical and theoretical insights into postcolonial and global relationships

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viii Contents

10 Hybridity Discourse and Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism

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11 Decolonizing Postcolonial Discourse

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Notes

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Works Cited

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Index

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Introduction

To probe the fundamental question of hybridity – the focus of this study – is like journeying into the soul of our civilization. Hybridity or métissage in its various shades (biological, cultural, religious, political, technological) has been a feature of all societies, from the Sumerians and Egyptians through to the Greeks and Romans down to modern times. Yet, in contemporary criticism, more particularly in postcolonial scholarship, hybridity is usually addressed from a theoretical and historical perspective that rarely extends beyond the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This study departs from this limited synchronic view of hybridity; it adopts a diachronic approach encompassing a much wider historical, political, and ideological spectrum. In offering a wide-ranging view on métissage reaching back to the ancient civilizations, this study does not merely intend to prove that all cultures are hybrid. This has now become a mere truism. Rather, this diachronic methodology is keen to resituate the power dynamics and multi-rooted nature of hybridity as both a practice and a discourse overlooked in postcolonial studies. This contextualized, historicized perspective on métissage is valuable on various counts. First, it should enlighten us about the multifaceted character of hybridity as a historical fact, a discursive practice, and as a political as well as an ideological construction. It must, above all, help us to dissipate a great deal of the confusion surrounding the contemporary discussions of hybridity in the humanities and beyond. It might ultimately lead us to realize, among other things, that much of the postcolonial conceptualization of hybridity is teleological, rather than completely new and disruptive, as is usually thought. The present study is divided into two parts, productively dialoguing with and illuminating each other. The first part of the book is entirely devoted to discussions of cultural, biological, technological, religious, 1


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and administrative hybridity from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century. This is, of course, a historical overview rather than an exhaustive examination of hybridity. Its overall methodology consists in mapping the archaeological structure of the practice and discourse of métissage with the aim of providing as broad a picture as possible of this muchdiscussed yet still relatively obscure phenomenon – at least as it is conceptualized in postcolonial studies. Together with illustrating the prominence of the practice of métissage within ancient and modern civilizations, this section pays close attention to the ways in which hybridity was experienced, construed, constructed, and manipulated across history to serve various, often contradictory, cultural, political, ideological, and economic ends. Through close analyses of the colonial encounters within Greek, Roman, and modern Western empires it brings to light the myriad of forces that presided over métissage. This overview is broad and informative enough to allow us to grasp the power relationships within which classical hybridity was articulated. Most importantly, it must help us to seize the intricate rhetorical and ideological designs, the unevenness, the totalizing impulse, the exclusionary and inclusionary practices, and the excisions attendant upon the practice as well as discourse of métissage. In order better to trace the breadth and the cultural, ideological, political, and economic implications of the process of métissage the first part of the book focuses on a number of key historical periods, among them the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, fifth-century BC Greece, Alexander the Great’s Persia, the Roman empire, the Visigoth realm and the Carolingian Christian kingdom. These periods are assessed in relation to our central topic of hybridity, with the principal objective of showing how cultural, scientific, administrative, and biological métissage was conceived, practised, encouraged or deterred. Particular attention is paid to the tensions and contradictions inherent in the handling of métissage in the ancient world; tensions between the perception of hybridity as, on the one hand, a means of cultural and epistemic enrichment and political empowerment, and on the other, a source of social disorder and racial degeneration. Among the leading figures of the ancient world brought to the debate in this section are Plato, Aristotle, Pericles, Euripides, Alexander the Great, and Virgil. Their views exemplify the ancient ambivalence towards métissage; an ambivalence which, as we shall see, is also present in most modern conceptualizations of métissage. Alexander the Great is unusual among men in ancient times in having clearly expressed a positive view of métissage in all its forms (administrative, cultural, biological, and so on). Alexander’s politics of 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

Introduction

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hybridity, enacted in the aftermath of his conquest of Persia, constituted a theoretical projection as well as a practical military and political move; that is to say, it was a case of strategic hybridism whose aim was to consolidate and strengthen his empire. As the historical evidence shows, shortly after taking possession of Persia, Alexander encouraged marriages between the Persian nobility and the Greek soldiers and officers. Alexander himself married a Persian woman, Roxane, the daughter of the defeated Persian king Oxyartes, captured by Alexander the Great in 327 BC. It goes without saying that Alexander’s marriage with Oxyartes’s daughter was a political alliance intended to tighten his grip on his Eastern empire. At the same time, in his promotion of interracial marriages and his effort to blend East and West into a common civilization, Alexander also projected hybridity as a universal norm. Such a perception of cross-racial relationships can appear revolutionary when gauged in the light of the Greco-Macedonian race politics of both Alexander’s time and earlier periods. Notwithstanding the political, ideological, and messianic motives underlying his discourse, the fact remains that Alexander’s ethics of hybridity largely departed from Greek notions of ethnicity laid out by Plato, Aristotle, and Pericles. All three, indeed, endorsed racial purity and the clear-cut distinction between allegedly backward ‘barbarians’ and superior Greeks. Plato and Aristotle, for example, both recognized the benefits of cultural and scientific métissage. They openly acknowledged ancient Greece’s indebtedness to Egypt; they even regarded this ancient civilization as the archive of human civilization. When it came to racial mixing, however, the two philosophers categorically rejected interracial marriages involving Greeks and non-Greeks. In keeping with his assumptions of racial purity Aristotle in Politics excludes individuals of mixed descent from high governmental positions. He goes on to remind his fellow citizens that racial mixing might lead to social unrest and moral degeneration. In The Republic Plato, too, emphasizes the need to preserve racial purity by avoiding interracial marriages, which he identifies with degeneration and fears as a source of social and political chaos. Pericles was similarly a strong advocate of racial purity. Pericles was an influential orator, politician, and general in Athens during the Peloponnesian and Persian wars. As a statesman he drafted a law which stipulated that only those whose parents were Athenians on both sides could be counted as Athenian citizens. Among the Romans, it is Virgil who best articulates the ambivalence of the discourse of hybridity. Writing more than three centuries after Plato and Aristotle, Virgil, in The Aeneid, offers us an enlightening 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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account of hybridity; one that, in many ways, is emblematic of the Romans’ conception of métissage and otherness. The Roman empire is commonly, and correctly, described as one of the most mixed or multi-ethnic empires. Within the Roman empire, cultural difference was usually accepted and accommodated; racial difference and biological hybridity, on the other hand, were often thrust aside, if not simply outlawed; at best, otherness was incorporated into and submerged by the hegemonic imperial same. In The Aeneid, Virgil relates these two concurrent Roman impulses towards métissage. In brief, in this poem Virgil is not completely dismissing biological métissage, as did Plato and Aristotle; he is rather articulating a subtle form of hybridization which betrays a totalizing orientation. While assuming that the Romans and the Trojans/Teucrians/Eusonians would blend through marriage, he also adds that the offspring of these mixed unions were to be Latin in almost every respect: Latin in physical appearance, in dress, in speech, and in customs. In short, Virgil simultaneously asserts difference as part of the same and denies this difference any distinctive and noteworthy contribution to the overall hybrid construct. Reclaimed as monolithically Latin, the hybrid progeny of Virgil’s poem are cast in what I call the space of the impossible; a condition which, as will be demonstrated in the course of this study, is characteristic of most métis people in the European empires established in later centuries. The Roman disavowal of racial mixing, underlined above, was to continue well beyond Virgil’s time. In the following centuries, the Roman attitudes to mixed marriages became even more radical, especially when Imperial Rome embraced Christianity from the fourth century AD. The Romans’ extreme views on racial mixing are widely illustrated in the Codex Theodosianus (AD 365) which made marriage between Romans and ‘barbarians’, the Jews in particular, a capital offence. It is important also to stress here that contempt for cross-cultural and interracial marriages was by no means restricted to the Romans or to the ancient Greeks before them. It was a recurrent pattern in the Western kingdoms and empires from the Fall of Rome through the Middle Ages and beyond: the Visigoths, Carolingians, Spanish, French, and British, to name only a few, all objected to interracial mixing and the resulting half-caste children. These ancient discourses on métissage will serve throughout as reference points in the light of which are assessed modern colonial discourses on métissage as well as postcolonial theory’s handling of the issue of hybridity; and by modern I mean from the late fifteenth century on. The main aim in discussing the topic of hybridity within a broad historical 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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perspective embracing ancient and modern times is to shed fresh light on the epistemic, ideological, and political power structures that have informed and widely determined the practice and discourse of hybridity across history. As both a historical fact and a theoretical tool, hybridity has a long, complex, and controversial history of its own. A widespread practice in the ancient empires, métissage in its manifold dimension was also prominent within modern colonial empires, to which Chapter 3 is devoted. Briefly, hybridity emerged as a major preoccupation in nineteenth-century colonialist discourse, prompted by scientific racism and the fear of cultural and racial degeneration. As was expected, within colonial politics and discourse, imbued with racial prejudice, hybridity was decried; it was essentially perceived as a source of moral corruption as well as racial decay. Against this background, the modern colonial empires’ representation and management of hybridity are examined in detail, with an emphasis on the ways in which this métissage was ideologically constructed and politically managed. Close attention is given to the cultural, racial, social, and political epistemologies presiding over the idea of métissage and, more generally, over the Western imperial perception of otherness. Modern colonial hybridity has been much discussed in postcolonial theory over the last three decades. Yet, the fact that much of the postcolonial assessment of this issue is exclusively synchronic makes the present diachronic, wide-ranging approach to the practice as well as the discourse of métissage all the more necessary. The whole of the book’s second part critically engages with contemporary postcolonial theory’s discussion of hybridity. It offers a fresh, challenging theoretical and empirical alternative perspective; one that not only radically questions mainstream postcolonial conceptualizations of hybridity, but also indicates original ways in which to reorient the whole postcolonial debate. Broadly speaking, the issue of hybridity, alongside the attendant metaphor of the third space, has become established as a fundamental topic in the humanities over the last two decades or so. In postcolonial studies hybridity and the third space are closely linked to Homi Bhabha; both concepts being introduced and extensively glossed in The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha adopted the term ‘hybridity’ and divested it of its colonial connotations of ontological and racial degeneration. With its adoption by Bhabha and, more generally, by postcolonial scholars, the concept of hybridity has seen its semantics rehabilitated and widely inflected to stand for inclusiveness, dialogism, subversion, and contestation of grand narratives. For most scholars in postcolonial and cultural studies hybridity represents a crucial emancipatory tool releasing the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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representations of identity as well as culture from the assumptions of purity and supremacy that fuel colonialist, nationalist, and essentialist discourses. A key feature of contemporary theoretical debates is a marked propensity to assess cultural encounters primarily by means of the metaphors of the in-between or third space, utilized as substitutes for the contested centre-periphery paradigm. Bhabha argues in this respect that cultural identity always emerges in the contradictory and ambivalent space, which unsettles all claims to cultural purity. In other words, as articulated in postcolonial studies hybridity theory sounds like a new form of utopianism; one that functions mostly as the yardstick by which are exclusively assessed the cultural encounters and processes of transnational communications at large. In terms of methodology, the theory of hybridity and the third space is inspired by and intensely reflects the cultural turn and poststructuralist ethos predominant in the humanities from the 1970s onwards. This mode of conceptualization of culture and identity has drawn widespread enthusiasm. As a result, there is a general consensus within postcolonial and cultural studies regarding the conceptual usefulness and subversive potential of hybridity and the third space. Bhabha’s conceptualization of hybridity has also elicited bitter criticism from a number of scholars, among them Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, and Ziauddin Sardar. These dissenting voices usefully draw attention to the inadequacies of Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and the third space. However, their critique of the middle-ground epistemology is on the whole limited; it falls short of providing a sufficiently contextualized approach that considers hybridity from a broad historical, cultural, and geopolitical perspective. Nor, for that matter, do these critics suggest an alternative, comprehensive, sound theoretical paradigm by which contemporary cultural, social, and political global networks and discourses can be adequately appraised. As it critically engages with these passionate, postcolonial, controversial debates, this contextualized study profoundly rethinks the discourse of hybridity and the third space, tracing its conceptual shortcomings and empirical mystifications. In the process, it provides a fresh theoretical outlook that transcends the linguistic, spatial, and postmodernist paradigm on which contemporary discussions of hybridity are based. A particular consideration will be given to crucial issues that are underexamined or simply overlooked in postcolonial hybridity discourse: race politics, class, global neocolonialism. Also freshly reappraised in this discussion are the intricate connections of postcolonialism with the postmodernist ethos, which can be justly considered as the conceptual, ideological, and epistemic matrix of postcolonial theory. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Postcolonial theory’s enmeshment with the postmodernist ethos has been caustically criticized by many scholars, and rightly so, given the extent to which the adopted postmodern vocabulary has contributed to obscuring the postcolonial debate on hybridity and other major topics. While breaking away from the postmodernist ethos predetermining postcolonial discourse on hybridity, this study also questions the widely held view that hybridity theory is a subversive, counter-hegemonic agency. It demonstrates instead that not only is hybridity discourse accommodated by global neoliberal/neocolonial power structures, but also that the very ambivalence or indeterminacy of this discourse is what made this accommodation possible in the first place. Together with uncovering the tacit complicities of the theory of hybridity with neocolonial global power structures, the bulk of the argument developed here throws doubt on the widely accepted idea that hybridity discourse is a privileged site of contestation of binary thinking and essentialism. In a kind of theoretical restorative justice, the present alternative theoretical and empirical reflection questions the postcolonial categorical rejection of binarism; it argues that certain forms of binarism, such as the anti-colonial brand embodied by Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, deserve a critical reappraisal by postcolonial scholars. As my argument goes, this type of resistive binarism merits re-evaluation in the light of contemporary neoliberal doxa and its attendant neocolonial practices; a necessary reassessment that is likely to enlighten us about the usefulness of resistive binarism as an anti-colonial tool. This re-evaluation must above all induce us to consider more seriously the relevance of this resistive binarism as a counter-hegemonic agency in today’s neoliberal/neocolonial, globalized world. As it rehabilitates anti-hegemonic binarism disparaged in postcolonial studies, this critical approach demonstrates the extent to which postcolonial theory, more specifically hybridity discourse, is in many ways surreptitiously repeating Manichean and essentialist discursive as well as epistemic patterns against which the whole postcolonial ethos articulates. The core of my argument consists, in sum, of framing a critical, contextualized, and balanced view on hybridity and the third space; a view that shies away from both modern colonial castigation of métissage and postmodern celebration of hybridity or in-betweenness. It also moves away from the culturalist and spatial turn to embrace a materialist conceptualization of hybridity. In a related way, this corrective interpretative lens is intended to show how far the discourse of hybridity has always been, and still is, closely connected to social prestige as well as to hegemonic structures of power with which it maintains complex, symbiotic relationships. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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In the main, the book’s second part highlights the conceptual and empirical inadequacy of the theory of hybridity and the third space. It shows that as it is framed in postcolonial studies, hybridity discourse is in many respects reductive, if not altogether mystifying. Fundamentally, the issue at stake here consists in deeply interrogating the third-space narratives by placing them within a wider historical, cultural, ideological, and geopolitical context, a contextualization widely neglected in postcolonial and cultural theory. This context, as mentioned earlier, includes ancient as well as modern colonial representations and discursive constructions of hybridity. It also integrates a sustained discussion of the global economic, political, and financial power structures that determine the third space and hybridity discourse. Examining the third space and hybridity within the wide context of globalization – which is a central preoccupation in this monograph – should add an important materialist dimension to postcolonial discussions of these major concepts. Probing the interrelationships between the postcolonial and the global, on the other hand, must broaden the theoretical as well as the ideological scope of postcolonial studies by bringing them to bear upon the political, economic, and ideological global forces that shape our contemporary world. This attempt to unveil the intricate connections between the postcolonial and the global is a necessary conceptual and empirical undertaking. It primarily intends to trace the ways in which hybridity discourse relates to the global hegemonic power structures which, too, are hybrid; they operate within the murky third space of power and coercion, whereby Western private and public military, economic, financial, and cultural institutions dovetail with Third-World comprador elite groups to reap huge material benefits from a globalization that Third-World elites officially decry. Ironically, however, postcolonial theory overlooks these global hybridities of domination (neoliberal/neocolonial structures of power mentioned above); just as it ignores the global hybridities of resistance (intercontinental, cross-cultural, anti-neoliberal struggles). My belief is that these neglected narratives of both hegemony and resistance partake of a postcolonial geopolitical amnesia that is closely examined in the second part of this book. The phenomenon of globalization has elicited much interest in the social sciences over the last decades, generating from the mid-1980s onwards thousands of articles and books. Paradoxically, despite inducement from such postcolonial scholars as Ania Loomba (1998) to engage with ‘globality’, postcolonial theory has widely disregarded the connections between the postcolonial and the global. This lack of commitment 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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to material globality is reflected in the dearth of postcolonial scholarship dealing with the phenomenon of globalization. Over the last five years, only a handful of books directly exploring the relationship of postcolonial theory with globalization have been published, and the bulk of these are written by scholars in social sciences, political science in particular, rather than by postcolonial theorists based in the departments of literature where much postcolonial talk is taking place. Prominent among these writings are Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development (Hoogvelt 2001), Geopolitics and the Postcolonial: Rethinking North South Relations (Slater 2004), The Postcolonial and the Global (Krishnaswamy and Hawley 2008), and Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (Krishna 2009). These works variously address postcolonial and global issues, although without sufficiently exploring the entanglement of hybridity discourse and the third space with the hegemonic global power structures. The Postcolonial and the Global edited by Krishnaswamy and Hawley (2008), both working in the field of cultural studies, however, does explicitly raise the question of postcolonial theory’s relation to globality in general and global studies in particular. In this edited collection, Krishnaswamy and Hawley point up the postcolonial and culturalist scholars’ hesitant attitude towards the global in terms that reveal deep theoretical and ideological anxieties. Following Ania Loomba’s advice (1998), Krishnaswamy and Hawley exhort postcolonial studies to commit itself deeply and productively to globalization. They nonetheless refer to a host of methodological and ideological problems in this direction. They, for instance, do not know what would be the ‘terms’ and finality of such an engagement. Krishnaswamy and Hawley further order globalization studies and postcolonial theory in a hierarchical pattern, considering the former as conceptually inferior to the latter. In the process, they stress the extreme dependence of globalization studies on postcolonial vocabulary. Knowing the postcolonial privileging of hybridity and bricolage over essence or purity, it is surprising to discover the extent to which Krishnaswamy and Hawley insist on postcolonial theory as the conceptual matrix of globalization studies. Ironically, their argument can sound like an attempt to undermine the very postcolonial ethos on which they rely, and which is characteristically founded on the murky and motley. Overall, Krishnaswamy and Hawley’s deliberation falls short of achieving its ambitious pedagogical and theoretical project. For despite much palavering about the need for postcolonial theory to involve itself with material globality, we are finally left in the dark as to how this engagement could be materialized. The editors’ failure to 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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live up to their initial ambition in the end may read as a sign of their awareness that a genuine, efficacious engagement of postcolonial studies with material globality would require a deep questioning of the postcolonial ethos; an urgent self-scrutiny that neither Krishnaswamy and Hawley nor postcolonial scholars at large seem inclined to undertake. As might be inferred from the argument above, my discussion of the relationship between the postcolonial and the global, central to this study, precisely takes off from where Krishnaswamy and Hawley left and proposes answers to the queries that they have raised. As it scrutinizes the postcolonial deficit with regard to globality, it indicates the ways in which postcolonial theory could efficiently engage with globality. More specifically, it suggests how postcolonial discourse could become a genuinely counter-hegemonic force efficiently mobilized against global neoliberal doxa and its attendant neocolonial power structures. This alternative theoretical and ideological reflection is based on a radical ethics of engagement and representation; one that requires a questioning of the whole postcolonial ethos and its underlying hegemonic epistemologies. The book offers a fresh, challenging, critical approach which ultimately consists in a complete emancipation, not to say decolonization, of postcolonial theory as well as its discursive and epistemic archive.


Part I Hybridity: A Historical Overview from Antiquity to Modern Times




1 Métissage, Ideology, and Politics in Ancient Discourses

1.1 Cultural, political, and scientific métissage in antiquity Exploring the issue of cultural, artistic, technological, administrative, and biological hybridity within the ancient empires, specifically those of the Greeks and Romans, is an invitation to delve into a fascinating network of intra-cultural and cross-cultural encounters and extra-territorial economic exchanges; a network that some historians and anthropologists came to regard as the first manifestations of globalization. Referring to the Roman empire, Jerry Toner asserted that imperial Rome ‘was the first “global” empire, stretching across time zones and cultures’ (quoted in Hingley 2005, 1). The ancient cultural and economic networks established by the Greeks and Romans through their imperial conquests have received much scholarly attention. Traditionally, studies of classical empires tend to follow the strict civilization versus barbarian model of interpretation with its reductive representations of cross-cultural encounters. Such studies reiterate, among other things, the idea that the Greeks and Romans were the sole civilizers or providers of universal light, while the ‘barbarians’ were mere receivers and consumers of Greek and Roman enlightenment. Consequently, scholarship written according to this model of interpretation emphasizes the theories of Hellenization and Romanization, that is, the idea that during their conquests the Greeks and Romans transmitted their respective cultures to the ‘barbarians’ but received little, if anything, from the subjugated peoples. Scholarship following the Romanization and Hellenization models has thus underplayed the influence and impact of foreigners on Greek and Roman cultures in ways that betray a sense of Western cultural 13


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arrogance and Eurocentrism. Over the last three decades or so, however, the theories of Hellenization and Romanization have been questioned. As in cultural and postcolonial studies, so in recent scholarship on the ancient Greek and Roman empires the emphasis is more clearly laid on syncretism and mutual influence. The works of such scholars as Chester Starr (1971), Margaret Miller (1997), and Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (2003), to name a few, all stress the dialogism and hybridity of ancient cultures. In the process, they also call into question the predominant theories of Hellenization and Romanization. In their edited volume, The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration (2003), Dougherty and Kurke are centrally concerned with bringing to light the cultural diversity and crosscultural interactions that existed within Greek cities. While excavating this Greek cultural diversity the contributors to the collection adopt a corrective methodology that backs away from the binary models of analysis of cultural encounters still predominant in the scholarly discourses of classics and ancient history. In the editors’ own words, the contributors to the volume are keen to offer ‘a notion of culture that transcends essentialized and national definitions to include the entire range and variety of groups and subcultures that comprise Greek culture’ (2003, 9). To this end they bring into the open the numerous ethnic and cultural groups and subgroups that interacted, collaborated, and competed within ancient Greece, thus underscoring the dialogical relations involved in the construction of the identities of these ethnic groups and subcultures. In short, what clearly comes out of this collection is that Greek culture was not monolithic or monological, but multiple and dialogical, shaped through collaboration and competition. Intra-cultural contacts between the Greek states were naturally frequent and contributed tremendously to the diversity and multiple identity of Greek culture. Although the ancient Greeks had, across history, keenly established cultural and racial barriers between themselves and non-Greeks, those boundaries often proved porous, especially with the rise of ancient Greece into a mighty empire under the Macedonian emperor, Alexander the Great. Indeed, during Alexander’s reign and later within the rule of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, Hellenistic culture and the ideology of Hellenism sustaining this culture were highly flexible. This Hellenic cultural and ideological resilience is reflected in the elasticity of the term ‘Hellenism’ itself. Historians usually use this word to refer to the period ranging from Alexander the Great’s death (332 BC) to the death of Cleopatra and the absorption of Egypt into the Roman empire in 30 BC.1 The term ‘Hellenism’ was also commonly 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

Métissage, Ideology, and Politics 15

employed to designate the cultural tradition of the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman empire and the influence of Greek civilization on Rome as well as on other regions, including Persia, Egypt, and India.2 The word ‘Hellenization’, in turn, indicates the penetration and diffusion of Greek civilization across the colonies that came under Greco-Macedonian control. Owing to this dynamics of interaction and flow resulting from Greco-Macedonian imperial expansion, the flexibility of culture and ideology of Hellenism allowed the Greco-Macedonian civilization to penetrate and impact upon the conquered populations’ cultures. This said, colonial cultural impacts are anything but one-sided. The victors’ civilization, in this case that of the Greco-Macedonians, was also transformed, consciously and unconsciously absorbing and incorporating into its realm customs, traditions, practices, and ideas looted from the ‘barbarians’. These external cultural interactions with non-Greek peoples (the Egyptians, the Persians, and so on) and the incorporation of foreign customs and practices were, as we shall see, major sources of inspiration, widely contributing to the development of Greek civilization. However, this ‘barbarian’ influence on Hellenistic culture has also always been the object of intense critical commentary and controversy. Plato and Aristotle, discussed in detail below and in Chapters 4 and 10, provided interesting accounts of the impact of the ‘barbarians’ on Greek civilization. Later writers like Tatian (110–180 AD) and Lucian (125–180 AD), both of Assyrian origin and subjects of the Roman empire, elaborated on this barbarian legacy, emphasizing the hybridity of Greek arts and knowledge. Both Tatian and Lucian admired Greek philosophy and rhetoric; both similarly satirized the sense of superiority entailed in the notion of ‘Greekness’. Tatian, who mixes literary genres and cultural as well as philosophical references in his works, wrote in To the Greeks what sounds like a challenge to Greek cultural supremacy: ‘Do not maintain a totally hostile attitude to foreigners, men of Greece, nor resent their beliefs. For which of your own practices did not have a foreign origin?’ (1982, 3). He further deliberates on the genealogies of Greek arts, emphasizing their derivative nature: ‘It was Orpheus who taught you the practice of poetry and singing, also initiation in mysteries; the Etruscans taught sculpture, Egyptian chronological records taught the composition of history’ (1982, 3). Tatian here reminds the Greeks of their hybrid civilization, in the process underscoring the barbarians’ contribution to the Greeks’ artistic and cultural development. In stressing the miscegenation of Greek civilization, Tatian destabilizes the Attic 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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myths of purity, thus turning the very notion of Greekness on its head. In like manner, Lucian points to the influence of ‘barbarians’ on Greek culture in ways that blur the frontiers between the same and Other, Greekness and barbarianism. Lucian was a cultural hybrid; his works are eloquent expressions of literary and mythological métissage. For example, in On the Syrian Goddess (Lucian 2003) in which he describes the Syrian city and goddess Hera, Lucian provides a dialogical discursive space whereby the profane and the sacred, Greek and ‘barbarian’ stories, and hybrid mythological symbols productively blend. As Lucian stresses from the outset, his own account is a hybrid narrative in which events experienced directly as an eyewitness mix with stories told by other sources, notably the priests: I shall tell what customs [the Syrians] use in their rites, the festivals they hold, and the sacrifices they perform. I shall tell about the founders of the temples and how the temples came into existence. I myself that write am an Assyrian and of things that I relate I have seen some with my own eyes, while others – the parts of my account that happened before my time – I have learned from the priests. (2003, 249) The hybrid poetic space represented in Lucian’s work is one of interaction and inclusion; it accommodates numerous, competing narratives, quite in keeping with the poet’s own multiple cultural and literary identity. The hybridity of Lucian’s discursive and imaginary poetic space is even more cogently rendered by the image of the Syrian goddess who ‘appears to be of many forms. While the overall effect is certainly that of Hera, she also has something of Athena and Aphrodite and Selene and Rhea and Artemis and Nemesis and the Fates’ (2003, 269). While through their hybridized aesthetics both Lucian and Tatian attempt to subvert the myths of Greek purity, the fact remains that the core of their subversive gesture is limited in both scope and reach. That is to say, it mostly seeks to compel the same to recognize the hybrid Other as a worthy epistemic subject collaborating in the dominant Greek cultural and philosophical archive. Lucian provides an illuminating example of this idea of hybridity as a performance geared toward achieving intellectual skills closer, or perhaps equal, to those of the targeted sameness. In The Dead Come to Life (Lucian 1905), he articulates this brand of performative hybridity through Parrhe¯siade¯s, an Assyrian character who sounds like Lucian’s mouthpiece. The poem is set in the Athenian Acropolis in which famous Greek philosophers 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


gather to judge Parrhe¯siade¯s’s ability to perform Greek paideia or culture. In this work Lucian represents Athens as the locus of philosophical fraud and intellectual pretension, attracting all kinds of people interested more in material gain than in the life of the spirit. He particularly indicts what he sees as fake philosophers who have all the appearance of the philosophical profession, ‘beard’, ‘walk’, and ‘garb’, but who lack the necessary core of knowledge and wisdom. Most significantly, in this poem Lucian especially shows via Parrhe¯siade¯s how hybridity is brought to trial, summoned to perform and prove its philosophical and epistemological worth. In a sense, the cultural hybridity embodied by Parrhe¯siade¯s – implicitly Lucian – is put to the test; its value and performance are uniformly measured against the yardstick of Greekness. The problematic issue of hybridity illustrated above will be pursued further in the second part of the book. This section of our study is entirely focused on cultural and colonial encounters from the ancient Greeks and Romans onwards. It does not offer an exhaustive examination of the ancient empires; this would have required far more space than is available. It consists instead of a historic overview of the idea of syncretism within the ancient empires, by which I mean the Greeks and Romans as well as the Egyptians and Persians. This overview is broad and informative enough to allow us to have a sufficient grasp of the power relationships within which classical hybridity was articulated. In this section and throughout the book the word hybridity is used interchangeably with the terms ‘syncretism’, ‘métissage’, and ‘mestizaje’;3 it encompasses the cultural, the aesthetic, the political, the ideological, and the biological. Cultural hybridity has received a great deal of critical attention in both cultural and postcolonial studies and most contemporary approaches maintain, rightly so, that no culture or people can lay claim to purity. When we say that all cultures are hybrid, we mean that whenever cultures come into contact with each other, whether through trade, marriage alliances, or war, they are inevitably transformed by their proximity with cultural and racial otherness. The transformations and mutual influences occurring during these exchanges are usually uneven and differently perceived by the actors involved in the cultural encounters. It is commonly recognized that powerful and dominant cultures, especially in colonial contexts, are more likely to impact significantly on the less powerful and subjugated cultures. Of course, there is also much historical evidence to the contrary. The tremendous cultural influence exerted by Persia on ancient Greece after Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great is a good illustration.4 Broadly speaking, being 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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in the position of power and domination, colonizing nations have both the means and the ambition to impact deeply upon indigenous cultural, political, and socio-economic structures. This is hardly surprising, given imperialism’s impulse to attain cultural hegemony while imposing on the colonized its political and economic domination. In order to achieve cultural domination, colonizers across history adopted various methods, which often combined exclusionary and inclusionary practices, modes of coercion and collaboration, negation and incorporation of difference. Within colonial politics, inclusive practices usually consisted of integrating a section of the colonized population, the aristocracy or elite, into colonial culture and institutions. The exclusionary practices, on the other hand, involved the political, social, and economic marginalization of the majority of the natives alongside downgrading the colonized languages and customs. Denying the majority of the colonized peoples political participation and basic social and economic rights was a defining feature of imperial domination, modern and ancient alike. This political and socio-economic marginalization generally went hand in hand with the cultural alienation and narcissistic debasement of the colonized. In both French and British empires, for instance, the native cultures were usually systematically marginalized and debased. An evidence of this colonial marginalizing practice can be seen in the occlusion and exclusion of the native languages and literatures from the colonial educational curricula.5 These colonial exclusions are premised on various considerations; some of these are strictly economic and political, others have a cultural and ideological basis. In this latter case the marginalization of the colonized cultures, languages, and, more broadly, the native systems of producing knowledge may be said widely to proceed from European cultural arrogance and racial prejudice; both feed on myths of supremacy which disqualify the native cultures and languages as worthy instruments of knowledge and civilization. That native cultures and civilizations have been consistently marginalized and devalued by colonial powers is an irrefutable historical fact. It is, nevertheless, important to remark that the deliberate marginalization of the dominated cultures by no means suggests that imperial cultures were unaffected by native cultures. Rather, despite imperial cultural arrogance and propensity to underrate or overlook the influence of colonized cultures, there is substantial evidence that intense mutual cultural and linguistic exchanges occurred through the proximity of colonizers and colonized cultures. The case of Persia evoked earlier is one of several illuminating examples of the transformation through 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


the indigenous culture of the colonizer’s culture. Another illustrative example, which will be discussed later, is the outstanding influence of Greek culture and literature on the Romans, following the incorporation of Greece into the Roman empire in 146 BC. Most importantly also, combined with the cultural syncretism resulting from colonial conquests is the political and administrative hybridity which has been a key feature of imperial rule since time immemorial. This type of administrative syncretism usually consisted of the preservation of the pre-colonial system of rule and administration on which were then grafted the colonizers’ modes of control. This is a predominant practice among ancient empires as well as modern colonizing nations. Most ancient empires resorted to such syncretic modes of governance. The Persian, Greek, Roman, and Inca empires as well as the modern Spanish, French, and British imperial systems all variously adopted this administrative syncretism to consolidate their political domination. For instance, the Empire of the Great Kings of Persia, which supplanted the Persian Assyrian empire, did not dispose of the administrative organization put in place by the Assyrians. Rather, they took up the existing efficient administration of the Assyrians and grafted onto it their own system of rule. Similarly, after his victory over the Persian empire, Alexander the Great maintained much of the Persian administrative organization, while substituting disloyal, unwilling administrative officials with loyal ones. Pierre Briant ([1996] 2002) has examined at great length this transitional period in Persia’s history and highlighted the ‘institutional continuity’ between the Persian empire and its Greek successors. Alexander followed the same pattern after his conquest of Egypt in 332 BC. He based his administration of Egypt on the former pharaonic socio-political organization, and at the beginning he even left in office the Egyptian kings. Alexander also undertook, as will be shown, a host of measures, real and symbolic, aimed at fusing the GreekMacedonian and Egyptian worlds. This being said, one of the most manifest and enlightening instances of ancient imperial hybridity and institutional as well as ideological continuity is found in Ptolemaic Egypt. The Ptolemaic dynasty, which reigned in Egypt for about three hundred years (305–30 BC), maintained an intricate relationship with Egyptian society at large and with the pharaonic ideology and mode of governance in particular. The Ptolemaic kings must have, to some extent, capitalized on the implantation of Hellenism on Egyptian soil, which scholars such as Gilbert Manning date back to the seventh century BC. Above all, they capitalized on the legacy of Alexander the Great. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Alexander’s rule in Egypt and his ideology manifestly served as an invaluable source of inspiration to the Ptolemaic dynasty. Following his victory over the Persians, Alexander presented himself as a liberator and protector of the Egyptian people and their civilization. He was even said to have been welcomed by the Egyptians as a deliverer releasing them from a much hated ten-year Persian domination. However, in order to live up to his role of liberator and, most importantly, to be recognized as a unifier of the Egyptian people Alexander had to perform a number of rites and symbolic acts, starting with his crowning as king in Memphis. The choice of Memphis is a significant symbolic gesture, in the sense that this place represents the cradle of the united Egyptian state founded by king Menes. The image of Alexander as a federator and continuer of the Egyptian tradition is further enhanced in his establishment of Memphis as the official residence city of the pharaoh; a decision that reflects an ideological continuity with the ‘Old Kingdom tradition which had emerged in the course of later Egyptian history’ (Hölbl 2001, 77–8). Alexander did not, of course, end his deft messianic projections here, but further multiplied symbolic acts and mythical identifications in order to consolidate his legitimacy in the eyes of his Egyptian subjects. The next definitive stage in this process of legitimation was to design for himself a mythical Egyptian descent and be finally recognized as a pharaoh. In keeping with Alexander the Great’s projection, a royal oracle pronounced the Macedonian king’s mythical descent from an Egyptian god – Amun of Siwah. With this pronouncement, Alexander was acknowledged as a legitimate successor of the Egyptian pharaohs. As with his choice of Memphis, so, too, Alexander’s mythical filiation with Amun of Siwah is of the utmost significance, dovetailing with his projected image as a unifier of the Egyptian people. That Alexander chose to emulate Amun of Siwah is all the more judicious, as in the fifth and fourth centuries BC this divinity brought different ethnic groups together. Most importantly, Amun of Siwah was not only a symbol of Egyptian unity, but also an integrative force whose religious aura and authority transcended Egypt’s strict geographical confines. A unifier of the different ethnic groups within Egypt, Amun of Siwah embodied religious fusion on a global scale, worshipped in Egypt, Greece, Macedonia, and beyond. He ‘enjoyed the highest standing in the entire world owing to the oracle in the Siwah oasis’ (Hölbl 2001, 98). The lessons of Alexander’s ideology, mythical projections, and deft handling of the Egyptian elite’s susceptibilities were not lost on the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Ptolemaic dynasty who, as it were, emulated Alexander the Great in almost every respect. Like Alexander, the Ptolemaic kings chose to be crowned in Memphis and represented themselves as ancient Egyptian pharaohs in order to be accepted by the Egyptian people. The Ptolemies also understood the need to respect Egyptian cults and sanctuaries, and, in the attempt to win over the Egyptian elite, that is, the priesthoods that constituted the repositories of pharaonic culture and traditions, they continued to build temples. These accommodating policies led to strong cooperation between the Egyptian priests and the Ptolemaic rulers. Furthermore, the Ptolemaic kings not only embraced the Egyptian gods but were also eager to achieve a synthesis of Egyptian and Greek religious and cultural traditions as well as political and economic structures. On one level, these attempts to fuse Hellenic and pharaonic political, cultural, economic, and religious institutions were primarily strategic, chiefly intended to consolidate the Ptolemaic kings’ power and control of Egyptian society. The Ptolemies’ strategic incorporation of pharaonic traditions and structures was both highly sophisticated and wideranging. It involved adopting the pharaohs’ ideology, symbols, and conduct, as well as their economic modes of production and means of political control. Referring to the Ptolemaic economic mode of production in Egypt, Manning and Morris argued that ‘the Ptolemies followed pharaonic theology by claiming ownership of all the land, and thus all sources of production in Egypt’ (2007, 177). To elaborate further on the cultural, political, and ideological interactions and métissage within Ptolemaic Egypt, it is crucial to observe that the process of hybridization emerging from these colonial encounters was ambivalent and profoundly unbalanced. For example, bilingualism, the living proof of hybrid cultural and linguistic identity, was more common among the Egyptian elite than among the Greeks. Only a small number of Greeks learned the Egyptian languages and dialects, while most of the Egyptian elite had to assimilate Greek language and culture in order to achieve social promotion. The syncretism of the Ptolemaic system of rule had attracted the attention of classical scholars at least as early as the 1930s. Among these are Claire Préaux who showed in her L’Economie royale des Lagides (1939) that the Ptolemaic administration was based on the pharaonic mode of administration and that the ‘forms and techniques’ of rule imposed on the Egyptians did not profoundly affect their lives.6 While highlighting the hybridity or the numerous inspirations informing the Ptolemaic mode of administration, Préaux, nevertheless, Eurocentrically 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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emphasizes the Greekness of Lagidis Egypt, as if the multiple Egyptian components incorporated into the Ptolemaic institutions had not taken place. In contrast to Préaux, scholars such as Rostovtzeff argue instead that the Ptolemaic administrative system was only partially, if not minimally inspired by the pharaonic administrative forms and techniques: No doubt the bureaucratic machinery of the Ptolemies […] was in part inherited from the past. To a certain extent, and to a certain extent only, it was a continuation and Hellenization of Oriental bureaucracy […] How much more refined, more logical and coherent the latter was not confined to the Greek names of the offices, to the elaborate Greek administration and financial terminology […], nor to the use of the Greek language in administration and taxation; nor to the Greek accounting system; it consisted above all in the general design and the spirit that permeated it. (1941, 1079) It is no doubt useful to know whether the Ptolemaic bureaucratic system was only partially or rather more deeply inspired by pharaonic administrative forms and techniques. It is just as crucial to underline that the shallowness or depth of inspiration, which is more a matter of degree than kind, does in no way question the hybrid character of the Ptolemaic administrative machinery. The other impediment regarding the nature of the Ptolemaic administrative machinery lies in the dearth of evidence, especially for the first five decades of Ptolemaic rule. And given this information deficit it is difficult to determine how much of the pharaonic bureaucracy was incorporated into the Ptolemaic forms and techniques of administration and how much had been left out. David Thomas writes in this respect that: the student of Hellenistic Egypt seeking to find out about the immediate antecedents of his period finds it impossible to discover more than a handful of facts. Furthermore […], there is virtually no evidence for the administration during the first fifty years of Ptolemaic rule. Therefore often the best one can hope is to compare the situation under the new kingdom with that prevailing at about 250 B.C. […] Many changes will be observed, but we usually have very little idea whether these changes are due to the Saite dynasty, the Persians or the Ptolemies. (1978, 188) 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Thus, the scarcity of information makes every attempt to map or categorize an understanding of the Ptolemaic system of administration incomplete at best. Nevertheless, the fragments we possess on the Ptolemaic mode of administration reinforce the idea that the Ptolemaic system of rule in Egypt was the product of active, strategic hybridization; that is to say, a hybridization that is moved by concrete cultural, ideological, economic, and geopolitical considerations, all aiming at imperial domination and supremacy. Several scholars, among them Walter Runciman (1989) and Gilbert Manning (2009) have discussed at great length the practice and ideology of syncretism of the Ptolemaic mode of administration and rule. Runciman, for example, identifies the Ptolemaic system as a ‘hybrid’ structure that mixes pharaonic, Persian, Macedonian, and Greek practices as well as modern modes of production and taxation (1989, 160). Manning elaborates on the hybridity of the Ptolemaic rule, stating: The Ptolemaic state, within its core territory, was neither an Egyptian, nor a Greek state. Indeed, it combined the traditions of the Egyptian monarchy – the ancient agricultural system, political control through the division of the country into nomes, and the ancient temples and priesthoods – with Greek fiscal institutions that derive most immediately from the fourth century BC and from ‘proto-Hellenistic’ […] exchange patterns. (2009, 3) We may here argue that the Ptolemaic dynasty’s pragmatic fusion of the Egyptian and Greek cultures and modes of political and economic control emulates Alexander the Great’s self-proclaimed project, the goal of which was presumably to unite the East and West in one common universal civilization. Alexander’s vision of hybridity will be discussed in detail below. At present, the focus is laid on the syncretic processes brought about by the Persian wars of the fifth and fourth centuries BC (500–323 BC). As a preliminary remark, Greek borrowing and incorporation of non-Greek traditions into their own culture started much earlier than the fifth and fourth centuries BC, although at these periods cultural syncretism and the display of foreign influence were more notable. Archaeological and anthropological studies undertaken in the last two decades or so have provided substantial evidence of the extensively syncretic character of Greek material culture. In this respect Chester Starr’s study of metalwork, glass, seals, and coinage gives the measure 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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of the transformation of Greek and Anatolian culture by Eastern influences prior to Alexander the Great. Starr argued that the discovery of Greco-Persian seals in Sparta showed that ‘Greeks could appreciate an art form which blended Eastern and Western elements’ and therefore undermined the strength of the natural enmity between the Greeks and non-Greeks (quoted by Dougherty and Kurke 2003, 209). In Athens and Persians in the Fifth Century BC, Margaret Miller has also demonstrated the influence of Persian cultures and artistic traditions on Greek artists, drawing attention to the pervasiveness of what she calls the phenomenon of ‘Perserie’.7 In her own words, this phenomenon of Perserie is the result of the openness and ‘receptivity’ of fifth and fourth-century BC Athenians to the culture of the Achaemenid empire. In examining ancient Greek syncretism, Miller has revealed how the Greek artists blended their own artistic traditions with those of Asia, combining Greek and Achaemenid or Phoenician iconography, dress design, and physical features. With regard in particular to syncretic funerary architecture, Dougherty and Kurke note in turn that ‘from the point of view of the artists involved in the production of these monuments, the evidence of Attic and Anatolian tombs attests to an ongoing cultural dialogue in which Greek and non-Greek elements were exchanged, fused, and transformed, to produce distinct and yet interconnected forms’ (2003, 229). As with funerary monuments where Greek and non-Greek blended in Attic and Anatolian tombs, so, too, in the military sphere foreign influence was perceptible. Greek armies learned from their enemies to the extent of adopting non-Greek weapons and military tactics. Most importantly also, the ancient Greeks adopted and elaborated upon the military devices or weaponry of earlier empires, among them the Sumerians and the Egyptians.8 More generally, in Athens in the years immediately following the Persian wars foreign cults were spreading, as was enthusiasm for Persian style, luxury goods, textiles, and Eastern dress. This manifest trend for Persian material culture and arts was to continue into the fourth century BC (see Miller 1997, 135–258; Dougherty and Kurke 2003, 229). Also notable, however, in the context of Persia’s major contribution to the development and refinement of Greek culture was the somewhat paradoxical racial prejudice exhibited by the Greeks towards the Persians. As we have shown, Greek artists, poets, military officials, and politicians borrowed extensively from the Persians. Yet most of the Greeks from the fifth century BC onwards showed contempt for the Persians and regarded them as backward, racially inferior ‘barbarians’ (see Bernal 1987; Isaac 2004; Acheraïou 2008). 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


There is ample historical evidence that the Greeks borrowed profusely from the ancient Egyptians, in all fields of knowledge, ranging from religion and philosophy to mathematics and astronomy. It is also suggested that the Greeks, too, had likely drawn on the Sumerian civilization, in the sphere of politics in particular but also in many other fields. Knowing that the Sumerian political system was based on democratic principles at least three millennia before democracy was established in Athens, there is good reason to contend that democracy as a political practice did not originate in Greece but was of Sumerian origin (see Kramer 1958, 66). Even in the field of letters the Greeks seem to share a great deal with the Sumerians. Noah Kramer points out that the epic genre or narrative poetry, which is usually attributed to the Greeks, was in fact a Sumerian invention. Kramer nonetheless adds that the Greek epic form is more complex and sophisticated than the Sumerian narrative poetry and that the differences between the two epic narrative forms are discernable on all levels: plot, narrative structure, symbolism, characterization, rhythm, and action or movement (Kramer 1958, 264). If the Sumerian legacy to ancient Greece is notable but less thoroughly examined by scholars of the classical civilizations, the tremendous influence of Egyptian culture and sciences on the Hellenic world has received much scholarly attention over the last four decades or so. The civilization of Egypt was not only the fount of Greek civilization, but it was also perceived as the matrix of civilization. Aristotle recognized that most of the sciences, including mathematics and geometry, originated with the Egyptians. This belief was shared by many Greek philosophers and mathematicians, including Thales, Plato, Euclid, and Eudemus. In Elements of Geometry, of which nine of the thirteen books are devoted to geometry, Euclid acknowledges Egypt as the birthplace of geometry; but he chauvinistically adds that ‘the geometry which was brought from Egypt to Greece, appears to be in its infancy; and all that Pythagoras and others borrowed from the Egyptians could not have exceeded some practical rules and applications’ (1845, ix). Like his predecessor, Eudemus, who wrote History of Geometry, History of Mathematics, and History of Astronomy, also regarded Egypt as the cradle of geometry. This is no wonder considering that Thales, the acknowledged founding figure of Greek mathematics, studied in Egypt and later introduced this science to Greece.9 Claims for Egypt as the fount of mathematics need to be nuanced, however, since there is also evidence that the Sumerians, to whom both the Egyptians and Greeks are variously indebted, were also versed in mathematics. Given the geographical proximity of the two ancient 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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civilizations, there is much reason to contend that the Egyptians were familiar with, if not influenced by, the Sumerian mathematical and scientific foundations. In line with Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Eudemus, and others, modern scholars have also discussed the intricate connections between the ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations, underlining Greek cultural and scientific indebtedness to Egypt. In The African Origin of Civilization, Cheikh Anta Diop deliberates at length on the influence of Egypt on the Greeks, arguing that ‘Greece borrowed from Egypt all the elements of her civilization, even the cult of the gods, and that Egypt was the cradle of civilization’ ([1955] 1974, 4). In their book, A History of the Modern World, R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton also emphasize the role of ancient Egypt as the source of civilization into which many cultures, including ancient Greece, tapped: Europeans were by no means the pioneers of human civilization. Half of man’s recorded history had passed before anyone in Europe could read or write. The priests of Egypt began to keep written records between 4000 and 3000 BC, but more than two thousand years later the poems of Homer were still being circulated in the Greek city-states by word of mouth. Shortly after 3000 BC, while the pharaohs were building the first pyramids, Europeans were creating nothing more distinguished than huge garbage heaps. (1965, 3) Over two decades later Martin Bernal published a well documented, controversial book, Black Athena (1987), in which he discusses at length the influence of ancient Egyptian civilization on ancient Greek culture, science, religion, and philosophy. As he glosses Greece’s indebtedness to Egypt, Bernal also points out the complex, ambivalent relation of the ancient Greeks towards Egyptian civilization. Théophile Obenga elaborates on this idea, stating that ‘the ancient Greeks traced all human inventions to the Egyptians from Calculus, Geometry, Astronomy and Dice Games to Writing. Since the time of Homer, Egyptian antiquity functioned strictly as a highly memorialized component of Greek history. Herodotus said it, Plato confirmed it, and Aristotle never denied it’ (1996, 47). The Egyptian influence on Greek civilization is undeniable, and both the ancient philosophers and modern scholars of the classical civilizations, including Obenga, have demonstrated it. Nevertheless, it is crucial to moderate Obenga’s assertion by remarking that most of 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


the sciences that the Greeks consider as having originated from Egypt were also practised within another ancient civilization, that of Sumer, which is at least as old if not older than the Egyptian civilization. Not just mathematics, astronomy or epic poetry, but also dice games were, as Kramer observes, common leisure activities among the Sumerians. A further important nuance here is related to the question of writing in the ancient world. The Greeks may well assume that writing was invented by the Egyptians, but historical evidence shows that the Sumerians, too, had developed, at about the same time as did the Egyptians, one of the earliest known forms of writing: the cuneiform language. Written on clay tablets with a blunt reed, the Sumerian script emerged in Mesopotamia between 4000 and 3000 BC. It later developed into a dominant language in most of the ancient Near East. Whether Sumerian cuneiform was anterior or subsequent to hieroglyphs cannot be absolutely ascertained. What is irrefutable is that Egypt and Sumer are the birthplaces of the two oldest known scripts. Egypt’s legacy to our civilization is no doubt enormous, as has been consistently recognized. Sumer’s contribution should yet be equally acknowledged and given full credit. In this regard, it is worth remembering that many inventions that propelled humankind’s progress were of Sumerian origin: the invention of the wheel, agriculture, the arch, the vault, and irrigation, to name only a few.10 To return to ancient Greece’s connections with Egypt, it is crucial to note that the Greeks’ borrowing from this African civilization was a source of controversy in ancient as well as modern times. As has been pointed out by Bernal (1987), Isaac (2004), and others, until the fifth century BC most ancient Greek historians, poets, and philosophers downplayed or remained silent about the influence of Egypt on the civilization of ancient Greece. In a way, the hybridity of Greek culture and thought was occluded, perhaps because the myths of purity and supremacy fuelling Greek civilization were so deep-rooted and so much taken for granted. From the fifth century BC onwards, however, Greek poets, philosophers, and politicians came to acknowledge the Egyptians’ influence on their culture, arts, sciences, and religion.11 Some, for example Plato, saw even the Egyptian system of education and its underlying educational values as models to imitate. His great admiration for the Egyptian system of teaching led him to induce his contemporaries to introduce this system and the values (fortitude, justice, temperance) underlying it to Greece (see Obenga 1996, 45–50). This change of attitude with regard to ancient Egypt at this specific period is understandable in that most Greek philosophers and scientists 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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had by then been widely exposed to ancient Egyptian civilization, through travel or studies, often both. Cheikh Anta Diop, Martin Bernal, and, more recently, Théophile Obenga, Benjamin Isaac, and Arun Bala have all usefully reminded us that most of the Greek philosophers and mathematicians studied in Egypt: Thales, Aristotle, Isocrates, Plato, Euclid, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, and Archimedes, to name a few, all spent several years of study in the Temple of Waset. From the fifth century BC, the Greeks thus commonly recognized that their civilization was influenced by the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Most scholars – as observed above – even acknowledged that their mathematics, for example, were an Egyptian legacy, introduced into Greece by way of Thales who studied in Egypt for many years. Herodotus, Aristotle, and his pupil Eudemos, who wrote a history of mathematics, all claimed that Thales ‘after a visit to Egypt, brought this study to Greece’ (quoted by Ronan 1983, 68). Eudemos, as Ronan notes, goes even ‘as far as to specify what Thales brought, namely a number of propositions in theoretical geometry’ (1983, 68). The Greeks incorporated into their own abstract system the theories of mathematics and astronomy borrowed from the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations (Bala 2006, 27). But, as we have seen, Greek borrowing transcended the field of science to encompass philosophy, religion, and the arts. Egyptian influence is strongly felt in all of these, so, too, is the syncretic character of Greek traditions resulting from the cross-cultural encounters between ancient Egypt and Greece. The syncretism of ancient Greek culture, deriving from Greek civilization’s absorption and synthesizing of non-Greek traditions, is, to state the obvious, a universal phenomenon. The Egyptians themselves, who greatly impacted upon Greek civilization, also drew from non-Egyptian traditions (see Fyle 1999); so, too, did most of the civilizations and empires that succeeded the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, starting with the mighty Roman empire. More specifically, the culture of Rome was characterized by an intense degree of syncretism, perceptible in almost all fields. The Roman attitude to Greek culture in particular is highly illustrative; their enthusiasm and admiration for Hellenistic culture and literary traditions have received much critical attention. Yet, a brief outline of Roman engagement with Greek cultural, literary, social, and political traditions after the incorporation of Greek states into the Roman empire, may enlighten us on the complexity and paradoxes of the process of hybridization that these ancient civilizations underwent. When Greece became a Roman protectorate in 146 BC the Romans 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


imitated the Greeks in almost all walks of life. They took up Greek sciences and adopted their strategies of imperial expansion, the arts, gods, rituals, and even dress, thus establishing significant continuities between the Hellenic and Latin worlds (Bernal 1987; Pagden 2001; Isaac 2004; Acheraïou 2008). Imperial Rome’s cultural, literary, ideological, and technological indebtedness to Greek civilization was, to say the least, impressive. The Romans, for example, owe the birth of their own literature to Livius Andronicus, a Greek actor and writer of tragedies and comedies, brought to Rome as a prisoner of war. Andronicus’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey into Latin marks the beginning of Roman literature. On translating Homer, which, in the meantime, he Romanized, Andronicus had not only made Homer accessible to the Romans; he also infused Greek ideas and consciousness into the Latin idiom. This process of cultural and linguistic hybridization was pursued and expanded by Naevius, a Roman epic poet and dramatist from Capua, who was steeped in Greek cultural and literary traditions from which he extensively borrowed. His works are based on a cultural and literary idiom blending Greek and Roman techniques. Ennius likewise was a fervent Hellenist. Ennius came from the Messapian region, which was characterized by linguistic diversity and cultural synthesis. As a result of this multicultural background, Ennius gained fluency in Greek, Latin, and the dialect of Oscan. His interest in and admiration for Hellenistic civilization led him to appropriate Greek literary traditions, assimilating and adapting the Greek hexameter to Latin literary norms. His massive borrowing from such Greek poets as Homer and Callimachus has been widely documented (see Gutzwiller 2007). His Annales, a chronological history of Rome in hexameters, reveals a highly Homeric inspiration; this is suggested in the opening of the poem in which Homer appears to Ennius to provide him with knowledge about the physical universe as well as to inform the Roman poet that a Homeric soul has migrated into him. The dream scene in Ennius’s poem appears as a cue to Callimachus’s opening lines in Aetia, in which the literary model of Homer figures prominently. The claim to direct filiation with Homer, illustrated here by Callimachus and Ennius, was common within both Latin and Hellenic literature; most Hellenistic and Roman writers imitated Homer and, at one stage or another, claimed to be contemporary Homer(s). Similarly, the admiration for Hellenic culture was pervasive at all levels of the Roman elite; poets as well as politicians, statesmen, and army generals were variously drawn to what was then seen as the cultural reference par excellence: Hellenic civilization. The Roman emperor, Hadrian, for example, was a strong Hellenophile; besides producing poems in 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Latin he also wrote poetry in Greek. Hadrian’s admiration for all things Greek was such that he was disdainfully called Graeculus, ‘little Greek’. Hadrian’s enthusiastic response to Greek culture was, to a great extent, emblematic of the Roman aristocracy’s overall appreciative attitude toward Greek civilization (see Rosenstein and Morstein-Marx 2010; Nasrallah 2010). It is now a well established fact that Roman aristocrats learned Greek and referred to those who did not speak Greek and Latin as ‘barbarians’. This said, the assimilation of Greek culture, particularly in the third and second centuries BC, was also a source of discontent and controversy within elite Roman circles. It was often met with resistance, even rejection by members of the Roman aristocracy and intellectuals. Juvenal, in particular, strongly indicted the Roman infatuation with Hellenic culture in Satires, making his character complain: ‘Citizens, I can’t stand a Greekized Rome. Yet what portions of the dregs of our town come from Achaia only?’ (1958, 35). In his Epistles (Book II, Epistle 1), Horace goes a step further in talking of victorious imperial Rome as having fallen prey to the civilization of its Greek subjects: ‘Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror’ (1891, 280). Cato, a politician and statesman of the Late Roman Republic, also objected to Roman society’s Hellenization. His Origines, whose title is ironically a translation of a famous Greek poem – Callimachus’s Aetia – crystallizes this anti-Hellenistic turn. The tension between admiration and resistance, adoption and rejection of Hellenism within learned circles in Rome indicates how far the Roman politics of identity and the process of hybridization which informed it were politically, ideologically, and emotionally charged issues.12 While most Roman intellectuals acknowledged, openly or indirectly, the benefits of incorporating the ‘superior’ Greek culture and literary traditions, the degree of transformation and corruption involved in the hybridizing process constituted a serious challenge to those seeking to codify Roman identity and articulate a stable, generic notion of what it meant to be Roman. From a cultural, literary, and political standpoint, hybridity – that is the incorporation of Greek culture into the Roman civilization – was for the majority of the Roman elite a necessary evil. Ideologically, however, many from both the same elite and beyond saw hybridity as a means of alienation and occlusion, preventing the emergence of a distinctive Roman collective identity. Beyond the cultural, political, and ideological considerations highlighted above, there is, yet, an important narcissistic dimension worth mentioning here with regard to this hybridization of Roman culture and society. Obviously, all the philhellenic Roman poets and 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


politicians evoked in this discussion engaged in what may be called pragmatic hybridism; that is to say a manifest process of hybridization motivated by practical considerations aiming to consolidate and empower Roman culture. This said, it is important to stress that the Romans’ articulation of their cultural and literary identity with reference to a cultural matrix – Greece – did not only result from the pragmatic need to build a national culture and literature blending Greek traditions and Roman imaginary. It was also fuelled by the necessity to establish a grand narrative of Romanness, tapping into Greek cultural prestige for self-validation. From a strictly narcissistic perspective then, this hybridization appears as a means of legitimization, not only of Roman cultural identity but also of the colonial enterprise itself and the myths of supremacy that sustained it. More clearly, together with enthusiastically affiliating themselves with a prestigious imperial civilization – ancient Greece – the Romans also blended the Greek and Roman foundational myths (the myth of Romulus and Remus with the myth of Aeneas) to articulate a hybrid collective imperial consciousness set for the domination of the world. In this way, the pragmatic hybridizing process consisting of the incorporation of Hellenistic culture and literary traditions towards the establishment of a ‘national’ Roman culture joins up with another more encompassing version of hybridization: strategic hybridism, geared to the subjugation of the whole universe to the Roman imperial will. The vocal apologist of Roman imperialism, Virgil, offers interesting insights into the Roman engagement with hybridity and Roman foundational myths. His views, as we shall see in Chapter 2, exemplify at the same time the problematic positioning of Rome toward the prominent, yet controversial question of hybridization. Above all, Virgil’s insights bring into sharp relief the enmeshment of the pragmatic and strategic forms of hybridization mentioned above. If Greek influence on Roman culture is, indeed, both manifest and controversial, so, too, Roman borrowing from their ‘barbarian’ colonized subjects is just as notable and problematic. However, before addressing this issue it is worth elaborating on Roman colonization and colonial cultural encounters elsewhere – in Britain, Gaul, or North Africa. In these regions, Roman conquest entailed violent military domination as well as the political imposition of Roman administrative rule and cultural hegemony. The ensuing Romanization meant disseminating Roman beliefs, ways of life, laws, and arts across the conquered societies. More specifically, in Britain Roman expansion progressed steadily until by 80 AD most of what is today Wales and England was under Roman 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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rule (Dudley and Webster 1965). As in Gaul, Roman domination in Britain lasted four centuries, long enough for Roman culture to disseminate and take root in the British Isles. Along with introducing the Gauls and Britons to Christianity, the Romans, who regarded themselves as the heirs to ancient Greece, were instrumental in spreading the classical values of rationality, democracy, order, law, and justice. Roman colonization left in France and Britain an impressive legacy that permeates many aspects of contemporary French and British culture and society. The influence of Roman law on the French and British judicial systems is perhaps one of the most obvious signs of this legacy (Millett 1990; Jenkyns 1992). It is important to point out, however, that Romanization in Britain, Gaul, or North Africa, was anything but smooth, as Fustel De Coulanges, for example, and others may contend. De Coulanges stated: ‘It was less Rome than civilization itself which won over the Gauls […] Being Roman, for them, was not a matter of obeying a foreign master so much as of sharing in the most cultivated and noble manners, arts, studies, labours and pleasures known to humanity’ (1891, 134–9). That the Gauls were seduced by some aspects of Roman civilization and wanted to share its advantages is understandable. Nevertheless, reducing a ruthless conquest to a smooth cultural encounter, as does De Coulanges, is tantamount to a romanticization of Roman imperialism. From a strictly scholarly point of view De Coulanges’s judgement is both a historical distortion and an intellectual fallacy. On the whole De Coulanges softens the brutality of Roman imperialism and downplays the traumatic effects of Romanization and Roman policies of assimilation at large. In this regard, it is crucial not to forget that Romanization was part of a process of subjugation that aimed at cultural, political, and socioeconomic domination. As such, it meant that the Gauls were forced to rethink their social and cultural identities within the dominant Roman frame of reference. The process of domination and acculturation underlying Roman colonization was surely not a simple, uniform practice, as De Coulanges wants us to believe. Rather, it was an extremely complex scheme, involving violence and accommodation, incorporation, and manipulation of native identities and power structures. Also worthy of note is that Romanization was by no means uniform. Some regions were more Romanized than others, and more often than not the tensions between adoption of and resistance to the Roman culture were simultaneously at work (Woolf 1998; Acheraïou 2008). Similarly, certain social categories assimilated Roman culture more quickly and more deeply than 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


did others. For instance, the peasantry in Britain was less thoroughly Romanized, although it was, as Hingley points out, undeniably ‘covered by a superimposed layer of Roman civilization’ (2005, 35). As in most colonial contexts, the various cultures forced into coexistence by Roman colonization were engaged in an ongoing dialogue, frequently accompanied by violence, and influenced each other. The British, the Gauls, and Numidians (Berbers), for instance, all variously adopted Roman culture; in the process they widely redefined their own cultural and social landscape in relation to the dominant Roman imperial culture. Roman culture was also transformed in the wake of these encounters with the ‘barbarians’, so, too, were the cultures of the previous as well as succeeding imperial powers. Roman borrowing from the ‘barbarians’ is widely reflected in the diverse items that the Romans took from the subjugated peoples and then naturalized as Latin items. Hingley rightly observes: ‘Works created in particular contexts and uniting local knowledge and materials were called Roman, despite their local production and the native aspects of the character of this pottery’ (2005, 45). Roman debts to their colonial subjects are also perceptible in many other fields, not least the military, as we shall shortly see. This ‘barbarian’ influence on Roman society has been discussed by Roman poets, politicians, historians, and philosophers; on the whole, debates on this issue have been characterized by controversy and ambivalence. Broadly speaking, the discourses regarding the impact of ‘barbarian’ legacies on the Romans reflect a general consensus about, on the one hand, the benefits of Roman domination for the colonized, and, on the other, the destructive influence of native cultures on the civilization of the conqueror. For example, Strabo (63/64 BC–24 AD), a Roman historian, geographer and philosopher, famous for his seventeen-volume work Geographica, acknowledged that the Romans destroyed the societies they conquered. In the meantime, he stressed that the Romans also brought to the colonized social and political stability: Take the case of the Greeks: though occupying mountains and rocks, they used to live happily, because they took forethought for good government, for the arts, and in general for the science of living. The Romans, too, took over many nations that were naturally savage owing to the regions they inhabited […], and thus not only brought into communication with each other peoples, but also taught them how to live under forms of government. (1967, 487) 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Strabo associates the Romans with worthy instructors teaching the ‘barbarians’ the principles of law and order, but downplays the colonized subjects’ impact on Roman culture with a striking display of cultural arrogance and Romano-centrism. In short, Strabo emphatically tells us what the colonized peoples learnt from the Roman civilizers, but says nothing of what the ‘barbarians’, including the highly advanced Egyptians, bequeathed to their masters. In Taktika, Arrian (92–175 AD), a Greek historian and philosopher of the Roman period, stressed instead the fact that the Romans, too, learned from their colonial subjects: ‘The Romans have many foreign (Iberian, Celtic) terms for formations, for they used Celtic cavalry. For, if on something else, also on this [matter], the Romans are worthy to be praised because they do not embrace [only] their own native things. Thus, having chosen noble things from everywhere, they made them their own’ (quoted by Isaac 2004, 244). Arrian uncharacteristically recognized the colonized as themselves owners of knowledge and culture. Yet his balanced perception of the colonial legacy is not the one that appealed to the modern colonial writers. It is Strabo’s interpretation – that the Romans and their followers were teachers to the child-like natives – which recurs in Western colonial ideology from the sixteenth century onwards. Roman colonial rule, too, was, to an extent, equally hybrid; it rested on both the violent penetration of the colonies and collaboration with the indigenous elite. Although the Romans imposed their administrative, legal, and political order on the subjugated peoples, they were keen to incorporate the elite into the imperial system of rule, as did Alexander the Great in Persia and Egypt or the Ptolemaic kings with the pharaonic aristocracy. There is much evidence that the elites in Britannia, Gaul, and North Africa were all encouraged to collaborate with Roman rule in exchange for a share in colonial power and privileges. This was a strategic move mainly intended to facilitate Roman control of their colonies. Hingley declares: It was also in the interest of the Roman administration actively to promote the adoption of Roman ways among provincial elites, because these were the peoples at the very core of the local selfgovernment who created the stability of relations that we term the empire of Rome. In these terms, Roman identity effectively had a symbolic dimension since it served to tie influential people into the evolving imperial system. (2005, 47) 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Obviously, the native elites benefited significantly from these political transactions; their adoption of Roman culture might, in this case, have been a prerequisite for a negotiation of their emergent political role in a new imperial context. Hingley further remarks that ‘Influential people are seen to have been keen to adopt “Roman” culture because this helped them to negotiate their own power simultaneously in local and imperial contexts [...] These people will then have “negotiated” their identities, but within the context of rules that were not entirely of their own making’ (2005, 47–8). That the native elites were seen as useful instruments for the fulfilment of Roman domination is almost a truism. Agricola, the Roman general who brought under Roman control much of Britain, made it his priority to draw the indigenous elites into the imperial centre and use them to legitimize Roman rule. This is why he consistently reminded these elites of the advantages of adopting the Roman culture and traditions. His call upon the sons of the elites to opt for a Roman education and become Latinized was an explicit invitation to the native upper classes to collaborate in Roman rule. The collaboration of these classes, whether in Britain, Gaul, or North Africa, facilitated Roman domination, as much as it served to validate Roman colonial rule in the eyes of the indigenous populations. From the standpoint of colonial psychology, by adopting Roman culture the native elites had interiorized its superiority. In political terms, on the other hand, the interiorization of Roman supremacy by the indigenous elites implicitly made native cultural and political subjugation a colonial fait accompli. To complete the picture of colonial encounters within the Roman empire, it is worth noting that not only had the Romans abundantly tapped into indigenous material culture and artifacts, as suggested earlier, but that they often did so without acknowledging their debts to these native sources. The hybridity of Roman culture is manifest and was largely informed by the colonial power relationships presiding over identity, culture, and, more generally, imperial geopolitics. Succinctly put, the Romans drew from different cultures across the empire a myriad of items which, as we have seen, they ultimately naturalized as Roman products. The fact that the Romans systematically naturalized the borrowed items as Roman instead of recognizing them in their specificity, that is as foreign, is of great significance. It illustrates the extent to which the material hybridity resulting from the imperial cross-cultural process involving the Romans and their colonial subjects is underpinned by a hegemonic, totalizing impulse. More particularly, the unilateral labelling of items produced in different provinces of the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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empire as Roman looks like a strong appropriative gesture; one which undermines the cultural Other that had, as it were, been an active participant in this Roman material hybridity. Ironically, the process of hybridization becomes here tautological, in that it is readily emptied of the productive dialogism, reversibility, and solidarity pertaining to any genuine condition of métissage. Concretely, rather than being acknowledged as essentially multiple, the hybrid products resulting from the mixing of various local traditions and forms of knowledge were taken up and consumed in imperial Rome as distinctively Roman objects. In a way, this hegemonic discursive and ideological impulse, reflected in the Roman perception of material hybridity, seems to subsume difference under a totalizing same, instead of recognizing in this difference equal status and agency in the production of hybrid material culture. In other words, the colonial cultural Other is incorporated into the imperial hybrid same, but, by the same token, is denied agency as a potent hybridizing agent.

1.2 Reflexive and strategic hybridism After this condensed exposé of the phenomenon of hybridity within ancient civilizations and empires, it is useful to discuss more critically the manifestation of syncretism in those remote times; the aim is to shed light on the artistic, cultural, political, and ideological implications of this practice. As the history of ancient societies has shown, encounters between civilizations, whether through colonization or trade, inevitably led to linguistic, cultural, and technological métissage, in which mutual influence, rather than one-sided imposition of sameness, was the norm. Another important observation is that much of this cultural, linguistic, and scientific métissage was subject to a dual dynamics. In the main, the practice of métissage in colonial contexts has always operated passively or unconsciously as well as intentionally and hegemonically. Mikhail Bakhtin has distinguished two kinds of hybridity: ‘organic’ or ‘unconscious’ hybridity and ‘intentional’ hybridity. He defines organic hybridity as an ‘unintentional, unconscious hybridization’ and considers this kind of hybridization as ‘the most important mode in the historical life and evolution of all languages’, in the sense that ‘languages change historically primarily by means of a mixing of various “languages”’ ([1935] 2004, 358–9). Intentional hybridization, on the other hand, refers to a deliberate dialogical juxtaposition of different languages, discourses, and points of view within the same semiotic/textual space without fusing them. In his discussion of the novel, Bakhtin argues 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


that the language of the novel is ‘a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other’ ([1940] 2004, 47). He further states: ‘the novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by another, the carving-out of a living image of another language’ ([1935] 2004, 361). If in Bakhtin’s notion of intentional hybridization, the emphasis is laid more on interaction and dialogism than on fusion or amalgamation (as in organic hybridity), he also warns us that no clear-cut distinction between the two forms of hybridization is to be drawn. The ‘centripetal’ forces fuelling organic hybridity are also subtly at work in intentional hybridity, just as the ‘centrifugal’ forces of intentional hybridity can be discerned in organic processes of hybridization. From a strictly literary or linguistic perspective, Bakhtin’s theory of hybridity is certainly helpful. However, the Bakhtinian linguistically-centred idea of both organic and intentional hybridity is starkly wanting when it comes to engaging with wider intercultural interactions as well as material geopolitical realities, more specifically with colonial contexts and politics. In addressing geopolitical contexts, we are, indeed, quick to realize that a more context-based methodological approach is required in order better to grasp the complex power relationships and geopolitical considerations inherent in the practice and discourse of hybridity, in both ancient and modern colonial ideologies. Broadly speaking, everyday contact between different groups and cultures brought together by imperial domination, whether ancient or modern, created a dialogical environment in which the cultures and traditions of the colonizers and colonized interacted, conflicted with, and impacted upon each other. Notwithstanding the cultural and racial prejudices characterizing the Greek and Roman empires, for example, the fact remains that cultural mixing took place, often reflexively or unconsciously, as a result of social and geographical proximity and mutual influence. This said, syncretism in its various forms is a subtle, elusive process. When we say that a great deal of hybridization might occur reflexively or involuntarily, we mean that it takes place almost mechanically by absorbing foreign cultural and linguistic patterns to which individuals in multicultural environments are exposed. Very often, too, the practice of métissage, especially in colonial contexts, ancient and modern alike, was prompted by more pragmatic economic, political, and ideological motivations. Earlier on, I referred to this type of métissage as strategic hybridism, a process that is fuelled by practical considerations and is mostly geared towards domination 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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and supremacy. In this case, the phenomenon of hybridity, rather than being an inert, automatic manifestation, takes the shape of an actively thought-out design with hidden political, cultural, and ideological objectives. Aristotle, as we shall see later, offers in The Politics an instructive example of strategic hybridism, whereby he explicitly constructs a sense of Greekness as a blend of Hellenic rationalism and war spirit with Asiatic intelligence and industriousness. His overall aim is to consolidate and promote the idea of the supremacy of Greek civilization and ethnicity. In Aristotle’s belief, this Greek superiority is owed to the astute mixing of what is seen as ‘best’ in the world of the different Other (Asiatic qualities of intelligence and thrift) with what is deemed of superior pedigree in the realm of the same (Greek war spirit and rationalism). The Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt can be cited again here to illustrate this notion of active, strategic hybridism. Before going further, however, it is useful to note that the concept of strategic hybridism, which will be employed in the course of this study, overlaps with the idea of pragmatic hybridity. More precisely, pragmatic hybridity is embedded in the idea of strategic hybridity. Strategic hybridization always implies an impulse towards domination and supremacy, while pragmatic hybridity may not necessarily involve such hegemonic orientations. The profound immersion of the Romans in Greek culture offers an enlightening instance of pragmatic hybridity. Ptolemaic Egypt, on the other hand, provides a good illustration of strategic hybridization. Regarding the Egypt of the Ptolemies in particular, it is important to remember that the dynasty’s incorporation of pharaonic political, economic, and religious traditions was not undertaken merely for the love of Egyptian customs or as a celebration of cultural hybridity per se. Rather, a judicious policy of hybridization, blending Greek and Egyptian traditions into a complex, blurred system of governance, was primarily conceived of as a legitimizing political stratagem intended to tighten the Ptolemaic grip on Egyptian society. In other words, the instrumentalized form of hybridity engaged in by the Ptolemies was primarily a means of domination and control, in which the absorption and incorporation of difference were intended to contribute to the consolidation and perpetuation of Hellenistic culture and power. The administrative continuities observed in both Ptolemaic Egypt and in the Persia of Alexander the Great also fit within the overall strategic hybridism of the Greeks. Its chief objective was the subjugation and economic exploitation of its African and Asian possessions, Egypt and Persia in this case. Similarly, the astuteness of the Ptolemies in involving 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


the native pharaonic elite in their governance was part of this strategic process of hybridization, a technique adopted by Alexander the Great in Persia and Egypt and later emulated by the Romans and such modern Western colonial nations as France and Britain. In order better to grasp the distinctions between passive and active forms of hybridity, it is worth pondering the ideological implications at work. First and foremost, reflexive or passive hybridity is, as hinted earlier, not necessarily politically or ideologically engineered. In contrast, active, strategic hybridism is more often than not a conscious ideological and political construction with domination of the Other as its ultimate goal. This said, while strategic hybridity, as both a discourse and practice, does not seek blatantly to annihilate the conquered populations, it nonetheless often constitutes a subtle rhetorical as well as empirical design intended to weaken, if not to neuter, opposition and resistance, especially from the colonized elite. In this respect, the accommodation of the Egyptian priesthoods through assimilation and incorporation of pharaonic religious and cultural traditions, a process undertaken by both Alexander the Great and the Ptolemaic dynasty, was part of this taming process. And in order for strategic hybridization, understood here as a mode of taming or neutering colonized dissidence, to become an efficient means of rule it must be deftly constructed and nurtured into a coherent, seductive mode of control and management. We may here pursue the discussion of the Ptolemaic system of rule in Egypt to substantiate this argument. Strategic hybridism was the cornerstone of Ptolemaic imperial politics in Egypt. A key feature of the Ptolemaic construction of hybridity is that it was both deftly tailored and finely staged. This strategic hybridity was, in other words, not only produced as a practice in the here-and-now of the geopolitical reality, based on a specific cultural, political, and economic agenda. It was also a form of theatricality implemented through gesture, conduct, and discourse. In this manifestation, strategic hybridism is envisaged as a source of power and empowerment, the aim of which is the achievement of political and economic supremacy, as well as the perpetuation of aristocratic privilege. The discourse and practice of hybridity are, as has been illustrated above, interlocked within a power dynamics. It is crucial, too, to stress that strategic hybridization as both a conscious practice and an adeptly constructed discourse was usually the privilege of the elite, colonizer and colonized alike. The Ptolemaic kings, as we have shown, incorporated the aristocratic pharaonic religion, philosophy, and ideology into their own governance only to maintain an elitist system imposed from 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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above on the lower rungs of Egyptian society. Worthy of note as well is that strategic hybridity in the ancient empires, specifically the empires of the Greeks and Romans, was not only an ideological and political means of domination, but could also take shape as a cultural and socioeconomic commodity primarily promoted and consumed by the elites. Fifth and fourth-century BC Athens in particular offers a good example of this. As outlined above, after the defeat of Persia by Alexander the Great, Athens saw an astonishing enthusiasm for Persian culture, arts, and goods. This trend – which saw hybridization as a conspicuous object of consumption – was prompted by Alexander’s admiration for Persian civilization but, above all, it was underwritten by his utopian project of uniting the East and West into a hybrid universal civilization. Margaret Miller has rightly referred to Alexander’s project of hybridization and to the consumption of hybridity by the Greek elite as an ‘active’ and ‘conscious’ process. According to Miller, in short, the Athenians were at that period ‘either active agents in the practice of Perserie or conscious consumers of borrowed cultural forms’ (1997). Greek enthusiasm for Asian goods and arts was so extensive that many saw in this conduct a symbolic or cultural victory of the so-called ‘barbarians’, that is, the Persians, over the Greeks (see Miller 1997). From the time of Alexander the Great to the Roman empire, then, hybridity was closely connected to power and domination; for the most part it was consciously geared to the political and ideological subjection of foreign peoples. As a mode of consumption, on the other hand, hybridity, as fifth and fourth-century BC Greece testifies, is similarly inscribed within power relationships and linked to social prestige. As a reminder, in Athens during those periods the most active consumers of hybridity, in terms of artistic taste, dress, social trends, and finery of all kinds adopted from Persia in particular, were from the elite spheres. Of course, borrowed social and cultural habits subsequently became more widespread; but again ancient Greek elites were resourceful in finding other – more distinctive – ways of using the borrowed items and trends (see Miller 1997). Besides, it is important to remember that, whether the result of war booty or gifts from foreign kings, the extensive adoption of non-Greek cultural and social traditions served in most cases to display and buttress elite social status. Dougherty and Kurke point out that ‘extensive borrowings from the non-Greeks in the funerary sphere attest to the fact that things foreign, or foreign forms of display were considered by many Greeks to be not only attractive but also useful in articulating status differences and in developing the vocabulary with which domestic 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


and familial contexts could be communicated in the public sphere’ (2003, 232). They add: For Attic consumers, mostly the economic elites capable of sponsoring the largest monuments, the decoration of their family plots with stones and Karian dynasts or Persian kings meant that they were consciously associating themselves with the non-Greek tradition of personal expression in the sphere that literary sources often used as a signifier of cultural difference between Greeks and non-Greeks. (2003, 229) The conclusion that may be drawn from the relation of fifth and fourth-century BC Greeks to Persian culture and artistic traditions is this: in ancient Greece cultural hybridity resulting from the incorporation of foreign, more specifically Persian, items and habits into Greek culture was in the first place an essentially elitist aspiration functioning as a conspicuous object of consumption. In a sense, it was a luxury that only economic and intellectual elites could afford. Interestingly, this notion of hybridity as a luxury or an elite privilege retains its currency in the postcolonial/postmodern era, as will become clear throughout this study.13 To return to the discussion of hybridity in ancient times, I examine a number of important historical and literary figures from ancient Greece; figures who articulated influential views on hybridity which continue strongly to resonate in modern colonial discourses as well as in contemporary scholarship: Pericles (495–429 BC), Euripides (480–406 BC), Plato (429–347 BC), Aristotle (384–322 BC), and Alexander the Great (356–323 BC).

1.3 Ancient literary, political, and philosophical perceptions of hybridity As we have seen, most of the fifth-century BC scholars and philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, recognized the greatness of ancient Egypt and Greek indebtedness to it. At the same time, many Greek scholars and politicians, among them Pericles and Euripides as well as Plato and Aristotle regarded non-Greeks as racially inferior. Aristotle, for example, was notoriously remembered for dismissing ‘barbarians’ as mere ‘plants’ or natural ‘slaves’;14 in his contention, these ‘barbarians’ lacked the Greek virtues of articulacy and clarity. In view of this, it is no wonder that Aristotle – along with many other Greek philosophers and 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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politicians – should strongly object to interracial marriages involving allegedly superior Greeks and inferior non-Greeks. In short, despite extensive Greek borrowing from other civilizations, the Egyptians and Persians in particular, myths of purity and racial prejudice continued to dominate in Athenian society and among Greek intellectuals and politicians, not least Pericles, Plato, and Aristotle. This ancient Greek discourse of racial purity originates from the Athenian myth of ‘autochthony’, that is to say the claim that Athenians had never mixed with other racial groups; a condition which led to the belief that Athenians, unlike other Greeks, remained racially pure. Athenians, as Jonathan Hall observed, described themselves as autochthonous for the first time in Aiskhylos’s Agamemnon, first performed in 458 BC (Hall 2000, 55). The myth of autochthony is a constructed discourse motivated by practical goals identical to those underlying the strategic discourse of hybridity discussed earlier. As laid out in Aiskhylos’s Agamemnon, the myth of autochthony ‘served to distinguish the “ethnically pure” Athenians from those whose descent from ancestors such as Pelops, Kadmos, Agyptos or Danaos made them barbarian by nature, even if nominally Greek’ (Hall 2000, 55). What significantly emerges from our discussion is that in ancient Greece cultural and scientific borrowing from the ‘barbarians’ was broadly acknowledged and considered useful. On the other hand, biological hybridity was deprecated and rejected. Racial mixing through marriage was not only deemed undesirable, it was even made illegal. In The Life of Pericles Plutarch reminds us that Pericles, a leading politician in Athens from 451 BC, proposed a law stipulating that only Athenians whose parents were Athenians on both sides could be elected to high public offices (see Haarhoff 1951, 44–5). Aristotle, who regarded the ‘barbarian’ as ‘a slave by nature’, reiterated in The Politics the same discourse of racial purity that excluded citizens of mixed descent from top governmental positions: ‘In practice a citizen is defined to be one of whom both the parents are citizens (and not just one, i.e. father or mother); others insist on going further back; say to two or three or more ancestors’ (1988, 53). By marginalizing mixed-race offspring both politically and legally, Pericles and Aristotle reveal the complexity and ambivalence of the ancient perception of hybridity. The ambivalence lies in this: on the one hand, cultural and scientific syncretism characteristic of ancient Greek civilization seems to have been interiorized by most of the Greek intelligentsia, including Aristotle; on the other hand, another form of hybridity – racial métissage – was disparaged and shut out from the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


overall syncretic character of Greek civilization. It looks as though the prevailing ancient Greek racialist discourse with its myths of purity promoted by Aristotle, Plato, Pericles, and others had left no room for racially hybrid possibilities.15 These views and policies against interracial marriages and the political integration of the hybrid offspring, stipulated in ancient Greek law and politics, also cogently feature in the Greek literature of the period, most notably in Euripides’s Helena. In this play both Helen and the chorus, for example, hold marriages between Greeks and barbarians in low regard. In Medea, too, Medea considers marriage with a non-Greek woman most disgraceful. In both plays, mixed marriages are, in short, associated with trouble and destruction. Such negative perceptions of interracial marriages, related by Euripides, Aristotle, and Pericles, were reiterated in later centuries by the Romans, and, more potently, by modern colonialist ideologues and colonizers. With regard to ancient Greece in particular, Alexander the Great’s perception of hybridity merits close consideration. For it sheds significant light on the race politics prevalent in Greece from the fifth century BC on. In order better to offer a wide picture of Alexander’s ethics of hybridity, it is useful to begin with the great general’s own cultural and racial descent. Alexander the Great himself was of mixed origin, the son of a Macedonian king, Philip II, and his wife Olympia, a princess of Epirus. Philip and Olympia were deeply involved in their son’s education and were keen to provide him with the best possible training. To achieve this high ambition, they hired Aristotle to instruct Alexander in rhetoric and literature as well as in science, medicine, and philosophy. This training contributed greatly to Alexander’s intellectual and spiritual development. Alexander had an unbalanced affective relationship with his parents. He was said to be very close to his mother, but had a distant, unharmonious relationship with his father. As his parents did not get on well, they finally separated, when Philip married Cleopatra, a Macedonian. Philip’s marriage with Cleopatra might have further hardened Alexander’s feelings toward his father. The relationship between Philip II and his son reached breaking point at the wedding banquet. During this ceremony Cleopatra’s father made a remark about Philip II fathering a ‘legitimate’ heir, that is to say one with ‘pure’ Macedonian descent. In response to this disparaging comment, Alexander threw his cup at the man – it was even rumoured that Alexander killed him. Angered by his son’s rash act, Philip II charged at Alexander, but, being too drunk, he tripped and fell flat on the floor. Alexander further mocked his father’s 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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loss of balance, casting doubt on his political capacities and imperial ambitions. After the divorce of his parents, Alexander fled, but returned when his father died, or as rumour had it, was murdered by Olympia in 336 BC. Alexander ascended to the Macedonian throne at the age of twenty. Once in power, he had his enemies and conspirators against him executed. By the end of the summer of 336 BC he had re-established his position in Greece. In 335 BC, Alexander campaigned toward the Danube to secure Macedonia’s northern frontier, and carried out a successful campaign against the disloyal Thracians. In the same year, Alexander marched to Thebes where his army wreaked havoc on the city, sacking, burning, and mass-murdering. This punitive act was intended as an example to other recalcitrant Greek cities.16 Alexander succeeded in maintaining Greece under Macedonian control. After the pacification of Greece and consolidation of his domestic rule, Alexander directed his imperial ambitions towards Asia. He launched war against Persia in 334 BC, with a large army, composed of about 35,000 Macedonians and 7600 Greeks. Alexander’s army was, as reflected in its composition, hybrid. Nevertheless, the key military figures were mostly Macedonian; a pattern of dominance by the colonial force reproduced in later centuries by most modern colonial armies, particularly the British and French. Among Alexander’s chief officers were Antigonus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus, all Macedonians. Alexander was a conqueror and a general who relied on the power of the sword to subdue the ‘barbarians’ and expand his empire. He was in this respect famously remembered as saying that the whole of Asia was to be won at spear point. Alexander’s forces defeated the Persian army in 331 BC, and he was proclaimed king of Persia. Victory over the powerful Persian empire clearly confirmed Alexander’s skills as a general in war. Post-victory, on the other hand, he was further revealed as a deft political tactician who appears to have realized the necessity of involving the native aristocracy of a defeated empire in the new governance. And in order to gain the support of the Persian aristocracy, Alexander, as many have noted, appointed mainly Persians as provincial governors (see Briant [1996] 2002; Behnke 2008). Alexander’s ambition for territorial expansion did not, of course, fade with the conquest of the Persian empire. In the year following the subjugation of Persia, Alexander marched down the Phoenician coast and forced the major cities to surrender. Tyre was the last to capitulate, after a seven-month siege. Alexander’s next step was Egypt which was 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


conquered in 332 BC. After the conquest of Egypt, Alexander invaded India in 326 BC. Alexander’s imperial conquests had altered the geography of the ancient world, creating a great shift in world geopolitics. Following his successful military campaigns in Greece, Persia, Egypt, and India, Alexander the Great controlled a huge empire which can, to some extent, be called global. While there were commercial and cultural exchanges between these various parts of the world well before Alexander’s conquests brought them into the same imperial system, what happened following their annexation is that trade become still more extensive across the globe, a phenomenon exemplified by the availability in Greece of such exotic products as the Chinese silk that, as Haarhoff reminds us, arrived in India in Alexander’s time (1951, 73). Together with initiating a significant shift in geopolitics, Alexander also inspired a tremendous ideological shift with regard to the idea of race and cultural purity. More specifically, his politics of hybridity questioned the ancient predominant Greek assumptions of culture and race, starting with those of his tutor Aristotle. Considering Aristotle’s overall influence on Alexander the Great, we might logically expect the pupil, that is Alexander, to ingest and emulate his instructor’s theories of race. This was not the case, however. Haarhoff rightly points out that Alexander the Great ‘retained the enthusiasm for Hellenic culture that Aristotle had taught him, but combined this with an openness towards the barbarian’ (1951, 72). In other words, Alexander was not inclined to treat the ‘barbarians’ as ‘plants’ or ‘slaves’, as recommended to him by Aristotle. He regarded them instead as human beings worthy of interest and consideration. More specifically, rather than espousing Aristotle’s exclusionary politics of race Alexander adopted a dialogical, inclusive cultural and racial politics that postulated the fusion of the ‘barbarian’ and the Greek. In so doing, Alexander’s ethics of hybridity marked a clear shift away from mainstream cultural and identity politics. It threw into question the ancient Greek assumptions of racial purity, in the process unsettling the Greek-barbarian binary promoted by Aristotle, among others. Alexander the Great was by far the most prominent promoter of hybridity in ancient times. As such, he might rightly be considered as the founding father of hybridity as a discourse, practice, and universal project. In short, Alexander the Great is the imperial historical figure that best illustrates the ancient deployment of hybridity as a stratagem of control and domestication of subjugated peoples; his use of hybridity as an active, conscious political design prompted by imperial ambitions 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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was to inspire several other conquerors, including Napoleon Bonaparte who explicitly referred to Alexander as his military and spiritual model (see Chapter 2). Alexander’s engagement with the notion of hybridity is, to say the least, intricate. It is replete with spiritual, ideological, and political considerations that demand scrutiny. While actively encouraging cultural and racial métissage, Alexander, as demonstrated by both his rhetoric and conduct, self-consciously projected the hybrid as a universal norm. And he did so in terms that entailed a sense of a global politics as well as an alternative ethics of being with the Other, that is to say the ‘barbarian’. This ostensibly inclusionary politics of otherness led scholars like William Tarn to regard Alexander the Great as a proponent of universal brotherhood and solidarity: ‘[Alexander the Great] was the pioneer of one of the supreme revolutions in the world’s outlook, the first man known to us who contemplated the brotherhood of man or the unity of mankind’ (quoted by Haarhoff 1951, 79). Tarn’s enthusiasm is surely understandable; it nonetheless needs to be tempered, if only because Alexander obviously did not want the unity of humankind for the sheer love of humanity. Rather, his design was prompted by the practical imperialistic goal of uniformly subjecting all peoples to the new imperial world order that he was attempting to carve out. Before further elaborating on Alexander the Great’s engagement with the issue of hybridity or unveiling the objectives he was trying to achieve by this hybridity discourse, it is useful to reiterate the relevance that Alexander’s mixed descent has for our understanding of his construction and perception of hybridity. Most importantly, his being considered an ‘illegitimate’ son by Cleopatra’s father might have profoundly conditioned the articulation of his politics of hybridity. Seen from this perspective, Alexander’s promotion of cultural and racial hybridity (for obvious imperial aims) sounds like a strong counter-discourse when read in the light of contemporary Greek-Macedonian racial politics; it is a discourse that not only challenges the Macedonian myths of cultural and racial purity, voiced by Cleopatra’s father, but also unsettles the Greek racialist views of the ‘barbarians’ reflected in Plato and Aristotle’s politics of ethnicity. When and how was Alexander’s discourse on hybridity articulated? We recall that when he set out to conquer Persia, Alexander declared that the spear, not diplomacy or negotiation, was the means by which Persia and the whole of Asia were to be subjugated. Winning Persia to his growing empire and spreading Hellenic civilization in Asia were then Alexander’s main projects. This is clearly reflected in the huge project of Hellenization undertaken after Alexander’s victory over 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


the Persian army. Haarhoff has pointed out that ‘all the cities founded by Alexander – seventy in number, we are told – spread the influence of Hellenic thought and language, law and custom’ (1951, 72). He further notes that ‘culture on the attic model took root everywhere. Greek cults, festivals, and games were founded, theatres and gymnasiums built’ (1951, 72). But as a shrewd politician, Alexander also knew that in order for Greek domination to be accepted and validated the Persian elite should be involved in the new imperial governance. We remember how after his victory he appointed mainly Persians as provincial governors. This strategic political gesture was further compounded by an ambitious project that aimed at synergizing the Persian and Hellenic civilizations. Like a tight-rope walker, Alexander was keen ‘to keep a balance between the Hellenizing of the east and the orientalizing of Hellas’ (Haarhoff 1951, 72). Alexander’s overall idea of political, cultural, and racial syncretism in Persia was itself both a deft political gesture and a perspicacious balancing act of enunciation in which sameness and difference were conflated to articulate an elusive discourse of power and domination; a power exercised not just from the extremes (military violence), but most importantly also from the middle or in-between with its characteristic progressive rhetoric of reconciliation and incorporation of otherness (personified by his Persian subjects). A visionary politician, Alexander obviously knew how to blend the power of the sword with the power of the word. He was also aware of the need to attach a spiritual dimension to his violent conquests; another pattern emulated by Western modern imperialist nations. Put in another way, Alexander had shown an extraordinary capacity to combine imperial pragmatism with spirituality, violent conquest with a ‘mystical belief’ that endowed his rule with a messianic dimension. He openly connected his rule to divine power, claiming, as Plutarch pointed out, that he was sent by the gods ‘to be a general governor and reconciler of the world’ (quoted by Worthington 2003, 302). This may explain why on conquering Asia he was reported as saying: ‘I accept Asia from the gods’ (quoted by Hammond 1997, 91). He presented himself to the conquered Persians as a benevolent god and saviour, whose ostensible mission was to unite Persia and Greece: Now it is I who possess the land, since the gods gave it to me; and I take care of those of your soldiers who have joined me of their will. Come then to me as I am the Lord of all Asia […] You shall have your family and anything which you persuade me as king of Asia to grant to you. (Quoted by Hammond 1997, 91) 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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It is useful to underline at this point that Alexander’s ambitious project to fuse East and West transcended the sphere of culture and civilization. It encompassed the racial and biological field in terms that initiated an alternative approach to ancient Greek racial politics; one that diverged from Platonic and Aristotelian theories of racial purity and of the idea of citizenship based on a categorical exclusion of the half-bloods from the polis. Not being himself a ‘pure’ Greek, Alexander the Great was ipso facto unable to claim Greek descent two generations back as stipulated by Pericles and Aristotle. Similarly, he could in no way qualify as a full citizen of the Greek polity as codified by Plato, Aristotle, and Pericles. By questioning Greek ethnic purity through his ethics of hybridity Alexander was thus engaging in a radical identity politics; one that postulated the integration of the racially mixed into the polity that Pericles and Aristotle considered as the sole privilege of the ethnically pure. More concretely, together with seeking to synergize the Asian and Greek civilizations, Alexander was projecting the biological fusion of the Asian and Greek races, in compliance with his politics of interracial rapprochement. Noteworthy in this respect is that Alexander’s project of racial métissage was anything but mere rhetoric. Instead, it took concrete shape. During the ceremony of celebration of the Greek victory over Persia held at Susa in the spring of 324 BC, Alexander and about eighty close associates married Persian noblewomen. In order further to encourage mixed unions, at the same event Alexander also seized the opportunity to legitimize former marriages between soldiers and native women, rewarding these unions with expensive wedding gifts. It is estimated that, all in all, Alexander induced about 7000 of his soldiers to wed Persian women. Prompted by a cluster of messianic, political, cultural, and ideological considerations, Alexander initiated a vision of cultural and racial hybridity that had a clearly dialogical, universalist impulse. But as in all the cases of syncretism discussed above, Alexander’s conception of hybridity was elitist at the core and profoundly strategic. Aware that racial prejudice was rife among his compatriots, Alexander moved to counteract it and to preserve the unity of his empire. It is no wonder, then, that he should see racial intermarriages, in particular those involving nobles from both sides, as the ultimate, most convenient solution. These interracial marriages were, according to Alexander, intended to blend the East and the West into a hybrid whole; one in which racial divisions and prejudice would be overcome. We may surmise that through such noble mixed unions Alexander was projecting an ideal interracial imagined collectivity, whose social 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


elitism brings to mind Plato’s own ideal republic. There is, however, one major difference between Alexander’s universal realm and Plato’s republic; a difference rooted in their antagonistic theories of race. Plato’s ideal republic is both eugenicist and based on myths of racial purity. Only the intellectually and socially fit are admitted into Plato’s ideal community. He states in The Republic: It follows from our conclusions so far that sex should preferably take place between men and women who are outstandingly good, and should occur as little as possible between men and women of vastly inferior stamp. It also follows that the offspring of the first group should be brought up, while the offspring of the second shouldn’t. This is how to maximize the potential of our flock. (1993, 173) In his sinister scheme to engineer a superior race Plato suggests abandoning the defective or children of inferior parents. In The Politics Aristotle goes even further in recommending killing deformed and retarded offspring for the same purpose: ‘As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live’ (1988, 182). Along with the mentally and socially unfit, Aristotle, as we have seen, also excludes mixed-race offspring from being full citizens of the polis. Mixed marriages and half-blood progeny were anathema to Aristotle and Plato, perceived as sources of social unrest and racial contamination.17 In Menexenus, Plato celebrates the legendary history of Athens and the ancestors. He accords a prominent place to the Persian war and refers to the allegedly pure descent of Athenians, arguing that they had never been corrupted by foreign blood. In The Republic, too, Plato emphasizes the need to preserve racial purity by avoiding interracial marriages which he closely identifies with degeneration and political disorder. In a similar vein, while urging his fellow citizens to engage in commerce with the outside world, Aristotle in The Politics also warns that ‘the introduction of strangers brought up under other laws, and the increase of population, will be adverse to good order [….] and is inimical to good government’ (1988, 164). In his caveat, Aristotle reminds his compatriots that ethnic mixing has often been a source of social and political chaos: Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution; 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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for example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, becoming later the more numerous, expelled them; hence the curse fell upon Sybaris. (1988, 114) From the standpoint of racial politics, Alexander the Great’s universal empire was manifestly in stark contrast to Plato and Aristotle’s views of the ideal Greek polis. Whereas Plato and Aristotle were altogether opposed to racial mixing, Alexander projected an ideal race of mixed blood, albeit of noble birth. In other words, while Plato and Aristotle make eugenics and racial purity the cornerstones of the Greek polis, Alexander anticipates a global empire in which hybridity becomes a universal norm. Alexander the Great’s project of hybridity, understood as the mixing of Greek-Macedonian and Persian noble bloods, was no doubt a reaction against Greek myths of racial purity and rejection of biological métissage. However, if Alexander’s encouragement of racial mixing is laudable, the unions between the Greek soldiers and Persian women blessed by Alexander himself were far from free of violence and coercion. In most cases, indeed, the Persian women wed by the Macedonian and Greek victors were no more than war booty (Alexander the Great’s marriage to Roxane mentioned in the introduction is a good case in point); they were means of forging political alliances with the vanquished native elite, as well as of tightening Alexander’s grip on his eastern empire. Notwithstanding the political calculations and coerciveness entailed in those mixed marriages the fact remains that through his notion of hybridity Alexander initiated a radical ethics of otherness; he articulated a discourse and practice of ethnicity that was far too revolutionary and unsettling for his contemporaries, most of whom were still burdened with myths of racial purity and cultural arrogance. The fact that nearly all the mixed unions contracted during Alexander’s reign were dissolved after his death in 323 BC testifies, indeed, to the persistence of racial prejudice and contempt for biological hybridity.


2 Myths of Purity and Mixed Marriages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Contempt for mixed marriages and their half-blood offspring, pervasive in ancient Greece from the fifth century BC on and reactivated after the death of Alexander the Great, has also been a key feature of other imperial cultures, ancient as well as modern. The Latin author, Virgil, writing some two centuries after the death of Alexander the Great, offers us an intriguing depiction of hybridity and mixed marriages in The Aeneid, a poem considered as the first apologia of Roman imperialism and ‘nationalism’. In this poem celebrating the birth of Imperial Rome, Virgil is not castigating mixed marriages or hybridity. His own hero, Aeneas is divinely appointed to marry Lavinia in a union that was to form the basis of a shared Trojan and Latin cultural and racial heritage. But is this mixed marriage between a Latin and a Trojan an unequivocal sanctification of métissage as such, or is this divinely-ordained match more convoluted and ideologically inflected than it first appears? In The Aeneid Virgil does not offer a clear-cut perception of métissage, although his murky, ambivalent representation of Latin-Trojan cultural and racial encounters betrays a totalizing impulse, as we shall shortly demonstrate. Rather than depicting a harmonious fusion of the Latins and Trojans through intercultural marriage Virgil subtly stages a one-sided vision of cultural and racial hybridity clothed in the robe of multiplicity; one in which the incorporated Trojan otherness in the end is subtly subsumed under a hegemonic Latin same. Juno’s insistence that the Ausonians are to be ‘incorporated’ and ‘submerged’ is indicative of the hegemonic impulse underlying the idea of métissage central to Virgil’s Aeneid. It appears that for practical ideological and political reasons Virgil endorses racial mixing between the Trojans and Latins. In order to preserve the supremacy of the Romans over the Trojans, however, Virgil maintains the pre-existing power relationships and hierarchy between the two 51


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ethnic groups. The comments of Juno, the goddess of marriage and childbirth who sided with the Latins, are eloquent in this respect. She replies to Jupiter as follows: … Jupiter […] I grant your wish. I yield, I am won over willingly. Ausonian folk will keep their fathers’ language and their way of life. And, that being so, their name. The Teucrians will mingle and be submerged, incorporated. Rituals and observances of theirs I’ll add, but make them Latin, one in speech. The race to come, mixed with Ausonian blood, will outdo men and gods in its devotion, you shall see – and no nation on earth will honor and worship you so faithfully. (1990, 398) Juno’s discourse illustrates the dialectics of tolerance or liberality1 and hegemony characteristic of the attitude of Roman imperial culture towards its conquered subjects’ traditions and languages. Juno forthrightly tells Jupiter that the Teucrians will be allowed to keep their language, name, way of life, and gods, quite in keeping with the traditional image of Roman tolerance and respect for cultural difference. She later adds that the Romans and the Teucrians/Ausonians will eventually marry and blend, engendering an outstanding breed emblematic of the Roman nation to come. Further down the line, however, Juno insists that the new race resulting from the unions of the Latin and Trojans will be Latin in every significant respect: Latin in physical appearance, in dress, in speech, and in customs. In The Aeneid, Virgil deftly articulates a complex, two-tiered discourse on identity and cultural politics. At one end of the spectrum, Virgil’s discourse emphatically asserts difference or ethnic otherness (Trojans/ Teucrians/Ausonians) as part and parcel of the same, that is of the Romanness he projects in his poem. At the other, however, this apparently inclusive discourse denies otherness any distinctive, noteworthy contribution to the overall hybrid construct. Fundamentally, in Virgil’s poem hybridity is presented as an essentially one-way process. And within this one-sided politics of hybridity the offspring resulting from mixed marriages are culturally, ideologically, and politically cast in the space of the impossible: they are neither recognized as fully hybrid nor can they posit themselves as such. In The Aeneid, the core of the dilemma of the half-bloods resulting from the unions between Romans and Trojans lies in this: while they are de facto biologically mixed, they are linguistically and culturally reclaimed as monolithically Latin. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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In short, within Virgil’s convoluted narrative of otherness, ethnic and linguistic difference is fused and melted into an overarching Latin same. Thus, his apparent acceptance of mixed marriages proves to be merely a façade: a disguised hegemonic discourse of cultural, linguistic, and racial purity draped in a progressive, inclusionary rhetoric. Seen from a wider perspective, Virgil’s literary representation of the cultural and racial interactions between the Romans and Trojans highlights how far the question of mixed marriages, and hybridity more generally, was not only a central concern among the Romans, but also and above all a source of anxiety and ambivalence. The hegemonic impulse underlying Virgil’s depiction of hybridity in The Aeneid outlined here reflects the Romans’ unfavourable attitude to biological mixing, even when this hybridity is embodied by illustrious figures such as Apuleius (125–180 AD) – a Roman author of Numidian (Berber) and Gaetulian origin. In his Apologia Apuleius defended mixed descent in the following terms: Concerning my fatherland, as you have shown on the basis of my own writings, it lies on the very border of Numedia and Gaetulia. I have in fact declared in my public declarations in the presence of the honorable Lollianus Avitus, that I am half Numidian and half Gaetulian. However, I do not see what there is in this for me to be ashamed of, any more than there is for the Elder Cyrus, being of mixed origin, half Mede and half Syrian. (Quoted by Isaac 2004, 145) Apuleius may well attempt to counteract his contemporaries’ disparaging accounts of biological hybridity by referring to other hybrid figures of note such as the Elder Cyrus, the fact remains that anti-hybridity sentiment remained intense and, on the whole, the Romans steadily continued to object to racial mixing. Well before the Roman empire became Christian, marriages between Romans and non-Romans were, as we have seen, strongly discouraged. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century AD, things took an even more radical turn, especially regarding unions between Christians and Jews. In the early fourth century AD, anti-Jewish propaganda was rife, leading to the persecution and social as well as economic marginalization of Jews. This propaganda was evident in letters, sermons, homilies, and commentaries on the Bible written during the fourth and fifth centuries AD by church leaders. Much of Christian hatred towards the Jews – encouraged by the church authorities – was premised on the belief that the Jews had 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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actively persecuted Christians for several centuries. This hatred was also spurred by the Jewish resistance to Christian domination and to their proselytism in the midst of ‘Christian triumph’. Within this context of religious odium and persecution, it is no wonder that laws and decrees concerning the Jews also emphasized that Christians and Jews should not mix. The earliest decrees prohibiting marriage between members of these two communities were issued in the pre-Constantinian council of Elvira in Spain in 300 AD. It was overtly stated in these decrees that Jews could not marry Christian women and men if they had not renounced their Judaic faith: ‘If heretics have refused to join the Catholic Church, then Catholic girls are not to be given them in marriage’ (quoted by Seaver 1952, 25). Subsequent decrees followed suit. The council of Nicaea, for example, prohibited unions involving Christians and non-Christians, whether the latter were Jews or pagans: Concerning the avoidance of marriage between members of different cults. Let Christians take wives from every nation provided the wives embrace the faith; that Christians ought not to give their girls in marriage to infidels, lest these girls be perverted to the error of their husbands, and be made either Jewesses or pagans because of their weakness and evil inclinations; and anyone who has not obeyed this order shall be excommunicated by the synod. (Quoted by Seaver 1952, 28) As stipulated in these decrees, any Christian marrying a Jew would be committing a capital offence. Furthermore, within this stew of hatred and persecution, the Jew was not only someone whom it was improper to wed, but also someone deemed unworthy of respect. Marginalized and turned into a social outcast, in the fourth century AD the Jew was mostly seen as a monster and an agent of evil, cunning, and malice; prejudices that were to cling to the Jews in later centuries, including into our modern times. Following the decline and fall of the Roman empire the powers that filled the vacuum left by imperial Rome displayed similar attitudes towards cross-cultural and inter-confessional marriage. However, before offering an overview of the geopolitical context of the post-Roman period, it is important to outline the factors that contributed to the demise of the Roman empire. Obviously, speculation on the causes that led to the fall of the Roman empire has been, and remains, a source of much scholarly debate and controversy. Theories of the fall of imperial 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Rome, modern as well as ancient, are numerous, and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ([1776] 2004) remains the work that provides by far the most detailed account. According to Gibbon and other historians, among the causes of the decline of the Roman empire were the rapid growth and size of the empire and the heavy taxation required by its administration, the decay of trade and industry, moral decadence and loss of civic values among the Roman citizens,2 inflation and ‘unsound’ economic policies such as low tariffs and inefficient control of prices on commodities, and endless civil wars between factions of the Roman army.3 Some scholars have also proposed hybridity as a major cause of the fall of the Roman empire. Martin Nilsson, for example, ascribed the fall of the Roman empire to its intense hybridization: ‘Hybridization on a considerable scale involves the break up of superior races into a heterogeneous and loose mass lacking stable spiritual and moral standards. This is, of itself, a sufficient explanation for the collapse of ancient culture and the Roman empire’ (1926, 365–6). Nilsson’s somewhat eugenicist argument should, of course, be strongly qualified, for the hybridization he invokes here, even on a large scale, could only be one possible cause among many – including political and moral decay alongside ‘over-militarization’ – for the collapse of the imperial dream (Gibbon [1776] 2004; Pagden 2001). Historians who have investigated the decline of the Roman empire seem broadly to agree that this decline was made manifest in the fourth century AD. This was the period at which Rome became prey to the ‘barbarian’ invasions which anticipated its demise. These invasions, which took place at a time that came to be called the Migration Period, approximately between 300–700 AD, involved the Goths (Visigoths and Ostrogoths), Vandals, Bulgars, Frisians, and Franks, to name a few. These tribes wrought deep changes within the Roman empire, which culminated in the sack of Rome in 410 AD by the Visigothic army of Alaric I. With the sacking of Rome, the imperial city fell into foreign hands but historians date the effective fall of the empire to 476 AD when the last of the Western Roman emperors, Romulus Augustus, was deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain. Odoacer became the first ‘barbarian’ king of Italy. But in 489 AD Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who was made king by the Eastern emperor, invaded Italy. Odoacer surrendered and was executed in 493 AD. Like most conquests, the Ostrogothic invasion of Rome was a violent undertaking that inflicted great suffering and many deaths on the Roman population. However, in line with their Roman predecessors, who considered themselves the heirs and continuers of the ancient 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Greek empire, so, too, the Ostrogoths, who took over Italy, established close continuities with Roman culture and civilization. Cassiodorus (485–585 AD), a Roman statesman and writer who served in the administration of the Ostrogothic king of Italy, Theodoric the Great, further enhanced these supposed genealogical links by ‘provid[ing] the Ostrogoths with a respectable, Romanised, past’ (see Burns 1984). No doubt encouraged by such theories, Theodoric the Great, the founder of the first Romano-barbarian kingdom, emphasized the links between Gothic and Roman civilizations. Throughout his reign Theodoric strove to reconcile Roman and Germanic populations and interests in a common realm of peace and prosperity. Broadly speaking, in the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy (493–553 AD), the Ostrogoths controlled the military and were in charge of the kingdom’s protection, whereas the civil service and trades were in the hands of the Romans (see Contamine 1984, 8). These were, of course, merely formal divisions of tasks and activities, whose frontiers were anything but hermetic, and from a legal point of view the Romans remained the subaltern subjects of the Ostrogothic kingdom. As such, they were expected to accept Gothic supremacy and to see the Ostrogoths as their protectors, ensuring their security and prosperity. Theodoric’s decrees were, in this respect, broadly favourable to the Romans, as Theodoric was aware that the peace and stability of his kingdom depended largely on the reconciliation of the two populations. This conciliatory attitude towards the Romans must have contributed to the stability that was a characteristic of Theodoric’s rule, and which generated about three decades of security and peace between the Romans and the Goths. A talented military leader, Theodoric was also a patron of the arts and an admirer of Roman literature and culture; his infatuation with ancient Greek and Roman civilizations led him to provide all his daughters with a classical education. Beyond his admiration for classical cultures and civilizations, Theodoric’s embrace of Roman traditions also had a clear political agenda: to be, as Theodoric openly claimed, a continuer or ‘restorer’ of the organization of the Roman empire in Western Europe (see Kemp 2006). Theodoric and Cassiodorus’s efforts to blend the Roman and Germanic traditions were the first steps in this ambitious imperial project. Documentary evidence related to Theodoric’s reign confirms his conviction of his role as continuer of the Western empire. This cultural ambition was underpinned by concrete political gestures and strategic alliances, such as marrying his daughters to Germanic kings and encouraging intermarriage between his family circle and the royal families of other Germanic kingdoms. Theodoric himself married 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Audofleda, the sister of Clovis. Manifestly, these various alliances and intermarriages were all designed to achieve one chief goal: to pave the way for the supremacy of his dynasty in the West. Burns refers to Theodoric’s dream to unite the Roman and Germanic peoples, arguing: ‘A sustained vitality of German and Roman within a controlled setting in which one’s strengths were preserved and nourished by the other, were a dream for Cassiodorus and Theodoric the Great’ (1984, 17). Theodoric’s politics of reconciling Gothic and Roman traditions was surely instrumental in securing the political and social stability of Ostrogothic Italy. Nevertheless, he did not realise his dream of fusing the two peoples. For while Alexander the Great encouraged racial fusion through mixed marriages of Greek and Persian noble families, in Theodoric’s Italy marriages between the Goths and the Romans were prohibited. After the demise of the Ostrogothic kingdom and the rise of the Visigothic kingdom (fifth and eighth centuries AD), which comprised present-day France, Portugal, Spain, Andorra, and Gibraltar, the policy toward mixed unions changed slightly. Marriages between Goths and Romans were no longer prohibited, as was the case in the Ostrogothic kingdom, becoming authorized during the reign of Leovigild (568–586 AD). The project to merge the peoples of Western Europe into a single commonwealth, initiated by the ancient Greeks and Romans and later taken up by Theodoric, was emulated by subsequent kings and emperors throughout the Middle Ages. Burns notes: ‘Roman legacy and the vitality of the late Roman-Germanic interaction influenced the thoughts of Charlemagne and others throughout the Middle Ages’ (1984, 17). The Carolingian empire, which in strict historiographical and geopolitical terms is often used to refer to the realm of the Franks under the Carolingian dynasty,4 may rightly be said to have achieved the unity of Western Europe that Theodoric had projected. The roots of the Carolingian empire, named after the Carolingian dynasty which founded France and Germany, were formed in 476 AD when the Roman empire fell to Germanic tribes under Odoacer (435–493 AD), but it was not until much later, in 719, at the end of a war between the Salian and Ripuerian Franks,5 that Charles Martel (688–741 AD) united the tribes and became ruler of the Franks. His victory over the Muslim army at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD enhanced his status as defender and unifier of Christian Europe. The Carolingian empire united most of Western Europe under a single ruler from about 751 until 987 AD. In the early ninth century, specifically during Charlemagne’s reign (800–814 AD), the Carolingian empire came to control much of Western and central 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Europe. By the time of Charlemagne’s death, the Carolingian empire comprised most of Western Europe, including all the areas which were formerly parts of the Roman empire and extending as far as the Elbe. Because the Carolingian empire was in practice continuing the Roman imperial project of uniting the whole of Western Europe, it is little wonder that several historians, starting with Henri Pirenne should have seen ‘the rise of the Frankish realm in Europe as a continuation of the Roman Empire’. Pursuing a similar line of argument, in his study of the ‘barbarian’ invasions, the French historian Lucien Musset rightly observed that the civilization of Medieval Europe resulted from a ‘synthesis between the Graeco-Roman world and the Germanic civilizations penetrating the Roman Empire’ (1975). The Carolingian empire is, in this respect, an instructive example of cultural, religious, and political syncretism characteristic of Medieval Europe. In the religious sphere, for instance, the churches of the Carolingian empire blended some of their own liturgical practices with traditions borrowed from the Church of Rome, a mixing which produced hybrid RomanoFrankish rituals. In terms of ordinations in particular, as Metzger points out, the Carolingian church ‘preserved rites which were Galician in origin (introductory directions, rituals of investiture, presentations of the instruments corresponding to each ministry, and so on)’ (1997, 121). Metzger further states: ‘Later on, the same rituals were adopted by the church of the city of Rome at the time of the Georgian reform (George VII, 1073–1085), under the influence of popes of Germanic descent’ (1997, 121). Religion and liturgy were not the only places where syncretistic practices were at work. In the field of law, too, it was common within the Carolingian empire to mix various legal codes in search of a workable hybrid legal system. Christopher Young and Thomas Gloning point out: ‘The Carolingians were keen to record the laws of the tribes over which they ruled [...] Pippin revised the laws of the western Goths, the Burgundians, the Alamans, as well as the Salian and Riparian Franks’. Later, they add: ‘Pippin’s son, Charlemagne, devoted much energy to legal codes – particularly in the years directly succeeding his coronation as Holy emperor (800 AD) – in the hope of reaching some form of unification which would aid the administration of a large empire.’ All these attempts at law codification were, Young and Gloning continue, ‘intended to bridge the gap between codes’ (2004, 54) and achieve a functional synergetic legal system. The attribute ‘hybrid’ fitted well the empire projected by Alexander the Great, as we have seen. It is equally appropriate to apply the same 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


epithet to the Carolingian empire, with perhaps one major exception: that Alexander’s projected hybrid empire had a global or universal dimension, whereas the Carolingian realm was Europe-centred. This being said, hybridity in its broader sense was a defining feature of the cultural, religious, and political identity of the Carolingian empire, which was established according to the conscious, pragmatic fusion of Germanic, classical, and Christian components. Further to this legal and religious syncretism within the Carolingian empire intercultural marriage was a common practice, although there were legal limitations placed on it such that only marriages between Christians from different tribes and places were encouraged and authorized. Inter-confessional and interracial unions, especially between Jews and Christians, were disapproved, if not illegal. Although the Jews were allowed to practise their trades and were even recognized as having usefully contributed to the Carolingian empire, they were still consistently seen as radical racial others whose complete integration into the Carolingian hybrid kingdom was clearly not on the agenda. As we shall see in the forthcoming chapters, the tendency to discourage mixed marriages between Christians and non-Christians prevalent in the Carolingian empire was to become a major feature of later Western empires, from the fifteenth century onwards. But before discussing the cogent issue of hybridity and interracial marriage in modern colonial ideology and politics, it is useful to offer an outline of the cultural and ideological syncretism of modern colonial empires by highlighting their extensive borrowing from classical civilizations. I have widely addressed these connections elsewhere, so, here, I will only briefly refer to the connections between modern and classical empires. Emphasis will be laid on the handling of cultural and biological hybridity within modern colonial politics and ideology.


3 Interracial Relationships and the Economy of Power in Modern Empires

3.1 Syncretism in modern colonial politics and ideology Just as the ancient empires were based on cultural, ideological, and administrative syncretism, so modern colonial representations and systems of rule are similarly profoundly syncretistic. Borrowing from both ancient and contemporary modes of representation and control has enabled the creation of a hybrid, multi-layered discourse and means of domination.1 In the sixteenth century the Spaniards, who vanquished the Incas and Aztecs, took the ancient European empires as their models. Like Alexander the Great in Persia or the Ptolemies in Egypt or, later, the Romans in Britannia, Gaul, and North Africa, the Spanish in the Americas used the native elites to validate and consolidate their rule. In Peru, for instance, the Spanish employed the curaca as mediators and tax collectors (Ramírez 1996; Mabry 2002). Similarly, in the nineteenth century, both Britain and France, taking the ancient Greeks and Romans as imperial models, used the colonized elites as intermediaries in order to maintain their control over the native populations. Thus, as in the Greek and Roman empires where the local elites were incorporated into the imperial system, so, too, within modern empires the indigenous aristocracy participated in colonial rule in ways that gave this rule a hybrid cast. Modern colonial rule was murky and multi-layered. It not only integrated the native elites, albeit marginally, into the empire’s structures of power, but it also grafted, as did the ancient imperial powers, Western mechanisms of rule onto the pre-existing indigenous power structures. Both the British in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia and the French in Africa continued earlier practices and cautiously amended inefficient, less advantageous ones. The British in India and the French in North Africa often retained traditional native power structures, which they 60


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turned into conduits of colonial rule. In India, for instance, the British did little to upset the existing Indian social organization. Most of the time, they left in place the Indian princes through whom they governed.2 In Africa, too, the British opted for indirect rule and administered their colonies via the local chiefs. Emulating the Spanish colonial incorporation of South American indigenous leaders, the curaca, they turned the traditional African elites into auxiliary forces collaborating, to varying degrees, with the colonial administration.3 The British in Southeast Asia also took advantage of prevailing traditional religious institutions and indigenous leaders, exploiting them as indirect instruments of colonial rule. They delegated authority on religious matters and customs to local Muslim rulers and furnished them with legal and bureaucratic tools with which to implement colonial policies. Together with using the traditional religious leaders to tighten their grip on local politics, British officials were keen to curb the independent-minded Muslims who were seen as a threat to the British presence and economic interests. For instance, in 1904, as Hefner and others have remarked, Mohammedan laws enacted in British Malaya forbade public teaching on Islam without the sultan’s written approval. An amendment to the law in 1925–26 threatened ‘severe penalties for anyone printing or publishing literature concerning the Islamic religion without the written permission of the sultan in Council’ (quoted by Hefner 2001, 21; see also Roff 1967). Both British authorities and the indigenous chiefs benefited from their alliance against the Muslim reformists. The British secured their hold on Malayan politics while safeguarding their commercial interests. The traditional religious rulers, in turn, found in their collaboration with the British a precious opportunity to counteract Muslim reformists – the ‘young group’ – who challenged the traditionalists’ authority and legitimacy as representatives of Islam and Muslims. Politically, the cautious British handling of Islam and deft management of the local chiefs helped to consolidate their power in the region. Economically, the establishment of free zones of international commercial exchange at Britain’s Straits Settlements – Penang, Malacca, and Singapore – contributed significantly to the prosperity of these settlements. A major characteristic of British rule in the Malayan archipelago was that Britain started as a regional trading force and grew comparatively slowly into a strong colonial power. Until the mid-nineteenth century British interests were mainly commercial and strategic. Like the Portuguese and the Dutch, the British were not initially interested in acquiring large territories in Southeast Asia, perceiving the administration of vast 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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dominions as an enormous financial burden. But in order to protect their economic interests, the British gradually increased direct intervention in the administration of the regions under their control. The most explicit example of such direct intervention was the appointment of British ‘advisers’, also called ‘residents’. Officially, a resident’s mission was to assist and guide the sultans. In practice, however, their main task consisted in pressuring the local chiefs to administer their states according to British law and bureaucracy. For instance, in order to protect their interests in the tin mining industry, the British took control of the Malay sultanate of Perak in 1874. In consequence, the sultan of Perak had to follow the instructions of a British ‘adviser’ in all matters except those pertaining to Malay custom and religion. The same policy was imposed on other Malay sultanates as British power expanded across the region. By 1889, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan, and Pahang all had British residents (Hefner 2001; Tarling 1992). British influence in the Malay peninsula had been consolidated toward the end of the nineteenth century. In 1895, the Malay states under British control in the peninsula – Negeri Sembilan, Pahang, Perak, and Selangor – came under a single British-run administration: the Federated Malay States. In 1909 the northern Malay sultanates of Kelanton, Terengganu, Kedah, and Perlis were ceded to the British by treaty. These four states, along with Johor in the south, formed what was called the Unfederated Malay States. These territories continued to have their own autonomous internal administrations, but in reality they were under British rule. More inclined to direct rule, the French relied on aristocratic families in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in order to tighten their grip. They took advantage of the prevailing power institutions. They administered the colony with the help of indigenous intermediaries, the qadis (Islamic judges), the caids or tribal chiefs, and the amins (religious leaders) who operated as useful functionaries, translating and validating colonial rule. The French and British benefited from the collaboration of the indigenous elites, as well as by shrewd exploitation of divisions within the conquered communities and the incorporation of native literatures and religious texts. For both the French and British during the nineteenth century, cultural domination headed by domestication of the native languages and literary and religious texts soon turned out to be vital to the process of dispossessing the indigenous populations of their lands and riches. Thus, modern colonial ideology and rule, based on coercion and negotiation, incorporation and rejection of difference, and progressive and archaic practices, were widely hybrid, mixing ancient Greek and Roman as well as native structures of power. The fact remains, however, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


that in colonialist discourse and epistemologies the manifest hybridity of modern colonial cultures and rule was usually presented as a oneway process. As a result, more often than not the impact of the colonial civilization on the native cultures was underscored, while the influence of the traditions of the colonized on the colonizers was either denied or completely ignored. Unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans who, in many different ways, recognized that they learned from the ‘barbarians’ that they colonized, nowhere did modern European colonial powers openly acknowledge the native legacy, in spite of manifest linguistic, cultural, and technological borrowings. The stubborn reluctance of modern colonial powers to acknowledge cultural influence from the colonies – their inability to recognize the natives as agents of knowledge and enlightenment – must have largely resulted from the kind of nationalism that inspired European colonial projects; a nationalism that drew inspiration from Darwin’s evolutionary model and, more broadly, from the myths of cultural and racial superiority promoted by Renan and Gobineau among others.4 Manifestly, this Western disregard for the intellectual and epistemic value of the colonized is a symptom of cultural and racial arrogance. It involves a narcissistic projection of the Western logos as the sole viable rational yardstick and epistemic agent. In strictly cultural terms, for instance, we all know that English and French idioms abound with words borrowed from native vernaculars. A plethora of Indian words related to trade, flora and fauna, religion, the military, and politics flowed into English. This flow began in the early seventeenth century and continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 900 English words as being of Indian origin.5 Appropriation and adaptation of native words were, of course, common practice for most colonial powers, if not for all cultures. As with English, French adopted over two hundred Arabic and Berber words.6 The reverse also holds true; foreign words and expressions also flooded the colonized dialects and cultures. The linguistic cross-fertilization occasioned by colonialism undoubtedly enriched the imperial languages, even as it profoundly subverted the notion of purity sustaining colonialist ideology. This linguistic hybridization emphasizes the reversibility of the colonial legacy, in that the cultures of both colonizers and natives as well as their collective identities were questioned and reshaped by the colonial encounters. Nevertheless, despite this obvious métissage, the former conquerors and conquered were, and often still are, unwilling to acknowledge their mutual debts. This colonial tendency to deny the non-European contribution to modernity persists today in almost all fields of scholarship and learning. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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In line with this imperialist mentality, modern Western historians of science still tend to downplay or simply to erase the significant contribution of non-European cultures and knowledge to the development of the West. While praising the ancient Greek contribution to modern science, Colin Ronan (1983), for example, criticizes non-Western societies, notably the Chinese, for lacking the values that facilitated the emergence of modern science in Europe. In a marked Eurocentrism, Ronan even goes as far as to reject the Greek claims that discoveries made in Egypt and Mesopotamia (Sumerians, Babylonians) influenced the sciences of ancient Greece. He specifically contests the belief that these non-Western ancient civilizations made any significant contribution to modern science. While he recognizes that ‘the Sumerians and Babylonians have made great advances in mathematics’ and that ‘they seem to have laid the very foundations of the entire subject’ (1983, 41; see Bala 2006, 17–18), Ronan nonetheless belittles the participation of these civilizations in modern scientific development: ‘Yet for the most part the activities of these ancient astronomers and mathematicians eventually proved to be misdirected. Their work in observing and calculating the movements of the heavens was often astonishing, but much of it proved of little importance to the ultimate development of science’ (1983, 61). Another Eurocentric narrative of the history of science consists in an acceptance that non-Western societies had scientific ideas that Europe took from them, but might also claim that those ideas were of no value before they had been incorporated and reinvigorated by the Western mind. This form of cynicism, if not bad faith, is, for instance, found in a study by Rupert Hall, published in 1963: ‘Europe took nothing from the East without which modern science could not have been created; on the other hand, what it borrowed was valuable only because it was incorporated in the European intellectual tradition. And this, of course, was founded in Greece’ (Hall [1963] 1981, 8). Most striking in this brand of Eurocentrism, which is reminiscent of Euclid’s insular views to which we referred in Chapter 1, is the force of denial or belittling of the important role played by non-Western peoples in the development of modern science, even when the influence in question is manifest. A case in point is the major contribution in the field of optics of the Muslim scientist and natural philosopher Ibn al-Haytham (called Alhazen in the West, 965–1030 AD). As Bala points out: Alhazen’s Optical Thesaurus had a profound influence on European optics immediately after it was translated into Latin in the twelfth or early thirteenth century. It influenced Robert Grosseteste and Roger 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Bacon, as well as leading optical theorists in the Middle Ages such as John Pecham and Witelo of Silesia. Galileo was to appeal to the Optical Thesaurus to prove that the moon was not a polished mirror, as some Aristotelians maintained; and Johannes Kepler began his studies from the point where Bacon, Pecham, and Witelo had developed the Alhazen optical paradigm. (2006, 85) Bala further comments: ‘Given Alhazen’s profound influence on optical science in Europe from the thirteenth century, it is unfortunate that his role in medieval optics has been systematically ignored by historians of science concerned with the modern Scientific Revolution’ (2006, 85). The main problem, Bala concludes, seems to be ‘the dominant Eurocentric orientation of historical studies in science, which makes it difficult to accommodate and acknowledge the dialogical influences that have conditioned both modern science and its philosophy’ (2006, 93). Bala’s emphasis on the ‘dialogical’ roots of modern science has been a central concern in a number of other works, starting with Joseph Needham’s seminal Science and Civilization in China (1954; 1956). In this ground-breaking study Needham, a British academic and sinologist, magisterially demonstrated the extent to which ideas and technological discoveries from China transmitted to the West determined the emergence and development of modern science. Since the publication of Science and Civilization in China other works focusing on the dialogism and multi-rooted nature of modern science have appeared. Among these are Hossein Nasr’s Science and Civilization in Islam (1968), A Concise History of Science in India by Bose et al. (1971), and Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987). More recently, David Held and Anthony McGrew reiterated these arguments in their discussion of globalization. In Globalization Theory, they state: ‘Not only was much of this [Western] technology “borrowed” from Chinese and Islamic civilizations but until the industrial age the West’s economic, military and technical edge over other civilizations was far from conspicuous’ (2007, 21). They add that ‘even as late as 1830 the East was still much more economically powerful and productive than the West: in 1750 China alone accounted for 33 per cent of world output compared to Europe’s 23 per cent’ (2007, 21).7 Despite the significant cultural and technological contribution of nonWestern societies to modern science, despite striking evidence of the transcultural character of this science, Western narratives of progress often remain elliptic and profoundly Eurocentric. As a result, the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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history of Western borrowing and the participation of non-European civilizations in modern science and thought are still often either overlooked or erased. This propensity to deny non-Western contributions to Western culture, science, political, and social organization is prominent in most fields of research and knowledge, even within the postmodern conceptualizations of culture and human progress, as we shall demonstrate in Chapter 10. Such erasures are particularly surprising in the postmodern arena, given postmodern theory’s ostensible emphasis on dialogism, multiplicity, and anti-essentialism. Eurocentrism, postmodernist and non-postmodernist alike, is a discursive practice that implicitly or explicitly constructs the West as the matrix of rationality and civilization.8 From this perspective, Western reluctance to acknowledge the influence of non-European peoples on their technology and civilization is no more than the logical conclusion of the engrained belief in the superiority of Western civilization, a basic tenet of Eurocentrism itself. As a construct, then, Eurocentrism is a rhetorical and ideological performance, informed by a host of myths and essentialist narratives of self-representation based on pseudo-scientific theories of cultural and racial hierarchies. It is a hegemonic discourse predicated on narcissistic, ideological, and political considerations, all of which are conditioned by geopolitical realities encompassing religion, culture, politics, and competition for the control of the world’s resources as well as collective representations. Eurocentrism, by definition, thrives on the exclusion and dismissal of the non-European cultural, racial, and religious Other. In the light of these geopolitical considerations, it is no wonder that the West, particularly in imperial contexts, should have been for so long reluctant to acknowledge the influence of non-European civilizations, whether Chinese or Middle Eastern. For such acknowledgement might have been of disservice to the religious, cultural, and political supremacy for which Europe was striving from the Middle Ages onwards. More markedly, from the fifteenth century Western colonial expansion was built on the subjugation and systematic devaluation of non-European cultures; understandably so, for any attempt to treat the non-European Other as an equal might have proved detrimental to Western Europe’s imperial project. The preservation of European overseas colonies depended on a display of both cultural arrogance and military domination. The same holds true in today’s globalized world, as the maintaining of neocolonial privilege enjoyed by Western societies is broadly predicated on power inequality, negative portrayal, and geopolitical marginalization of non-Europeans. Any representations likely to resituate the West as merely one component or agent of progress within a long chain of 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


progressive forces of human development might, ipso facto, question the sense of superiority on which both former colonial ideologies and today’s neocolonial global structures of power are based. Western unwillingness to recognize non-Europeans as active, worthy contributors to civilization was, as suggested above, manifest within the modern imperial context from the fifteenth century on. As the nationalistic ideology fuelling the project of colonization was founded on the West’s sense of cultural and racial superiority, the European colonizing nations could certainly not recognize the colonized as conduits of knowledge and enlightenment. This would have undermined the whole imperial enterprise which, as many French and British colonial ideologues stressed, consisted of bringing cultural and racial improvement to the colonized. It is in this spirit, for example, that Albert Sarraut, a French Minister of the Colonies, suggested regenerating Algerian culture and mores through a ‘wise, useful infusion of modern principles of progress’ (1923, 104). Ernest Renan, in turn, recommended improving the racial characteristics of the natives by instilling them with a few drops of noble blood ([1896] 1971). Such an extreme eugenicist conception, which considers some races nobler than others, had far-reaching implications in the colonial world. It established a racial hierarchy that justified social and economic injustice. This eugenicist orientation also implicitly legitimized rape – a predominant colonial trope – as a means of improving the biology of the natives (see Labanyi, 2000). The issue of rape, as both a metaphor and a colonial reality, is best understood in the light of Western imperial race politics; more specifically the colonial discourse of métissage.9 As shown in the previous chapters, from Alexander the Great onwards métissage in its various shapes has often been strategically utilized as a colonial discourse of domination; and an ambivalent one at that. Within modern Western empires in particular, métissage, rather than being categorically rejected as was commonly thought, has thus always been part of the colonial stratagem of subjugation and control. Most of the European imperialist nations, more particularly France, Spain, and Portugal, variously harnessed the idea of métissage to their colonial project. For instance, the French colonial policy of assimilation, aiming to turn its colonized subjects into neoFrench citizens, is one version of this imperial strategic métissage. It was a key ideological component of French imperial politics, endorsed by many important French colonial ideologues and intellectuals, such as Samuel de Champlain, Colbert, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In Canada, for instance, the French process of strategic hybridization was multi-layered and went through various stages, in which the ultimate 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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objective was the subjugation and domestication of the useful, yet despised, Amerindian cultural and racial Other. Broadly speaking, the French colonial enterprise was believed to have been less violent than, say, the Spanish. Given their small numbers the French colonists relied on diplomacy and alliances with the Amerindians. They also counted on the giving of gifts to secure the Amerindians’ collaboration in the fur trade and, after 1680, their military support (Havard 2003). This said, the idea that French colonization in Canada was not violent is, of course, no more than a myth, if only because gradually a whole range of coercive measures entailing epistemic and psychological violence were put in place; these included active policies of assimilation, religious conversions, linguistic and cultural acculturation, and interracial marriages. Racial intermarriage, our focus here, can be traced back to early unions between Amerindian women and European fishermen and sailors along the Atlantic coast. This practice later spread into the hinterland as traders and interpreters, coureurs de bois, and garrison troops came into contact with the tribes of the interior. However, as the law forbade the marriage of Catholics with pagans, Amerindians involved in such interracial marriages and their children had to be baptized in order for their unions to become legal. Basically, the hybridizing process to which intermarriage subjected the Amerindians was a case of profound alienation; it compelled the Amerindians to shed their cultural and religious specificity – to abandon their distinct Amerindian identity – and to accept their subsumption into the cultural and racial imperial same. Despite, or perhaps because of, its alienating effects interracial marriage constituted a fundamental tool within the French colonial strategic process of hybridization in Canada. Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Québec and ‘father’ of New France, was a fervent promoter of intermarriage as a means of peaceful colonization and acculturation. In his 1633 address to the Hurons, Champlain told his audience: ‘Our sons will marry your daughters, and we will become one people.’10 In this declaration Champlain promotes interracial mixing between the French and Amerindians in order to pacify the Indian tribes and enrol them into the French colonial project. Colbert, Minister of Finance of Louis XIV, expressed a similar ideal of racial fusion between the French Amerindian allies, the Hurons and Algonquians, arguing that if these peoples could mix, with time they would become one single people sharing the same blood.11 The colonial hybridity discourse articulated by Colbert and Champlain is a political and ideological ruse, the sole unstated aim of which is domination and dispossession of the Amerindian communities. In short, Champlain and Colbert’s ideal of racial fusion 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


is no more than strategic hybridization exhorting the Amerindians to assimilate and accept hybridization, while expecting the French to retain their unique cultural and racial identity. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America (1835–40), follows an identical rhetorical design with respect to French colonial politics in Algeria.12 Like Colbert and Champlain, Tocqueville regarded métissage, embodied in the French politics of assimilation, as a useful means of pacification and control of the indigenous populations of Algeria. However, as he empathically urged the Algerian Berbers and Arabs to assimilate and fade into the French culture, he strongly reminded the same natives of their radical difference and racial inequality. As he bluntly put it, ‘It is our duty neither to encourage our Muslim subjects to have any exaggerated opinion of themselves, nor to persuade them that we are bound to treat them precisely in all circumstances as our countrymen and our equals’ ([1847]: 2003, 199). Tocqueville’s caveat is a strong reminder that, beyond being mostly a strategic mode of domination, the colonial ideology of métissage is also essentially a horizontal, one-dimensional process; that is to say within the imperial discourse of métissage it is always the colonized, not the colonizers, who are expected to fuse and hybridize. This said, for numerous practical reasons the colonizers did often immerse themselves in the languages and customs of the colonized populations; although more often than not this pragmatic journey to the colonized Other’s languages and traditions was moved less by a disinterested, genuine desire for intercultural exchange, than by the power to Westernize and impose on the indigenous populations the colonizers’ political will and cultural and religious norms. The conduct of French missionaries in Canada offers us an enlightening example of strategic hybridization. It has been well documented that these missionaries eagerly learned the Indian dialects, not for the sake of linguistic delight but in order to achieve religious and political control of the Amerindians (see, for example, Rops 1964; Sears 1973; Musa and Staley 2002). The attitude of the French missionaries, but also the discourses of Tocqueville, Colbert, and Champlain all exemplify modern colonialist ideology’s ambivalence toward the issue of métissage, biological as well as cultural.

3.2 Métissage: a double-edged colonial weapon If, as illustrated by the declarations of Champlain, Colbert, and Tocqueville, the colonial discourse of hybridization was profoundly ambivalent, it was also deeply eugenicist. This pseudo-project of improving racially the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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colonized championed by such writers and intellectuals as Ernest Renan and Arthur de Gobineau13 was, consciously or not, the leading impulse behind the promotion of interracial sexual intercourse and mixed unions resulting from the encounters between European colonizers and the indigenous peoples of America, Africa, and Asia. In most cases, these interracial unions, as evidenced in historical documents from the time of Alexander the Great onwards, involved coercion and rape. By and large, the métissage projected by colonial politics through these mixedraced relationships was a case of sheer strategic hybridism with specific political, ideological, cultural, and racial intentions. One of the goals of this strategic imperial métissage was to create a hybrid offspring that would later serve as connective agents between Europe and its colonized peoples. This pragmatically projected racial hybridity also had the more sinister, hidden intention of wiping out the colonized races by means of biological mixing. From the sixteenth century on, then, the idea of mixed unions was seen as a long-term solution towards the extinction of the colonized races. In the same way as colonialists were convinced that the encounter between the powerful, presumably superior Western cultures and the so-called stagnant, inferior cultures of the colonized would cause the latter to disappear, so, too, they believed that interracial mixing would dilute the conquered races and later lead them to extinction. This assumption stems from the colonial belief that white blood, being allegedly superior, was to overflow the inferior native extraction. Early signs of these colonial cultural and racial biopolitics were cogently exposed in Spanish imperial expansionism in America. Spain’s colonization of the Americas from 1492 onwards involved violent conquest, settlement, forced assimilation, and religious conversion. As historical evidence shows, these coercive measures led in some places, as in nineteenth-century Argentina, to genocide.14 The politics of assimilation and religious conversion was primarily intended to alienate Amerindians from their cultures and gods. Interracial unions between the Spanish and the Amerindians, which were a key component of this policy of assimilation, were, in turn, seen by many Spanish officials and colonists as a subtle means of racial cleansing. They were envisaged as a way of diluting and, in the long-run of divesting, the Amerindian ‘race’ of the biological characteristics that many colonialists regarded as the main cause of the natives’ retardation and primitiveness (Boxer 1962, 1969; McAlister 1984). This kind of amelioristic discourse entailed in the earlier Spanish responses to mixed unions was expressly articulated in the late eighteenth century by Pedro Fermín de Vargãs. A radical Creole15 activist, Vargãs 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


joined a group of revolutionaries in New Granada who sought to free Latin America from Spanish domination. This revolutionary conspiracy was soon unveiled and crushed by the Spanish colonial regime; those involved in it were persecuted and severely punished.16 Vargãs’s political radicalism was compounded by ideological radicalism, if not extremism, especially on issues pertaining to racial identity. For Vargãs sexual and economic politics were closely linked. He saw interracial relations as the ideal means by which the Creoles could not only dispossess the indigenous populations of their lands, but also extinguish them as a race. This Creole revolutionary is notoriously remembered for advocating interracial breeding between whites and Indians as a way of ‘hispanizing’ the native population and eliminating those presumed biological deficiencies leading to the Indians’ backwardness and degeneracy: To expand our agriculture, it would be necessary to hispanize our Indians. Their idleness, stupidity, and indifference towards normal endeavours causes one to think that they come from a degenerate race which deteriorates in proportion to the distance from its origin […] It would be very desirable that the Indians be extinguished, by miscegenation with the whites, declaring them free of tributes and other charges, and giving them private land. (Quoted by Anderson 1983, 21) Viewed from a wider perspective, Vargãs’s racist discourse towards the Indians strongly echoes the racism of Ginés De Sepúlveda who over two centuries earlier dismissed the Indians as a backward, degenerate species redeemable only through Christian morality and the virtues of hard labour, a euphemism for slavery. Given this long-term project of ‘hispanization’ promoted by Vargãs and others, we may easily understand why both the Spanish state and church looked favourably on mixed-race sexual relationships in the New World. Miscegenation, which critics such as Labanyi associated with a ‘normalization of rape’ (2000, 58), was commonplace in the Spanish American colonies. It was even officially sanctioned and promoted. At the same time, miscegenation was also strongly qualified. In both the Roman empire and the Ostrogothic kingdom, as mentioned earlier, marriages involving ‘barbarians’ and Europeans were prohibited. Similarly, in the Spanish Americas, interracial marriages were strongly disapproved while sexual relations and concubinage between the Spaniards and the Amerindians were tolerated. It was feared that the legalizing of mixed unions might unsettle the whole social order by calling into question 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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the traditional lines of lineage and descent based on social hierarchy and racial purity. As Michael Banton pointed out: ‘If such persons were allowed to marry, the children would claim Spanish ancestry and the calculation of their social rank would be too problematic’ (1983, 22). From the Spanish perspective, the fear of having the social hierarchy destabilized by mixed marriages and half-blood offspring was compounded by the more pressing concern that such unions might disrupt the deep-seated assumptions of racial purity on which Spanish colonial ideology was founded. As in the Spanish Americas, in the Caribbean, too, the anxiety that mixed marriages and children might disturb social and racial lines bulked large in colonial (slavery) politics and the collective imperial consciousness. Black slavery was introduced into the Caribbean in the sixteenth century. In its wake, interracial sexual relationships involving masters and slaves, usually based on violence and coercion, were very common. By the seventeenth century interracial mixing in most of the Caribbean islands was sufficiently widespread – albeit uneven17 – to be viewed as ‘normal’, even though most of the master-slave relationships would have been classifiable as exploitation and rape.18 However, in the Caribbean, as in the Spanish American colonies, where interracial sexual relations were tolerated, mixed marriages were prohibited. Fernando Henriques remarked: ‘To consort with black and coloured people in terms of a sexual relationship was acceptable. What was not was the notion that such women could even aspire to marriage with a white man [...] Lightness of colour and a great deal of money might, however, overcome the barrier’ (1975, 95). The prohibition of mixed marriages by the Spanish state and church was prompted, as we have seen, by the fear of destabilizing the established social order and racial line of descent. These Spanish anxieties and racial bias related to mixed marriages in the Americas were, unsurprisingly, to become key features of later Western empires. This was particularly salient in the nineteenth century where pseudo-scientific theories of the potential for racial degeneration through mixed marriages were gaining prominence. As in Spanish America, so in Dutch as well as French and British colonial politics miscegenation was an extremely sensitive issue and one that had been much debated and regulated (see Anthias et al. 1992; Brah and Coombes 2000). The Dutch were present in Southeast Asia as early as the sixteenth century, and their racial politics and attitudes towards interracial unions in Batavia and Southeast Asia more generally were, on the whole, as ambivalent as those of the Spanish in the Americas. In Dutch Southeast Asia mixed marriages 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


between Christians and non-Christians were prohibited by the decree of 1617; a prohibition that lasted over two centuries. Nevertheless, the proscription of interracial marriages did not prevent Christians and non-Christians from engaging in sexual relationships. Most Europeans had Asian concubines, and the phenomenon of concubinage reached an astonishing level in the nineteenth century, as did the number of mixed-race children (see Bosma and Raben 2009). Ann Laura Stoler notes that of ‘the 70,000 legally classified Europeans in the Indies in 1900 […] many were living on the borderlands of respectable bourgeois European society’ (2000, 30). Stoler further argues that concubinage was prevalent ‘not only among subaltern European military barred from legal marriage but also among civil servants and European estate supervisors for whom marriage to European women was either formally prohibited or made an economically untenable option’ (2000, 30). In Dutch Southeast Asia the Mixed Marriage Regulation, which authorized unions across cultural and religious lines, allowed European men living in concubinage with non-Christian women to legalize their unions (Jones et al. 2009). While this legislation obviously solved the thorny problem of concubinage, the outcome was by no means equitable to all the parties. More explicitly, within this new regulation a native woman marrying a European man in the French and Dutch Indies was not recognized as a full legal subject. The 1898 regulation clearly stipulated that she ‘acquires the legal status of her husband’ ( Jones et al. 2009, 105). The children of mixed-race couples were also caught in a political and legal conundrum, as they were constantly subject to inclusionary and exclusionary practices. These children were often unsure of where they really belonged or what rights they were entitled to. In French Indochina, from 1893 to 1911 French officials consistently warned against concubinage. Their argument was that these degrading interracial unions were sources of pauperism and a financial burden; these unions were also accused of leading to the creation of another mixed-race generation with no cultural and racial bearings (Chafer and Sackur 2002; Watson Andaya 1998). It is true that hybrid people in French and Dutch Southeast Asia often found themselves in dire financial and social conditions. But concubinage, as has been repeatedly pointed out, was far from being the only cause of Indo-European pauperism. The political treatment of the vexed issue of métissage by French colonial officials was to undergo a significant change in the 1920s. From this period on, a policy of strategic hybridism was put in place by the French colonial government. This softening of French politics towards métissage 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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was already perceptible in the 1928 decree, according to which ‘all persons born in Indochina of unknown parents of which one was presumed to be French could obtain recognition of “la qualité de Français”’ (Stoler 2000, 32). It is especially in the 1930s that the French began clearly to promote interracial mixing in their South Asian possessions. At that period, the official line encouraged Southeast Asian women of mixed European and Asian descent to marry Frenchmen and to follow them to the hinterlands, ‘where young women from the metropole world be hesitant to follow their husbands [… and would form] the foundation of a bourgeoisie, attached at one and the same time to their native land and to the France of Europe’ (quoted by Stoler 2000, 28). It is clear that French colonial officials saw marriages between French men and Asian women of mixed European and Asian descent as a useful, practical move; a strategic hybridism characteristic of most colonial powers as well as neocolonial structures of domination, as we shall see. At the same time, the French colonial administrators expressed fears about these interracial unions and potential problems that their progeny might pose to the colonial state: ‘What could be done with this mixed population, whose ambiguous positioning and identifications could make them either dangerous adversaries or effective partisans of the colonial state?’ (quoted by Stoler 2000, 29). Identical ideological and political responses could be discerned in the handling of miscegenation and mixed-race offspring in Portuguese India and British Southeast Asia. The Portuguese established themselves in India after they had taken possession of Goa in 1498, and mixing between the Portuguese colonialists and Indian women soon became common. Concubinage was widespread and in 1510 the Portuguese Governor of India, Alfonso d’Albuquerque prompted his countrymen to wed Indian women in order to consolidate Portuguese authority in India. After founding permanent bases in India in 1497, the Portuguese were looking for trading stations in Southeast Asia, and Malacca appeared as the ideal centre for trade across the region. The Portuguese settled in Malacca in 1509. Following the Phoenician model in the Mediterranean, the Portuguese did not seek to acquire large territories. To avoid costly personnel and bureaucracy, they concentrated instead on establishing trading posts from which to control local trade and strategic sea routes (Boehm 2004). For the Portuguese, trade and religion went hand in hand. This sacrosanct alliance was also a key feature of Spanish rule in the Philippines from 1521 onwards. Like the Spanish, the Portuguese were known for their religious intolerance and their zeal in converting Asian populations to Catholicism. In Malacca Portuguese religious bigotry and 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


heavy taxation of the indigenous populations sparked the hostility of the local inhabitants. As a result, many inhabitants, including a number of Muslim merchants, left Malacca. Furthermore, the Portuguese were drawn into local politics and had to confront the hostility of several indigenous sultanates. Johor, Atjeh, and the major Muslim states in Java all regularly challenged the Portuguese. Johor in particular, Portugal’s long-time indigenous enemy, was instrumental in helping the Dutch to gain control of the former Portuguese colony of Malacca in 1641. The practice of métissage seen in Portuguese Goa was also at work in Portugal’s possessions in Southeast Asia. Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben rightly note that ‘for at least a century before the Dutch and British arrived in Asia, the Portuguese had been mixing with the local populations. A large diaspora of (Mestizo) Portuguese had spread throughout the ports and cities of the Indian Ocean’ (2009, 23). The increase of racial mixing within the Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia and elsewhere led many to believe that the Portuguese were less racist towards the colonized peoples than, for example, the French, British, and Dutch. Such assumptions are, of course, too categorical to be taken at face value. At one level of Portuguese colonial politics it might be conceded that racial considerations were less overtly proclaimed as a lever of domination by the Portuguese than was the case, say, in British, French, or Dutch colonial politics and practices. At the same time, however, Portuguese prejudice against both the natives and mixed-race people, usually based on religious distinctions, was rife. Several historians, including Charles Boxer (1962) and Lyle McAlister (1984), have discussed the racism of Portuguese colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, and Brazil, showing how within the Portuguese community there was strong resistance to interracial unions and mixed-race children. They further drew attention to the pervasiveness of racism within Portuguese society itself, since the Reinois (Portuguese born in Portugal) tended to despise the Portuguese born in India, Southeast Asia, and America, whom they considered defective and contaminated by their place of birth – the overseas colonies. Lyle McAlister argued that ‘the European Portuguese believed that American birth carried inherent defects including the presumptive taint of Indian or African blood’ (1984, 413). We may add, here, that the contempt shown by the Portuguese for mixed race people and their nationals born in overseas colonies is a recurrent pattern within most Western colonizing nations; the French metropolitans, for example, despised the pieds-noirs of Algeria, just as the British generally looked down on people of mixed British and Irish blood and, later, on Anglo-Indians. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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In British India in particular, responses to interracial sexual relations and unions were grounded in similar ideological, political, and racial assumptions. British presence in India dates back to 1600 when the East India Company established trading posts at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The Mughal Dynasty then ruling India was strong enough to hold the European traders in check. However, with the fall of the Mughal empire at the turn of the century, and the resulting emergence of numerous small states vying for supremacy, the East India Company stepped in to fill the vacuum. The victory of the troops of the East India Company, led by Robert Clive, over Indian forces at the Battle of Plassey (1757) radically transformed the geopolitics of the subcontinent. From that time on the East India Company was to become the leading power in India, governing, either directly or indirectly, vast portions of the subcontinent.

3.3 Sexual politics, from tolerance to abjuration: the case of the British East India Company From the early years of Western imperial conquests, sexual politics and intercultural relationships emerged, along with economic interests, as central issues. The Dutch East India Company, for instance, regulated sexual and social conduct between Europeans and Southeast Asians from the very start (see Bosma and Raben 2009, 27). In India, too, the control of sexual and social behaviour between the agents of the British East India Company and local populations became a top priority. This regulation went through different stages, moving from liberal and inclusionary practices to exclusion and rejection. In 1687 the Company encouraged mixed marriages between the British soldiers and the agents of the Company and Indian women. As a result, many of the Company’s agents not only married Indian women, but bequeathed most of their possessions to their native spouses and their mixed-race offspring. Dalrymple writes: ‘The wills of East India Company officials, now in the India Office library, clearly show that in the 1780s, more than one-third of the British men in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives, or to Anglo-Indian children – a degree of cross-cultural mixing which has never made it into the history books.’ Dalrymple further stresses the liberality and inclusiveness of the Company’s politics of cultural, social, and racial politics in the following terms: ‘the India of the East India Company was an infinitely more culturally, racially and religiously mixed place than modern Britain can even dream of being’ (2002). 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


The British East India Company’s cultural and racial politics were, as Dalrymple and others observed, broadly liberal and inclusive. Nonetheless, such liberality can be read as straightforward pragmatic hybridism; the outcome of economic, geopolitical, and social considerations, rather than the result of a genuine politics of intercultural mixing and universal brotherhood. All the more so as the economic and political dominance of India was the Company’s primary motivation. Furthermore, the Company’s very existence, as we know, depended heavily on military force and on the manipulation of the indigenous structures of power. In order for the Company to control India’s natural resources and penetrate Indian markets, its managers had actively exploited to their advantage, often even ignited, rivalries between the local chiefs as well as religious and ethnic divisions within Indian society. For the most part, the British East India Company was an ambivalent system of domination in which military violence and coercion dovetailed with pragmatic social and cultural inclusionary practices. With time, however, the British East India Company’s structures, attitudes to intercultural relationships and political weight underwent important transformations. These changes began to appear in the late eighteenth century, growing into prominence during the Victorian period. Evidence of the transformation of the Company’s intercultural politics was reflected in the decline of mixed marriages between the Company’s agents and Indian women; a decline confirmed by the Company’s record of its agents’ wills. Dalrymple writes: This period of intermixing did not last: the rise of the Victorian Evangelicals in the 1830s and 1840s slowly killed off the intermingling of Indian and British ideas, religions and ways of life. The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared. By the early nineteenth century official attitudes towards Anglo-Indian offspring had hardened; mixed-race unions and their progeny were, as a result, increasingly disapproved of by the colonial authorities, and this recalcitrant attitude was to continue into the early twentieth century and up to the end of British rule in India (see Buettner 2004). The influx of European women into India during the Victorian period 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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must certainly have contributed to unsettling further the previous cultural and racial proximity between British men and Indian women, although it is important not to forget that European women were present in the subcontinent during the pre-Victorian periods, even if in smaller numbers. Nevertheless, despite the increasing influence of Victorian racial thinking on Indian politics and the gradual erosion of the East India Company’s authority, the Company remained in control of India until the late 1850s. The East India Company controlled the subcontinent for over two centuries; until the beginning of the nineteenth century, with little interference from the British government. During its long rule the Company enjoyed economic and political autonomy; it even had its own army, which was composed of British officers and Indian soldiers or sepoys. By 1850, the Company had become a hegemonic power, controlling most of the Indian subcontinent. The Mutiny of 1857, however, seriously eroded the authority and power of the East India Company, and led to the British government taking direct control of the region; as a result of this political change attitudes to culture, identity, and race also began drastically to alter. The violence and racial hatred accumulated on both sides during the Mutiny were to transform forever the way the British and Indians saw each other. In consequence, the earlier tolerance and liberality towards interracial mixing were wearing thin. In the mid-nineteenth century British culture and traditions were imposed on India and in Victorian elite circles interracial unions were strongly condemned (Bosma and Raben 2009, 22). Racism was rife in 1850s India and it was directed at native Indians as well as ‘domiciled’ Europeans and Anglo-Indians. Several historians of the British empire have drawn attention to the British middle class’s significant contribution to hardening mainstream racial prejudice against the Indians (Buettner 2004). Considering the predominant racial exclusiveness characterizing Victorian India, the appointment of Indians as civil servants in itself might be taken for a significant inclusive practice. These apparently inclusionary practices showed, nonetheless, striking limitations when it came to top positions, where British prejudice against the Indians proved a major impediment. Just as in the British army Indian soldiers rarely attained positions of power, so, too, in the civil service the Englisheducated Indian civil servants were the victims of racism and were usually confined to subaltern functions. More often than not the few Indians who had managed to secure high profile jobs were usually paid far less and received much less consideration than their British or European peers. A case in point is the situation of Indian engineers 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


working in the East India Railway; they were said to have been paid twenty times less than their British counterparts. During the Victorian period, then, British racist colonial politics in India contributed to eroding the pre-Victorian politics of cultural and racial rapprochement. Following this sea-change, the hybridities resulting from pre-Victorian ethics of proximity (mixed-race progeny, AngloIndians, and so on) came to be seen as colonial monstrosities. They were widely associated with forces of disruption threatening to destabilize the foundations on which colonial ideology and race politics were built. In order to remove this presumed threat, it was recommended that hybrid progeny in British India and, more generally, across Western colonial possessions be tightly contained. The fear that mixed-race offspring engendered in the colonial authorities led to policies which often condemned these children to cultural, social, and political marginalization. As a result of their marginalization, the mixed-bloods in British India as well as in Dutch or French Southeast Asian colonies became at best second-class citizens, and at worst, non-citizens cast in a legal and political limbo. They faced a wide range of socio-economic and political obstacles that led to poverty and often to pauperization.

3.4 Hybridity as the space of the impossible: the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean Thus, in both modern and ancient times, mixed-race offspring were for the most part caught in what I have called the space of the impossible. As conceptualized in this study, the space of the impossible is a site of extreme psychological, cultural, and racial alienation in which the duplex, unique identity of mixed-blood offspring is subject to a double denial: it is tacitly or explicitly rejected by both sites of identification – the Western and non-Western – of which hybrid subjectivity is constitutive. To illustrate further the idea of hybridity as the space of the impossible, it is useful to refer back to the Caribbean of the early and mid-eighteenth century. By the seventeenth century racial mixing was widespread in the Caribbean. At the same time, interracial marriages between Europeans and blacks were not allowed. This prohibition did not, of course, prevent interracial sexual relationships from which were born numerous mixedrace children. However, despite widespread interracial mixing and the ensuing blurring of the racial line, in the eighteenth-century Caribbean the lives of the half-bloods were strongly determined by a politics of race predicated on the rigid colour line drawn between black and white. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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In this context, it is little wonder that from 1730 onwards mixed-raced people in the Caribbean should be socially marginalized and deemed a serious threat to both white and black communities. In 1859 Anthony Trollope articulated the plight of the ‘coloured’ people in the following terms: ‘Both the white men and black dislike their coloured neighbours. It is useless to deny that as a rule, such is the case. The white men now […] dislike them more in Jamaica than they do in other parts of the West Indies because they are constantly driven to meet them and are more afraid of them’ ([1859] 2004, 60). The rejection of the half-bloods by both the European and indigenous communities, as Trollope remarked, confirms the persistence of strong beliefs in myths of purity on both sides of the colonial racial divide. But the cartography of racial politics, more specifically the condition of the half-bloods in the Caribbean at that period, would not be complete without a reference to the mixed people’s perceptions of their own hybridity. It is important at this point particularly to consider the way the mixed-race offspring positioned themselves towards the issue of colour and social prestige gained or denied by skin complexion. Because in the Caribbean light skin was usually favoured over dark, and because hybrids had ‘white blood’, many mixed-race individuals in the eighteenthcentury Caribbean, as Alibhai-Brown points out, ‘felt themselves to be closer to white than black in terms of status’ (2001, 44). Alibhai-Brown further discusses how colonial racial politics ‘corrupted’ the half-bloods, arguing that ‘many coloured people in the Caribbean took up white snobbery and values about light and dark skins’ (2001, 44). To substantiate this claim, Alibhai-Brown makes a reference to a traveller from England, Mrs Flannigan, who wrote about coloured women in Antigua, stating: ‘The coloured women participated in the prejudice of their masters, and as they became mothers of female children, they reared them in the same spirit and inculcated into their heads that it was more honourable and praiseworthy to inhabit the harem of a white man than to be the lawful wife of a man of colour’ (1844, 165). The desire for whiteness expressed by the coloured women of Antigua; the projection of their children into that superior white world, mentioned by Mrs Flannigan, is theorized by Frantz Fanon in the twentieth century as the wish among Antillean/Caribbean men and women to ‘bleach’ themselves white; the aim being to gain acceptance from the colonizer and attain that ideal human norm allegedly typified by the European self. According to Fanon, such longing for whiteness is reflected in the black/Antillean man’s sexual desire for the white woman; an erotic craving replete with psychological as well as 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


political and ideological implications: ‘[In] the Negro who wants to go to bed with a white woman [looms] the wish to be white’ as well as a ‘lust for revenge’ ([1952] 1967, 16). To Fanon, the desired white woman becomes the privileged site in which colonial desires, anxieties, and brutality are played out. For the black man, then, Fanon suggests, the conquering of the white woman involves both the symbolic empowerment of the colonized and revenge against colonial domination based on the racial and physical separation of whites and blacks. Fanon further remarks that from the standpoint of colonial identity politics such sexual and ideological projections lead nowhere, since once in Europe the Antillean/black is systematically sent back to where he truly belonged: ‘The Antillean does not think himself as a black man; he thinks of himself as Antillean […] But he is a negro. That he will learn once he goes to Europe; and when he hears Negroes mentioned he will recognize that the word includes himself as well as the Senegalese’ ([1952] 1967, 147). In this statement, Fanon implies that whatever their efforts to bleach themselves white, blacks are inescapably embedded in their blackness; a blackness racially and socially constructed by the Europeans who expect that ‘not only must the black be black; he must be black in relation to the white’ ([1952] 1967, 110) The blacks’, more specifically the Caribbean creoles’ wish for whiteness stems in large part from their interiorization of the white man’s felt cultural and racial superiority. In a sense, the colonial European reifying, Orientalizing gaze had succeeded in imposing whiteness as the physical and racial point of reference. Prominent among the Creoles or racially mixed people in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the craving for whiteness, alongside its social, narcissistic, and ideological projections, was also common among the colonial elites; it persists even in today’s postcolonial societies. Evidently, the reasons for such colonial desires, in the Caribbean and in the colonial world at large, cannot be accounted for only by the colonized people’s narcissistic dependence on the colonizer. They were also premised on social, ideological, and economic considerations. It can be argued in this respect that if hybrid people in the Caribbean, for instance, tended to lean towards their white rather than black legacy, this was largely because social and economic privilege was on the side of whiteness. Seeking entry into the white world was synonymous with integrating into the space of the possible; a space where power and social status conferred by wealth would, if not completely bleach the Creoles, at least induce the white masters to look favourably upon them. And some Creole families, as many have noted, accessed this 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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coveted space of the possible and rose socially (Alibhai-Brown 2001). However, for most half-bloods in the Caribbean as well as in Dutch and French Southeast Asia, hybridity did not yield much potential for social promotion and narcissistic emancipation. Worse still, for the majority of the métis in the colonial worlds hybridity was fundamentally a source of cultural alienation and social marginalization. To pursue the discussion of colonial identity politics and the mixed people’s self-representations in the Caribbean and in the colonial world more broadly, we might stress that the cultural and racial alienation of the colonial métis was reflected in their inability to reconcile their white and non-white legacies. In the face of this impossible reconciliation, the métis, both in the Caribbean and in Dutch Southeast Asia, for example, became schizophrenic subjects. They were torn between the unattainable wholeness (reconciliation/fusion of their Western and nonWestern sides) and the temptation of purity (retreat into racial binaries depending on circumstances and interests). The very idea of hybridity, embodied by the mixed-bloods, in turn, prefigures a dissolute, loose site of identification, in the sense that this hybridity leaves the subject with no stable cultural and racial mooring point. As might be expected, this site of identification is one of ambivalence and indeterminacy, as the hybridity of the half-bloods at once blurs the colour line and repeats the very racial rigidities it apparently contests. In other words, while biological hybridity de facto transcends racial and cultural essentialism, the position of many mixed-blood people towards colonial racial politics often turns out to be essentialist and mimetic; that is to say, it simply reproduces the dominant racial binaries. Many colonial half-bloods in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, as we have shown, favoured their black or white side, rather than fully assuming their duplex character or reconciling in one harmonious whole their dual cultural and racial identity. In so doing, they reiterated and succumbed to the binary racial thinking that their very mixed identity was supposed to have undone. The tendency among many Caribbean coloured peoples to privilege their white legacy over their black roots was, as pointed out by Fanon, largely due to the inferiority complex that the Europeans instilled for centuries into the African slaves, and, broadly speaking, into the colonized. A number of scholars still believe that the colonial legacy of white superiority persists even today among many Caribbean people. Alibhai-Brown reminds us that: there are many people who believe that one reason so many black British men and women have relationships with white people today 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


is because there was, for centuries, a white bias in Caribbean societies. People tried to marry lighter than themselves. There was a tendency up to the 1960s to worship Europe and European values, while looking down on their African heritage. (2001, 44) Whether white bias is a fundamental prompter of mixed relationships (Caribbean-white and beyond) in Britain and elsewhere is open to debate. What is, yet, evident is that colonial mythologies of race and Western cultural arrogance still burden contemporary conceptions of and responses to métissage, whether cultural, technological or racial. Part II, which follows, explores race politics, power, and discursive practices in connection with the notion of hybridity. It critically engages with postcolonial debates on hybridity and adopts a diachronic, holistic methodology that sets in constant dialogue theory and practice, past and present, myth and reality. One of the aims of this methodology is to highlight the merits and limitations of the teleological and disjunctive process inherent in contemporary conceptualizations of hybridity.




Part II Hybridity in Contemporary Theory: A Critical Assessment




4 The Ethos of Hybridity Discourse

As demonstrated above, hybridity has been a key feature of civilizations since time immemorial. Most civilizations, from the Sumerians through to the Egyptians and Greeks, developed and thrived through the incorporation of foreign ideas, philosophies, and technologies. In a sense, these ancient societies widely practised hybridity and produced, to varying degrees, hybridized cultures. However, they were obviously not as selfconsciously aware of this process of hybridization as we are today.1 Nor, for that matter, did these ancient civilizations reflect on and conceptualize the issue of métissage or process of hybridization as intensely as we have done in our postmodern era. Over the last three decades, indeed, hybridity has been one of the most discussed and widely utilized concepts in academia and beyond. It has become a central concern in postcolonial studies in particular and in the humanities more generally, gaining, in the process, an unprecedented degree of critical prestige. This said, neither the discussion of hybridity nor the practice of métissage is new in itself. Even the term ‘hybridity’ is far from being a modern invention; it was common among ancient Greeks and Romans; it entered into popular usage in English in the nineteenth century, but evidence of its use has been found from the early seventeenth century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in Greek the term hybris/ hubris means ‘presumption or insolence towards the gods’. In Athenian law, hybris was a serious criminal offence, sometimes punished by death. In The Rhetoric Aristotle defined hybris as a physical or verbal assault inflicted on the victim merely for self-gratification. The term hybris/hybristic was also linked to the pastoral world, where it referred to a plant of excessive growth; such plants had usually to undergo pruning in order to be brought back to normal development. While in ancient Greece the noun hybris, as has been pointed out, did not seem 87


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to be applied to plants outside the realm of poetry, evidence of the use of the verbs hybrizô and exubrizô is found in the botanical texts of Theophrastus (Michelini 1978). In Latin, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘hybrida/hibrida/ibrida’ means the ‘offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar, child of a free man and slave’ (this may extend to the children born to a Roman father and foreign mother). As demonstrated in Chapter 1, the notions of excess and (natural or physical) outrage entailed in the Greek use of hybris with reference to plants were also central to the Roman definitions of biological hybridity, generally indicative of something held in low regard. To turn to the modern use of the term hybridity, it was Charles Darwin who first employed it in 1837 in his experiments with cross-fertilization in plants. The concept of ‘hybridity’ then had a purely biological dimension and suggested fixed essence. It grew into prominence in scientific and political debates from the nineteenth century onwards. In the nineteenth century, more specifically, the issue of biological hybridity and a connected implication of racial degeneration gained particular salience. At this specific period, during which Western colonialism was at its height, hybridity was closely connected to supremacist race politics. It was fuelled by the theories of classification of peoples into superior and inferior races following a Darwinian evolutionary model.2 And because in the nineteenth century colonial ideology’s persistent assumptions about racial degeneration caused by the mixing of whites and nonwhites were dominant, biological hybridity was viewed unfavourably. It was seen as a source of moral and racial corruption. Dismissed as monstrous in the nineteenth century, hybridity was deemed a serious threat to socio-political order and racial purity. The paradox, though, was that whereas in Western imperial consciousness biological hybridity was consistently indicted in the nineteenth century, indigenous peoples’ modes of rule as well as their cultural and literary imaginaries were, as demonstrated earlier, actively incorporated into colonial politics, the better to dominate the colonized. This design is once again an instance of willed, strategic imperial hybridism, one that rests on a two-tiered structure: it is based on the rejection of some putatively dubious mixing, interracial métissage in this case, as well as on the integration into the imperial same of those native components considered useful to the colonial project. The concern with hybridity and the racial threat it entailed that pervaded nineteenth-century colonial politics persisted well into the twentieth century. It was only in the last two decades of the century, that discussions of hybridity – in particular, those in Western academic 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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circles – could be seen to have undergone a clear shift from the nineteenthcentury debates on the controversial issue of racial mixing. In the West there has been a renewed interest in the topic of hybridity from the late twentieth century onwards. Nevertheless, the use to which the concept is harnessed and the goals towards whose aim it is employed are very different from those for which it was formerly intended. Another notable change relates to the voices through which the issue of hybridity is articulated. Whereas in previous centuries debates on métissage were almost exclusively the provenance of Europeans, from the late twentieth century onwards a great deal of the conceptualization of hybridity, most notably its cultural version, has been conducted or prompted by intellectuals based in Western universities but originating in former colonies. Such writers, among them Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edouard Glissant, and postcolonial scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, and Françoise Lionnet, have helped to bring the issue of hybridity into sharp relief. Through their works these scholars and writers have contributed to establishing the issue of métissage as a major focus in cultural studies and social sciences. Today hybridity is widely debated in most intellectual circles. In the last three decades in particular, concern with métissage has been so intense that we have witnessed in the humanities as well as in politics, communication studies, and economic discourses what could be called a scramble for hybridity and the third space. Obviously, the type of hybridity for which we scramble today in the humanities and in other fields is different from the hybridity glossed and codified in the nineteenth century, a period dominated by clear-cut racial and biological assumptions. In contemporary postcolonial discussions, by contrast, the biological conceptions of race are elided and cultural issues and identity politics are given primacy. In other words, postcolonial discussions of hybridity have moved from the earlier focus on race and bio-politics to a strictly semiotic, discursive, and cultural realm. This semiotic-cultural inflection was sparked by the works of Mikhail Bakhtin,3 Emile Benveniste, Jacques Lacan, and poststructuralist or deconstructionist theorists more generally. These theorists in turn influenced such leading postcolonial scholars as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Chakravorty Spivak. As has been frequently pointed out, the Foucauldian perception of power, discourse, and knowledge (Foucault 1980) strongly impacted on Said’s examination of colonialism and colonialist discourse in Orientalism ([1978] 2003) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). The views of Foucault and Derrida on power and discourse as well as Bakhtinian dialogism and Lacanian notions of split 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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enunciation also left a strong imprint on Bhabha’s theory of culture and identity. Said was among the first of the postcolonial critics closely to scrutinize colonialism’s discursive practices; he brought to light the rhetorical and representational schemes through which the West constructed and manipulated the representations of the Orient to imperialist ends. His seminal work, Orientalism has been rightly considered as the initiator of a new field of criticism, postcolonial studies. His analyses of imperialism and the colonial archive and discursive practices have been influential in the postcolonial field, generating praise as well as criticism. One of the recurrent critiques levelled against Said was related to his theorization of colonial discourse. In this respect, many postcolonial scholars faulted him for following in his analysis of colonialism a model of binary thinking initiated by such earlier anti-colonial theorists as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Said was, above all, indicted for conceiving of colonial discourse as a hegemonic, monolithic structure of representation and rule. Bhabha was among the earliest scholars to have criticized Said’s assessment of colonial discourse and power. His theory of hybridity may, in large part, be seen as a challenge to Orientalism. Simply put, in contrast to Said who stressed the hegemony and monological character of colonial discursive practices and power, Bhabha draws attention to their heterogeneity and contradictions. He does so in terms that question the rigid binary of colonizer and colonized, ruler and ruled, central to Orientalism as well as to the works of Fanon and Césaire among others. In his influential studies of colonial discourse and cross-cultural encounters, Bhabha has instigated a theory of hybridity that contests the idea that colonial discourse and power were homogeneous and hegemonic. Introduced in The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and the third space has dominated postcolonial and cultural studies over the last two decades. Bhabha redefines culture, discourse, and identity as fluid and ambivalent, rather than fixed and one-dimensional. While emphasizing the hybridity of all cultures, Bhabha closely links the notion of hybridity to the spatial metaphor of the third space, a concept that is inspired by the works on spatiality by historians and philosophers such as Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel Foucault. As theorized by Bhabha, the third space is interchangeable with hybridity, or more precisely, hybridity is the third space: All forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


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moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. […] the process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation. (1994, 211) This passage contains a cluster of theoretical, ideological, cultural, and utopian projections that Bhabha associates with the third space. In its actual formulation, the third space, like hybridity, is posited as a site of subversion, displacement, newness, renegotiation of cultures and identities, and multiple positionality.4 In the following quote, the subversive and creative potential of the third space is further emphasized in terms that reveal this concept as a site in which polarities are dissolved and where the conceptualization of a ‘genuine’ international culture is made possible. The third space is the precondition for the articulation of cultural difference […] the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but rather on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end, we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting-edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture […] And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves. (1994, 38–9) In Bhabha’s conceptualization, ‘cultural hybridity is a form of radicalism, an alternative and better way of conceiving culture’ (1994, 164). In other words, for Bhabha and for most postcolonial scholars hybridity and the third space are conduits of a revolutionary politics of identity and cultural relationships. The predominant spatial trope of the third space in particular is usually associated with a site of transformation and newness as well as of contestation. Bhabha states: ‘The transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One […] nor the Other [...] but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both’ (1994, 28). Bhabha further enhances the contestative, creative potential of the third space when discussing the international culture he proposes in his work. This projected 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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international culture is not, as Bhabha argues, built on a problematic, discredited multiculturalism. While stressing that hybridity is inscribed into each culture, Bhabha also insists that this international culture is located in the in-between space of translation and a constant negotiation of meaning and cultural identities. Intercultural translation is, as becomes manifest in Bhabha’s works, a central component of his notion of hybridity. From his perspective, the act of translation is a significant, unsettling process of pluralization; it estranges individuals from cultural sameness as it familiarizes and immerse them in cultural Otherness to the extent that the resulting spatial configuration is ‘a space of hybridity […] that is new, neither the one nor the other’ (1994, 25). In a sense, translation involves a self-othering process, one in which cultural sameness and difference are transcended to allow for new and wider modes of personal and collective cultural identification. The idea of translation as a simultaneous transcending of cultural sameness and difference is further emphasized by Bhabha through the notions of ‘going beyond’ and ‘intervention’ which he considers to be the key features of the third space: Being in the ‘beyond’, then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as any dictionary will tell you. But to dwell ‘in the beyond’ is also […] to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, the intervening space ‘beyond’ becomes a space of intervention in the here and now. (1994, 7) There is no denying that translation creates useful cultural bridges that bring difference and sameness closer to each other. Moreover, in absolute abstract terms translation may well be said to open up a space in which individuals engaging in cross-cultural/interracial translations emerge anew or, to paraphrase Bhabha, as the others of themselves. It is, nevertheless, important to underline that translation is not a neutral cultural gesture. It constitutes instead a culturally and ideologically charged medium with significant epistemological and ethical implications. More concretely, the third space in which translation is seemingly located is not a neutral ideological site of exemplary congruity between cultures and subjectivities, as we tend to think. It is profoundly conditioned by cultural, ideological, and political cartographies in which power operates in the guise of a universal ethics of cultural exchange and solidarity. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


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Rather than being a site of balanced relationships, therefore, the third space is underpinned by an insidious totalizing drive that inscribes translation in a subtle struggle for meaning and construction of cultural identities. Moreover, for all its theoretical significance the third space of translation does not collapse the politics of polarity into a flat, disempowered narrative of equivalence and entropy. It merely reshapes the terms of the binary same-Other and, in so doing, it masks the will-to-power and hegemonic impulse inherent in cultural translations. In view of these theoretical as well as ideological and epistemological considerations, it is thus far-fetched, if not simply erroneous, to think of the third space of translation as a site where Manichaeism is dissolved and power destabilized, as Bhabha wants us to believe. That the third space may, according to Bhabha and his peers, help us to emerge as ‘the others of ourselves’ is in an abstract sense theoretically viable. In practice, however, the emergence of newness through translation is often, openly or implicitly, spelled out in a terminology of empowerment and disempowerment. More explicitly, by their very position as epistemic subjects the literary or cultural translators are already implicated in the field of power and knowledge with their attendant epistemologies of control and discipline.5 In a sense, from the very moment at which they begin translating, cultural translators are, ipso facto, inscribed within the dialectics of empowerment and disempowerment. They empower the same and disempower the Other or vice versa, depending on cultural, ideological, political, and ethical demands. The reason for this ambivalence is that no cultural representations of difference, even the most dialogical or inclusive, can be completely independent of the economy of power, prejudice, and essentialism. As such, every act of translation is, directly or indirectly, closely linked to ideology and power structures, a fact overlooked by Bhabha and his peers.6 The interlocking of objective and subjective patterns, of translators and ideological and power structures, pointed out by Pierre Bourdieu (1991), and Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (1990) among others, have been characteristics of translation since its earliest manifestations.7 Furthermore, translation, as Bhabha seems to forget, has often been imbued with cultural and racial prejudice. It was also frequently harnessed to political, nationalistic, and imperialist aims, from the ancient Roman poets to the Renaissance and down to modern colonial ideologues and writers.8 In the nineteenth century in particular, during which Western colonialism was at a peak, translation contributed significantly to consolidating the colonial enterprise. At this time, as Edward Said ([1978] 2003), Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (1990), and Elleke 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Boehmer (1995) have remarked, translation was essentially a violent act of cultural penetration, appropriation, and manipulation of indigenous literary, cultural, and social representations. It functioned as a potent ideological apparatus intended to achieve cultural, political, and economic domination. Its overall aim was to ensure that the natives depended for their self-definitions on the colonizers’ representations. As an energizing imperial practice, translation thus collaborated in maintaining the antagonistic, asymmetrical power relationships on which colonial politics was founded. Within the imperial context, translation was certainly not the vehicle of subversion or emancipation described by Bhabha, nor a means of narrowing the gap between polarities. Rather, translation, like the colonial ideology it supported, was deeply locked into, if it did not reinforce, the rigid racial and cultural polarities sustaining the imperial system. From a strictly colonial perspective, then, translation entertained a symbiotic relation with the imperial ideology and, as such, it participated, to a great extent, in colonial epistemic violence. Judging from the enmeshment of translation with coercive colonial power structures, Bhabha’s idea of translation as an emancipating tool cannot therefore be taken at face value. Its credibility is importantly undermined by Bhabha’s manifest obliviousness to the complex geopolitical context that has informed translation across history. For one thing, a sound, convincing theory of cultural translation cannot be abstracted from its material condition or detached from the various political and ideological forces determining it. It can surely not afford to neglect, as does here Bhabha, the ramifications of translational practice with colonial and neocolonial power structures presiding over the constructions of cultural meanings and collective identities. Nor should it overlook translation’s elusiveness and multi-faceted character. Whatever functions it is made to perform, the fact remains that translation is not a monolithic cultural and epistemic construction. It is instead a multi-layered, ambivalent system of cultural transaction and representation. At once translation is inclined to the politics of friendship and remains anchored in the realm of sameness where it edits and manipulates difference for domestic consumption. Translation is, in other words, a complex, protean, and dialogical activity in which the frontiers of culture and identity are constantly blurred and reshaped for poetic, ethical, ideological, and political purposes. Speaking in these terms of translation may today sound like a mere truism. Nevertheless, when we look at the significant shift in translation scholarship over the last few years, from the colonial polarities mentioned above to a consensual middle ground of mediation and fusion, it is vital not to 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


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lose sight of translation’s complicity with both colonial and neocolonial binary structures of power.9 To pursue our critical examination of the theory of hybridity and the third space in relation to colonial discourse, we may argue that hybridity, as conceived by Bhabha, was not only a key feature of colonial cultures, but was also deeply inscribed in the very structure of colonial discourse and power. In his discussion of colonial cross-cultural encounters Bhabha consistently deploys the concept of hybridity mainly to highlight the ambivalence of colonial discourse and power. He argues on this premise that it is the very hybridization produced by colonial power which precisely undermines colonial discourse and authority: ‘The effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native tradition […]. [It] enables a form of subversion […] that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention’ (1994, 154). For Bhabha colonial discourse is essentially a heterogeneous, ambivalent structure through which colonial rule was at once established and contested, done and undone. In short, in Bhabha’s conception colonial rule and discourse are systems in which coercion and negotiation, authoritarianism and consensus were simultaneously at work. Building on the assumption that colonial discourse is ambivalent and heterogeneous, Bhabha further considers hybridity as a privileged means of resistance and subversion with a strong liberatory potential for the colonized or subaltern subjects. According to Bhabha, then, hybridity is the fundamental tool by which the colonized resisted and subverted the colonizer’s cultural, political, and ideological domination. This idea of hybridity as an anti-colonial agency is still predominant among postcolonial and cultural critics. For example, May Joseph and Jennifer Fink, scholars in performance studies, think that hybridity can be used for political aims to reflect ‘multiple affiliations’ and can, above all, serve as an ‘anti-imperialist, participatory discourse of cultural citizenship’ (Joseph and Fink 1999, 2). In postcolonial debates the presumed resistive impulse of hybridity is often reiterated with force and zeal, verging on conceptual dogmatism. Similarly, the notions of ambivalence and negotiation, heterogenization and mongrelization, which Bhabha considers constitutive of colonial encounters and ideology, consistently recur in the discussions of discourse, culture, and identity. According to Bhabha, this in-between space of enunciation resists binary categorizations and essentialism. His contention is that cultural identity always emerges in the contradictory and 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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ambivalent space where binarism and claims to cultural purity are transcended (1994, 38–9). Like Bhabha, many postcolonial writers and critics promote hybridity (aesthetic, cultural, and racial) to contest binaries, purity, and essentialism. The West Indian Nobel Prize winner, Derek Walcott is a good case in point. Most of Walcott’s plays and poems deal with the history, culture, and identities of the Caribbean and the Caribbean peoples in the postcolonial period. In his 1970 essay on art (and specifically theatre) in his native Saint Lucia, ‘What the Twilight Says: An Overture’ (published in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott laments the lasting effects of colonial rule and bemoans the psychic and cultural alienation wrought by colonialism: ‘We are all strangers here. [...] Our bodies think in one language and move in another’ (1970a, 10; 31). While acknowledging colonization’s destructive effects on the colonized, Walcott celebrates the hybrid Caribbean cultures. His epic poem Omeros exposes the cultural strains converging in Saint Lucia. In three books, Omeros journeys successively into the past of Africa, the USA, and Europe in what looks like an effort to encompass the multiple components of the Caribbean world. By bringing together these topographies Walcott locates the history of the Caribbean at the confluence of three civilizations: the African, European, and North American, each contributing to shaping the motley cultures of the Caribbean; a cultural mixing that defies essentialist discourses such as those promoted by the Négritude writers, for example. Walcott himself is of mixed descent: West Indian, Dutch, and English. His celebration of Caribbean hybridity is thus of a self-reflexive kind; in a sense, his own mixed heritage is somehow emblematic of the history of the Caribbean. Walcott declares in what sounds like a counter discourse to those essentialist considerations which tend to root the Caribbean islands in a remote African cultural matrix: Pastoralists of the African revival should know that what is needed […] is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using the old names anew, so that mongrel as I am, something prickles in me when I see the word Ashanti as with the word Warwickshire, both separately intimating my grandfathers’ roots, both baptizing this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian. (1970a, 10) In both Omeros and Dream on Monkey Mountain Walcott stresses the hybrid, multi-faceted character of the Caribbean. During his 1992 Nobel 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


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Prize lecture, which was concerned with Trinidad, he stated that the history of the Caribbean was created by ‘the fragments of Africa’ and European colonialism and Asian immigration. A hybrid figure who seems to assume his variegated cultural background, Walcott in his writing explores the multilayered nature of Caribbean history, culture, and identities, through a relentless embrace of hybridity as the principal characteristic of the Caribbean world. His attitude to both culture and language is that of inclusion and blending. In other words, Walcott does not play local legends and idioms off against Western languages and literary traditions; he advocates instead a synergy of these multiple creative forces. He sees no contradiction between reclaiming his African roots and adopting a foreign idiom and culture. In his early poem, ‘A Far Cry from Africa’, he voiced his inability to choose ‘between this Africa and the English tongue [he] loves?’ (1962, 18). In this way, Walcott distances himself from the divisive either-or dichotomy that characterizes both colonial Western and African essentialist conceptions of history and culture. He consistently adopts an inclusive both-and formula that bridges the gap between same and Other, Africa and Europe, black and white. All through his work he celebrates multiplicity and makes Creolization a fundamental, energizing feature of his art. He explores the oral tradition and speech rhythms, using a style that oscillates between Creole and English with the aim of ‘transform[ing]’, as he declared, ‘the Queen’s English’. Walcott’s blending of Western and Caribbean literary traditions is no doubt a useful conciliatory gesture that transcends the violence and inhumanity of the Middle Passage. It also entails a form of subversive agency, in the sense that the stylistic and cultural hybridity promoted by Walcott is openly claimed as a means of unsettling both colonial and postcolonial assumptions of racial supremacy and cultural purity. A ‘mulatto of style’, as he defines himself, Walcott claims to use ‘the Queen’s English’ less to sanctify this language and the culture carried by this idiom than to transform and subvert the English idiom and values. To employ cultural and linguistic hybridizing techniques to transgress the dominant cultural and literary canon, as does Walcott, is surely a significant aesthetic and ideological gesture. However, one may doubt the efficiency of this hybrid aesthetics as an emancipating gesture, especially when this aesthetics is brought to bear upon concrete geopolitical realities where clear-cut binaries and elusive myths of purity still retain all their potency. Another fervent spokesman for mongrelization, Salman Rushdie takes even further Walcott’s reflection 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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on métissage. In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie writes that The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes out of new and unexpected combinations of human being, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the pure. Melange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and that, is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change by co-joining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves. (1991, 394) In a similar vein, Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, and Françoise Lionnet, to name only a few, celebrate hybridity as a practice against essentialism and binary thinking. In Against Race (2000), for example, Gilroy advocates ‘planetary humanism’ and assaults all forms of essentialisms. Lionnet, too, argues against essentialism, seeing hybridity as a crucial aesthetic, ideological, and cultural means of subversion. For her, métissage is a form of ‘bricolage’, a means to ‘think otherwise’, and ‘the site of undecidability and indeterminacy, where solidarity becomes the fundamental principle of political action against hegemonic languages’ (1989, 6). Elsewhere, Lionnet further emphasizes that hybridity sets identities and cultures within ‘non-linear, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical’ relations (1995, 79); dialogical relations in which ‘the global mongrelization or métissage of cultural forms creates complex identities and interrelated, if not overlapping, spaces’ (1995, 7). The dialogism, overlapping, indeterminacy, and sense of newness and subversion which Lionnet takes to be emblematic of hybridity are also central to Edouard Glissant’s conceptualization of cross-cultural encounters in Poetics of Relation, which reveals a manifest Deleuzian inspiration. Like most postcolonial writers and scholars, Glissant indicts binary thinking. Paradoxically, however, the core of his poetics of relations rests on binary modalities; it is articulated on a clear-cut opposition between ‘root identity’ and ‘relation identity’, with the latter being clearly favoured (1997, 143–4). According to Glissant, ‘root identity’ is ‘founded in the distant past in a vision, a myth of the creation of the world; [it] is sanctioned by the hidden violence of a filiation that strictly follows from this founding episode; [it] is ratified by a claim to legitimacy that allows a community to proclaim its entitlement to the possession of a land’ (1997, 143). Conversely, ‘relation identity’ 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


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is defined as being ‘linked not to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures; [it] is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation; [it] does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended’ (1997, 144). Beyond being Manichean, this conceptualization of identity starkly ignores the complexity of both colonial and postcolonial relationships and global articulations of cultural and ideological affiliations. Glissant’s sharp contrasting of ‘root’ and ‘relation’ identity is unconvincing for various reasons: first and foremost, identity, whether collective or individual, is, broadly speaking, both rooted and relational at the same time; that is to say, in practice identity is always rooted in time and space, while being widely informed and determined by the here and now of geopolitics; it is also relational, in that it shapes itself in relation to and, often against, the difference with which it interacts. Glissant’s theory of identity is even more wanting when gauged in the light of imperial encounters and politics. Indeed, if we take a close look at colonial relationships we are quick to realize that within the imperial context cultures and identities – those of both the colonizer and the native – belie this simplistic categorization. For contrary to Glissant’s assumptions, these colonial identities were not fundamentally articulated through the reductive ‘root’ and ‘relation’ dichotomy. Rather, they were founded on multi-layered relationships in which filiation and myths of origins enmesh with dialogical networks that question and constantly redefine these colonial subjectivities. More concretely, the colonizer resorted to myth to claim cultural and racial supremacy in the attempt to legitimize colonization. The colonized peoples, too, mobilized their mythological and imaginary worlds in order to redefine and emancipate themselves from colonial rule. In either case, identities were to be reformulated within an enmeshed network of centripetal and centrifugal forces; forces that generated a complex dynamics of identification, whereby no side had prevalence over the other. The centripetal (filiation/root, and so on) and the centrifugal (alterity, relation, and the like) complement and exist in symbiotic relation with each other. Bluntly put, Glissant romanticizes the ‘relation identity’ to the point of mystification. While highlighting the transformations and creativity occurring in cultural encounters, he insists that the crossfertilizing process in which these cultures are involved turn the latter into unrecognizable entities. Regarding the process of métissage more specifically, Glissant considers this phenomenon as a dynamic agent of history and progress. Above all, he views it as an ideal tool to be 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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brought to bear against intolerance and assumptions of cultural and racial purity. By and large, the bulk of the arguments put forth by Glissant, Walcott, Bhabha, Rushdie, Gilroy, and Lionnet tend to present hybridity not only as a revolutionary politics of identity, but also as a profoundly transformative ethics and aesthetics. This conception of métissage clearly departs from conventional, and, more particularly, from colonial perceptions of hybridity. It is, in short, a conception that is widely inflected, conceptually, ideologically, and politically. In order better to grasp this inflection, if not deflection, it is important once again to consider a wider historical perspective. As we have seen, from the mid-eighteenth century onward the concept of hybridity and its variants (métissage, creolization, mestizaje) became fraught with essentialist and racist connotations. It was associated with racial degeneration and most of the nineteenth-century colonial ideologues and writers warned against social mixing as well as sexual promiscuity with the natives. In ‘Beyond the Pale’, for example, Kipling strongly recommended avoiding social and sexual intercourse with natives: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society and paid for it heavily’ ([1888] 1899, 159). Kipling exhorts the British to remain where they belong in order to avoid racial degeneracy, a central nineteenth-century concern, as we have pointed out, but also a prominent theme in the works of ancient Greek authors, including Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates. Implicit in Kipling’s caveat is a belief in racial and cultural purity, the preservation of which demands a strict adherence to the empire’s ideology and codes of conduct. Through this insistence on the dangers of mixing with the natives Kipling in ‘Beyond the Pale’ especially reflects the colonizers’ pervasive fear of miscegenation. Owing to this lingering anxiety social and sexual relationships with the indigenous peoples were strongly discouraged. When mixed marriages or relationships took place they were usually dismissed as the disreputable actions of marginal characters bringing shame onto their race. This was, of course, not always the case, since many people who would have been considered highly respectable, including political officials, were also involved in concubinage with native and half-caste women. This said, within the colonial cultural context – promoting the reproduction of the same in the face of threats by the Other – it comes as no surprise that hybridity should have been considered a threat, if not a monstrosity. In the colonial contexts of the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


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nineteenth century described by Kipling and other authors of the period, hybrid characters were objects of apprehension and contempt. Such was precisely the situation of Nina in Joseph Conrad’s novel, Almayer’s Folly. A mixed-race character, born to a Dutch father and Malay mother, Nina is the subject of nineteenth-century colonial racial hatred, as is reflected in the attitude toward Nina taken by a young Dutch officer. Although physically attracted to Nina on their first meeting, the Dutch officer finally discards her on the grounds that she is ‘after all a half-caste girl’ ([1895] 1976, 103). Here, the Dutch officer’s desire for Nina is seen to be constrained by the colonial race politics which casts biological hybridity as a threat to social order and racial purity. In a sense, both in this specific case and in the passages above from Kipling, the issue of hybridity is as closely connected to race and racism, as it is linked to social and political marginalization. Historical evidence shows that contempt and hatred for hybrid people remained a consistent pattern of nineteenth-century colonial ideology. This pattern persisted in various guises into the twentieth and even into the twenty-first centuries. Yet, in contemporary postcolonial discussions of hybridity the issue of race and racism has been undermined; so, too, are the histories of colonial genocides and exploitation of nonEuropean societies. Also excised from postcolonial conceptualizations of hybridity are the historical manipulations of hybridity discourse intended to uphold hegemonic imperial power structures. This has been demonstrated in the discussion of the responses of the Ptolemies and Alexander the Great to métissage in the first part of this book. None of the key postcolonial scholars and authors mentioned earlier (Bhabha, Rushdie, Gilroy, Glissant, and Lionnet) heeded these crucial aspects of hybridity discourse prominent in ancient times and recurrent throughout Western colonial history. The postcolonial scholars’ privileging of the synchronic over the diachronic may be part of the explanation. With regard to race politics in particular, postcolonial hybridity discourse has simply evacuated this vexed question. In adopting the nineteenth-century concept of hybridity, the postcolonial promoters of the third space readily abstracted hybridity discourse from its earlier racist biases and thus turned it into a sanitized trope. Their selective approach to hybridity involves a clearly rehabilitative discursive gesture; one that sounds paradoxical in a discipline whose ambition is to contest and dismantle the myths of purity. For, in the end, by purging the concept of hybridity of its previous racist content, Bhabha, Rushdie, Glissant, and Lionnet among others seem to succumb to the very assumptions of purity that they intend to break down. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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By and large, in de-racializing the concept of hybridity Bhabha, Rushdie, Glissant, and Lionnet reinstate it as, essentially, a positive, emancipating agency. In their contention, hybridity, purged of its historical, ideological, and political denseness, is geared towards collapsing hegemonic power structures, essentialism, aesthetic and generic boundaries, and binary thinking. Such questioning of essentialism and binary thinking is induced by postmodernism’s suspicion of grand narratives of history and representation. Broadly speaking, the postmodern celebration of the ambivalent, the multiple, the fluid, the open-ended, and the shifting has become a predominant intellectual and interpretative paradigm in postcolonial discussions of culture and identities. This very ambivalence or indeterminacy, embodied by the notion of hybridity, alongside the theoretical vagueness and ‘elasticity’ of the concept itself, is certainly what makes this concept so appealing to many scholars in postcolonial studies and the humanities at large. As we shall see, the same vagueness and elastic uses of the term hybridity are, on the other hand, sources of criticism and discontent. An adept of Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, Robert Young is one of a number of scholars who have discussed most enthusiastically and effusively the ambivalence of hybridity. He glosses this concept in the following terms: ‘Hybridity once again works simultaneously in two ways: “organically”, hegemonizing, creating new spaces, structures, scenes, and “intentionally”, diasporizing, intervening as a form of subversion, translation, transformation’ (1995, 25). Young, here, recycles and adapts Bakhtin’s notion of ‘organic’ and ‘intentional’ hybridity to emphasize the double consciousness entailed in the process of hybridization. He also rehearses Bhabha’s views of hybridity as a vehicle of subversion, translation, and transformation, without, however, telling us how this transformative potential of hybridity translates into concrete geopolitical terms. Basically, Young’s overall discussion of hybridity is reductively synchronic, set in a time-span that does not extend beyond the nineteenth century. On the following page, Young further stresses hybridity’s capacity to undo binary representations and blur cultural and racial outlines, arguing: ‘Hybridity thus makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different’ (1995, 26). Young concludes on this premise that in terms of race and bio-politics, an overlooked issue in postcolonial studies, hybridity creates a ‘raceless chaos’ (1995, 25), whereby the very notion of essence or purity is made irrelevant. To speak of hybridity as being ambivalent is, from a linguistic or semiotic standpoint, something of a truism. Most tropes, including hybridity, are 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


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semantically and epistemologically ambivalent, just as the linguistic idiom in which these tropes are conveyed is essentially ambivalent. As such, ambivalence is anything but exceptional; it is constitutive of language (as one language effect within a large linguistic paradigm) and, one may add, it is part and parcel of humankind’s existence. In view of its striking ubiquity, ambivalence is thus neither a virtue to be celebrated nor an anomaly to be feared and shunned. Nevertheless, knowing that language and ideology are intricately connected, the ambivalence of hybridity, which is our main concern here, is underpinned by political and ideological considerations worth investigating. As in most postcolonial scholarship, in Young’s argument, too, the ambivalence of hybridity is underscored in order to contest monolithic notions of race, culture, and identity. At a strictly theoretical level, hybridity’s ambivalence may, to some extent, be credited with a subversive potential. From a pragmatic standpoint, on the other hand, this ambivalence, as will be shortly demonstrated, may turn out to be synonymous with ideological and political disengagement at best, and at worst a sign of complicity with both national and global structures of power and inequality. Despite its theoretical potential for emancipatory politics, therefore, the fact remains that the widespread idea of hybridity as an anti-imperialist agency, promoted by Bhabha and reiterated by Young (1995) and Joseph and Fink (1999) among others, proves highly problematic. One of the main problems with hybridity discourse is precisely that it has been tamed and accommodated not only by neoconservative scholars in the academy but also by global neocolonial structures of power and domination. The numerous limitations highlighted here invite us, then, to take postcolonial hybridity discourse with a pinch of salt. However, notwithstanding my various reservations about hybridity’s potential for subversion and emancipation, I consider hybridity, as a practice, too fundamental a feature of our civilizations to be undermined or devalued. Additionally, being strongly convinced that métissage in its manifold expressions (cultural, biological, administrative, and technological) is a fundamental agent of development and progress for all civilizations, I cannot but support this immemorial practice. Moreover, because I firmly believe that hybridity could and should be utilized to fight racial hatred and ‘intolerance’; that it can and ought to be used as a means to achieve a race-blind planetary solidarity, I largely endorse the idealistic projections attached to the concept of hybridity. At the same time, being aware of the ways in which hybridity discourse has been manipulated across history by hegemonic, coercive, political, ideological, and economic forces presiding over the practice of métissage, I cannot share 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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in the widespread postcolonial enthusiasm about hybridity’s capacity for transgression and emancipation. Nor can I, for similar reasons, sanction the assumption that the sphere of in-betweenness in which hybridity presumably operates is completely free of binary thinking and essentialism. What I find most alarming is the historical myopia characterizing contemporary theorizations of the issue of hybridity; that is to say the fact that postcolonial theorists of métissage adopt a critical perspective exclusively cast in a synchronic dimension that does not transcend (post)modernity. Having addressed this question at some length in the first section of this book, I will not indulge further in the topic. I will simply add that this historic myopia constitutes a serious theoretical and empirical flaw that can be held largely responsible for much of the vagueness and mystification plaguing the contemporary discourse of hybridity. This myopia clearly prevents postcolonial scholars from developing a broad, holistic historical perspective that would resituate the complexity and multi-layered nature of the discourse and politics of métissage on which postcolonial studies is focused. A close consideration of the diachronic dimension of métissage is indispensable both theoretically and empirically, if postcolonial criticism is to be updated and reinvigorated. My contention is that without a thorough diachronic or wide-ranging historical approach any theory of hybridity may turn out to be incomplete, if not truncated. Sadly, both incompleteness and mystification are key features of contemporary theorizations of hybridity.


5 Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space

Critics of hybridity theory in academia range widely and can be schematically divided into three distinct categories. The first category includes scholars who completely reject hybridity discourse, deeming it entirely useless. This type of criticism usually consists in denying that the theory of hybridity has any conceptual value, albeit without providing substantiated, convincingly argued claims. The second category comprises scholars who adopt an intermediate critical position which broadly approves of hybridity discourse, but who nonetheless occasionally embark on mild criticism of this discourse, albeit without profoundly questioning its conceptual and empirical potential. This intermediate critical approach is useful, in a way, but also limited, as it tends to maintain the theoretical and ideological status quo. The third category consists of scholars who are bitterly critical of both the identity and ideological orientations of postcolonial studies. This somewhat radical critical trend usefully draws attention to shortcomings within the theory of hybridity by confronting hybridity theory with the material context which it often eludes. This type of criticism can be seen as productive, in the sense that it creates a dialogical space whereby a constructive discussion of the identity and role of postcolonial hybridity theory can take place. Generally speaking, the insights provided by this trend of criticism are worthwhile, although there are limitations here too. One of the main failings of this critical trend lies in its propensity to highlight flaws in postcolonial scholarship without suggesting concrete ways in which to remedy the detected inadequacies or offering new theoretical directions through which to reinvigorate debates on hybridity. This deficiency is widely discernable in most postcolonial scholarship, notably in that which stresses the uselessness and ‘banality’ of the concept of hybridity itself. 105


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After protesting that cultural hybridity is merely a ‘banality’ in cultural theory, Schirmer et al., for example, go on to argue that the fact that this concept of hybridity has been ‘used in heterogeneous ways’ in postcolonial and cultural studies leads us ‘to doubt its usefulness’ (2006, 16). They further question the utility of the notion of hybridity, which they see as ‘no more than old wine in a new bottle’ (2006, 37). Nederveen is even more radical in his rejection of hybridity theory which he dismisses as sheer ‘non-sense’, at best (2001, 221). These critiques are no doubt legitimate, although they seem too extreme to be taken at face value. Generally, to consider a specific concept banal or worthless, as do Schirmer and Nederveen, is problematic and unlikely to be either theoretically or empirically productive. In brief, this sort of criticism has little conceptual and empirical significance, being, as it is, based not on thorough, context-based examinations, but on simplistic value judgements. Besides, to dismiss a concept as ‘non-sense’ or ‘useless’ very much depends on the speaker’s standpoint and ideological orientation. In absolute terms, such rebuttal can be proffered on any concept or idea that one does not find to one’s liking. This said, with respect to sense or lack thereof, many postcolonial discussions of hybridity certainly fail to spell out clearly the sense of their arguments. The reason for their diffused obscurity is two-fold: in addition to being riddled with opaque jargon1 randomly and indiscriminately applied to all types of situations and issues, postcolonial approaches to hybridity and the third space are usually insufficiently contextualized, if not completely decontextualized. Moreover, for the most part these approaches are historically limited, often confined to the here and now of diaspora and the postmodern condition which is made paradigmatic of the condition of humankind. Further still, both politically and ideologically, postcolonial conceptualizations of hybridity are indeterminate, open-ended to the extent that their agency can be employed in the service of hegemonic power structures as well as anti-hegemonic modalities. The immediate effect of this characteristic indeterminacy casts the field of postcolonialism and the postcolonial practitioner in what I call a state of theoretical and ideological schizophrenia, whereby the thing and its opposite can simultaneously be expressed and assigned almost equal epistemological, ideological, and ethical value. This postcolonial schizophrenic orientation is expressly rendered in Young’s comment, cited earlier, in which the ambivalence of hybridity, rather than being subjected to a close critical scrutiny, is praised and celebrated for its own sake.2 The various theoretical and empirical inadequacies outlined above profoundly weaken the analytical, ethical, and epistemological potential 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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of hybridity theory. As a result of its conceptual weakness and catch-phrase status, hybridity discourse has become a reductive, ‘normative’, and normalizing epistemology whose critical potential is blunted. Normative, for in promoting a universal mode of being and meaning this discourse tends to flatten out the very multiplicity it celebrates. Dirlik’s observation is illuminating in this respect: ‘Africa, Caribbean, Southeast Asian literatures come from different places with different histories, and not merely different from France, but different from each other […] It is this real sort of difference that disappears in Postcolonial Studies’ (1997, ix). One may add that the literatures and cultures of New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and the USA, too, are often lumped together within the ‘postcolonial’ category with minimal, if any qualification regarding their postcolonial status. We see from the examples above the ways in which postcolonial discourse turns out to be a totalizing discursive practice. It tends to subsume distinct, multiple literary and cultural traditions under one universal descriptive paradigm. Rather than being assessed in its cultural, social, and political concreteness and diversity, ‘difference’ is thus removed from its context and treated simply as an abstraction and a generic entity. The fact that in practice hybridity discourse conceives of difference as a monolithic meta-narrative; that it is deeply ‘normative’; that its analytical edge is diminished by its semantic proliferation; that it disregards the material context obviously undermines its critical effectiveness. However, this is no reason to lead us to believe that the concept of hybridity is absurd and should be readily disposed of. Nor should the ‘elasticity’ or ‘heterogeneous use’ of the concept of hybridity induce us, as Nederveen and others contend, to condemn the whole theory of hybridity as ‘useless’. What is crucially needed instead is that this concept be clarified and restored in its multiple historical, political, economic, conceptual, and ideological manifestations. This necessary rethinking of hybridity discourse from a wider historical, cultural, and ideological perspective is a valuable critical alternative that should help us to redirect postcolonial studies in more productive ways. It constitutes an indispensable theoretical move likely to offer a more elaborate, clearer picture of the multiple agencies and contradictory forces informing hybridity discourse. This alternative prospect is essentially diachronic: it casts the concept of hybridity in a broad spectrum that both embraces the remote past and remains attentive to the immediate global present. While this wide-ranging historical approach should enable us to seize hybridity’s multi-layered dimension, it might, by the same token, allow us better to measure this theory’s conceptual and 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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empirical potential as well as its limitations. Above all, this profound rethinking of the concept of hybridity must steer us away from the angelic hybridism predominant in postcolonial scholarship to a more sober, realistic, and historically grounded conception of hybridity. To elaborate on the inadequacies of postcolonial theorizations of hybridity, the following argument concentrates on what is usually referred to as the anti-hybridity ‘backlash’. This is not an exhaustive study, but a critical engagement with some of the key recurrent critiques arrayed against contemporary approaches to hybridity over the last two decades or so. Let me start this discussion by scrutinizing the views of the Marxist scholar Aijaz Ahmad, one of the earliest and most vituperative critics of Bhabha’s theory of hybridity in particular and postcolonial criticism at large. Ahmad blames postcolonial scholars, specifically Bhabha, for developing a theory of postcoloniality that is completely disconnected from the material colonial context and post-independence realities of the former colonies. This is no doubt a serious discrepancy, since colonialism and post-independence are after all what postcolonialism is supposed to focus on in the first place. Ahmad writes: ‘Between postcoloniality as it exists in a former colony like India, and postcoloniality as the condition of discourse by such critics as Bhabha, there would appear to be a considerable gap’ (1995, 10). Ahmad is right in highlighting the postcolonial scholars’ detachment from the concrete daily preoccupations of millions of peoples in the former colonies. We may even state that in the postcolonial discourse on hybridity and, more specifically, in its emphasis on diaspora as its very embodiment, looms a strategy of displacement, if not usurpation. More concretely, migrant postcolonial practitioners promote a diaspora-centric narrative of culture and identity that appears to function as a metonymy for the global postcolonial condition. In a sense, this minor narrative of diasporic identification turns out to be hegemonic and totalizing. Rather than being conceived mainly as one entity within a larger global postcolonial condition the diaspora has simply become the part that stands for the whole, that is, the former colonial societies. In the light of this process of displacement, it is fair to be suspicious about hybridity discourse’s claim to subversion and counter hegemony. It is just as legitimate to doubt the postcolonial ambition to dismantle the colonial centre-periphery mode of organization and thinking. With respect to binary thinking specifically, these doubts are all the more justified as postcolonial discourse is far from collapsing binarism as it proclaims. Rather, in practice postcolonial theorists simply tend to frame a new centre-periphery binary by 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


privileging diaspora-centric narratives of culture and identity. Within this new configuration of postcolonial relationships the diaspora narratives, whose locus of enunciation is located in Western academic or elite circles, occupy the centre, whereas the narratives of the former colonies are either silenced or marginalized. In other words, the cultures and arts of the diaspora are given pride of place in postcolonial studies and academic debates, while the former colonies’ cultures, languages, and texts receive little, if any consideration. Karin Barber, a specialist in Yoruba popular culture, offers a critique of postcolonial criticism that is particularly enlightening in this respect. She notes that postcolonial criticism has promoted a binarized, generalized model of the world which has the effect of eliminating African-language expression from view […] Despite intermittent claims to specificity, this model blocks a properly historical, localized understanding of any scene of colonial and post-Independence literary production in Africa. Instead it selects and overemphasizes one sliver of literary and cultural production – written literature in the English language – and treats this as all there is, representative of a whole culture or even a whole global ‘colonial experience’. (1995, 3) Barber’s reproach is aimed at postcolonial practitioners who focus on and canonize postcolonial writers in English to the detriment of those working in African and Asian vernaculars as well as in French, Spanish, and Portuguese.3 She justly draws attention to these exclusionary practices, bringing to light the discrepancies evidenced in the ideological choices and critical methodologies of postcolonial practitioners. From this standpoint, postcolonial studies turns out to be a partisan discipline that imposes a hegemonic Anglophone canon, instead of democratically establishing a wide-ranging, more inclusive translinguistic and transnational literary postcolonial canon. It is also worth adding that it is not only the non-diasporic African or Asian arts and vernacular texts that are absent from postcolonial studies. Almost the entire body of knowledge and scholarship on both colonialism and post-independence politics produced in the former colonies is also missing. Noteworthy in this respect is that this negation of non-Western scholarship within postcolonial doxa ironically looks like a neocolonial impulse. It is as though the Western and migrant postcolonial scholars based in Western academies had nothing to learn from the African or Asian scholars 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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writing from and about their original countries. This indifference to non-European scholarship, reflected in the dearth of non-Western works in Occidental university libraries, may not be a mere accident or simply due to lack of funds. There is a deliberateness about this disregard for non-Western scholarship that partakes of the politics of denegation of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian knowledge and narratives of progress discussed earlier. As such, these erasures may be viewed as symptoms of a neocolonial mentality predicated on a Eurocentric belief that the natives are (still) not viable agents of knowledge and scientific reasoning. Postcolonial criticism, consciously or not, is certainly complicit with this institutional neocolonial mentality, if only because it does not openly reject it. It is just as accountable for having overlooked the material geopolitical contexts of the former colonies. In this respect, Ahmad accuses migrant postcolonial critics of betraying the very postcolonial realities they were intended to serve. In his diatribe, Ahmad clearly dismisses postcolonial theorists as free-floating, detached from the global postcolonial condition with which they are supposed to involve themselves. In the process, he strongly indicts these theorists for not living up to their critical role and to the resistive agency they are supposed to embody. Furthermore, in stressing the privileged status of migrant postcolonial practitioners, Ahmad argues that these scholars have not only greatly benefited from postcoloniality, but are also accomplices and beneficiaries of colonialism: ‘Those who came as students and then joined the faculties, especially in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, tended to come from upper classes in their home countries. In the process of relocating themselves in the metropolitan countries, they needed documents of their assertion, proof that they had always been oppressed’ (Ahmad 1992, 196). Arif Dirlik’s critique follows a similar vein. He, too, criticizes migrant postcolonial intellectuals for their privileged position, lack of real engagement with the postcoloniality of the former colonies, and abdication of their critical role. Ultimately, he insists that the postcolonial practitioners ‘are not so much victims as beneficiaries’ of both colonialism and neocolonialism (1997, 74). To extend Ahmad and Dirlik’s observations, we might point out that migrant postcolonial practitioners did not only have to represent themselves as victims of colonialism, but had also to stress that they were hybrid colonial products for both narcissistic and ideological reasons. There is a sense that in presenting themselves as colonialism’s victims postcolonial migrant scholars expect to be acknowledged as authentically indigenous and thus a living proof of postcoloniality; a postcoloniality 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


that is located at the heart of the former empires, with narratives of migration and deterritorialization as its most eloquent expressions. In other words, by promoting hybridity theory Third World postcolonial scholars hoped to be accepted as equal cultural and epistemic agents of knowledge; a privilege that colonialism massively denied to the colonized. In this, hybridity theory reads as a kind of writing back or mediated dialogue between the postcolonial migrant intellectual and the former colonizing nations. By laying emphasis on their hybridity the postcolonial migrant scholars wished to be recognized as genuine traitsd’union between the former colonies and former Western colonial powers. Most importantly, in emphasizing their colonial cultural hybridity these scholars wanted – most of all – to have their theory of postcolonial hybridity legitimized and credited by the Western institutions into which they integrated. It is evident that most migrant scholars are, in one way or another, hybrid (post)colonial subjects; Spivak herself openly acknowledges that she and migrant postcolonial academics more generally are themselves part of the imperial culture.4 Many other critics, including Ahmad, Dirlik, and Neil Larsen, have also underlined the bourgeois and upper class extraction of many Third World postcolonial practitioners. In colonial times as was commonly acknowledged, these classes closely collaborated in and benefited from imperial rule. Historical evidence shows, indeed, that the native elite groups to which most migrant postcolonial intellectuals belong were privileged conduits of colonial hybridity and beneficiaries of colonialism. They profited from the empire’s largesse and made their colonial bread and butter through mixed alliances with the colonizers. Similarly, owing to their class origin and professional ‘opportunism’ the migrant postcolonial scholars have marketed the discourse of hybridity and their emigrant condition into what Ahmad calls ‘an opportunistic kind of Third Worldism’ (1992, 86). That postcolonial scholars such as Bhabha, Rushdie, Gilroy, Glissant, and Lionnet discussed earlier have efficiently marketed the tropes of migrancy, exile, and deterritorialization to achieve professional and social goals is undeniable, and hardly surprising. Furthermore, the fact that these scholars made these tropes into the linchpin of the postcolonial condition also comes as no surprise. Similarly unsurprising is the fact that these scholars should readily promote hybridity in their works and elevate it into a universal mode of being and meaning. In their projection of hybridity into a universal experience and ideal, there is also, one may say, the migrant scholars’ projection of their own cultural and sometimes biological hybridity into a universal human norm. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Ahmad and Dirlik, as we have seen, spelled out a critique of postcolonial theory that usefully draws attention to the postcolonial scholars’ detachment from the concrete global postcolonial condition. This critique is, no doubt, timely and essential in the sense that it revolves around the very raison d’être and identity of postcolonial studies as a discipline. It is also fundamental in that it relates to the role of postcolonial scholars as both educators and as cultural and political critics of the multicultural societies in which they live. Yet, so far the views of Ahmad, Dirlik, and Larsen on the elitism of postcolonial scholars or on the connections between hybridity and universalism, for example, have neither been closely scrutinized, nor examined within a wider historical and ideological perspective. Such a historical perspective is – once again – extremely useful, for it enables us to set in fruitful dialogue our own contemporary discussions of hybridity with the ancient perceptions of this phenomenon. The migrant postcolonial scholars’ projection of hybridity into a universal ideal is, as Dirlik and Ahmad fail to see, not typically modern or postcolonial but a historical commonplace. As such, the contemporary emphasis on the universalist vocation of hybridity proves more teleological than radical or ‘revolutionary’, as many postcolonial scholars would have us believe. The views of Napoleon Bonaparte are illuminating in this respect. After his conquest of Egypt (1789–1801), Napoleon conspicuously expressed his desire to connect East and West; he was projecting the construction of a hybrid universal civilization in which Eastern wisdom would be productively blended with Western cerebration. Further back in history, Alexander the Great, who was Napoleon’s model and the inspiration behind the idea of fusing the civilizations of East and West, had, following the conquest of Persia clearly enunciated hybridity as a universal project. As shown in the first part of this book, Alexander the Great projected his expanding empire as a multi-racial, hybrid realm in which aristocrats of both sides would build an ideal, superior hybridized civilization. In this light, postcolonial scholars, who today stress hybridity’s universalist vocation, can be seen to a large extent as continuers of ancient colonial conceptions of hybridity promoted by two of the greatest imperial conquerors in history: Alexander the Great and Napoleon. And considering that these two conquerors used hybridity mostly as strategic designs for the domination of non-Europeans, there is good reason to suspect, too, that the fervour surrounding the contemporary discourse of hybridity might equally be sustained by dubious pragmatic, cultural, political, and ideological goals that are just as hegemonic. The examples provided above illustrate the extent to which the enthusiasm for hybridity, manifest in postcolonial scholarship, has 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


been an elite preoccupation throughout history. As shown in Chapter 1, in fifth and fourth-century BC Athens, for instance, the promoters and consumers of hybridity were mostly from the Athenian elite. In today’s world, too, although hybridity in its various shades is a commodity daily consumed by many people, the fact remains that it is mostly the elite who gloss and promote hybridity. Despite the prominence of hybridity talk in the humanities and economic and political circles, hybridity, as Anjali Prabhu rightly observes, ‘is not everywhere. It is only the elite who can afford to talk about hybridity […] It applies more to metropolitan elite émigrés and far less to migrant diasporas and even less to those who have “stayed behind” in the (ex)colony’ (2007, 12). It is evident that hybridity discourse in its actual articulation is almost exclusively produced and championed by a Third World elite in a global academia. We know practically nothing of the thoughts of the immigrant masses or their responses to hybridity discourse; neither do we know much about what these masses think of the diaspora or migrant condition as articulated by Rushdie, Bhabha, and their peers. Similarly, we are in the dark as to how hybridity is perceived in the former colonies. The response of the non-elite colonized mass to the colonial and elite practice of hybridity certainly deserves an in-depth study. As there is not, here, sufficient space to address this question in detail, I can simply offer a few examples to illustrate this point. As a reminder, the colonial politics of assimilation, as articulated and practised in French and other European colonies, was a strategy of domination and control; one of its aims was to detach the indigenous elite from the non-elite indigenous majority, better to subjugate the natives. In short, the colonized elite, who had been induced by the colonizers to join the imperial enterprise, actively participated in the colonial project of hybridization or policies of assimilation, in the process gaining social, economic, and political privileges.5 The colonial masses were not explicitly invited to assimilate in the way the elite were, neither, it would seem, did they wish completely to turn Western and thus lose their cultural and religious roots. There is evidence that in most of the former colonies the colonized mass resisted colonial policies of assimilation, especially those inducing them to forsake their religions and languages. In Algeria, for instance, the French project of assimilation explicitly urged Algerian Muslims to renounce their Islamic faith in order to become French citizens. The Senatus Consulte of 14 July 1865 stipulated that the privilege of French citizenship and the rights it conferred were conditional on the indigenous populations’ renunciation of their personal Islamic status. Not surprisingly, the majority of Algerians were reluctant to relinquish what 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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they regarded as a key component of their collective identity. This reluctance is evidenced by the minuscule number of Algerian Muslims who agreed to give up their Muslim faith and become French citizens.6 Even members of the intellectual Algerian elite such as Ferhat Abbas, who advocated a qualified sense of assimilation, warned that Islam was not to be forsaken; he recommended instead integrating the indigenous population as they were, that is as Muslims, into French citizenship. In his caveat, Abbas remarked that it was inconceivable for Algerians to forsake their Islamic status, for such a step was equivalent to betrayal, if not apostasy.7 The Algerian population’s resistance to French assimilation policies was also conveyed in the refusal by parents to send their children to French colonial schools, especially in the early years of colonization.8 To take another example from the French colonial world, the Amerindians in Canada were also unwilling to adopt the colonizers’ language and ways of life, despite the eagerness and religious zeal of the colonial ideologues, more particularly the Jesuits, in the project of uprooting the Amerindians from their languages, customs, and religions. This Amerindian resistance to the French ideology of assimilation is best exemplified by native responses to the French educational project imposed on the tribes. Amerindian children were massively recalcitrant in regard to the attempt to enforce a colonial education on them; they deserted the schools with such speed and in such numbers that even Minister Colbert who tried to reactivate the ‘programme de francisation’ in 1668 finally came to the hopeless conclusion that it was ‘impossible’ to ‘civilize’ and ‘Frenchify’ these ‘savages’. This said, despite the resistance of indigenous populations to imperial policies of assimilation, in Canada, Algeria, and other colonies the colonized mass was unconsciously implicated in the hybridizing process that was the inevitable result of these imperial encounters. In Algeria, for instance, the incorporation of numerous French words into popular Arabic and Berber dialects indicates how far the non-elite colonized, too, were selfreflexively absorbing the culture that they were apparently resisting. Such a self-reflexive, unconscious absorption of the imperial material cultures by the non-elite colonized entails the idea of colonial métissage as an all-encompassing mode of acculturation overwhelming all sections of colonial societies. In a sense, the colonial ideology’s insidious power of penetration, largely the result of the broader imperial politics of assimilation, is a clear indication that imperial strategic hybridism was an extremely valuable weapon for subjugating the indigenous peoples. It was too subtle and slippery to be easily countered or demystified by 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


either the elite or non-elite colonized. With respect to the non-elite native populations in particular we may further argue that, broadly, colonial strategic hybridism, crystallized in the policies of assimilation, must have appeared as fate, just as in some of the former colonies colonialism itself was perceived in similar pessimistic, fatalistic terms. Indeed, in several parts of the colonized Muslim world European colonialism was seen as both fate and retribution; it was interpreted as the Almighty’s punishment of his subjects for having diverted from the path of probity and truth.9 Similarly, in the Americas the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas regarded the European colonizers as a scourge inflicted on them by their angry gods (Ramírez 1996). If evidence of non-elite attitudes towards the colonial project of assimilation or métissage is scant, non-elite responses to hybridity in contemporary discourses are entirely absent from academic discussions. This absence is hardly surprising, considering that today’s debates on hybridity are mostly taken in charge by elites who are addressing other elites. As a result of these missing links in postcolonial debates, hybridity discourse is more fittingly conceptualized as a minor narrative with a hegemonic status and reach. Minor because it is produced by a migrant elite living in the West. Hegemonic because, first, this diaspora-centred narrative of postcoloniality narrates the condition of the diaspora as if it were emblematic of the global postcolonial condition; and second, it marginalizes or excludes vernacular and non-Anglophone literatures and scholarship published in the non-Western world. The question of the identity and the critical role of postcolonial studies, saliently raised by Ahmad, Dirlik, and Barber, is also central to many other critics, among them Benita Parry (2004), Talal Asad (1993), Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994), and Marwan Kraidy (2005). In addition to frequent criticism for its slavish dependence on postmodernist conceptions of culture and identity, postcolonial studies has also often been indicted for privileging linguistic perspectives over materialist approaches. In ‘Signs of Our Time’, in which she discusses The Location of Culture, Benita Parry protests that Bhabha’s study constitutes ‘a strong articulation of the linguistic turn in cultural studies, distinguished by [his] recourse to Lacanian theories and hence foregrounding the instabilities of enunciation’ (2002, 243). Parry further inveighs against Bhabha’s semiotic absolutism, or what she calls the ‘autarchy of the signifier’ and strongly questions his assumption that ‘the generation of meaning [is] located in the enunciative act, and not in the substance of the narrated event’ (2002, 230). In Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004), Parry reiterates her indictment of the linguistic turn predominant in the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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postcolonial field. In this insightful and audacious study of colonialism and postcolonial theory, Parry concentrates on colonialism’s sociomaterial conditions and vigorously criticizes postcolonial theorists for reducing colonialism to a mere textual and cultural event. As she highlights the violence and imbalance of colonial encounters, she urges the critics to evolve towards a more materialist critique that connects imperialism’s epistemic violence and material aggression. The core of Parry’s critique in this book centres on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of empire (2000) and Homi Bhabha’s ‘middleground’ theory (Bhabha 1994). While acknowledging Hardt and Negri’s distance from the current consensual ideology and commitment to a world beyond capitalism, Parry deplores their preference for cultural explanations of colonialism over economic and political explanations. She further laments the book’s conceptual promiscuity and subordination of class to ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In the process, she criticizes the authors’ theoretical aversion to nation-based struggles which merely replicates the postcolonial scholars’ contempt for all forms of nationalism, including the nationalism that resists the neoliberal and neocolonial structures of domination. Parry underlines similar theoretical inadequacies and contempt for nationalism in Bhabha’s writings. She convincingly identifies the limits of his psycho-linguistic approach to colonialism and contests his view of colonial encounters as fundamentally transactional and agonistic. Bhabha’s conceptualization of colonial as well as postcolonial cultures and identities is manifestly dependent on linguistic and Lacanian theories of signification and subjectivity to the point of mystification. For the most part, Bhabha treats culture, identity, and social contingencies as semiotic occurrences scrupulously abstracted from the material conditions from which they emerged (see Callinicos 1989, 111). In the end, his characteristic psycho-semiotic approach makes both culture and identity appear as de-substantiated entities whose realities and meaning are defined as being merely linguistic or enunciative. If the cultural and linguistic orientation predominant in postcolonial scholarship has been bitterly criticized, so, too, the popular spatial metaphor of the third space, defined by Bhabha as the site of enunciation of hybridity, has elicited some unfavourable criticism. In their recent edited collection, Communicating in the Third Space, Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner offer a wide-ranging critical assessment of the concept of the third space. As they remind us of the popularity of this concept in postcolonial studies and in the humanities at large, the editors state that their volume’s aim is ‘to launch a critical debate on both [the concept of the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


third space’s]: theoretical premises as well as its empirical implications’ (2009, 2). Equally conscious of the theoretical and epistemological obscurity of the concept of the third space, Ikas and Wagner consider it central to ‘clarif[y] Bhabha’s theory by reconstructing its logical, philosophical, psychological, sociological, geographical, and – not to forget – political meaning’ (2009, 2). Judging from the vagueness with which the term ‘third space’ is imbued, it is, indeed, no mean feat to attempt to clarify this concept. And some authors of this collection spent the entire space devoted to them trying to do just that. Robert Young, in particular, elaborated extensively on the meaning of this spatial trope, reaching the conclusion that the third space, as intended by Bhabha, is in fact not a space in any geographical sense, but a ‘site’: ‘The third space is not a space, nor is it a place. If anything, it is a site […] It is more like a shifting caravan site, a place where people come unobserved and where they go without trace’ (2009, 81–2). As he reiterates much of Bhabha’s own conceptualization of the third space, Young attempts to invest the concept with some concrete foundations. His effort of clarification remains nonetheless very limited, if not vain. After a steady paraphrasing of Bhabha’s ethics of hybridity and the third space, he soon retreats behind the postmodern/postcolonial pale, to narratives of migrancy, fluidity, and multiplicity, as well as to well-trodden linguistic considerations, in a last ditch attempt invoking Emile Benveniste: The third space, above all, is the site of enunciation, the instance of every utterance, and, at the point of the tongue, the fall into language. Its theoretical origins begin from Emile Benveniste, whose course on general linguistics represents the hidden, forgotten site from which much poststructuralism was constructed. For Benveniste the pronoun has become a third space. (2009, 82) It is interesting to note how Young’s clarifying endeavour becomes trapped within the postmodern/postcolonial moment with its characteristic fuzziness and hegemonic culturalist and linguistic abstractions.10 Despite its ambition, the whole effort fails to extend its reflection to that material globality which patently contradicts Young’s idealized, phantasmagoric projections of spatiality. One of these inconsistencies lies precisely in the fact that the third space, as we shall shortly see, is co-opted by the hegemonic global power structures; structures which ironically exert their control of the world order from the third space of both enunciation and concrete geopolitics. That Young should not 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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discuss the concept of the third space in the light of the tangible global geopolitics determining every discourse may be understandable, given his exclusively linguistic and culturalist orientation. What remains surprising is the realization that the other contributors to the volume did not deliver the radical theoretical and empirical critique of the third space promised by the editors. Like Bhabha, they, too, adopt mostly a culturalist approach, falling short of providing the reader with graspable, concrete, sufficiently contextualized findings. The lack of concreteness is crystallized in the absence of discussions of the third space in relation to material globality;11 a fact that weakens the volume’s methodological and critical approach. For this and other substantial reasons Communicating in the Third Space did not live up to the editors’ declared ambition. Its overall intellectual undertaking is fraught with conceptual and empirical inadequacies; it especially reveals a striking absence of contextualization and deep engagement with the global geopolitical condition that determines the very concepts we use. Since these concepts, including hybridity and the third space, are highly informed and conditioned by global geopolitics, their deep significance can only be properly grasped by taking into consideration this materialist context; a context encompassing the political, ideological, and economic forces as well as the global power relationships which preside over the definition and construction of cultures and geopolitical representations. Absence of contextualization and a marked disengagement from global neocolonial power structures, highlighted with reference to Communicating in the Third Space, are regretfully central features of postcolonial scholarship. The cultural turn within the humanities at large and in postcolonial theory in particular is partly responsible for this postcolonial disengagement from salient global economic, political, and social issues. It has obviously facilitated the postcolonial scholars’ retreat into abstract, mostly psychoanalytic and linguistic discussions of cultural difference and social communication. Keya Ganguly aptly remarks how postcolonial theory is ‘locked in an endless embrace of ideals of difference, deferral, and constitutive paraphrasis that inform hybrid readings in the literature about hybridity, liminality, mimicry, and so on’ (quoted by Krishna 2009, 111). As we have pointed up previously, the term ‘postcolonial’ itself was tamed and purged of any significant critical agency from the moment it was introduced into academic discourse and curricula in the 1980s. To add to this, the cultural turn predominant in postcolonial studies has made this field of scholarship even more blunted and dramatically inflected its ideological and political orientation. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Ella Shohat notes in this respect that the American English departments into which she integrated ‘had been loath to seriously engage the imperial colonial underpinnings of so-called aesthetic disciplines, such as English literature, and they found in the expansive yet milquetoast idea of the “postcolonial”, as articulated in The Empire Writes Back, a way to remain conservative while appearing progressive’. Relating her own experience at CUNY, Ella Shohat states: My recent experience [...] at one of the CUNY branches illustrates some of the ambiguities […] the generally conservative members of the college curriculum committee strongly resisted any language invoking issues such as ‘imperialism and Third Worldist critique’, ‘neocolonialism and resisting cultural practices’, and the ‘geopolitics of cultural exchange’. They were visibly relieved, however, at the sight of the word postcolonial. Only the diplomatic gesture of relinquishing the terrorizing terms imperialism and neocolonialism in favor of the pastoral postcolonialism granted approval. (Quoted by Krishna 2009, 107) This example reinforces the view that academia was, and still is, widely informed by a neocolonial ethos. In particular, academic inquiry into both colonialism and neocolonialism remains embedded in the mental cartographies and legacies of colonialism itself. Specifically, the colonial desire to discipline and control the colonized Other has been manifest in the institutional management of the (post)colonial idea from its very introduction into the curriculum. Shohat aptly illustrates this neocolonial mentality by showing how in her institution the word ‘postcolonialism’ was readily preferred to the more engaging terms ‘neocolonial’ or ‘Third Worldist perspectives’. With this consideration in mind, the choice of the de-historicized, de-politicized, and sanitized term ‘postcolonialism’ in the end sounds like a strategy of domestication premised on ideological conservatism and totalizing impulses. Since the emergence of the cultural turn, postcolonial discourse, which is usually presented as a counter-hegemonic avant-garde, has thus turned into a flat, normalized epistemic and ideological space. Furthermore, the strategy of surveillance and containment that presided over the word ‘postcolonialism’ from its very incipience has had the disabling effect of blunting the concept’s critical edge. Blunted and depoliticized, the term ‘postcolonialism’ could finally be safely consumed by the academic public. This depoliticizing of the concept of ‘postcolonialism’ has greatly contributed to the postcolonial scholars’ 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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soft, conciliatory handling of Orientalism, whose effects persist in today’s globalized world, including within the global academy. In a sense, the cultural turn had a castrating effect on postcolonial scholarship, specifically on hybridity discourse; a discourse whose inability or unwillingness to transcend its psycho-linguistic orientation illustrates postcolonial theory’s impotence as an analytical and critical agency of the material globality. Krishna notes in this respect: The effect of postcolonial scholars’ one-sided concern with the constitution of ‘otherness’/alterity/difference, or with the production of silent subject positions, has been to cause matters of discourse undeniably to take precedence over the material and social conditions prevailing during colonialism and in the post-independence era. The postcolonial shift away from historical processes has meant that discursive or ‘epistemic’ violence has tended to take precedence in analysis over the institutional practices of the violent social system of colonialism. (2009, 111–12) The manifest impotence of postcolonial discourse with regard to material globality is reason for concern. A number of critics, including Ahmad, Dirlik, Parry, and San Juan, have raised the alarm and called on postcolonial scholars to shift from the linguistic and cultural turn to a materialist critique. This theoretical and ideological move would result in the postcolonial scholar giving more attention to the economic, political, and ideological forces determining the much discussed, albeit still theoretically obscure, issue of hybridity. Nevertheless, although the call to transcend psychological, linguistic, and deconstructionist conceptions of culture and subjectivity has been resonant for a few years now, this much criticized psycho-deconstructionist inclination remains predominant in postcolonial studies. Also prevalent in postcolonial scholarship is a manifest neglect of race and class politics, which will be closely examined in the next chapter.


6 Class, Race, and Postcolonial Hybridity Discourse

As a general pattern, studies examining hybridity in the light of class and race politics are scant in postcolonial studies. Besides, the few works dealing with the issues of class and race are often ignored or marginalized by the high-priests of hybridity discourse in the name of anti-essentialism and emancipation from racial thinking.1 A quick look at past and recent postcolonial scholarship is, indeed, enough to show that class and race, as well as the global material geopolitical context are all conspicuous by their absence. This is paradoxical in light of our knowledge that the question of class, for example, has been a fundamental concern in colonial politics from the sixteenth century onwards. The neglect of class by postcolonial scholars is more surprising still given that throughout history hybridity discourse and class considerations have always been intertwined. In ancient Greece, as demonstrated in the first part of the book, the discourse of hybridity was closely linked to social privilege and was based on class inequality. In modern times, too, the connections between class and hybridity discourse, whether retrogressive or emancipatory, are manifest. As Puri rightly observes in her discussion of Caribbean colonial and postcolonial discourses: ‘From the earliest articulations of hybridity as a populist nationalist discourse to the present post-nationalist elaborations of hybridity, there has existed an intimate and vexed connection between hybridity-discourse and class discourse’ (2004, 84). Not only have postcolonial scholars neglected the historical connections between hybridity discourse and class inequality, as Puri remarks, but they have also nowhere felt the need to account for this neglect. The migrant postcolonial scholar’s ‘skepticism about the desirability or feasibility of revolutionary class politics’ (2004, 85) may partly explain why the question of class has not been a central concern in postcolonial 121


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studies. That postcolonial scholars, who promote cross-cultural and interracial solidarity, find undesirable or unfeasible a revolutionary class politics is one thing; to avoid the topic altogether is quite another. Whatever the reasons, it is difficult to believe that the postcolonial disengagement from class and race politics could be entirely innocent or accidental. It might rather constitute a deliberate strategy of occlusion predicated on theoretical, social, ideological, and political interests. One of these possible premises might consist in the postcolonial scholars’ wish to perpetuate the primacy of the culturalist turn over a materialist or Marxist critique that accords class inequality pride of place. Knowing that Marxist social and economic theories are either ignored or perceived as discredited by most postcolonial scholars, the eluding of class in the postcolonial sphere seems to be no more than the logical conclusion of this anti-Marxist orientation.2 Marxism is widely disparaged within the postcolonial field for numerous theoretical, ideological, and political reasons. Even those postcolonial scholars with a former Marxist background have today for the most part turned post-Marxists, if not anti-Marxists; they assume that proletarian class analysis is irrelevant and Marxist notions of class agency and organization are consequently ‘anachronistic’ and ‘obsolescent’. Krishnaswamy and Hawley argue in this regard that ‘the very concept of class as a constituency seems to be vanishing into thin air […] After postcolonialism, it is clear that class can no longer be deployed as an abstract homogenizing category that subsumes or occludes other oppressions’. However, as they go on to say: ‘What is less clear is whether anti-capitalist critiques can afford to discard the concept of class altogether’ (2008, 14–15). If Marxist notions of class agency and organization can appear anachronistic in the sense that they are rooted in a different economic, cultural, and ideological context, this is no reason for postcolonial scholars to dismiss the issue of class as irrelevant. In any case, as long as there are rich and poor, haves and have-nots, theories of class retain their relevance and cogency. New conceptualizations of class in the light of globalization are not just necessary; they are urgent. Surely, these conceptualizations do not have to be Marxist; why should they, after all? In our global world the classical organization of labour and modes of production has been profoundly transformed, so, too, has the notion of class itself. Class in the sense of haves and have-nots has today a global resonance; it is not simply an opposition between one group (bourgeois) and another group (working class), but one involving far broader distinctions: on one side, the global poor or dispossessed (both Western and non-Western, from capitalist and non-capitalist countries), 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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and on the other side, the global rich (multinational corporations, comprador Third World groups, and so on). Further still, in its globalized reconfiguration class is not only articulated through the global rich/ global poor dichotomy, but also via the binary global wealthy states/ global poor countries. Given that Marxist approaches to social and economic organization are anathema to postcolonial scholars, their neglect of global class polarities may not be so surprising. Furthermore, this neglect is a part of a wider assault on binarism, of which the haves/have-nots polarity is only one version. It is ironic that the global haves and have-nots dichotomy is such a strong reminder that binarism, whose demise is celebrated by postcolonial scholars, is fully alive. Prominent on both local and global scales, binarism still constitutes an energizing epistemic tool and organizing principle underpinning our globalized world. Beyond demonstrating their distrust, if not distaste for Marxism, there might be a more basic social opportunism prompting the avoidance of the question of class and, more specifically, of class inequality in the work of postcolonial scholars. From a strictly socio-economic and ideological perspective, an open, bold engagement with class inequality is likely – among other things - to call deeply into question the social privilege enjoyed by most migrant postcolonial scholars. Thus these scholars risk revelation as beneficiaries of class inequality entertained by the very structures of power that hybridity discourse sets out to break down. Puri states in what sounds like a defense of hybridity discourse that ‘class equality is part of the unconscious of liberal discourses of hybridity’ (2004, 85). She further asserts that these very liberal discourses of hybridity ‘attempt to create a space in which to explore and reinvent an aesthetics of equality’ (2004, 85). From an ontological standpoint the ethics of equality suggested in the utopian community projected by hybridity discourse is certainly laudable. In practice, however, the issue becomes more vexed. More clearly, as noted above, the disengagement from class politics in a discourse that seeks to reinvent an ethics of universal equality seems not only paradoxical but also self-defeating. For in the final analysis the occlusion of the issue of class may even be said tacitly to sanction social privilege. It might as well be considered complicit with the politics of inequality which presides over and maintains this privilege. In other words, the ethics of equality entailed in the agenda of hybridity discourse is undermined by the social politics of inequality eluded by postcolonial scholars. Besides class inequality, race politics is, as has been previously argued, the other major issue neglected in postcolonial studies. It is true 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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that in recent postcolonial scholarship we see occasional attempts to engage with race politics. Huggan and Law’s edited collection: Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe (2009) is one of a handful of postcolonial endeavours to tackle race and racism. This collection of essays offers useful insights into the political and legal handling of racial prejudice in Europe. However, its limited field of investigation (Europe) means that the collection does not set Europe’s treatment of racial violence in the context of the global structures of racialization within which European race politics is, after all, no more than the local expression of a more global, deep-rooted, and historically multi-layered racial ideology. Furthermore, from a conceptual point of view, the contributors to Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe do not provide a sufficiently historicized, broad theoretical and empirical methodology that would deeply resituate the enmeshed relationships between old (colonial) and new (neocolonial) forms of racism. To hark back to the manifest postcolonial neglect of the idea of race, it is fair to state that the politically and ideologically charged aspect of the idea of race, alongside its potential for controversy, may partly explain this nervousness about the incorporation of race politics. Robert Young’s idea of the world as a ‘raceless chaos’ (1995, 25) combined with Paul Gilroy’s utopian call for a ‘wholesale renunciation of race’ and ‘postracial humanism’ may have also contributed to the postcolonial disengagement from race politics (2000, 41, 37). In view of the odyssey of migration and intermixing between peoples throughout humankind’s history we can fairly argue that racial and cultural hybridity, not purity, is the norm. On the other hand, considering the extent to which the concept of hybridity has been manipulated through centuries in order to achieve various and often contradictory goals, we cannot afford to lose sight of the ideological and political implications entailed in past as well as contemporary uses of this concept. We may note that Young’s employment of the word ‘chaos’ is perhaps excessive, given that, in practice, interracial mixing concerns only a tiny portion of the population of the modern world. Moreover, history has shown us that interracial marriages, especially within colonial contexts, often attracted more suspicion and racial prejudice than was dispelled. This said, the fact that Young naively or idealistically assumes that the planet has become a ‘raceless chaos’; that Young and Bhabha, among others, avoid discussion of race politics; that Gilroy advocates a ‘postracial’ ethics with the diaspora as its very embodiment in no way means that issues of race and racism are things of the past.3 Neither does it seem likely that they will cease being relevant issues in the future – unless, of course, ego-centrism (individual as well as collective) 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


is curbed and the socio-economic inequity that lies at the root of all forms of racisms (biological, cultural, social and so on) is abolished. As a reminder, from the ancient Greeks onward racial categorization has always been a socio-political and cultural construct fuelled by social, political, and economic interests. The Greeks’ racial assumptions and racism about the Persians, for example, were based not only on cultural prejudice, but also on the desire for imperial political and economic dominance. Similarly, from the fifteenth century onward socio-economic and political interests were at the heart of the categorization of race and its accompanying racist bias. Both slavery and Western imperial conquests were primarily moved by capitalist greed and nationalist zeal rather than simply by skin colour considerations (see Cox 2000, 6). So, if today it is both right and necessary completely to reject the nineteenthcentury biological constructions of race, we are yet far from having done with race and racism as a culturally, socially, and politically constructed reality.4 As in previous centuries, racism remained deeply rooted in twentieth-century societies and the racial question retains all its cogency at the start of the twenty-first century. The only difference is that nowadays racism, as Fanon pointed out, ‘no longer dares appear without disguise’ ([1964] 1994, 36). Contemporary racism is not only expressed by clearly identified traditional xenophobic politicians or political groups, it is also subtly diffused throughout international power structures such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, as well as in academic and scientific discourses. The resurgence of a ‘scientific’ racism sanctioned by genomics is further proof that the old structures of racial inequality which enabled slavery, colonialism, and fascism are anything but dead. They are simply in search of new channels through which to validate the idea of race and racial hierarchy, shifting their focus from the body and colour, on which former imperial racial politics was based, to the more intricate field of the genome. In both cases, the goal remains largely the same: to maintain racial hierarchies and inequality in order to achieve global dominance.5 Genetic exploration of the idea of race is, of course, a source of much discussion and controversy. Many fear that genomics will simply perpetuate the old racial thinking, whereas others believe that genetics could, on the contrary, emancipate our world from this racial thinking. In his plea for a ‘postracial’ ethics, Gilroy, for instance, sees the contemporary genomic constructions of race as a sign of the ‘crisis of raciology’ (2000, 15). In Gilroy’s formulation, gene-oriented studies on race are in radical rupture with the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific racism, in the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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sense that the ‘distance’ of this genetic-oriented research ‘from older versions of race-thinking […] produced in the 18th and 19th centuries, underlines that the meaning of racial difference is itself being changed as the relation between human beings and nature is reconstructed by the impact of the DNA revolution and of the technological developments that have energized it’ (2000, 15). In order further to emphasize that this shift in the constructions of race is more of a crisis than a glorious development of the idea of race, Gilroy states: Why, then, describe this situation as a crisis of raciology rather than its crowning glory? It is a crisis because the idea of ‘race’ has lost much of its common-sense credibility, because the elaborate cultural and ideological work that goes into producing and reproducing it is more visible than ever before, because it has been stripped of its moral and intellectual integrity, and because there is a chance to prevent its rehabilitation. (2000, 29) Gilroy is obviously aware of the dangers involved in contemporary – potentially eugenic – ambitions. He nonetheless insists that genomic research might serve more to overcome race than to consolidate it: Disregarding for a moment the obvious dangers represented by contemporary eugenic ambitions, which neither employ the word ‘eugenic’ nor coincide with divisions derived from the old racial categories, I want to argue that the perceptual and observational habits that have been associated with the consolidation of today’s nano-science might also facilitate the development of an emphatically postracial humanism. Genomics may send out the signal to reify ‘race’ as code and information, but there is a sense in which it also points unintentionally toward ‘race’s’ overcoming. (2000, 37) The fact that genetic research has authoritatively established humankind’s genetic uniqueness is certainly of high significance and might discourage racial essentialism; theoretically at least, this may encourage people to transcend racial thinking and racism. On the other hand, the fact that a number of scholars and scientists of the genome tend to explain intellectual achievement or underachievement by resorting to genetics can also dangerously prompt pseudo-scientifically based racial prejudice and inequality. In times of crisis, biased genetic constructions 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


of race could even be exploited by extremist ideologies to confirm, rather than transcend, racial inequalities. The other issue worth questioning with regard to contemporary developments of race politics is the idea, entertained here by Gilroy, that today’s genetic conceptualizations of race completely break away from older forms of racial thinking. It is evident that from a strictly empirical and methodological point of view contemporary genetic constructions of race do widely depart from earlier paradigms of constructing race. Ideologically, however, I doubt that genomics, especially the racist version promoted by such scholars as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the authors of The Bell Curve (1994), Philippe Rushton (1994), and Christopher Brand (1996), really move away from the previous codifications of race and racism. Surely, in both spirit and ambition there are interpretations of genetically based methodologies that remain closely connected to eighteenth and nineteenth-century racial categorizations, the aim of which was to sustain the racial hierarchy on which imperial domination was founded. This assertion substantially diverges from Gilroy’s clear severance of contemporary constructions of race from its older versions, specifically from the eighteenth-century conceptualization of race:6 We cannot remind ourselves too often that the concept of ‘race’ as it is used in common-sense, everyday language to signify the connections and common characteristics in relation to type and descent is relatively recent and absolutely modern invention. Though it would be foolish to suggest that evil, brutality, and terror commence with the arrival of scientific racism toward the end of the eighteenth century, it would also be wrong to overlook the significance of that moment as a break point in the development of modern thinking about humanity and its nature. (2000, 31) That scientific racism, as Gilroy notes, did emerge in the eighteenth century is undeniable. The fact remains, however, that racist codifications of ethnicity and cultural difference are anything but modern; rather, in many respects they prove to be no more than an elaboration on and a sophistication of former conceptions of race or ethnicity. Thus, despite methodological differences, eighteenth-century racist constructions, for example, are, in both spirit and ambition, broadly continuous with the sixteenth century’s colonial race politics as articulated by Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and elsewhere. In the same way, the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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sixteenth-century politics of race was in turn widely inspired by the ancient Greek racialist discourse which deemed inferior and backward the non-Greeks. We recall, in this case, how during his Valladolid confrontation with Bartolomé de Las Casas (1550) Ginés de Sepúlveda reiterated Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery and linguistic as well as ethnic racialism to demonstrate the inferiority of the Amerindians.7 Likewise, a great deal of eighteenth-century racial thinking was inspired by classical racialist discourse. In this respect, the idea of topographic determinism, central to Hippocrates’s treatise, Airs, Waters, Places, was a key feature of the eighteenth-century mode of classification of species and racial thinking. These various connections illustrate the enmeshment and solidarity of the old and new notions of race and racism. The eighteenth century forms in this regard the binding agent. While symbiotically feeding on classical constructions of ethnicity, the eighteenth-century codification of race provided a pseudo-scientific validity for the classical racialist discourse. Ironically undermined in Gilroy’s argument, this crucial historic continuum from which the idea of race and racism derives its full significance should urge us not to establish too clear-cut distinctions or a severance of the links between old and new constructions of race. It should also prompt us not to consider the question of race and racism only from modern and contemporary perspectives. All the more so as from the ancient Greeks onwards, racialist discourses have presided over the construction of otherness and ethnic hierarchy. As has been demonstrated in the previous chapters, the ancient Greeks borrowed extensively from the ancient Egyptians and from other civilizations, among them the Persians. They learned and adopted the Egyptian sciences, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy and, on the whole, the Greeks looked rather favourably on Egyptian civilization, at least until the fifth century BC. However, from that time on, as we have seen, the Greeks changed in attitude towards the Egyptians as well as towards the Persians. They developed a racialist discourse which dismissed both civilizations as barbaric and inferior (see Chapter 1). In modern colonial Europe, too, specifically in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, racist discourses propelled by pseudo-scientific theories played a fundamental role in establishing the Western belief in cultural and racial superiority over non-Europeans. Given the central part played by what we might call ‘raciology’ in colonial ideology and discourse the postcolonial neglect of race politics in conjunction with the class question discussed earlier is all the more striking. Throughout Western imperial history the production of racialist discourse was intimately linked to 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


an economy predicated on class power. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, racist scientific discourse was produced by the elite and gradually diffused through society; from the 1850s onwards, considered by many as a period of high racial bigotry in Britain (see Lormier 1978), racism permeated the whole social fabric. Until the 1850s, Ann McClintock remarks, scientific racism remained ‘relatively class-bound and inaccessible to most Victorians’; but later imperialist race propaganda was instrumental in spreading racism on an unprecedented scale (1995, 209). In other words, from the late 1850s onwards racism became, as it were, democratized in Britain and Europe at large; as a result, racial prejudice increased notably. The pseudo-scientific principles on which racial theories were based endowed racist discourse with a power and legitimacy which were to persist in the twentieth century, at least until the end of the Second World War; after the horrors of Nazism, scientific racism had a bad press. Interestingly, class and race are also often embedded in more modern Western political and social representations of former colonized peoples. In post-war Britain, in particular, the conflation of class and race is illustrated by the inflected uses of the term ‘black’ in contemporary political discourse. Whereas in previous centuries this racialized term was employed mostly to designate Africans or people from the Caribbean, in post-war Britain, which saw the arrival of the first waves of immigrant labourers from former British colonies, it became a generic term encompassing all non-European immigrants as a social and racial sub-category. Neil MacMaster notes: ‘The term “black” was often used in post-war period as a political category that includes all non-European minorities, whether of Caribbean, Asian or Arab origin, on the grounds that they have shared a common class position in European society as an exploited and racialized stratum’ (2001, 3). Nowadays, in Europe and, more generally, in the Western world, it is the word ‘immigrant’ or ‘refugee’ that refracts and attracts Western racial prejudice and hatred towards Africans, Indians, and Asians. As has been pointed out, responses to immigration in Europe went through two major stages. From roughly 1945 to 1974, the immigrant worker, brought in to rebuild a devastated Europe, was encouraged by the state and was broadly tolerated by the general public. The second phase, from 1975 to the present, was characterized by tight immigration controls compounded by a clearly negative discourse on migrants. In both political and popular perceptions, then, the immigrant worker has drifted from his earlier position as a tolerated, useful builder of a shattered Europe into that of a despised ‘parasite’ variously associated with 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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a ‘burden’ on the welfare system, a ‘criminal’, and an ‘inassimilable’ individual (see MacMaster 2001). Thus from the late 1970s on, the terms ‘immigrant’ or ‘refugee’, which in political and public usage were broadly synonymous with stereotyped non-Europeans, became an almost exclusively negative attribute (see MacMaster 2001, 177). Defined as racially and culturally degraded, in both European political discourse and public representations the immigrant is reduced to the very embodiment of ‘disease’, ‘dirt’, ‘laziness’, and moral and social corruption, attributes which substantially repeat the colonial representations of the former colonized. The racism and hypocrisy of both European political elites and the popular classes are such that few positive images of the immigrant find a discursive space in the monolithic Western narrative of immigration. Although anti-immigrant racism has often been challenged in Europe by anti-racist associations and government agencies across the European Union, racism remains rife and more often than not European governance proves ambivalent, if not complicit in the very structural racism it is intended to bring down.8 In any case, we rarely hear constructive narratives of immigration from these government agencies or from antiracism groups. The significant contribution of immigrants to Western prosperity (for example, in the rebuilding of post-war Europe and taking up jobs unwanted by Europeans) and demographic growth in an increasingly ageing Europe, for instance, are simply erased or silenced. In order for these anti-racist voices to become fully credible, they should remedy this serious discrepancy between ideology and practice. This is all the more urgent as it is hard to imagine how anti-racist politics could really be effective without an open, bold recognition of the constructive role of immigration. Perhaps the consistent occlusion of the value of immigrants by both progressive and retrogressive voices in Europe is better understood in the light of the overall tendency in Western discourse on progress to erase non-Western participation in the world’s cultural and scientific development; an erasure which, as we have shown, has a long history and still permeates many Western cultural representations of scientific progress and modernity (see Chapter 1). There is a sense that the absence of positive counter-narratives of immigration in both racist and anti-racist discourses on immigration is, explicitly or implicitly, intended to keep non-European immigrants out of the Western tales of progress and development. But given the grim prospects facing the labour force in Europe in the coming decades a rehabilitation of the immigrants’ image and their edifying economic as well as social role is required. According to a United Nations report 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


published in 2000, the EU will need about 159 million immigrant workers by 2025 in order to maintain its economic growth. With this staggering figure in mind, the persistence of racial hatred could have devastating effects on Western economies and societies. One way of rehabilitating the status of immigrants would be to cease seeing them merely as a necessary evil whose sole function is to slave silently and keep the economic machine going. A more humane and mutually beneficial approach would consist instead of integrating the immigrant as an equal racial and cultural partner. This move would naturally necessitate that the West divest itself of its characteristic racial and cultural arrogance in order better to build with its non-European immigrants a genuine ethics of collectivity based on mutual respect and recognition. Such an ethical orientation should help to shift the West’s radical Other, that is the immigrant, from a ‘necessary evil’ into a significant and equal human being. The expression, ‘necessary evil’, used above to describe the European perception of non-white immigrants, is a fitting trope, and one that has a long history. Canadian immigration policies of the late nineteenth century offer in this respect an eloquent example. In response to a growing preference for white rather than Asian immigration strongly voiced in the Canadian Parliament, in 1883 Prime Minister Macdonald defended Chinese immigration in terms that presented the Chinese workforce as a necessary evil: ‘[It would be] all very well to exclude Chinese labour when we can replace it with white labour, but until that is done, it is better to have Chinese labour than no labour at all’ (quoted by Mackey 1999, 33). As in Canada, in twentieth-century Europe, too, there is ample evidence that from the 1940s on both right and left-wing politicians in the European states clearly favoured white over non-white immigration (see MacMaster 2001, 177). This may partly explain why the successive waves of non-white immigrants, allowed into Europe and generally into the Western world more by default than through sheer philanthropy, continue to be regarded as unwanted guests regardless of their contribution or degree of integration into their host communities. Because non-white immigrants are routinely tolerated rather than perceived as wanted guests, we can understand why in the collective Western imaginary immigrants are persistently seen as radical racial others, often defined by racist stereotyping that feeds on nineteenthcentury Orientalism. And just like the former colonialist racialist assumptions,9 today’s racism towards the immigrant also transcends class boundaries and political persuasions. Although expressed differently, elite political racism and mass racist prejudice feed symbiotically 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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on each other.10 These two forms of racism are so enmeshed that it is difficult to tell which is influencing or determining the other. For the most part, the issue is more like a hen and egg thing. All the more so as racial prejudice against non-Europeans is so deep-seated and intricately woven into Western social fabrics that it has become part of the collective unconscious. It constitutes a common cultural lore that can be mobilized at any time to exorcize national anxieties or justify unsuccessful political and economic policies. As hinted earlier, it is the educated and bourgeois classes which constructed or conceptualized dominant racist discourses. Nevertheless, it is crucial not to forget that the masses, too, have always played, and continue to play, an important role in spreading and maintaining racial prejudice (see McClintock 1995, 8). When it comes to racist discourse, therefore, the elite/mass binary is blurred. Also blurred are the distinctions between liberal and conservative, left and right. In his discussion of British race politics, MacMaster states: ‘During the decade 1955–1965 both labour and conservative governments, in spite of their public condemnations of racism, moved towards a de facto support of the racist Commonwealth Immigration act [1962] and the 1965 White Paper on Immigration’ (2001, 177). It is worth noting at this point that ambivalence towards immigration on the national level is also perceptible in the political structures of the European Union. In this case too, a liberal, anti-racist rhetoric often dovetails with exclusionary, racist practices that perpetuate the negative identification of the immigrant as a source of disorder, moral corruption, and disease. That said, this ambivalence is more manifest among European left-wing politicians than among conservative or far right leaders such as Enoch Powell in the 1960s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s in Britain or Jean-Marie Le Pen and Berlusconi today in, respectively, France and Italy. We may add to the list Samuel Huntington in the USA, whose racial categorizations in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) in the end sound like pale imitations of Powell and Le Pen’s racist discourses. Many right-wing politicians, from Europe and elsewhere, are strong advocates of what has come to be called ‘new racism’, with its attendant hatred and fear of non-European immigrants. New racism is commonly defined as a sort of cultural racism which, while not directly subscribing to the earlier scientific racist ideology called into question after the Second World War, still feeds on and perpetuates nineteenth and early twentieth-century theories of race. In his notorious and much-quoted ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968,11 Enoch Powell articulated a racist discourse targeting blacks, West Indians, Caribbean people, and Asians. This xenophobic discourse 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


was to influence greatly subsequent policies of immigration in Britain and across Europe. MacMaster rightly states: By 1968 Powell had developed all the key components of the anti-black racist discourse that remained essentially unchanged down to the present. All later controversies over further immigration legislation, relating to the arrival of Ugandan, Kenyan, Hong Kong and other ex-colonial passport holders, as well as illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and ‘bogus’ refugees, continue to be formulated in identical terms. (2001, 182) In short, Powell considered the blacks, West Indians, Caribbean people, and Asians inassimilable because of their religious and cultural differences. His presumption was that these migrant populations represent persistent internal threats. In keeping with nineteenth-century theories of cultural and racial purity, Powell further excluded these non-European categories from Englishness on the grounds that ‘the West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact, he is a West Indian or an Asian still’ (quoted by Smithies and Fiddick 1969, 77). In order to emphasize the un-Englishness of the blacks, Caribbean people, Asians, and West Indians Powell presented them as a dangerous ‘flood’ that threatened to wash away British culture and race: he grimly predicted that ‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years time the black man will have the whip-hand over the white man’ (quoted by Smithies and Fiddick 1969, 36). Of the utmost significance, here, is the way in which Powell’s racist discourse was underpinned by the neocolonial Western anxiety of seeing the history of colonial domination repeating itself, this time in reverse. For in Powell’s reformulation of the old colonial relationships the black, a former slave and colonized victim, is now cast as an impending subversive political force; a potential victimizer threatening to subdue and rule over his former white master. Although numerically a minority; although they have no significant economic and political power to unsettle Western societies to the extent projected by Powell, Powell’s phantasmagorical discourse assigns to the non-European immigrants a powerful destructive potential. He projects the coloured immigrant as a would-be tyrannical ruler with the power to enslave the Western majority and thus avenge his past history of slavery and colonialism. This strategic inversion of the colonial master-slave, colonizer-colonized 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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power relationships is excessive in every respect; it is bigotry in action, fuelled by populism and Machiavellian politics. In other words, in presenting an economically and politically dominant white majority as helpless ‘victims’ of an emergent, totalitarian black power Powell strategically constructs a racist propaganda founded on a politics of fear and degradation of the non-Western Other; a politics whose chief goal is to perpetuate in postcolonial (or rather neocolonial) Britain the former imperial racial and cultural divisions. In terms of immediate political fallout, Powell’s racist speech was, as many have remarked, widely negative. Following his speech Powell was expelled from Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet. In ideological terms, however, Powell’s infamous speech initiated a race politics that gradually elicited popular support and legitimacy as well as social and political ‘respectability’. Powell’s racist ideas, which became popular from the 1970s onwards, and his anxieties over the ‘enemy within’ (blacks, Asians, West Indians, and Caribbeans) threatening to flood British culture and presumed ethnic essence were strongly reactivated by such politicians as Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.12 She, too, reignited the fear of seeing Britain ‘swamped by foreign cultures and peoples’. In France, Le Pen’s antiimmigrant discourse echoes the same fears and anxieties. It also reiterates Powell’s view that non-European immigrants are inassimilable. The targets of Le Pen’s xenophobic rhetoric are the North Africans; ethnic groups whom the French far right politician treats as a monolithic category. In short, according to Le Pen, North Africans are not only inassimilable, but could never become French.13 Fundamentally, the cultural racism of Powell, Thatcher, and Le Pen aims to keep the image of a hostile immigrant alive on the political agenda as well as in the British and French collective unconscious. These right-wing politicians’ objective was two-fold: first, to emphasize the impossibility of the immigrant’s integration on the grounds that the latter is chronically inassimilable; second, to make sure that even if fully integrated the immigrant would continue to be seen by the general public as not ‘one of us’. Considering the diffusion of racist stereotyping of non-European immigrants within both political discourses and among the general public, we may argue that the new racism, which in practice continues in disguised forms most of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century racialist discourses, is a sad reminder that the cultural and racial solidarity so enthusiastically projected by hybridity discourse remains wishful thinking. Moreover, the very idea of cultural and racial equality, implied in the discourse of hybridity, is threatened by a new form of scientific 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


racism, evoked earlier, which we thought had disappeared in the wake of the post-war period. It is promoted by such scholars as Philippe Rushton, Christopher Brand, and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, mentioned previously. All these argue that genetic differences, not just economic or social factors, determine differences in IQ between blacks and whites. The resurgence of scientific racism, the diffusion throughout Western societies of ‘common-sense’ racism, and the presence of insidious racist prejudice within the field of international relations and in such Western-dominated transnational institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund all indicate the need to take the issue of racism very seriously. Within this context, the evident absence of race politics and racism in hybridity discourse in particular and, more generally, in postcolonial studies, is both surprising and a cause for concern. Given the persistence of structural and institutional racism in our contemporary national communities and transnational institutions, postcolonial studies should no longer continue to neglect this fundamental question. Nor can it persist in ignoring that in today’s world, which celebrates the demise of absolutes and binaries, global race politics is still predicated on the old binaries of white and black, European/non-European, Western/non-Western. Both in Britain and in the USA, for example, colour still retains all its significance at a time when these multicultural countries are becoming more and more racially mixed. But increase in interracial marriages or mixed populations, one needs to add, is no guarantee that contemporary Western societies fully agree with or accept racial mixing. And owing to the pervasiveness of binary racial thinking within Western structures of power, it is tempting to claim that racial mixing is at best tolerated and at worst simply ignored. It is certainly far from being sanctioned or fully integrated as part and parcel of the Western cultural and racial archive. Discussing racial thinking in Britain, Alibhai-Brown argues that: the black/white dichotomy remains at the very centre of ‘race’ discourse, whether or not, and to whatever extent, ‘race’ is explicitly biologized or seen as an essential human property. The distinctive connotative properties of ‘black’ and ‘white’ maintain power and material reality, and it would be an act of disavowal to deny the significance of the visible markers of racial identity in contemporary Britain. (2001, 155) 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Lingering racial binarism within Western discursive practices and politics argues for the need to have race politics constantly in view when discussing such issues as hybridity or cultural and identity politics. For despite the promotion of interracial mixing by hybridity discourse and cultural theory at large; despite the fact that Western societies continue to become increasingly racially mixed, racism is pervasive in all strata of society; it is present within economic and political structures as well as in scientific institutions, including academia in both North America and Europe.14 Indeed, if racism was not deeply rooted, why should, for example, a second generation of North Africans born in France still be regarded as radically racial others, even when the subjects in question happen to be fully integrated citizens? Also, if cultural and ethnic mixing is so valorized and considered subversive of binaries and absolutes, why are so many mixed couples and children in Europe and the USA often defined by pre-established racial, usually racist, categories, instead of being left free to define their identities on their own terms? Or, more importantly, why are these mixed couples and children still viewed suspiciously despite the growing cultural and racial mixing within Western societies? The explanation partly lies in the resurgence of the old colonial anxiety that racially mixed people might corrupt and cause the degeneration of the white race. Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell’s attacks on cultural and racial mixing, as has been pointed out, illustrate this insidious fear, and their views sadly remain deeply rooted in most Western societies. The racist prejudice towards cultural and racial mixing reflected in Thatcher and Powell’s discourses in particular and, broadly, by the general public takes even a more extreme turn in the USA’s handling of race politics. The ban on marriages between blacks and whites in the USA was lifted only in 1967. Furthermore, as the narratives of colonization and slavery in the New World show, the issue of hybridity has always been, and remains, a central concern. In the USA today it is especially the legal status of hybrid children – the offspring of white-black couples more specifically – which merits a close critical attention. For it presents us with a serious deontological problem and a humanitarian concern. More concretely, what is most worrying in the USA’s treatment of métissage is that the biological hybrid is legally and socially profoundly determined by a politics in which the old belief in racial purity remains intact. The persistent contempt for and alienation of the hybrid in the USA are all the more striking, as American society is witnessing an unprecedented number of mixed-race people. Etzioni points out in this respect that ‘since 1970, the number of mixed race 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


children in the United States has quadrupled. And there are six times as many intermarriages today as there were in 1960’ (1997). In short, the American ideology of racial purity is reflected in the ‘one drop’ policy, which arbitrarily decreed that mixed white-black children are black on the grounds that they have non-white blood running in their veins (see Spickard 1991, 16). This policy completely defies the laws of biology by virtue of which a mixed child is genetically a compound entity; and as such, is, naturally, both white and black. From a biological standpoint the one drop policy is, crudely put, simply anomalous. On an ethical and human level, on the other hand, it constitutes a historical aberration that should have no currency in today’s world. The one-drop policy literally casts mixed-race children in what I have earlier called the space of the impossible (see Chapters 2 and 3). Within this space of the impossible the identity of the children is framed through erasure and denial rather than aggregation and fusion of same and Other, as should have been the case. As a result, the hybrid becomes an alienated subject whose dual cultural and racial identity is reduced to a single definition. What is most disconcerting about this kind of racial politics is that the children of mixed white-black parentage have no grip on the construction of their own identity. Rather than being let to write their own narratives of identity in their own words, the whole definition of their cultural and racial self is imposed on them from the outside. From this perspective, someone like Tiger Woods, for instance, may justly claim ‘to be a mixture of Caucasian, black, native American and Asian’ (Alibhai-Brown 2001, 106); the fact remains that in actuality he is summoned by the various ethnic entities constituting his motley identity clearly to define himself within the entrenched racial affiliations specified by the one drop policy. Precisely, the lingering white-black racial binary sanctioned by the one drop policy may explain why a number of Afro-Americans, as Alibhai-Brown pointed out, reproached Tiger Woods ‘for not wishing to embrace his “true” African heritage’ (2001, 106) and thus show ‘black solidarity’. Because race politics in the USA is still predominantly organized along the nineteenth-century binary opposition between black and white; because biological hybridity is still considered suspect and, explicitly or implicitly, dismissed as an anomaly in the USA, the United Kingdom, and Europe at large; because in the USA biological mixing is legally defined in accordance to myths of racial purity, it is striking that hybridity discourse, most of which is articulated from American academic institutions, should enhance hybridity’s emancipatory virtues. In social, political, and legal terms the hybrid even today remains to an extent 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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more of an outcast, a stigma, and a helpless victim than a powerful agency defining his/her social, cultural, and biological identity according to his/her own perceptions. Given this grim context, insisting on hybridity’s subversive, counter-hegemonic impulse may sound absurd. Instead of clinging to a utopian, mystic tale of hybridity, postcolonial studies would surely gain tremendously by deeply engaging race politics; in ethical terms, the gain would even be more substantial by energetically militating against enduring racist discourses and laws that determine peoples’ identities, hybrid and non-hybrid alike. With this engagement postcolonial scholars could efficiently deconstruct the binarism and essentialism that continues to burden contemporary perceptions of racial mixing. Surely, in order to fulfil its presumed counter-hegemonic role, postcolonial studies can no longer continue to neglect or mention only in passing the topic of race and racism with reference to hybridity. Nor should it, in that prospect, pursue such a mystical hybridism which, by evading race politics, is more likely to weaken than embolden the narrative of universal racial equality projected in hybridity discourse. The neglect of such a fundamental issue as race certainly undermines hybridity discourse; it also discredits its critical, subversive potential. Underlying this neglect or erasure are a number of ideological and political objectives that will presently be discussed. A key characteristic of hybridity discourse is that it both evades the issue of race politics and tends to marginalize the few studies dealing with race. The reasons for this marginalization may lie in the postcolonial scholars’ keenness to maintain the conceptual and ideological status quo, that is to say the psycho-deconstructionist doxa alongside the cultural turn and ideological conservatism characterizing postcolonial studies. In the USA in particular the conservatism of departments of literature has manifested itself since the early 1980s, as pointed out by Shohat’s earlier statement. From that period, the pressure was becoming strong on these departments to design literary programmes that would reflect the ethnically diverse student population. The study of colonialism and postcolonial literature proved then a serious pedagogical and ideological challenge to the English departments. More specifically, the handling of such politically and ideologically charged words as ‘colonialism’, imperialism’, and ‘anti-colonialism’ became a highly sensitive issue from its incipience as shown in Chapter 5. If the term ‘postcolonialism’ is problematic, so, too, is hybridity discourse, as has been argued in the course of this study. To elaborate on the issue of race politics in a present-day colonial context, I highlight 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


the enmeshment of hybridity and race politics in Latin America. Simply put, Latin America is, as it were, characterized by a marked cultural and racial ‘sedimentation’. Building on the idea that ‘today all cultures are frontier cultures’ Garcia Canclini argues that ‘Latin American countries are now the product of the sedimentation, juxtaposition and intercrossing of Indian traditions [especially in the Mesoamerican and Andean areas], of colonial Catholic Hispanism and of modern political, educational, and communicative practices’ (1995, 325 and 71). The roots of this sedimentation and the actual ‘baroque’ identity and consciousness it entails may, as Roger Toumson and others observed, be traced back to the seventeenth century.15 Broadly speaking, mestizaje in Latin American intellectual and political discourses has been a recurrent theme from the nineteenth century. As early as 1819, in his message to the Congress of Agostura Simón Bolívar stressed the racial hybridity of Latin American societies, stating: Let us bear in mind that our people is neither European nor North American, but a composite of African and American rather than an emanation of Europe […] It is impossible to assign us with any exactitude to a specific human family. The greater part of the native peoples has been annihilated, the European has mingled with the American and with the African, and the African has mingled with the Indian and with the European. (Quoted by Del Sarto et al. 2004, 85) Bolívar was referencing an undeniable historical fact; the racial mixing of the different ethnic groups brought together by European colonialism and the slave trade. Given the scale of intermixing in Latin America it is, indeed, difficult to impute a racial matrix to the people resulting from these colonial encounters. Nevertheless the fact that in his address to the Congress of Agostura Bolívar mentions only in passing the annihilation of the majority of the indigenous populations as if it were a mere incident or minor detail within the Western colonizing enterprise somehow downplays the brutality involved in the attainment of this racial métissage. In a similar vein, in Nuestra America ([1891] 1897) [Our America] José Marti, the Cuban anti-colonial revolutionary of Spanish descent, also emphasized the hybridity of Latin America to which he famously alluded as ‘our Metis America’. Since Bolívar and Marti’s declarations, the trope of métissage has been relentlessly reiterated and harnessed to various political and ideological purposes. During the period of national consolidation and modernization in Latin American countries such as Mexico, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Brazil, and Cuba (1920s–1960s), for example, mestizaje was brought into action to assert a common cultural identity, with the aim of building a national consciousness. Since the 1980s the idea of métissage has come to stand for the recognition of the multiple cultural identities of the region, including the descendants of the former European colonizers and indigenous Latin American populations as well as the various diasporas: Japanese, Jews, Africans, Lebanese, and Chinese, to name a few. While the issue of mestizaje in Latin colonial and postcolonial America has been much debated, in most scholarly discussions the emphasis is laid more on the constructive, progressive aspects of the process of hybridization than on its destructive, alienating effects. Besides, the phenomenon of Latin American métissage itself is never studied within a broad historical perspective that would inscribe the minor narrative of Latin American hybridity within the grand history of métissage encompassing all civilizations, from the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to the present. This kind of historical approach is fundamental, in that it can usefully resituate the depth and diachronic development of the phenomenon of métissage, while at the same time moderating all forms of extremes and reductionism when addressing such complex topics as métissage. With reference to Latin America in particular, a wide-ranging historical perspective has the benefit of inducing us to view métissage in this region, not as something radical or unique to this area, but rather as a common historical occurrence and thus all too relative; that is to say as only one layer (no matter how thick this may seem) of the immemorial process of hybridization that has accompanied humankind’s existence and development. This relativistic scope may, in turn, discourage idealistic and politically motivated perceptions of Latin American métissage, such as those endorsed by the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos and the Cuban author and critic, Roberto Fernández Retamar. José Vasconcelos, one of the first Latin American thinkers to conceptualize the phenomenon of métissage, articulates here an apologetic discourse of hybridity that projects the racial hybrid engendered in Iberian America into an ideal human norm. In The Cosmic Race ([1925] 1997) Vasconcelos talks of this new multiracial civilization forged in Latin America as a race ‘fashioned out of the treasures of all the previous ones, the final race, the cosmic race’. In his enthusiastic formulation, Vasconcelos suggests that the different ethnic groups brought together by colonization and slavery (Europeans, blacks, and Amerindians) would all be equal collaborators in the projected superior universal civilization whose matrix is Latin America. Roberto Fernández Retamar in Caliban 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


reiterated this idyllic vision of Latin American métissage: ‘within the colonial world there exists a case unique to the entire planet: vast zone for which mestizaje is not an accident but rather an essence. The central line: ourselves, “our mestizo America”’ ([1971] 1989, 4). Whereas the idea of a new interracial humanity is appealing in theory, in practice it is unrealistic, if not simply demagogic. In a way, both Vasconcelos and Retamar undermine the impact of colonial politics and the ideology of slavery on the collective consciousness of the victims as well as of the victimizers. Above all, they tend to mystify both colonial and postcolonial definitions of cultural and racial affiliations. In regard to colonial politics, the celebratory discourse of métissage promoted by Vasconcelos and Retamar has the character of intentional amnesia, as it tends to gloss over the bleak narratives of colonial oppression and annihilation of the majority of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In today’s Latin American geopolitics, on the other hand, the same discourse celebrating the birth of a new, ‘modern’ mestizo race boils down to a postcolonial mystification, in the sense that this ideal hybrid race could only be achieved at the cost of further annihilation: the cultural assimilation of the different ethnic groups. By and large, Vasconcelos and Retamar posit the Latin American version of métissage as both homogeneous and totalizing, if not totalitarian; in short, they conceive of the Latin American mestizo condition as the universal ideal of humanity into which each ethnic group on the planet will be absorbed, not to say subordinated. By definition, métissage connotes impurity and blurring of outlines. Yet, while talking of Latin America as the site of métissage par excellence, Retamar also paradoxically identifies mestizaje with ‘essence’. Retamar explicitly stresses that Latin American métissage is an ‘essence’ rather than an ‘accident’. In Retamar’s use, the term ‘accident’ (followed by the negative ‘not’) connotes that métissage in Latin American societies was a willed (and, implicitly harmonious, non-hierarchical) process jointly accomplished by the different ethnic groups, rather than the working out of chance or fate. However, the idea that hybridity was not an accident has another interpretation. It implies that here, as elsewhere, as I have been arguing in this book, the colonial policy of métissage was a deliberate, strategic design intended for domination, just as colonization was the result of aggressive capitalistic expansionism sustained by a political will and a supremacist nationalist ideology. For all its appealing utopianism, then, the idea of a universal métis humanity projected by Vasconcelos and Retamar is problematic on many important counts. Whereas through their ethos of hybridity the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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two Latin American intellectuals question white racist theories, they also recreate other racial binaries, which simply reverse the traditional colonial power relationships instead of overcoming them: in short, in the rhetoric of Vasconcelos and Retamar the hybrid Latin America is ranked racially superior to the rest of the world; a superiority owed, according to these two intellectuals, to the Latin American peoples’ capacity to blend the ‘virtues’ of the West and those of the Indians (see Joseph and Hendersen 2002). From a wider historical perspective, this idea of Latin American peoples as a superior mix of European and Indian extractions strongly echoes Aristotle’s definition of the Greeks as a supreme race, blending Greek and Asian virtues (see Chapters 1 and 10). Vasconcelos explicitly advocated the presumed racial superiority of mestizo Latin America in The Cosmic Race. After assigning racial attributes to the multiple peoples of the planet, Vasconcelos gives vent to crude racist stereotyping, dismissing, for example, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as ‘soulless’ and immoral ‘pragmatists’. From the standpoint of Latin American geopolitics, the mestizo doctrine is manifestly caught in a huge paradox; it ironically essentializes the process of métissage by deeming the mestizo Latin America a racial essence and universal human norm, while at the same time eluding the thorny issues of race and racism that still plague most of contemporary Latin American societies. In his 2005 book entitled Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization Kraidy addresses Latin America’s baroque cultural and racial identity, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, cultural, and ideological implications of the ideology of mestizaje revived by Mexican intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, he points out that in Mexico, and in most of the Latin American nations to which he refers, mestizaje is ‘a deeply racialized discourse whose progressive surface has a reactionary undertow’ (2005, 52–3). Kraidy further argues that the ideology of mestizaje was, both culturally and racially, a ‘destructive’ practice, since by displacing mixture from race to culture, and by selectively welcoming and rejecting native traditions, Latin American ideologists of mestizaje (and transculturation) saw institutionalized cultural mixture as a sure way to effect the slow decay of postcolonial cultures and integrate them in the dominant society, which welcomed their non-threatening arts, crafts, and selected rituals, while imposing on them the Spanish or Portuguese language, the catholic faith, and colonial political and social organization. (2005, 53–4) 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Kraidy continues: ‘As a discourse that recognizes and celebrates cultural difference, mestizaje in effect is a tool for “bleaching” all but the most benign practices that gave precolonial natives their identities. Cultural mixture within the emerging nation-states thus obeyed the residual colonial logic’ (2005, 54). The use of hybridity discourse as a means of alienating the colonized peoples, highlighted here by Kraidy with respect to the Mexican mestizaje ideology, has, of course, been a common practice across history. As shown in the first part of the book, the discourse of hybridity often served as a strategic mode of discipline and control in the ancient civilizations, from at least Alexander the Great’s time. Interestingly, this retrogressive, coercive aspect of hybridity discourse retains currency in today’s approaches to cultural and racial métissage. Surprisingly, though, this retrogressive orientation is, as I have been consistently demonstrating, undermined in postcolonial discussions. Instead, most migrant and Western postcolonial academics welcome, even celebrate the concept of hybridity for its ambivalence, elasticity, and its presumed subversive character. In this respect, it is fair to wonder whether in practice the postcolonial emphasis on hybridity’s ambivalence does not serve to mask the unflattering control and discipline power structures underlying every discourse, including hybridity discourse in both its progressive and retrogressive expressions. There is, admittedly, no clear-cut answer to this inquiry. However, because postcolonial scholars ignore race politics; because they see hybridity in a wholly positive light, we may read these scholars’ silence about the suggested inadequacies of hybridity discourse as a deliberate strategy of occlusion and theoretical mystification. We may further argue that this strategy of denial itself might, paradoxically, be seen as a sign of ideological commitment to an epistemic archive based on a double rhetorical and discursive standard. On the one hand, postcolonial discourse harbours a liberal, inclusionary rhetoric that seems to encompass cultural and identity formations in their diversity; on the other hand, it betrays exclusionary practices that surreptitiously privilege some narratives of culture and identity (diaspora, elite tales of migrancy, and so on) over others.


7 Postcolonial Discourse, Postmodernist Ethos: Neocolonial Complicities

Postcolonial theory is both conceptually and ideologically enmeshed with postmodernism. Postcolonial scholars themselves acknowledged their debt to the postmodernist ethos. This is a non-negligible debt, as most of the postcolonial concepts in use are a postmodernist legacy. Among the basic postmodernist features also shared by postcolonial ethics and aesthetics are the celebration of the transient, the fragmentary, difference, heterogeneity, multiplicity, contestation of foundational narratives and overarching discourses of emancipation, the cult of ambivalence, indeterminacy, and collage. As they promote these postmodernist conceptual and epistemological tenets, most postcolonial scholars come to view postmodernism as a means of emancipation; some like Robert Young (1995) stress postmodernism’s anti-Eurocentrism in terms that elevate postmodernity into a privileged site of insurgent politics and anti-essentialism. Murphy goes a step further in fusing the postmodern and postcolonial sensibilities. He assumes that postmodernism is also ‘postcolonial in its mentality’ (1991, 124). The yoking of the postmodern with the postcolonial serves mostly to enhance the resistive, counter-hegemonic impulse of the postmodern ethos. Naturally, not everyone shares the enthusiastic views of Young, Murphy, or Bhabha on the ethics and the politics of the postcolonial and the postmodern. Nor, for that matter, is the idyllic postcolonial vision of the relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism unanimously embraced. Arif Dirlik, for instance, criticizes postcolonial theory’s conceptual indebtedness to postmodernism and disdainfully calls postcolonial studies ‘a progeny of postmodernism’ (1997, 73). He goes on to argue that the postcolonial scholars’ ‘most original contribution would seem to lie in their rephrasing of older problems in the study of the Third World in the language of poststructuralism’ (1997, 73). 144


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Considered in the light of its strong dependence on postmodern concepts, postcolonial studies may, indeed, be understood as a conceptually colonized field with no distinct theoretical, discursive, and ideological identity. From this perspective, the postcolonial scholars’ dependence on postmodernism may, to some extent, be seen as a re-enactment – with only slight variation – of earlier colonial relationships. On one side of the equation, we have the postcolonial migrant scholar who can fittingly be described as primarily a consumer and assiduous recycler of Western modes of thought and conceptualization; on the other, the postmodern theorist, who functions as an overarching epistemic enterprise and a custodian of a master narrative of being and meaning. Within these intricate relationships the postmodern ethos, by virtue of the sheer scale of its conceptual input throughout postcolonial theory, constitutes an absolute theoretical and epistemic enterprise that conditions the whole field of postcolonial studies. The postmodernist ethos appears even more totalizing when it comes to engaging with the narratives of humankind’s progress and development. The views of Lyotard, a key postmodernist figure, are in this regard illuminating. Emblematic of postmodernist thought in its most arrogant and pessimistic version, Lyotard’s discourse on science, knowledge, politics, and rationality in particular proves profoundly Eurocentric, if not residually neocolonial. First and foremost, Lyotard’s discursive practice follows the Western Eurocentric tradition from Friedrich Hegel and Edmund Husserl to, among others, Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci.1 The Eurocentrism of Lyotard is manifest in his narrative of human progress as reflected in The Postmodern Condition. In this work, Lyotard emphatically attributes the bulk of scientific, political, philosophical, and ethical development of civilization to one single source: the Western world, with ancient Greece as its fountainhead (1986, 8). African and, more generally, non-European cultures are, by contrast, completely erased from these tales of progress in what looks like a totalizing intellectual and ideological endeavour.2 Besides being profoundly Eurocentric on both the conceptual and ideological levels Lyotard’s tendency to dismiss non-Europeans as unworthy epistemic and ethical agents betrays significant self-contradictions. Basically, in establishing a clear-cut distinction between the so-called positive narratives of the West, on the one hand, and the ‘savage narratives’ (1988, 156) of the non-West, on the other, Lyotard succumbs to the very essentialism and binary thinking that he is ambitious to dismantle. This essentialist orientation deeply discredits Lyotard’s declared intention to wage ‘war on totality’ (1986, 82). Above all, his argument 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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about cultural and scientific development is historically unfounded. Lyotard’s monolithic, Eurocentric representation of civilization in particular is starkly contradicted by historical reality. Indeed, the history of ideas and sciences has shown us that modern science, ethics, and politics, rather than being monological as Lyotard contends, are manyrooted and essentially dialogical. According to a number of scholars, even the European Enlightenment fed and thrived on Asian and Middle Eastern ideas (see Jones 2006, 49 and 59). In fact, much of what Lyotard takes to be uniquely Western did not originate from Europe at all, let alone from ancient Greece, but from non-European and non-Greek sources: the Sumerians and the Egyptians among others. Democracy, for instance, was not born in ancient Greece, as Lyotard and others want us to believe; it was first practised within the Sumerian world about two millennia before it was established in Athens. Nor did mathematics come from Greece; the Greeks, as has been widely documented, learned this science from the Egyptians (see Chapter 1). Lyotard’s categorical dismissal of non-Westerners as active agents of science, ethics, philosophy, and politics is all the more surprising as the Greeks themselves acknowledged their debts to these African and Mesopotamian civilizations. By rejecting the contribution of these nonWestern civilizations to modernity Lyotard is, thus, crudely perpetuating the long Western tradition of omission and silence in relation to all that contradicts its self-centred narrative of progress and modernity. Considering the silence or disregard for non-Western participation in the development of modernity, reflected in Lyotard’s discourse and recurrent in postmodernist thinking, it is fitting to associate postmodernism with a neocolonial discursive, ethical, and ideological practice. Postmodernism’s neocoloniality is implied in a number of scholarly debates. Ziauddin Sardar, for instance, thinks that ‘postmodernity is nothing more than the continuation of Western cultural imperialism by other means’ (1997, 8–9). Postmodernism appears, in short, as a self-centred, proliferating consciousness that hegemonically projects as universal Western notions of culture, identity, and humanity, while ostensibly celebrating cultural multiplicity and anti-essentialism. Prior to Sardar, Edward Said had indicted postmodernism’s Eurocentric orientation, especially the brand embodied by Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault (Said [1978] 2003; Sardar 1999). Said criticized these leading postmodernist scholars for shying away from the major issues of racism, neocolonialism, exploitation of the North by the South, and for their political fatalism. Spivak (1999), too, has reproached postcolonial theorists, Foucault and Deleuze in particular, for neglecting the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


topic of colonialism. It is important to remark, here, that most of the postmodern theorists targeted in this criticism are of French origin. Yet, while indicting Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Deleuze for their silence about the fact of colonialism, neither Said nor Spivak, for example, tried to assess this silence in the light of contemporary France’s overall attitude to her colonial enterprises in Africa and elsewhere. This contextualization is crucial, since the erasure of the colonial moment within the French postmodern theorists’ discourse is teleological; that is to say it is in keeping with the official silence about French colonialism overseas, especially in Algeria, during the last four decades or so. Being too emotionally and politically charged, the issue of French imperialism remained taboo until the late 1980s and early 1990s. In eluding the topic of colonialism, Lyotard, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Deleuze have, thus, simply conformed to the dominant ideology as well as to the French collective imperial consciousness, torn between guilt and nostalgia, anxiety about colonial crimes, and a persistent belief that colonialism was a necessary evil, if not a profoundly positive enterprise. This revisionist view, stressing French colonialism’s benefits for the colonized, is crystallized in the law 2005-158 voted on 25 February 2005 by the right-wing UMP senators (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire). In the main, this law, which was controversial in France,3 valorizes colonialism and legitimizes the French civilizing mission. Article 4 clearly stipulates that ‘School curricula particularly recognize the positive role of French presence overseas, notably in North Africa’ (my emphasis). With the same flourish, the 2005 law seeks to rehabilitate the French colonial enterprise, as well as imposing a monological historical outlook on colonialism. Beyond dangerously distorting and manipulating collective history and memory, that this law could be voted in indicates that the imperial mentality is deep-rooted in France; one may add, in the former Western colonial countries at large. This begs the question as to how postcolonial theory relates to Eurocentrism in general and how, specifically, does it fit within the overall Eurocentric impulses central to the postmodern ethos constitutive of the identity of postcolonial studies? In short, is postcolonial studies as Eurocentric as the postmodern thought which inspired it? Broadly speaking, the declared intention of postcolonial theory is, like postmodernism itself, to bring down all totalizing systems of representation and power, including Eurocentrism. We have seen that in practice postmodernism does not live up to its theoretical and ideological ideals of emancipation. Can we proffer a similar judgement upon postcolonial discourse? It is fair to argue that by neglecting the Third World’s former 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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histories of anti-colonial struggles and today’s tales of resistance to neocolonialism, postcolonial discourse is far from eradicating essentialism and Eurocentrism. We have previously highlighted the presence of essentialist and binary impulses within the postcolonial ethos. What about Eurocentrism? Can we reasonably state that because it does not openly question postmodernism’s Eurocentrism, postcolonial discourse, as exemplified by hybridity theory, appears tacitly neo-Eurocentric? Although there is no definite answer to this inquiry, there is much reason to believe that postcolonial doxa is structurally neocolonial, in so far as the unquestioned postmodernist ethos on which it is based proves, as shown above, intrinsically Eurocentric. Furthermore, what is most obvious in this connection is that postcolonial discourse is profoundly opportunistic, if not parasitic. It symbiotically feeds on postmodern concepts and ideas, not in order to emancipate the postcolony from its neocolonial condition, but primarily to fuel a diaspora-centric narrative of culture and identity. Of significant note also is the way in which postcolonial scholars, like their postmodernist peers, tend to erase (colonial) history or romanticize it. As with regard to colonial history, so, in its relation to politics postcolonial discourse is, like postmodern thought, one of disengagement. It is imbued with the same political and social ‘pessimism’ or ‘resignation’ that characterizes postmodern thought. Lyotard again offers us a good illustration of postmodern political, economic, and social fatalism. For Lyotard, as is made clear in Postmodern Fables, pessimism and inaction are the order of the day, since, according to him, ‘the liberal capitalist system under which we live is not subject to radical upheaval but only to revision’ (1997, 200). In Lyotard’s bleak prospect, there is, in fact, no political and economic alternative to the capitalist and neoliberal global system. He considers capitalism as the best humankind can hope for, and, as such, an economic system that is not to be questioned but simply streamlined and improved. It is evident that in the acceptance of capitalism as the economic system par excellence Lyotard is far from waging an effective war on grand narratives and totalities. For such an ethics and politics of emancipation would require an assault on capitalism, which is after all a totalizing structure of power and inequality, especially in its ultraliberal version, rather than a defence. A sense of disengagement and pessimism similar to that of Lyotard’s discourse also saturates Baudrillard’s discussions of the contemporary global condition. Baudrillard’s argument is that liberalism and the forces of the market have definitively won, since ‘there is no revolt any more, no antagonism, no longer any convictions, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


no longer any real opposition’ (1998, 55). Baudrillard further states that even the formerly combative and anti-hegemonic forces in the Third World have been defeated. According to him, this ‘combative periphery’, too, is ‘absorbed’ by the irresistible ideology of the market. Postmodern political and social fatalism as exemplified by Lyotard and Baudrillard has been widely criticized; Jacques Rancière (1995) is among a number of fervent critics who have indicted postmodernism for downplaying the importance and relevance of political struggles in today’s globalized world. The characteristic postmodernist spectatorial standpoint underlined in this discussion might result from intellectual, ideological, and political conformism. It might as well find itself indebted to two other interrelated factors: first, an unwillingness to question the European self as a human universal norm; second, the reluctance to challenge Western societies’ projection of their political and socio-economic system into a global model of governance and progress. Seen from the wider perspective of globalization, the preclusion of any and all possibilities of social, economic, and political alternatives that would transcend the current global world order is certainly a manifest case of inertia and resignation. Beyond intellectual and ideological conformism, underlying postmodern political disengagement and pessimism is – paradoxically – a tacit endorsement of global neoliberal power structures and their attendant neocolonial mentality. As in postmodern discourse, in postcolonial theory, too, the prevailing sense of political and social fatalism might rightly be considered as being complicit with the neoliberal world order. As Krishna remarks: ‘The dominant mode produced by postcolonial theory is one of ironic resignation and apathy, rather than militancy and third-world solidarity. This plays into the hands of neoliberal globalization and militarism’ (2009, 118). The question of postcolonial resignation is certainly worth keeping in view; it nonetheless requires some qualification. The reason is that postcolonial discourse is in practice not one of complete social and political resignation. Rather, it is in some significant respects a discourse of moderated pessimism and resignation. At one level, postcolonial discourse obviously shows little, if any solidarity and engagement with the global postcolonial condition. At another, however, it reveals, as we shall shortly see, a deep commitment to the more limited, not to say parochial postcolonial condition of the migrant/diasporic elite.


8 Hybridity Discourse and Binarism

If postcolonial political resignation needs to be qualified, so too does the contestation of binarism in postcolonial scholarship. To outline the historical contours of the postcolonial debate on binarism, it is worth remembering that the critique of binary models of perception in the humanities began in the late 1960s. In postcolonial studies, significant attacks on binary modes of thinking with regard to colonialism started in the early 1990s, with Bhabha’s Location of Culture (1994) as a key manifesto. Since then, the anti-binarism backlash, targeting mostly Fanon, Césaire, and Memmi, has developed into a consistent theoretical orientation in postcolonial studies.1 These anti-colonial activists have all been criticized for reducing complex, multi-layered colonial encounters to the rigid binary of colonizer and colonized, centre and periphery. Young’s protest in Colonial Desire is eloquent in this respect: ‘It is striking, however, given the long history of cultural interaction, how few models have been developed to analyze it. Since Sartre, Fanon, and Memmi, postcolonial criticism has constructed two antithetical groups, the colonizer and colonized, self and another […] a Manichean division that threatens to reproduce the static, essentialist categories it seeks to undo’ (1995, 5). Just as the culturalist turn that emerged in the 1970s became a leading trend in social sciences, so, too, the non-binary models that Bhabha, Young, Gilroy, and others have promoted over the last three decades now enjoy prominence in postcolonial studies and beyond. They have become predominant modes of conceptualizing colonial and postcolonial cultural encounters to the extent that binary modes of theorizing and resisting colonialism/neocolonialism have been relegated to the postcolonial theoretical hinterlands. Notwithstanding their persistence in today’s global order as well as their conceptual, 150


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political, and ideological significance, binary models are dismissed as theoretical anomalies, if not simply deemed taboo. Together with the culturalist trend, the spatial turn, inspired by Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel Foucault from the 1970s on, has also contributed to challenging the binary model of thinking. In the postcolonial field, this spatial turn is crystallized in Bhabha’s notion of the third space, which became popular in the humanities over the last two decades or so.2 If the doubt surrounding binary thinking can be historically accounted for, the postcolonial rejection of political activists such as Fanon, Césaire, and Memmi in the name of an anti-binary backlash is certainly unfair; it may even have a neocolonial resonance in many significant respects. All the more so as the anti-colonialist discourse of these prominent intellectuals, disparaged by the promoters of hybridity discourse, is still highly relevant in our neocolonial world. From a strictly theoretical perspective, on the other hand, the postcolonial dismissal of these key anti-colonial figures as anachronistic is both counter-productive and in conflict with the postcolonial ethos. In a sense, it is paradoxical that postcolonial scholars overlook the fact that anti-colonialist discourse is multiple, rather than monolithic; historically it comprised binarism and frontal conflict, negotiation and consensus. To deny binarism resistive agency and political significance, as do Bhabha, Gilroy, and Young is thus tantamount to an exclusionary practice with no historical foundation. And this manifest politics of exclusion is certainly paradoxical in a discipline priding itself on being inclusive and multiple. Even more ironic is these scholars’ disregard for the history of anti-colonialism. In this, the postcolonial attack on binarism, that is, resistive binarism, finally looks like a symptom of historical short-sightedness, intellectual disengagement, and political conservatism. Basically, middle-ground theorists or promoters of the ‘in-between’ space such as Bhabha, Young, and Gilroy tend to forget that if Fanon, Césaire, and Memmi had not rejected colonialism en bloc; if they had not presented the colonial relationship as being fundamentally comprised of victims, on the one hand, and victimizers, on the other, the colonial idea would never have been declared illegitimate, nor would colonialism have been brought down. After all, Bhabha and his peers correctly acknowledge that colonial rule and discourse were founded on duplicity and ambivalence. In this context, we see no reason why the protean colonial discourse and rule would not have continued to thrive if it had not met stiff resistance from the uncompromising binarism of the likes of Fanon, Césaire, Sartre, and Memmi. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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It might be argued that anti-colonial resistance did not originate with such binarist activists as Fanon, Césaire, and Memmi, but that it was initiated by advocates of the middle ground in previous centuries. As early as the Renaissance humanist writers and scholars such as Michel de Montaigne, Bartolomé De Las Casas, and François Rabelais, to name a few, condemned the excesses of colonialism in the Americas (see Las Casas [1550] 1992; Montaigne [1595] 2001). In the process, they advocated cultural relativism, militating for a more humane treatment of the colonized. In the twentieth century, too, again well before Fanon, Césaire, and Memmi, writers such as Joseph Conrad, André Gide, and E.M. Forster, to name the most prominent, indicted the excesses of colonialism. Like their humanist forebears, Conrad, Gide, and Forster articulated their anti-colonial critique from an intermediate or in-between position. They pleaded for a reformed, re-humanized brand of colonialism, rather than for a dismantling of the whole imperial enterprise.3 In any discussion of the Western anti-colonial tradition, we may contend that, although limited, the contribution of writers like De Las Casas, Rabelais, Gide, Forster, and Conrad should not be minimized. They are part of the picture because their condemnation of the excesses of colonialism must have influenced, directly or indirectly, later antiimperialists such as Fanon, Memmi, and Césaire. Against postcolonial doxa, one might nonetheless add that the deprecated binarism of Fanon, Sartre, Memmi, and Césaire was more lethal by far to colonial ideology than were the intermediate positions of the Renaissance humanists and those following in their footsteps: Conrad, Gide, and Forster. Without going so far as to sanctify the achievement of binary models of resistance, as do postcolonial scholars with hybridity, it is nevertheless crucial not to undermine the major contribution of Fanon, Césaire, and Memmi to the emancipation of the former colonized from the grip of Western colonial hegemony. My argument about the intermediate anti-colonial forms of resistance embodied by De Las Casas, Rabelais, Gide, and Conrad also holds for postcolonial hybridity discourse. Earlier on I stressed that intermediate anti-colonial resistance was useful, but far too limited to threaten the ideology of colonialism which was what facilitated colonial excesses in the first place. Similarly, hybridity discourse is no doubt instrumental in encouraging planetary solidarity and cultural as well as racial tolerance. Politically and economically, however, its manifest, celebrated doubleedged constitution is reason for concern. In short, the main problem with this constitutive duality is this: in the same way as hybridity discourse 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


could be employed for benevolent, progressive purposes, it might just as well be designed to achieve unethical, destructive ends, as will be illustrated shortly. Hybridity discourse is structurally highly resilient, in the sense that it is able to integrate multiple, even contradictory, discursive practices. In the main, from the standpoint of cultural and identity politics this resilience allows the discourse of hybridity to cater for multiple cultures and subjectivities. Thanks to its discursive and epistemological elasticity as well as its ideological open-endedness hybridity discourse can also easily encompass opposing, sometimes even apparently irreconcilable political and ideological persuasions. In view of this structural flexibility, the discourse of hybridity lends itself to ready appropriation by almost anyone, to serve almost any political or ideological purpose. Despite its appeal, therefore, hybridity discourse is problematic in more ways than one. Conceptually, it is both limited and mystifying; ideologically, too, it is self-contradictory, especially regarding its relation to binarism. As most postcolonial scholars contend, the theory of hybridity is primarily intended to resist hegemonic powers and binary thinking. In practice, however, things are less simple and conclusive. Defined as anti-binarist par excellence, the discourse of hybridity is in fact a two-fold rhetorical and discursive design: as it contests binarism, it also opens up a discursive space for binary and monolithic structures. At the least, this double consciousness undermines the idea that hybridity is profoundly subversive and resistant. The very discursive dialogism enabled by the ambivalence of hybridity discourse conflates antagonistic agencies in the same discursive space: on one side, a resistant impulse that may be unleashed against hegemonic political and ideological structures of power; on the other side, orientations which appear collusive with systems of domination and inequality. In other words, hybridity discourse is essentially Janus-faced; at once it contests binarism and, thanks to its dialogism and elasticity, it enables rather than disables binary thinking and dominant systems of control. Owing to this inherent duplicity, hybridity discourse can thus easily be, and, in fact, is harnessed indifferently to forces of emancipation and retrogression, to progressive and reactionary power politics. And given that hybridity discourse is a double-edged tool the question arises as to why most postcolonial scholars see this discourse exclusively as a progressive, subversive, and resistant agency. In other words, why are the retrogressive or conservative impulses of hybridity discourse so readily refined away while the progressive aspects are exaggeratedly emphasized? 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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The silencing of the retrogressive effects of hybridity discourse might be the result of a cluster of ideological and political motives. Most significantly, the fact that hybridity discourse can be appropriated by binary structures of power and domination (globalization and antiglobalization, racist ideologies and anti-racist discourse) is, above all, down to the discourse’s own celebrated ambivalence and theoreticoideological self-contradiction. It is also facilitated by the neutrality or lack of direct political and ideological commitment of postcolonial scholars. Postcolonial scholars, who celebrate the ambivalence of hybridity discourse, may, of course, argue that it is no fault of theirs, nor are they responsible, if the concept of hybridity is utilized for dubious, retrogressive purposes (racist, exploitative, domineering aims). After all, everybody is free to use concepts for whatever purposes they judge fit. With this insight in mind, theorists can never be certain about how and to what ends their concepts can be used. Neither do they have the means to prevent people from employing these concepts as they think fit. This said, there are nevertheless important methodological, deontological, intellectual, and ethical considerations involved in every intellectual undertaking; considerations without which scholarship might become no more than a jungle of words and ideas free of guiding principles and with no demands of accountability, ethical or otherwise. The fact that most postcolonial theorists stress the ambivalence of hybridity discourse; that they employ the multi-faceted and ideologically fraught concept of hybridity in such a fuzzy, elastic, and de-contextualized fashion is surely not evidence of deontological and ethical responsibility; it is even less an anti-hegemonic posture, as these scholars want us to believe. At best, the postcolonial scholars’ enthusiastic support of ambivalence is a proof of non-commitment to anti-hegemonic global struggles and, at worst, it represents a tacit complicity with former colonial and today’s neocolonial structures of rule. We may further argue that the postcolonial celebration of hybridity discourse’s ambivalence in the end sounds like a neocolonial discursive practice. More specifically, the postcolonial neglect of race politics, examined in Chapter 6, may indicate a particular refusal to address colonial racist assumptions which still inform and condition the representations and management of otherness in contemporary Western societies. From a concrete geopolitical standpoint, the postcolonial scholars’ promotion of hybridity discourse begins to look highly suspicious. It can rightly be assimilated to a form of collusion with the Western-dominated global structures of power such as the World Bank, the International Chamber of Commerce, or the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


International Monetary Fund. These hegemonic structures, as will be discussed in detail later, organize and regulate global relations in terms that repeat in disguised forms former colonial racist and imperial patterns of domination and rule. In view of its numerous contradictions and limitations, hybridity discourse should certainly be taken with a pinch of salt. However, notwithstanding its theoretical and empirical shortcomings, hybridity discourse remains widely popular. The elasticity of the concept of hybridity itself partly accounts for this. One of the side effects of this popularity is – as noted above – that hybridity discourse can be and, in fact, is ‘appropriated by anyone to mean practically anything’ (Gómez-Pen ˜a quoted by Kraidy 2005, 66). The polysemy of the term ‘hybridity’ and the fuzziness surrounding the discussion of this concept in the humanities certainly facilitate such appropriations. Furthermore, the fact that hybridity discourse can be so randomly utilized raises serious theoretical, ideological, political, and ethical concerns. Many people, including scholars of both left and right, fear the effects that hybridity discourse may have on the ethical foundations of society, which are still essentially based on the right-wrong dichotomy (see Schirmer et al. 2006). Politically, the danger is even more serious. Because ambivalence or selfcontradiction is apotheosized as a key constitutive feature of hybridity discourse, any clear-cut hierarchy of values is dismissed. In concrete political terms, within this prevalent postcolonial moral vacuum all ideologies, good or evil, are not only allowed equal voice, but their materialization is also discursively posited as possible, if not legitimate. And since the postcolonial practitioners do not clearly and responsibly postulate any substantial ethical demands, hybridity discourse may indiscriminately be used to immoral as well as moral, inhumane as well as humane purposes. In other words, by flattening out the ideological and ethical paradigm hybridity discourse may be said to allocate equal discursive space for reactionary and progressive politics, for benevolent and malevolent forces, for oppressive and emancipating agencies. Within the epistemic model envisioned by hybridity discourse, then, binaries such as fascism and anti-fascism, racist and anti-racist feeling, for instance, can easily coexist and be fulfilled in the same discursive and epistemic space. Indeed, these opposing tendencies can, as it were, claim equal discursive representation in the name of the ideology of pluralism and ambivalence characteristic of hybridity discourse. Given this structural and epistemic ambivalence, it is no wonder that some critics consider postcolonial promoters of hybridity discourse as retrogressive, dismissing 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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them as mere proponents of ‘reactionary politics wrapped in trendy jargon’ (Kraidy 2005, 65). Postcolonial conceptualizations of hybridity no doubt appear reactionary in many respects, not least because most postcolonial scholars consolidate rather than challenge the established order, be it an academic ideological conservatism or the global political and economic system of domination. What is even most remarkable is that the advocates of métissage and the promoters of purity alike often move easily from one extreme to the other depending on political and economic advantage. I refer here to two prominent historical figures to illustrate this point: the Mexican philosopher, politician, and journalist, José Vasconcelos, discussed in Chapter 6 and Leopold Sédar Senghor, one of the ‘fathers’ of the Négritude movement. In my earlier discussion of Vasconcelos I focused primarily on his status as a fervent advocate of hybridity. However, the picture would not be complete without invoking Vasconcelos’s role as a proponent of purity and supremacist racial ideologies before his later embrace of the ideology of métissage. As historical evidence shows, Vasconcelos, the champion of the mestizo doctrine from the 1970s onwards, was a supporter of the fascist and Nazi regimes in the 1940s. He was the editor of the pro-Nazi publication, Timón, and his support for fascism has been well documented (see Kelly 1944; Schonbach 1985; Joseph and Hendersen 2002). Vasconcelos’s collaboration in the ideology of Nazism, with its emphasis on purity, discredits his subsequent romantic discourse on métissage; all the more so as his former essentialist beliefs in purity are still subtly present, albeit in reverse, in his theory of mestizaje as pointed up in Chapter 6. Like Vasconcelos, Leopold Sédar Senghor, too, moved from an early endorsement of cultural essentialism embodied in the ideology of Négritude, which postulates the existence of an ‘African personality’ or consciousness, to a celebration of métissage, which invalidates his former essentialist claims. It was especially his rejection of Nazism and the resulting horrors that led Senghor to embrace hybridity. Manifestly, this transformation marks a radical ideological shift, considering that in the decade preceding the Second World War, Senghor thought of métissage as a ‘disintegrating’ agent. Senghor’s most explicit endorsement of métissage was conveyed in his 1950 declaration in which he stated that ‘the ideal civilization could be nothing but hybrid’ (1964, 96).4 If Senghor and Vasconcelos reveal the inconsistency as well as the elusiveness of the discourse of both purity and métissage, they most 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


importantly also indicate that very often the two impulses (essentialist and anti-essentialist) coexist within the same discursive paradigm, impacting upon and redefining each other. To pursue our critical discussion of the theoretical, epistemological, and ideological discrepancies of the theory of hybridity, we may further note that by allocating a space to monolithic, hegemonic structures of power within the dialogical paradigm it favours, hybridity discourse, ipso facto, legitimizes the very system of domination and inequality that it is meant to break down. To elaborate on this point, we may contend that in general terms hybridity discourse can, to some extent, be granted a relative subversive and resistive impulse. At the same time, there is also much reason to argue that this discourse appears, in many fundamental ways, reactionary and complicit with hegemonic discourses and practices. The theory of hybridity, as articulated by Bhabha, can, to a certain degree, be seen as a discourse against power and authoritative representations of the world. It may just as well be read as a discourse of power and empowerment with a hegemonic impulse. The question worth asking again at this point is why should Bhabha and his peers consider the allegedly progressive and subversive aspect of hybridity more significant than its retrogressive impulses? Both are after all constitutive of hybridity. In other words, why is a complex, multifarious, and elusive phenomenon such as hybridity flattened out into an idealized, reductive monolith? We have seen that the postcolonial narrative of the diaspora is a hegemonic discourse of power and empowerment; that is to say it is a discourse which narrates the minor tale of immigration and exile as a major, universal postcolonial condition (see Chapters 5, 6 and 7). We may here add that from a strictly academic standpoint, too, the discourse of hybridity is a vehicle of hegemonic power; hegemonic in the sense that it has turned into an authoritarian, dogmatic interpretative paradigm. More explicitly, within a few years this discourse has become an absolute analytical tool which has virtually shut out all the other modes of discursive and cultural analysis (Marxist, anticolonialist, anti-globalist, and so on). And, like all structures of power, hybridity discourse is profoundly protean; it functions positively as well as negatively. On the positive side, hybridity discourse produces alternative forms of identification, new inclusive systems of knowledge and representation, and discourses of emancipation. On its negative side, hybridity denies, restricts, and represses discursive modes, perceptions, and forms of knowledge that do not conform to its theoretical and empirical frame or purposes. Among the things repressed, denied, or occluded by the postcolonial theorists of hybridity are, as we have 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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seen, non-Western postcolonial scholarship, class and race politics, and economic and political structures of power and inequality. Added to these are discursive practices based on binary perceptions of power, culture, and identity. To expatiate on the issue of binarism, it is important to point out that postcolonial theory is suspicious of epistemologies that favour antagonistic over agonistic models of perception. Bhabha’s preference for the term ‘agonism’ to ‘antagonism’ has been criticized by a number of scholars, among them Benita Parry. Parry aptly reminds us that ‘agonism/agonistic’ is a Greek word descriptive of ancient Greek athletic contests as well as debate in Attic Old Comedy. In the process, she thinks, rightly so, that the term ‘antagonism’ describes more fittingly the colonizer-colonized relationships than does the word ‘agonism’ preferred by Bhabha: ‘In rejecting antagonistic in favour of agonistic, is [Bhabha] then positing colonialism as a competition of peers rather than a hostile struggle between the subjugated and the oppressor?’ (2004, 63). To extend Parry’s insightful observation, we may state that any worthy postcolonial sensibility in a polarized and neocolonial context such as ours today must be antagonistic and contestative. All the more so as, in my view, an antagonistic ethics is more suitable for a genuinely anti-hegemonic postcolonial sensibility and far more efficient in challenging totalizing power structures. This said, an antagonistic ethics is a demanding counter-hegemonic epistemology; one that requires the postcolonial scholar to adopt a bold ideological position alongside unwavering commitment to the concrete global geopolitical world. In the main, the antagonistic postcolonial sensibility projected in this discussion entails a radical ethics founded on dissension and rupture from hegemonic structures of domination. The agonistic modality endorsed by Bhabha is instead based on mild objection and compromise rather than on a radical questioning of totalizing systems of control. Like hybridity discourse itself, Bhabha’s agonistic ethics is basically an intermediate mode of ethicality, with a limited resistive potential. As such, it is far from being the revolutionary aesthetics proclaimed by postcolonial scholars. It constitutes rather a consensual ethics that involves political and intellectual conformism as well as implicit collusion with the neoliberal structures of power; structures which, by now, have thoroughly accommodated hybridity discourse and the third space. To pursue this cross-examination, it is worth noting that, broadly speaking, binarism per se is neither good nor bad; nor, from this prospect, is hybridity discourse positive or negative. It very much depends on the purposes for which they are both intended. If binarism is put in the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


service of decolonization or women’s liberation, for instance, then, from a political and human rights perspective binarism is worthwhile and ethically sustainable. If binary thinking, on the other hand, upholds racist or fascist theories, it is ideologically and morally culpable. This observation also holds for hybridity discourse. If hybridity discourse is geared towards progressive, emancipatory projects it should be encouraged and valorized. But in the event it is harnessed to retrogressive, exploitative goals, as is the case in neoliberal politics today, it must be boldly denounced. Seen from these multiple historical and theoretical perspectives, therefore, any categorical rejection or enthusiastic endorsement of either binarism or hybridity discourse may be misleading as well as dogmatic. Beyond dogmatism, the postcolonial scholars’ dismissal of binarism betrays signs of a historical myopia that does not render justice to binary modes of anti-colonial struggle.5 From a strictly theoretical and methodological point of view, on the other hand, such a rejection sharply contradicts the principles of openness, multiplicity, and the ‘contrapuntal’, central to hybridity discourse. In mainstream postcolonial discourse binary modes of resistance are dismissed as the undesired Other of postcolonial studies; an exclusionary practice that finally turns hybridity discourse into an epistemic and conceptual monological enterprise. Furthermore, in conceiving of hybridity discourse as essentially positive and progressive, in contra-distinction from the binary model seen as negative and regressive, postcolonial scholars such as Bhabha, Young, and Gilroy endorse a theoretical orientation replete with Manichean patterns which they energetically condemn in other discursive practices, namely binary models. Thus, for all its assault on Manichean aesthetics, the postcolonial discursive paradigm eventually boils down to a stark opposition between, on the one hand, a valued, progressive hybridity, and, on the other hand, a negative, despised binary model. Ironically, this rigid conceptual categorization replicates a postcolonial situation of binary epistemologies and structures of representation. To expatiate on the issue of resistance in colonial and postcolonial contexts, we may further state that resistance to hegemonic structures of power, whether colonial or neocolonial, can take multiple forms and may be conveyed in various discourses, binary and non-binary alike. As proclaimed by many postcolonial scholars, hybrid, multi-layered modes of resistance may certainly serve to fight oppressive structures of domination. Similarly, these hegemonic forces can just as well be efficiently challenged by binary models. I personally see no reason why resistance could not be achieved by either, or, yet more productively, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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by the combination of the two. But in order for such combinative processes of resistance to be possible, postcolonial studies must move away from unproductive exclusionary practices; it must also emancipate itself from the dogmatic belief that hybridity and ambivalence are the only viable agencies of contestation and emancipation. One of the main postcolonial arguments for not engaging with binarism other than by denial or dismissal is that binary thinking is an inadequate tool for a mixed, interconnected global world. Gilroy, for instance, argued that Fanon’s ideas are out of place in the current world because: ‘In our period, Fanon, whose work yields so many precious insights, becomes less than helpful precisely because his thinking remains bound to a dualistic logic we must now abjure’ (2000, 253). To reject binarism is understandable in a scholar who has made hybridity into the sole intellectual and ideological paradigm by which human experience should be assessed. Nevertheless, Gilroy fails to recognize that the rejection of binarism is no guarantee that the binarism in question has disappeared from the face of the earth. More concretely, to pretend, as do Gilroy and most postcolonial scholars, that, by its evident prominence in the humanities or the extent of its evocation, hybridity has collapsed once and for all the binary structures of power and inequality is a fantasy wrought with dangers. The structures of power and domination of our global world, which in many respects is profoundly neocolonial, are still based on binary thinking, albeit cloaked in a hybrid, progressive rhetoric. In other words, today’s global political and economic world is structurally organized and regulated by neocolonial, binary institutions of power which operate in subtle, disguised ways. Furthermore, the recurrence in academic as well as political and economic discourses of polarities such as North and South, developed and developing countries, and so on, alongside the sense of superiority and racial prejudice underlying these polarities, illustrates the extent to which binary perceptions are still leading the world. These Manichean discourses and practices are, as has been observed before, manifest in the workings of such structures of power as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. The neocolonial motives of these institutions are underpinned by mechanisms of domination that reiterate earlier Manichean colonial modes of oppression and dispossession, and it is perhaps surprising that despite the prominence of these neocolonial binarisms, neither Gilroy nor Bhabha nor Young, for example, concretely engages with these exploitative structures. In what looks like a regressive impulse, postcolonial scholars are instead obsessively concerned with indicting one remote 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


type of binarism, the resistive brand embodied by Fanon, Césaire, and Memmi. A concrete engagement with neocolonial binary structures and rhetoric would certainly have contradicted Gilroy’s assumption that Fanon’s thoughts are useless or irrelevant to our contemporary world. For contrary to what Gilroy and his peers might think, Fanon’s insights into colonial ideology and domination retain their critical edge and epistemological as well as ethical value in today’s globalized world. It is in this respect worth emphasizing again that the colonial binary thinking denounced by Fanon and Césaire is still persistent in the present neocolonial world; a persistence that sharply contradicts the mystical projections of hybridity discourse. It is obviously for this reason that the resistive binarism of Fanon and Césaire is fought with so much determination by postcolonial promoters of hybridity discourse. On a strict theoretical level the categorical dismissal of Fanon and Césaire’s binary mode of resistance sounds like a postcolonial ethics of survival; that is to say, the very existence and legitimacy of hybridity discourse are predicated on the demise of Fanon and Césaire’s discourse on colonialism. In other words, in order for Bhabha, Gilroy and others to legitimize as well as to market their hybridity theory in a postcolonial, or rather neocolonial, era they had first to kill the anti-colonial fathers (Fanon, Césaire) in order to take their place. The postcolonial indictment of binarism, counter-hegemonic binarism in this case, is a deft discursive practice replete with narcissistic, theoretical, and ideological implications. Bluntly put, this stubborn exclusion of the very notion of binarism from the discursive sphere of postcolonial studies involves political neoconservatism and academic correctness, as well as theoretical absolutism. By theoretical absolutism, I mean the postcolonial practitioners’ erection of hybridity discourse into a theocratic discursive and analytical mode by which politics, cultures, and the human condition are measured. From an empirical standpoint, on the other hand, the postcolonial scholars’ undermining of neocolonial binarisms reveals a historical myopia alongside a manifest political disengagement from the reality of the neocolonial condition. Both may be the result of, if not facilitated by, the very conceptual fuzziness surrounding postcolonial studies. Significantly, the vagueness, epistemological ambivalence, and manifest abstraction of issues from the context and history to which they respond might account for this political disengagement and historical short-sightedness. They might also explain why postcolonial discourse, known for its indeterminacy and porosity, lends itself to indistinct appropriation by both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic agencies. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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There is a strong tendency among postcolonial scholars to connect postcolonial studies with anti-hegemonic agencies. This is usually done with an insistence that gives the impression that postcolonial theory has initiated an unprecedented theoretical and ideological revolution. However, the relation of postcolonial studies to global hegemonic structures of power and neocolonial binarisms has been widely overlooked. The following chapter examines the relationships between global neocolonial structures of power and postcolonial discourse.


9 The Global and the Postcolonial: Uneasy Alliance

9.1 An overview of globalization: hegemony and resistance The phenomenon of globalization is characterized by intense transnational interconnectedness in the fields of economics and finance, politics, technology, communications, and culture. Goods, capital, skilled workers, war, political violence, and disease flow across national borders with unprecedented speed. Within this extensive network, things happening on a local level can have quick global repercussions. Geopolitically, globalization implies that the nation-state, which formerly had almost complete sovereignty over domestic economic, social, and political issues, is now more dependent on a global economic and institutional order. This said, the diminishing of the nation-state’s sovereignty or regulative power, outlined in most discussions of globalization, is, of course, uneven. For it is evident that the sovereignty of the countries of the South, most of which are financially almost entirely dependent on global structures of power such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has suffered far greater erosion than the sovereignty of the developed nations of the North. Globalization is an unsettling, elusive phenomenon that resists easy categorization. The term ‘globalization’ itself and the history of this complex process are likewise elusive. There is no single definition of the concept of globalization, just as there is no consensus regarding its starting point. A number of scholars and historians see globalization as a modern phenomenon that developed in the mid-nineteenth century and has grown to prominence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see Held and McGrew 2007, 19). Others trace the source of globalization back to the sixteenth century, a period corresponding to the rise of 163


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Spain and Portugal as world imperial powers; another group goes still further back by locating the roots of globalization in the ancient Greek and Roman empires. For these scholars, present-day globalization is thus merely an intensification of older forms of globalizations. As the accounts of the history of globalization are diverse, so, too, are responses to the practices and effects of globalization. There are basically three distinct attitudes toward globalization: the first, and economically most powerful group, consists of those who assume that globalization is ‘natural’, ‘benign’, and beneficial to the global populations. This is generally the line defended by the ‘hyper-globalists’, most of whom are partisans of the neoliberal orthodoxy propelled by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s; an aggressively market-driven ideology with an emphasis on ‘privatization’, ‘deregulation’, and imposition of financial discipline on nation-states, particularly those of the South. Another category consists of the ‘sceptical’ who, as this adjective indicates, doubt the benefits of globalization but are not necessarily actively involved in anti-globalist activism. The last group is composed of ‘anti-globalist’ activists who view the current articulation of globalization as harmful; for these activists globalization is essentially a source of global inequality, violence, and destruction of cultures and societies (see Holton 2005; Bruff 2005; Held and McGrew 2007). As we shall shortly see, this group not only condemns the effects of neoliberal globalization, but also offers a more humane and more equitable alternative. Contemporary globalization is certainly a source of much discontent in both the developing and developed countries. This discontent is easily understood as any clear, honest judgement on the economic, political, cultural, and social consequences of globalization on the majority of the inhabitants of the globe will recognize that globalization is no cause for universal celebration. Notwithstanding the ostensible enthusiasm of the global neoliberal ideology, the fact remains that so far globalization has generated more poverty and disorder across the planet than happiness and prosperity. It would seem that the liberal assumption, from the Marquis de Mirabeau through to Adam Smith and Richard Cobden down to today’s American and European neoliberals,1 that free trade and capital flow would contribute to global prosperity, solidarity, and happiness is simply a myth. From sluggish economic growth, through the severe financial crises that hit South East Asia in the 1990s and the Western world in 2010, the numerous conflicts around the globe, the destruction of ecological systems, to the degradation of living conditions worldwide, it is clear that globalization is not procuring for the planet that prosperity and well-being promised by the neoliberal 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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ideology. Singh rightly points out that most of ‘the policies associated with globalization have also contributed in the deterioration of education, health and other social indicators in many parts of the world’ (2005, 14–15). Most significantly, not only has globalization failed to generate global prosperity, it has also proved considerably ‘uneven’ and ‘unequal’ in its gifts; profitable mostly to transnational elites and financial corporations. A small number of global investors and comprador groups reap inestimable profits from globalization. The majority of the world population is poverty-stricken and working in conditions close to those of slavery; most of the world population has to survive on less than two dollars a day. The profits generated by multinational corporations, most of which are based in Western metropolitan centres, are not redistributed in the countries of the South where these corporations operate; countries which, for the most part, are no more than neoliberal/ neocolonial outposts of progress. Slater points to this global unevenness, citing the case of Mexico: ‘While Mexican trade with the US has skyrocketed, going from 36 billion in 1993 to 450 billion in 2002 [US$], most of the high-volume south-north exchanges have been between a handful of transnational subsidiaries in Mexico and their US-based corporate headquarters’ (2004, 172). Similarly, the ideal of modernization and industrialization of the countries of the South implied in the neoliberal discourse remains wishful thinking; just as the nineteenthcentury colonial project of bringing modernity and industrialization to the colonized world was a hoax, as illustrated by the miniscule number of industries set up in the former colonies. To elaborate on this crucial point, it is important to remark that the unevenness of globalization is also reflected in the unequal circulation of financial investments within the developing countries themselves. There is significant evidence that global financial investment is concentrated in a handful of developing countries, among them China, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. In contrast, most African countries, lacking skilled labour, large domestic markets, and political stability, receive a very small proportion of the global financial flow (see Singh 2005, 81). The signing of both bilateral and multilateral investment agreements between First World and African countries did not improve this situation; in most cases the developing countries failed to attract the much needed foreign investment. As a result, a number of commentators on globalization have come to the conclusion that these agreements, including multilateral agreements which in theory were meant to ‘enhance the bargaining power of weak countries’, turn out themselves to be conduits of unbalanced relationships or ‘unequal power’ (Singh 2005, 83). 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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Other signs of unequal power relationships between the North and South are to be found embedded in the structure as well as in the economic and ideological orientations of the institutions regulating the global world order: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the International Chamber of Commerce. These international institutions, with the remit of creating a uniform political, administrative global order, variously serve the neoliberal ideology. In keeping with the neoliberal doctrine, these institutions promote ‘good governance’, ‘transparency’, and ‘democracy’; values that, as many have noted, are conspicuously lacking within these global institutions themselves. The United Nations, in particular, is inherently undemocratic. Singh reminds us that ‘the principle of “one country, one vote” is applicable in the General Assembly but the power to veto granted to the five permanent members of the Security Council is without any democratic principle’ (2005, 124). Besides being hypocritical, these international institutions prove hegemonic. In this context, it is little wonder that the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the like should be seen as neocolonial structures of power. The propensity of these institutions to impose a neoliberal world order by relying on the dubious principles of ‘good governance’ and ‘democracy’ is in many respects imperialist and totalizing in both structure and intent. All the more so as the countries of the South have virtually no say in this imposed world order, most of them being dependent on financial assistance from these very neocolonial structures of power. And when the developing countries dare to criticize these neoliberal, hegemonic proceedings, they are reprimanded and coerced into obedience to the laws imposed by the international institutions. The case of Algeria, which in the 1980s criticized the World Bank for being an ‘imperialist’ institution, is a much-cited example. When members of the World Bank visited Algeria in the aftermath of these protests, the Algerian government which, like most African governments, was also indebted to and dependent on the World Bank and other international financial institutions, was forced to tone down its criticism. Moreover, they were ultimately compelled to transform Algeria’s statist economy into a liberal economy open to foreign capital and competition. Viewed in this light, then, the modernization discourse endorsed by the international structures of power and by the neoliberal doxa has deep implicit imperialistic orientations. It is in many subtle ways continuous with the nineteenth-century European civilizing mission, whose presumed objective was to bring non-Europeans into the orbit of 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Western modernity and progress. The main difference, though, is that the cultural arrogance and racism of today’s civilizational messianism operate in disguised forms. Besides, the disciplining neoliberal agenda sustaining this messianism is couched in a progressive rhetoric of ‘good governance’, ‘democracy’, and global well-being that few liberal-minded spirits dare to contest. Slater fittingly remarks: ‘The term “modernization” had a positive, progressive and seductive orientation – to be against modernization would be tantamount to being irrational, backward and retrogressive’ (2004, 62–3).2 From this perspective, to be against modernization per se may, indeed, be judged irrational and reactionary. But let us not at present confuse the terms of the debate. Clearly, the crux of the matter in this debate on globalization is not modernization in general, but a specific discourse of modernization promoted by a neoliberal orthodoxy; a discourse strategically moved by what might fittingly be called Kurtzian voraciousness and megalomania.3 We may here note that from a broad historical perspective, the discourse of modernization promoted by neoliberal ideology today is ambivalent and in colonial contexts it often served hegemonic imperialist ends. It is founded on the total erasure of all the bleak narratives of violence and dispossession of non-European peoples that in the first place made Western modernity possible (genocides, rape, enslavement). Its primary goal is not, as neoliberal doxa would like us to believe, to spread the benefits of modernity and modernization on a global scale. Rather, it is mainly motivated by desires for short-term profit and pillaging of the planet’s human and decreasing material resources. Rather than being reactionary or irrational, then, those who question this neoliberal discourse of modernization, although dismissed by neoliberals as backward and ‘irrelevant to the present’ (Slater 2004, 117), are in reality making a significantly progressive and responsible planetary gesture. This progressive, planetary agency is in itself an expression of a muchneeded politics of insurgency in today’s world; a world dominated by conformism and led by a predatory global elite selfishly tied to the eternal neoliberal moment of greed and rapacity. Such an insurgent politics not only sheds light on the neoliberal discourse’s imperialist orientation, it also reveals its significant self-contradictions. These selfcontradictions are evident in the gulf that separates neoliberal ideology from its practices. For instance, the principles of ‘good governance’ and ‘democracy’ on which the neoliberal discourse of modernization rests are broadly undermined and flouted by those who are supposed to spread them across the planet. This disparity between stated ideal and practice confirms that the neoliberal discourse of modernization is 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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nothing other than an ideological and political subterfuge. In view of the brutal methods used by the USA to spread ‘democracy’ and ‘good governance’ in the countries of the South, it is only too natural to be suspicious of the ideals projected by neoliberal politics. All the more so when US military interventions and the overthrowing of numerous, often democratically elected governments around the world from the 1940s onwards is added to the equation. Significantly, this well documented, aggressive political interventionism indicates how far the neoliberal globalization incarnated and championed by the United States feeds on a degree of political and economic violence that serves only to discredit the neoliberal assumption that globalization is benign and conducive to peace and global well-being. Violence, in its diverse forms (military, economic, political, cultural), is a major feature of today’s globalization, although, paradoxically, as Held and McGrew (2007, 15) have pointed out, it is often overlooked in studies of globalization. George Modelski was among the earliest critics to discuss the connections between globalization and violence in a work written over three decades ago. He remarked that ‘One striking feature of the process of globalization has been the quality of arrogance and violence that fuelled it’ (1972, 49). Charles Tilly also referred to the symbiotic relationship between globalization and global violence, arguing that ‘violence makes globalization and globalization makes violence’ (quoted by Held and McGrew 2007, 15). McGrew in turn devotes a full chapter to organized global violence, stating that ‘historically, organized violence has been constitutive of globalization – although it is theoretically neither a necessary element nor the sole determinant – while the current phase of globalization represents a significant challenge to orthodox thinking about security, the state, and world order’ (Held and McGrew 2007, 16). He further observes: ‘Modes of production as well as modes of destruction are both essential to explaining the history and dynamics of globalization, from the archaic globalization of the seventeenth century to the polycentric globalization of the twenty-first’ (2007, 36). Global, organized violence and destruction are not new phenomena, but key features of both modern and ancient empires. Imperial violence, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to modern times, was perpetrated by hybrid armies or organizations, comprising soldiers of different nationalities and from different cultures. The armies of imperial Rome were known for their multi-ethnicity; a hybridity that some historians, as we saw in Part I, cited as being among the main factors that led to the decline and fall of the Roman empire. From the eighteenth century on, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


most modern colonial armies, too, were ethnically diverse. A good case in point is the army of Frederick the Great, king of Prussia (1740–86), about half of whose contingent were of foreign origins. Nineteenthcentury European colonial armies were also broadly multi-ethnic. The British army, for example, had English and Scottish officers as well as Irish and Indian soldiers. This said, both within the British army and, more generally, within colonial contingents the presence of diversity or hybridity was in no way synonymous with equality. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that in both the British and French armies, for example, native soldiers were the victims of racism which prevented them from attaining top military positions (see Acheraïou 2008). Like modern imperial armies and colonial violence in today’s neoliberal globalization, much contemporary socio-economic global organized violence (military, social, economic, and so on) is essentially hybrid in character. In it, ‘statist’ and private structures collaborate and amass huge profits by spreading war and destruction. Such wars tend to be located in poor African or Latin countries, but the violence wrought is usually engineered globally, rather than just locally. It is understatement to assert that together with political corruption and nepotism within Third World elites, globally orchestrated violence is one of the main causes of poverty, underdevelopment, and social and political disorder in many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There is abundant evidence that economic globalization has contributed to social, ethnic, and political conflicts in many parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia; there is just as much proof that global structures supported many of the conflicts in these regions (see Kaldor 1999; Duffield 2001; Black 2004; Held and McGrew 2007). To bring to this outline of globalization a less pessimistic note, we may stress that neoliberal globalization’s imperialist, destructive methods have not gone unchallenged. Anti-neoliberal globalization action has been going on for at least a decade or so and is growing each year. It is supported by activists from all over the world, progressive nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, pressure groups, and writers and intellectuals, such as those involved in the World Social Forum; a movement born in Brazil in January 2001 as a challenge to the World Economic Forum. With their ideas and actions, these anti-globalization activists challenge the global neoliberal orthodoxy and its neo-imperialist practices. In the process, they argue that there is an alternative, if not numerous alternatives to the actuality of dehumanizing neoliberal globalization. Sen and Waterman declare in this respect: ‘Over the years and through the voice that it has articulated, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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[the World Social Forum] has made abundantly clear to the world at large that there is an alternative to neoliberal globalization; indeed, that there are several alternatives. And equally, there is much reason to think that people all over the world are now mobilizing to define and to live those alternatives’ (2009, xxi). These anti-globalists across the world are held together by similar concerns and the common belief that ‘Another World is Possible!’;4 one that is humane and based on planetary solidarity, equal enjoyment of human and economic rights on a global scale, global justice, and participatory democracy. The alternative form of globalization proposed by these communities is a ‘globalization from below’, as opposed to the neoliberal imposition of ‘globalization from above’.5 Whereas the latter form can be seen as a clubbish globalization profiting only a select transnational elite or happy few; globalization from below instead projects an inclusive, genuinely democratic, and egalitarian world order of solidarity and fair redistribution of wealth. Although it is difficult to tell precisely how this ideal form of globalization could be materialized on a global level, globalists-from-below nonetheless suggest that the insatiable plundering, destructively market-driven world society, and economic fascism fuelling neoliberal globalization are antagonistic to our civilization and in the last analysis will prove lethal to all planetary species. Beyond their optimism in the struggle for a humane, equitable world, the globalists-from-below have two other important characteristics worth taking into consideration: their outstanding diversity and their broad planetary consciousness and perception of resistance as a historical continuum; that is to say, their understanding of a complex network in which struggles against former colonialism inform and dovetail with present struggles against neoliberal globalization and the neocolonial structures that sustain it. Neoliberal doxa and anti-globalism are antithetical ideological structures, and each is informed by discursive and ideological archives that transcend the here and now. US-led neoliberal ideology, with its attendant imperialist and messianic impulse, is set within an ideological and historical continuum that stretches from Jefferson’s urge for ‘internal’ and ‘external’ expansionism6 through to Monroe’s doctrine of 1823 and Roosevelt’s ‘big stick’ (later, ‘good neighbour’ diplomacy) down to Reagan’s ‘good governance’, and George W. Bush’s policy of ‘preventive war’. Similarly, the narratives and acts of resistance to neoliberal globalization and US hegemony, specifically in Latin America, are also often inscribed within the grand narratives and memories of anti-colonial struggles. We recall how in their first declaration the Zapatistas, who named themselves after the peasant revolutionary 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919), connected their social struggle against both national and transnational power structures to the long LatinAmerican tradition of anti-colonialism: ‘We are the product of 500 years of struggle’, the declaration went (quoted by Slater 2004, 205).7 The anti-globalists’ sense of historical struggle reflected in the Zapatistas’ declaration is manifestly the absent centre of postcolonial studies. Ironically so, given that postcolonialism has always prided itself on being resistant. The fact that postcolonial discourse neglects the global geopolitical narratives of the memory and spirit of anticolonial/anti-global resistance again deeply undermines this discourse’s claim to subversive, anti-colonial agency. More concretely, by neglecting the resistive hybridities (embodied by the anti-neoliberal activists) and the hegemonic hybridities (incarnated by the promoters of neoliberal globalization), postcolonial discourse (hybridity discourse in particular) seems to have betrayed the very theoretical foundations on which it rests: the notion of hybridity itself and its inherent counter-hegemonic impulse. Postcolonial inattention to the global hybridities of resistance and domination combines with its evasion of the issues of class, race, and neocolonialism, which have been discussed above. Both erasures might be the result of postcolonial scholars’ geopolitical amnesia; that is to say the deliberate occlusion of the geographies of resistance and the histories of anti-colonial and neocolonial struggles.

9.2 Empirical and theoretical insights into postcolonial and global relationships The emergence of the term ‘postcolonialism’ in the early 1980s coincides, as has been pointed out, with the rise of neoliberal globalization (Krishna 2009, 64). From the start, then, postcolonialism and globalization, in its neoliberal form, have been closely connected. Yet, while globalization is much discussed and conceptualized in the humanities in general, and beyond, there is a striking absence of any serious, in-depth analysis or theorization of globalization in postcolonial studies. Postcolonial critics sporadically refer to globalization in their works, but such references are often framed in abstract, generalized terms that obscure more than they enlighten their subject. Brah and Coombes provide an example: In an increasingly globalized world, the term ‘hybridity’ has become the means for reflecting upon the interrelationship between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ and the multiple ways in which globality, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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region and locality feature in economic, political, and cultural forms and practices. The concept of ‘hybridity’ as it informs the analysis of the links between the local and the global operates polysemically, bringing together disparate themes ranging from imperialism to subject formation, and different theoretical traditions covering a variety of disciplines including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and history. (2000, 12) Brah and Coombes present a cluster of abstractions characteristic of hybridity discourse and, more generally, of postcolonial discussions of hybridity. Here, and in the remainder of their edited collection, the term ‘hybridity’ is randomly tied to a host of other concepts, including globality, without any concrete explanation of the interconnections between these various concepts and discursive layers. In fact, we neither know how in practice ‘hybridity’ reflects upon the interrelationship between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’, nor are we given any tangible picture of the ‘multiple ways in which globality, region and locality feature in economic, political, and cultural forms and practices’ (2000, 12). The lack of contextualization with respect to hybridity and globality, manifest in the statement above, is characteristic of postcolonial discourse; a lack which may derive from a clear disengagement on the part of postcolonial scholars from the material conditions of globalization. This disengagement is perhaps the more surprising, given that over a decade ago Ania Loomba in her Colonialism, Postcolonialism called on postcolonial studies to engage with ‘globality’ (1998, 256–7); a request that was reiterated in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005) edited by Loomba. Nonetheless, globalization is still notable for its absence from postcolonial scholarship. The postcolonial reluctance, or unwillingness, to address globalization is reflected in the very small number of studies directly dealing with this complex, elusive phenomenon. Globalization has been a regular topic in the social sciences from the mid-1980s and has generated a substantial body of work. Within postcolonial studies, however, the connections between globalization and postcolonialism have been widely ignored. Moreover, when globality occasionally surfaces in postcolonial scholarship it is not tackled in engaging, concrete terms. Over the last ten years, of a handful of books exploring the connections between the global and the postcolonial, the majority have been written by scholars in cultural studies, social sciences, and political 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


science, rather than by postcolonial theorists. A (brief) list of significant books is provided in the introduction, so here I mostly focus on a critical discussion of Krishnaswamy and Hawley’s edited collection, The Postcolonial and the Global. The reason for this methodological choice is that this collection is the one that explicitly raises the issue of the relationship between postcolonial studies and globalization. After having comprehensively delimited the origins, field of action, and sphere of influence of the two disciplinary fields in their introduction, Krishnaswamy and Hawley, following Loomba’s request, reiterate the need for postcolonial studies to engage with globality. According to them, the question for postcolonial studies today is not so much whether to globalize but how to go global: ‘To globalize or not – that is no longer the question. What kind of globalization – that is the question both postcolonial and globalization studies must grapple with’ (2008, 15). As a preliminary remark, we may argue that it might be critically unproductive to conflate, as do Krishnaswamy and Hawley, globalization studies and the postcolonial field with reference to the issue of globality. The main reason is that globalization studies is deeply engaged with globality, whereas postcolonialism is not, or only superficially. Thus, what is required in the first place is a clear involvement of postcolonial studies with globality, not with one specific form of globality (cultural), but with globality in its multiple shades (political, ecological, economic, ethical, judicial, and so on). As they urge postcolonial studies to globalize, Krishnaswamy and Hawley go further in linking the survival of postcolonial studies to its willingness as well as capacity fully to implicate itself in this globality: If the discipline of postcolonial studies is to survive in any meaningful way, it needs to absorb itself far more deeply with the contemporary, and with the local circumstances within which colonial institutions and ideas are being moulded into the disparate cultural and socioeconomic practices which define our contemporary ‘globality’. (2008, 2) Here, Krishnaswamy and Hawley have correctly diagnosed the necessity for postcolonial studies to engage deeply and productively with globality. Meanwhile, they nonetheless point to a number of methodological difficulties standing in the way of this projected agency. More concretely, Krishnaswamy and Hawley do not see what form this engagement would take and what its outcome might be: ‘The question of how postcolonialism should engage globalization, on what terms 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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and to what ends, remains unclear’ (2008, 2). A sense of confusion also prevails in regard to whether globalization preceded postcolonialism or vice versa. Krishnaswamy and Hawley argue in this respect that it is unclear whether contemporary globalization has been made possible by the postcolonial challenge to older Eurocentric forms of globalization premised on the centrality of the nation and narrated in terms of modernization or whether postcoloniality itself is the consequence of globalization premised on the marginalization of the nation in the economic and cultural domains … It is unclear whether the postcolonial precedes and provides the foundations for the global and hence for transnational cultural studies, or whether globalization has created the historical and material conditions that have both enabled the production of postcolonialism and eroded its political purchase through incorporation and domestication (2008, 3) In absolute terms, the question of which came first – globalization or postcolonialism – is a legitimate one. From a more concrete historical standpoint, however, and given – as observed above – that many historians and theorists of globalization trace the roots of globalization as far back as the sixteenth century, it might sound redundant. The more so, perhaps, in terms of those historians who have located the earliest manifestations of globalization in the ancient Greek and Roman empires.8 From these perspectives, contemporary globalization appears merely as an amplification and sophistication of an age-old phenomenon. To pursue the critical assessment of Krishnaswamy and Hawley’s reflection on the relationship of the postcolonial with the global, we may state that it is unclear how much of globalization there is in postcolonial theory and vice versa. That said, and in face of a lack of clarity regarding the nature and finality of the postcolonial engagement with the global, many postcolonial theorists go on to highlight globalization theory’s indebtedness to postcolonialism. Scholars like Gikandi (2001) and Krishnaswamy (2002), for instance, stress the dependence of current globalization theory on postcolonial concepts, pointing out the recurrence in globalization studies of such concepts as deterritorialization, migrancy, difference, hybridity, and the use of certain cultural productions designated as ‘postcolonial’. Krishnaswamy and Hawley also reiterate the dependence of globalization theory on postcolonial vocabulary, asserting that ‘the terms of globalization theory – universal and particular, global and local, homogeneity and heterogeneity – derive 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


from a decidedly postcolonial grammar, especially the Homi Bhabha brand’ (2008, 3). To insist on the derived character of globalization theory’s vocabulary, as do Gikandi and Krishnaswamy and Hawley, is unexpected. It is also theoretically inefficient and ideologically paradoxical. For in the end such arguments sound like a retreat into a sort of theoretical essentialism that proves to be in sharp contrast to the postcolonial ethos; an ethos that privileges mixing and derivation over essence and purity. From a disciplinary and ideological perspective, on the other hand, Krishnaswamy and Hawley and Gikandi’s observations are significant and deserve close examination. A number of critics have pointed out the reluctance of postcolonial theorists to engage with globalization and have speculated about the reasons for their hesitance. Anthony Ballantyne, for example, observed: ‘More generally, imperial historians and postcolonial critics alike are hesitant to deploy globalization as an analytical starting point, let alone as an interpretative framework’ (2002, 115). Ballantyne brings together in his critique the imperial historian and the postcolonial theorist, but it is doubtful that the two categories neglect the consideration of globalization for the same reasons. The postcolonial critics’ unwillingness to engage deeply with globalization is expressly rendered in the numerous questions asked by Krishnaswamy and Hawley in their introduction; questions related to the desirability or possibility of integrating globalization discourses within postcolonial studies. In this respect, it may be fair to suggest that one of the hidden reasons for the postcolonial critics’ lack of commitment to material globality may, as implied in Krishnaswamy and Hawley’s argument, lie in the fear of losing their theoretical identity and conceptual privilege. Indeed, a deep engagement with globalization might induce postcolonial critics not only to revise and reinvigorate their conceptual arsenal, but also to venture beyond the ossifying culturalist turn within which postcolonial theory is confined. This is surely a prerequisite for any possible active and productive involvement with the global economic, financial, and institutional power structures. Beyond diffidence, what especially comes out from Krishnaswamy and Hawley’s inquiries into the relations of the postcolonial and the global is a profound sense of unease. It looks as though the wished-for venture into the terra incognita of material globality is too unsettling for the postcolonial scholar, who is generally more comfortable with the familiar and predictable discourse of hybridity and the third space. As has been reflected in the insights provided by Krishnaswamy and Hawley and Gikandi, the relation between the postcolonial and the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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global is certainly not an easy one, nor is it crystal clear. The issue of the postcolonial scholar’s engagement with globalization is equally opaque. In their attempts to overcome this conundrum, Krishnaswamy and Hawley assume that the method and finality of any such engagement are imprecise. They further add that on purely theoretical considerations globalization has little to offer to the postcolonial field; since it is their assumption that globalization studies constitute, metaphorically speaking, more of a disciple than a tutor. Still, while stressing the conceptual indebtedness of globalization studies to postcolonial vocabulary, Gikandi and Krishnaswamy and Hawley fail to tell us how postcolonialism could concretely engage with globalization; although this is after all one of their stated ambitions. The efforts of Gikandi and Krishnaswamy and Hawley in setting global studies against postcolonial theory are obviously moved by disciplinary interests, which, though legitimate, have not managed to remove the obscurity surrounding the intricate question of global–colonial relationships. By and large, in their cautious arguments Gikandi and Krishnaswamy and Hawley contrast postcolonial studies and global studies in order to bring into sharp focus the theoretical primacy of the first over the second. This approach serves more to obscure than to enlighten the topic. All the more so as the crux of the matter is, in fact, not globalization studies in some abstract sense, but globalization in its concrete social, economic, and political manifestations. Overall, one might rightly wonder why globalization should be the sole concern of globalization studies; any discipline, including postcolonial studies should implicate itself more compellingly in a phenomenon that leaves no single sphere of our lives untouched. There are, most likely, a myriad of hidden theoretical, ideological, and political reasons for the lack of active critical involvement by postcolonial theory with global power structures and North–South relations of domination and inequality. One of these, as noted previously, might be related to conceptual privilege and disciplinary entrenchment. In this context, Krishnaswamy and Hawley’s insistence on the indebtedness of globalization theory to postcolonial concepts sounds like a claim by postcolonial critics to conceptual originality. Their assumption that postcolonial theory is a conceptual matrix into which globalization studies relentlessly tapped is baffling; it betrays an essentialist orientation that goes counter to postcolonial sensibility. If we follow the arguments of Gikandi and Krishnaswamy and Hawley to their logical conclusion, we end up with this: since globalization theory is so dependent on postcolonial concepts, it amounts to little more 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


than a mimetic, sub-theoretical category. That globalization studies employs postcolonial concepts is both understandable and legitimate. After all, appropriation and adaptation of concepts, indispensable in themselves to the growth and reinvigoration of the fields of knowledge, are common to all disciplines, including postcolonial studies itself. As a reminder, most of the key concepts that are considered postcolonial (nomadology, deterritorialization, in-betweenness, dialogism, indeterminacy, brisure, split enunciation, and so on) originated with Bakhtin ([1935] 2004, [1940] 2004), Derrida ([1967] 1976), Lacan (1977), and Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987), and deconstructionist theories of discourse at large (see Chapter 4). From this perspective, it is fair to state that both as an academic discipline and a discourse postcolonialism is also essentially mimetic or iterative. The whole postcolonial field, in turn, appears no more than a subcategory of postmodernism, which carved for itself a theoretical niche and privilege by incorporating and ingesting the postmodern ethos and concepts.9 Given the imprint of postmodernist vocabulary and thought on postcolonial studies, globalization theory’s presumed conceptual indebtedness to postcolonialism turns out to be all too relative. In any case, to advocate the conceptual indebtedness of globalization studies as a sufficient incentive for not engaging with material globality is facile, if not altogether too dogmatic. It sounds like subterfuge intended to distract attention from the serious postcolonial engagement deficit with regard to material globality. Furthermore, to consider postcolonial theory as the conceptual and ideological matrix of globalization theory breaches postcolonialism’s own core principles: hybridity, bricolage, anti-essentialism, and so on. This being said, the fact that postcolonial discourse and globalization theory share a common (postmodernist) vocabulary should in no way constitute a problem. Rather, it should help to foster rapprochement and collaboration. For their shared theoretical base might serve as a stepping stone toward a productive dialogue and mutual enforcement. As it stands, postcolonial discourse, even in its presumed counter-hegemonic version, has practically no impact on the global political order. From surveys, it would appear that anti-neoliberal globalization movements do not cite postcolonial theory as having had the slightest influence on their own struggle. Krishna notes in this respect: ‘It is obvious that postcolonial theory did not serve as one of the rallying cries for those who protested against neoliberal globalization in Seattle in 1999, or in the World Social Forum meetings at Porto Allegre and other flashpoints of antiglobalization protests in recent years’ (2009, 118). This is understandable given the silence of postcolonial scholarship about cogent 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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global issues such as the Gulf War or the havoc wrought by neoliberal corporations worldwide, leading in some parts of the globe to forms of slavery and horrifying suicide rates, in particular among farmers.10 To ignore or discount such sordid global realities, which are the result of neocolonial practices, is ironic in a discipline whose primary objective is to fight imperialism (in its neocolonial forms) and hegemonic power in all its multiplicity. Thus, unless postcolonial studies deeply and critically engages with globalization, postcolonial discourse will continue to be impotent and have little, if any, impact on the global world order. Let us be straight about this one cardinal truth: if postcolonialism is, as Krishnaswamy and Hawley presume, strong theoretically thanks to its borrowing from psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the postmodernist ethos, it is manifestly weak, if not indigent when it comes to understanding and conceptualizing political and economic globality. The advances made in globalization studies in these fields should no doubt highly benefit postcolonialism. But in order for this fruitful collaboration to take place, thorough dialogical relationships should be established between the two fields of studies. This hoped-for dialogism involves productive interactions as well as a necessary reciprocal questioning.


10 Hybridity Discourse and Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism

As we have seen, the very ambivalence or indeterminacy of postcolonial discourse, specifically hybridity discourse, allows for it to be co-opted for both emancipatory and oppressive uses. The way in which neocolonial structures of power, embodied by ultra-liberalism and such institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have appropriated and accommodated hybridity to achieve their own goals reveals the limitations of hybridity discourse as a counter-hegemonic agency. Asad argued in this respect: ‘Neither the invention of an expressive youth culture (music, dance, street fashions, etc.), as Gilroy seems to think, nor the making of hybrid cultural forms, as Bhabha supposes, holds any anxieties for the holders of the status quo’. Rather, these cultural forms have been ‘comfortably accommodated by urban consumer capitalism’ (1993, 266). In a similar vein, Ahmad also assimilates hybridity discourse to a means of endorsing neoliberalism’s logic and objectives: ‘Speaking with virtually mindless pleasure of transnational cultural hybridity, and of politics of contingency, amounts, in effect, to endorsing the cultural claims of transnational capital itself’ (1995, 12). Epifanio San Juan follows suit, arguing that ‘postcolonial discourse generated in the “first world” academies turns out to be one more product of flexible, post-Fordist capitalism, not its antithesis’ (1999, 8). Asad, Ahmad, and San Juan indicate the degree of the enmeshment of hybridity discourse and neoliberalism. Before elaborating on this point, it is important to set the American neoliberal ideology and its attendant global expansionism in a wider historical perspective. This should allow us to bring into focus the resilience of the neoliberal doxa and its aptness, depending on economic and political interests, to use the thing and its opposite in order to achieve its aims. As we have demonstrated, contemporary American expansionism as typified by Ronald Reagan and 179


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George W. Bush maintained a continuity with the spirit of the imperialist projections of Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. Regarding the presentday interconnections between hybridity discourse and neoliberal politics, we may note that this time round neoliberal ideology is ostensibly in rupture with the grand narratives of race and cultural difference articulated in Thomas Jefferson’s declaration; a declaration in which purity is clearly preferred to mixing. It is true that the world has become more culturally and racially mixed since Jefferson’s declaration; today, it is harder to be openly racist or boldly to reject hybridity. It is also true that in our market-oriented world hybridity is a juicy source of profit that neoliberals cannot afford to neglect. In this context, the annexation of hybridity discourse by neoliberal doxa is hardly surprising. Pascal Zachary is undoubtedly the scholar who most explicitly and earnestly yokes together hybridity and neoliberalism. In The Global Me, which sounds like an apologetic discourse on hybridity and its economic usefulness, he talks of hybridity as the engine of global neoliberal orthodoxy and substantiates his argument by referring to Silicon Valley, which he describes as ‘a poster child for mongrelization’. In the process, he insists that the cultural and ethnic diversity of Silicon Valley is key to its success, nationally and internationally (2000, 64). Zachary stresses the economic advantages brought by hybridity in the USA, arguing that: All across the United States, hybridity pays off – big time – in higher quality ideas, greater flexibility and tighter ties to places and peoples around the world. America offers the best example of what happens economically when an entire business class exploits hybridity. The new economic paradigm, though still poorly understood, matches the skills and mentalities of hybrids. It turns hybrids into a signal economic weapon. Because the United States has more hybrids than anywhere else, it gets the biggest bang from them. (2000, 67) Zachary further states that because ‘money follows the mongrel’ and ‘innovation favors the mixed’ (2000, xii), it is little wonder that ‘among the most vigorous proponents of mongrelization are the world’s biggest, richest, most profit-hungry corporations’ (2000, xx). He argues on this premise that the ‘adept handling of diversity is the secret of economic competitiveness and national vitality’ (2000, xii). Zachary ultimately advises that ‘those who wish to profit from changing economic conditions must view hybridity as their first and best option’ (2000, 57). Zachary emphasizes the role of hybridity as a privileged means of fuelling a 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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neoliberal economic system – exemplified by the United States – that Hardt and Negri (2000) define as an empire. As in postcolonial hybridity discourse, so, too, within neoliberal doxa is cultural and racial difference valorized and promoted. Difference is incorporated into mainstream liberal parlance and harnessed to the interests of rapacious transnational firms and comprador groups. With the annexation of hybridity discourse by neoliberal ideology, the third space, which Bhabha defines as the privileged site of enunciation, in turn appears as the locus of ultra-liberalism and global hybridities of power and domination. In short, the third space becomes a grey area of global power and geopolitical representations; an area where hegemony is, contrary to the assumptions of the postcolonial promoters of hybridity discourse, not contested or subverted, but asserted with force and brutality. We have seen how the global structures of world order and the networks of globalized violence are mostly hybrid, involving groups and organizations from both the North and the South. Also worth pointing up is that politically, too, much of global geopolitics is ostensibly articulated from the locus of the third space. This does not, of course, mean that binarism is no longer at stake in global geopolitics; we have widely demonstrated this. Rather, on a global geopolitical level ‘thirdism’ and binarism are intertwined, together fuelling the neoliberal doxa and its affiliated international administrative and economic institutions. Within this symbiotic relationship, thirdism is what is often masqueraded; binarism instead operates stealthily underneath the neoliberal global structures of domination. It permeates the structure of the seemingly progressive neoliberal doxa of ‘good governance’ and ‘democracy’, whose site of enunciation is ostensibly the third space. In a sense, the Manichaeism of the neoliberal global world order is embedded in the very third space from which global power and geopolitics are spelled out. And it is in this regard that the form of democracy that neoliberal ideology, for example, attempts to spread globally is highly illustrative. Manifestly hybrid, the neoliberal market-oriented, commodified type of democracy promoted by the USA from Ronald Reagan’s presidency onwards, primarily serves the interests of American and more generally Western neoliberal powers.1 This neoliberal propaganda for global democracy, as some have correctly observed, led to the emergence of a kind of political regime in non-Western countries and the former Soviet Union that the American political scientist Robert Dahl (1971) has described as ‘polyarchy’. A major characteristic of these political regimes, directly or indirectly fashioned by the global neoliberal power structures, is that they are 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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fuzzy, grey political constructions which are, as Singh notes, ‘neither completely democratic nor authoritarian. These regimes are located in the grey zone between genuine democracy and over authoritarianism’ (2005, 110).2 The ‘neither-nor’ phrase used here to describe the political identity of this polyarchy is highly significant. Bhabha and his peers commonly consider the neither-nor formula as the defining feature of hybridity discourse and its attendant spatial metaphor of the third space. In their conceptualization, the subversive and counter-hegemonic agency of hybridity discourse lies precisely in its rhetorical and epistemological indeterminacy, embodied by the neither-nor dichotomy. However, considering the extent to which the third space has become the site of a hegemonic neoliberal global order and its political satellites in non-Western countries, there is much reason to disagree with those views which emphasize the counter-hegemonic impulse of the third space. And because hybridity discourse is annexed by the neoliberal political and economic order, there is much reason, too, not to continue to stress the resistive agency of the third space and hybridity. In particular from a global materialist perspective this suspicion is all the more justified as the discourse of hybridity and the third space has become normalized knowledge and naturalized as a site of hegemonic power. With its incorporation into neoliberal global power structures hybridity and the third space have become, in fact, geared towards global domination rather than social and political emancipation, planetary solidarity, and universal economic justice. From this perspective, to associate the sphere of in-betweenness with a locus of resistance or anti-hegemony, as do Bhabha and his disciples, at best only tells a part of the story of hybridity. There is, indeed, much evidence, both ancient and modern, that reveals the domineering, hegemonic impulses of in-betweenness. In The Politics, for example, Aristotle clearly identifies in-betweenness with supremacy and domination. In articulating his theory of ethnicity and classification of races, Aristotle placed the Greeks in the middle and regarded them as an ideal racial group. In his own words, the ‘Hellenic race is situated in the middle’, fruitfully blending the spirit of the ‘war-like races’ exemplified by the Greeks (1988, 40) with Asiatic ‘intelligence’ and ‘competence’ (1988, 165). Owing to this privileged position the Greeks were, according to Aristotle, entitled to universal rule, as they were a perfect blend of the best of both worlds, the Greek and Asian. This Aristotelian idea of the in-between as a site of imperial domination and supremacist racial assumptions is echoed in modern colonial writing, particularly in the works of Albert Camus, whose knowledge 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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and admiration for Aristotle and, more generally, for Greek culture are no secret. In The First Man, for instance, Camus re-enacts the colonizercolonized dichotomy, but reshapes the terms of the equation to the settler community’s advantage. Camus in this novel associates the settlers with semi-colonized peoples; in the process he re-appropriates the colonial representations of the natives, which he applies to the settlers the better to reinforce their feeling of oppression from the metropolis. Meanwhile, he readily distinguishes the indigenous cultures from those of the settlers to reassert Western cultural supremacy. Whereas more conventional colonial lines of demarcation between colonizer and colonized comprise language, culture, and race, Camus’s distinction between bourgeois colonialists and the European working classes operates mainly on cultural and economic lines. His rejection of French elite imperialism in favour of mass colonization involves a strategy of de-centring and re-centring that re-casts the colonial relation. Within the re-shaped binary, the empire’s elites are turned into usurpers of property. Their role in building the colony is in turn implicitly minimized. The settlers acquire instead pre-eminence and become an emergent centre of dominance with an edifying economic role. In their primacy, they embody a retrieved centre with two peripheries: the bourgeois are confined to their posh ghettos, the Arabs and Berbers dwell in the social hinterlands, and the settlers stand somewhere between the two. From this intermediate position they challenge French colonial rule and mounting Arab and Berber nationalist aspirations. By positioning the settlers in the middle, Camus thus follows to an extent Aristotle’s paradigm and seems to suggest that they, in their turn, are ideally suited to rule Algeria. These examples show how far in-betweenness is enmeshed with hegemonic power and domination; an enmeshment that contradicts the postcolonial belief that the third space is an anti-hegemonic agency par excellence. In its actual condition, then, postcolonial discourse as framed in the predominant theory of hybridity and the third space amounts to a partial, ossified, and monolithic category of analysis. Specifically, this discourse’s celebrated epistemological ambivalence is profoundly mystified and calls into question its presumed political and ideological radicalism. It functions as a means of occlusion, discouraging efficient engagements with the material global world. Thus, from a strictly global perspective, hybridity discourse can certainly not be credited with any significant insurgent, emancipatory potential. By occluding the violence, genocides, and racism of imperialism, on the one hand, and contemporary neoliberal economic fascism and the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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neocolonial international power structures that regulate the world, on the other, postcolonial discourse has become a site of mystified power tacitly endorsing a neoliberal global order. In this way, it operates more as an antidote to anti-hegemonic struggles than as a conduit of insurgent politics. For this and other reasons outlined in this discussion, postcolonial discourse appears thus not only ‘pale’3 and ‘toothless’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000), but also implicitly collusive with hegemonic powers and epistemologies: that is, with neoliberal globalization and its neocolonial ideology. Fundamentally, hybridity discourse boils down to a conciliatory, agonistic discursive agency which, willingly or not, shuts out genuinely transformative, insurgent politics and ethics. In consequence, this discourse may be said to enable rather than disable the operation of both local and global dominant structures of power and inequality. Given this striking postcolonial deficit with regard to material globality it becomes a matter of urgency to reorient postcolonial debates beyond hybridity and third-space discourses; all the more so as these discourses seem too compromised to offer any significant challenge to the neoliberal global status quo and to inspire change. This necessary rerouting of postcolonial studies would certainly benefit the discipline. First, it would help to reinvigorate the field’s conceptual, ideological, and epistemological paradigms. Most importantly, it should establish postcolonial theory as a privileged vehicle of anti-imperialist – or rather, anti-neo-imperialist – insurgent politics mobilized against the neoliberal doxa and the global neocolonial world order. As suggested above, the rerouting of the postcolonial primarily requires transcending the reductive cultural and spatial turn and its inherent inept, consensual thinking. It above all entails decolonizing the conceptual arsenal and emancipating the postcolonial imagination and epistemologies.


11 Decolonizing Postcolonial Discourse

The manifest conceptual and ideological dependence of postcolonial theory on postmodernism leads me to argue that postcolonial discourse reveals symptoms of a colonized imagination. Starting from the observation that postcolonial studies is conceptually and ideologically colonized, I think that one way of achieving the field’s theoretical emancipation consists primarily in decolonizing its own conceptual arsenal and epistemologies. The necessary decolonization of the postcolonial is a manifold process. It first consists in subjecting to a close critical scrutiny the predominant concepts in use: hybridity, the third space, deterritorialization, migrancy, nomadology, fluidity, brisure, and indeterminacy. This is the task undertaken in the previous chapters which have highlighted the inadequacy of these concepts as both counterhegemonic tools and as means to approach material globality. In these chapters, I have widely demonstrated that such concepts are not fitted for an efficient analysis and deconstruction of global hegemonic power structures. I have also argued that the emancipation of postcolonial studies requires moving away from the cultural and spatial turn into a historicized, contextualized, and diachronic conceptualization of power relationships, including those inherent in hybridity discourse itself. Of course, this projected conceptual and ideological decolonization would not be complete without a clear reconsideration of the value of colonial binaries as anti-hegemonic agencies. At a structural level, on the other hand, the decolonization of the postcolonial field inevitably involves a marked decentring of the postcolonial debate, from the hegemonic core of the diaspora to the migrant masses of the West and the peripheries of the South. This alternative conceptualization of the postcolonial is, as suggested above, framed from an anti-hegemonic, theoretical, epistemological, and 185


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ideological standpoint. In both spirit and orientation, then, this alternative mode of theorizing the postcolonial is underpinned by a radical ethics that challenges the intermediate mode of ethicality and its attendant consensual thinking predominant in postcolonial studies. Importantly also, the alternative conceptual modality anticipated in this discussion is arrayed against a postcolonial theoretical absolutism whereby hybridity discourse has been elevated into the sole viable tool of analysis. From a more global viewpoint, on the other hand, the radical ethics attendant upon the new mode of conceptualization laid out here profoundly challenges the global neoliberal and neocolonial structures of power and domination with which postcolonial theory is tacitly complicit; a complicity that is reflected in the silence of postcolonial scholars about the neoliberal hegemonic impulse to control global human and material resources. It is also conveyed in the manifest disregard among postcolonial scholars for the Third World’s resistance to the totalizing neoliberal forces. As it is framed in the present argument, the projected emancipatory postcolonial ethics involves a dynamics of engagement and rupture. At once this ethics actively militates against global neoliberal/neocolonial agencies and departs from both the Eurocentrism and political fatalism of postmodernism. This new postcolonial sensibility similarly shuns mainstream postcolonial discourse for its privileging of ideological and political escapism over a commitment to global geopolitics. In the main, the postcolonial ethics advocated in this study is premised on the decolonization of the whole postcolonial archive, that is to say the system through which knowledge and power are produced and managed in postcolonial studies. This necessary emancipatory ethics primarily entails demythologizing the postcolonial epistemic paradigm that has made hybridity and the third space into a hegemonic, theoretical, intellectual, and ideological perceptual mode through which global postcoloniality is assessed. Global postcoloniality, in this instance, indicating both the condition of the migrant communities living in the West and the postcolonial masses based in the former colonies; masses that the migrant postcolonial doxa has relegated to the margins while according the diaspora elite centre stage. Evidently, the decolonization of the postcolonial archive cannot be efficiently carried out without a complete deconstruction of hybridity discourse; a deconstruction that is urgent in light of the fact that it is hybridity discourse that best illustrates postcolonial sclerosis and the colonized imagination. I have already discussed at some length the limitations of hybridity as an anti-hegemonic agency. I have similarly emphasized its value as an 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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antidote to racism and essentialism. At this point, I am mostly interested in investigating the ways in which hybridity discourse could be released from the mystification surrounding its use in postcolonial studies. One means of demystifying hybridity discourse is by setting discussions of hybridity in a contextualized, globalized, and diachronic perspective, as I have consistently recommended. This wide-ranging approach should better enlighten us about the multi-layered character of the discourse of hybridity. It should especially contribute to emancipating postcolonial thinking from the false assumption that hybridity is an unquestionably counter-hegemonic agency. In the same way, a closer attention to the various mechanisms through which hybridity discourse is co-opted by global neoliberal structures of domination must invite a reconsideration of the status and role of this discourse. In this respect, and given the fact that hybridity discourse has been accommodated to the interests of global neocolonial structures of domination and that it has no impact on global anti-neoliberal movements, it would be intellectually and politically irresponsible to persist in crediting this discourse with a counter-hegemonic potential, especially from a concrete global geopolitical perspective. The emancipation of the postcolonial imagination or mentality thus consists partly in refraining from taking for granted the counterhegemonic potential of hybridity discourse. This should ultimately lead the postcolonial scholar to a more realistic and responsible use of this discourse. It is nonetheless important to add at this point that the emancipation of the postcolonial imagination cannot be effective without the redefinition of the postcolonial scholar’s status and role as an intellectual and a social critic. So far, most postcolonial scholars are persuaded that they are speaking from an anti-hegemonic standpoint; a conviction based on the premise that the hybridity discourse and the third space they promote are subversive, counter-hegemonic agencies. The inadequacy of hybridity discourse as a means of resistance and subversion has been amply demonstrated in this study. Since I take hybridity discourse to be emblematic of the postcolonial ethos, I believe that the deficiency of this fetishized discourse as a subversive, insurgent agency deeply undermines the postcolonial practitioners’ presumed anti-hegemonic agency. To elaborate on the question of postcolonial agency, we may argue that just as the anti-hegemonic agency of hybridity discourse finally amounts to sheer mystification; so, too, the subversive role with which the postcolonial scholar is fabled is no more than a myth. It is a myth in the sense that the aim of the intermediate mode of ethicality characteristic 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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of postcolonial sensibility is geared more towards the maintenance of the status quo and consensus than to a thorough questioning of local and global epistemologies of power and inequality. A counter-hegemonic stance, as anticipated here, would instead entail a radical ethics. Basically, this postcolonial radical ethics requires an emancipated diction as well as a bold ideological and ethical commitment to the world. Both are drastically lacking in the postcolonial field, particularly regarding the question of race and racism which, as pointed up in Chapter 6, is conspicuously absent. The engaged postcolonial sensibility envisaged in this study should not only centrally tackle race and racism, but above all audaciously demystify and challenge the racist mythologies still surrounding métissage, more particularly the social, legal, and epistemological status of the biological hybrid. Having in the course of this study referred to the third space of mainstream postcolonial hybridity as the space of the impossible, I here further argue that this anticipated social, legal, and conceptual rehabilitation of the hybrid subjectivity would consist in releasing this subjectivity from the fragmented, alienating third space in which it has been confined by postcolonial criticism; following this radical move the hybrid subject would integrate into the realm of the possible; a condition of social, political, and ontological possibilities where hybrid identity would finally be defined on its own terms. Within this realm, the hybrid subjectivity would ultimately be freed from the tutelage of alienating hegemonic powers, whether conceptual (postcolonial third space) or political/juridical (one drop policy). Henceforth reshaped as an active agency, this rehabilitated hybrid subjectivity would thus be in the position of recovering an ethics of wholeness. In other words, within these reconfigured relationships, the hybrid Other would finally (politically, ideologically, epistemologically) be recognized in his/her multiplicity and murkiness; he/she would not only have the right and freedom to redefine his/her identity on his/her own terms, but would also be integrated as an equal part into the dominant archive of collective and individual identifications. If race and racism are of central importance in this alternative postcolonial sensibility, the overall contestative postcolonial agency projected in this work is of a much wider scope and intent; it critically engages with globality in its multiple forms through a close materialist analysis and direct involvement with the global power inequalities. By this explicit engagement with global material conditions, so far the absent centre of postcolonial criticism, postcolonial discourse would become truly an anti-hegemonic agency; its major concern would consist in assaulting the 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


North–South binary that is sustained by unequal neoliberal/neocolonial global power structures. What emerges prominently from this argument is that the emancipation of postcolonial agency is a two-way process. Together with demystifying hybridity discourse and decolonizing the postcolonial archive, the role of the postcolonial scholar needs, as suggested earlier, to be rearticulated. This would primarily consist in urging the advocates of hybridity discourse to shift from their position as neutral spectators of world politics to the role of actors and producers of both social and political agency. But such a move, as might be presumed, is both radical and requires the injection of a significant dose of pragmatism into a field currently divorced from the concrete global here and now. This shift, in short, entails that postcolonial studies blend theory with practice and actively becomes involved with globality, rather than continuing to elude the global economic, political, and ideological forces that organize and regulate our lives. Ultimately, this globalized postcolonial studies would offer opportunities for postcolonial scholars not only to react to, but also, and above all, to act upon the global power structures. Another important way of reorienting postcolonial studies would consist in redefining in more inclusive, global terms the postcolonial condition. So far, in mainstream postcolonial scholarship the postcolonial condition is reduced to its simplest expression. It is embodied by diaspora-centred tales of postcoloniality related, often, in a normative discourse which represents the diaspora as paradigmatic of global postcoloniality. In order for postcolonial studies to commit itself efficiently to the reality of multi-faceted, brutal globality it needs to extend the postcolonial debate from the hegemonic diaspora-centred narratives of postcoloniality to the global postcolonial. This necessary re-articulation of postcolonial narratives of identity and global geopolitics would enable us to re-conceptualize postcoloniality in its global dimension; one in which diaspora is only one component of a wider planetary postcoloniality. Together with re-writing or re-telling the postcolonial narratives, what is also urgently required is the creation of a multiple epistemic space in which Western-produced scholarship and non-Western epistemologies would be set in fruitful dialogue. Within such a genuinely dialogical paradigm of intercontinental sharing and solidarity the non-Western scholar would be recognized as an equal subject of knowledge. Such a reconfigured pattern of representation is in complete rupture with current mainstream discursive practices. It aims to reinstate an epistemic balance in which, as suggested above, both the West and non-West would be recognized as worthy contributors to civilization. Most importantly, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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within the redrawn postcolonial epistemic network projected here the whole discourse of postcoloniality is recast in a new light. That is to say, thanks to the new dialogical relationships evoked above the discourse of postcoloniality so far exclusive and elitist would become inclusive and globalizing. It is a discourse that enunciates the postcolonial condition, not in terms of unbridgeable gaps or breaks, but in terms of continuum, dialogue, and solidarity between the ‘here’ and ‘there’, the same and the Other. In other words, rather than flattening out the postcolonial condition into no more than one symptom of a globalized postmodern condition, as do most migrant postcolonial scholars, the new theoretical and epistemic paradigm proposed here resituates the diasporic condition as simply a segment of a much larger global postcolonial condition. This global condition includes both the diaspora and the former colonies with their arts, cultures, literatures, and histories, all of which are undermined in diaspora-centric postcolonial discourse. This necessary re-conceptualization of the postcolonial condition will, I hope, help us to resist the persistent view of the diaspora of the Western metropolitan here-and-now as emblematic of the global postcolonial condition. More broadly, this should ultimately enable us to restore the ruptured dialogue between the narratives of the diaspora and those of the former colonies. Once this much needed dialogue is restored, productive relations of reciprocity and solidarity on a global scale may ensue. With regard to diaspora in particular, the alternative discourse on postcoloniality for which this study argues should especially allow us to realize the extent to which the minor narratives of the geographically displaced diaspora are significant only in so far as they are reconnected to a wider pattern of geopolitical representations: to the major narratives of colonial racism, slavery, and economic exploitation as well as to the hegemonic neoliberal global power structures which stealthily continue the patterns of former colonial domination. The enmeshment of the idea of the diaspora with both former narratives of domination (colonialism) and today’s neocolonial globality confirms the diaspora’s temporal or historical ramifications. Added to this are the many ways in which diasporic communities are often both physically and emotionally linked to their original homelands. Taken together, these ramifications reinforce my claim that it is more fitting to describe the diasporic condition as a continuum or sutured tale of belonging, rather than as an eternal instance of fragmentation and deterritorialization. Notwithstanding the postcolonial insistence on the deterritorialized condition of the diaspora, therefore, the fact remains that the diaspora’s postcolonial condition cannot properly be understood 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


without the deeply historicized and territorialized memories of slavery, colonialism, and dispossession. All these narratives are inscribed in the postcolonial subconscious and continue profoundly to determine the diasporic sense of collectivity. As becomes manifest in this argument, my idea of the diaspora as a sutured narrative of belonging goes against postcolonial doxa. Most postcolonial scholars, including Bhabha, Young, and Gilroy, heavily influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of nomadism and deterritorialization, have all emphasized the diaspora’s deterritorialized condition. Gilroy, for instance, argues that diaspora is a concept that ‘problematises the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging […] It disrupts the power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location and consciousness’ (2000, 123). Diaspora no doubt defines its history and identity in multiple ways. What is also obvious is that no viable narrative of collective identity, be it that of the Caribbean or Indian diaspora, can be convincingly defined and assessed outside anterior narratives of place, time, and consciousness. No identity, whether individual or collective, can be articulated solely through spatiality. Both time (history) and space preside over the construction of identity, in the same way as space and time are fundamental in the formation of culture. Edward Hall offers an illuminating insight into this dynamic. While agreeing that space is an important formative force, Hall also refers to the importance of the temporal dimension in the construction of culture: A complicating factor in intercultural relations is that each culture has its own time frames in which patterns are unique. This means that to function effectively abroad it is just as necessary to learn the language of time as it is to learn the spoken language […]. Time is treated as a language, as a primary organizer for all activities, a synthesizer and integrator. (1983, 3) From this perspective, the connections between diasporic identity and place, location, and consciousness do not necessarily have to be, and rarely are, linear, nor do they have to obey ‘a simple explanatory sequence’. These links can certainly not be explained sequentially. It may, nevertheless, be misleading to believe that all connection between the ‘here’ of the diasporic condition and the ‘there’ of pre-diaspora (colonial/ enslaved) sub-existence is completely severed and fully erased from the diaspora’s archives. 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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In sum, the trope of deterritorialization by which the diaspora is usually defined may well tell some truth about the condition of diasporic communities, yet this truth is anything but complete. In emphasizing the disjunctive over the connective, deterritorialization discourse thus tells us only part of the story and history of the diaspora. It is in fact no more than a minor narrative of identification that privileges immanence over permanence, the synchronic over the diachronic. In order fully to grasp the entire diasporic identity, then, we should, as suggested previously, bring into the equation the missing or hidden major territorialized narratives of colonialism, slavery, and dispossession. These narratives still haunt the diaspora, but lie hidden as a way of sheltering these communities from the traumatic experience of slavery and colonialism. From an existential standpoint, this collective amnesia, whether deliberate or unconscious, may certainly be soothing. However, from a historical and geopolitical perspective, it can by no means be considered as a reliable mode of collective identification. My belief is that no convincing narrative of the diaspora can afford to disconnect the diasporic communities from their former historical and geopolitical contingencies. To do so is tantamount to succumbing to the amnesiac impulses so characteristic of postcolonial studies, postmodernism, and international studies, to name a few.1 Rather than continuing to emphasize disjunction and deterritorialization, postcolonial scholars should thus reconnect the diaspora to the geopolitical continuum of recollection and remembering. They should also reconnect postcolonial discourse with past histories of anti-colonial resistance and contemporary struggles against neoliberal globalization and its attendant neocolonial practices. To elaborate on the problematic conceptualization of the idea of the diaspora in postcolonial theory, we may argue that the fact of using the concept of deterritorialization to stress the out-of-placeness of diaspora communities is in itself a territorializing gesture. It is a discursive practice that assigns to these communities a site of belonging couched in the tropes of displacement and uprootedness. In other words, to define a community as being deterritorialized means that this community has moved from an original territory to another, or that it grew up in a specific territory with original roots elsewhere. In either case, the communities in question are de facto territorialized in relation to an immediate here and a remote there, whether these communities acknowledge or reject the connections. It is specifically for this reason that I find much of the deterritorialization discourse regarding the diaspora reductive, if not mystifying. Equally mystifying and disembodied is the assumption, championed by Salman Rushdie, that ‘migrant people root themselves in 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


ideas rather than territory’ (1991, 124). For all its appeal to a postmodern sensibility, Rushdie’s assertion neglects one fundamental truth: that most migrants are widely conditioned by cultural, mental, and ideological cartographies of their origins through which they continue to perceive and assess their migrant condition. Contrary to Rushdie’s belief, then, a majority of migrants are not deracinated individuals hanging onto loose ideas picked up in exile or looted from the postmodern archive. Diverse as they are, migrants are instead informed and profoundly determined by their original culture and history. One of the main reasons is that, as Edward Hall aptly remarks, culture is something that an individual cannot easily dispose of: No matter how hard man tries, it is impossible for him to divest himself of his own culture, for it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. Most of culture lies hidden and is outside voluntary control making up the warp and weff [sic] of human existence. Even when small fragments of culture are elevated to awareness, they are difficult to change, not only because they are so personally experienced but because people cannot act or interact at all in any meaningful ways except through the medium of culture. ([1966] 1983, 188) It is worth noting, here, that the cultural, mental, and ideological cartographies determining the immigrants’ perception of their identities are also at work in Western perceptions of self and in Western definitions of the radical others with whom they interact daily. No doubt Rushdie has a myriad of reasons for believing that displaced people root themselves in ideas rather than in places. However, the reality of migration teaches us a more complex story. Like hybridity discourse, which is the privilege of the elite, abstract ideas, too, are more often than not luxuries that only the highbrow can afford. These ideas can certainly provide some sort of mooring for intellectuals or writers of the diaspora, but surely this is not the case for ordinary migrants, most of whom remain, both emotionally and culturally, strongly attached to their country of origin. The majority of migrants, indeed, feel the need to recreate in exile a space of their own, in many respects a replica of their native land; the aim is to alleviate their sense of alienation and homelessness. The replication of their original background in exile is all the more vital as the homeliness provided by abstract ideas is usually not in their reach. With this in mind, any attempt to reduce the multilayered 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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migrant mode of being and representation to the postmodern aesthetic and epistemological cartographies of Rushdie or Bhabha is, again, tantamount to turning an elite, minor narrative of migrancy into a major narrative of immigration and exile. When we know that the number of people migrating across national borders amounts to roughly 2.5 per cent of the global population (Puri 2004, 8), there is a sense of intemperance and a manifest ignorance of world demography in theorizing migrancy as a universal condition, or in talking of the world as ‘a planet of nomads’. Ikas and Wagner enthusiastically stated: ‘At the turn of the 21st century, globalization has transformed the earth into a planet of nomads. Whether it is empires, states, nations, public spheres, religious communities, ethnic groups, townships, or neighbourhoods, today millions of migrants challenge the existing power structures and expose the available self-images as ideologies’ (2009, i). That migrants and ethnic groups are increasingly visible in Western societies is an undeniable fact; yet to assume that these migrants challenge the existing political, legal, and social institutions to the extent suggested by Ikas and Wagner seems far-fetched. Do these migrants really have the economic and political power to undertake such a challenge? The answer is, of course, no. By way of summary, among my arguments for a re-routing/re-rooting of the postcolonial field are a theoretical emancipation of postcolonial studies, decolonizing the postcolonial archive, rewriting the global postcolonial condition, re-orienting postcolonialism towards material globality, and recognizing the significance of binary modes of resistance. The bulk of this attempt to usher postcolonial studies in new, more committed directions is articulated within a critical discussion and interrogation of the validity of hybridity discourse as a resistive agency. I call this re-routing process postcolonial realignment. It is indispensable, and necessitates a significant conceptual and ideological shift. It consists of three major interrelated processes: first, movement away from the cultural and spatial turn that runs alongside political pessimism in order to engage actively and critically with material globality; second, reconnection with the histories of anti-colonial struggles, which are more than useful and relevant in today’s neocolonial global order; third, a need for diasporic postcolonial discourse to interact and even align itself with the postcolonial discursive practices of the South, by which I mean engaging critically with resurgent imperialism – and the responses to it – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. With particular regard to Latin America, diasporic postcolonial discourse should seek to learn from the ethics of ‘dependency theory’ as articulated by Latin American postcolonial theorists from the 1960s onwards and which is today 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


actively engaged against resurgent imperialism.2 This critical dialogical process would imply not just writing or theorizing back to the global centres, but also writing and theorizing with the global peripheries. From this projected critical dynamics diasporic Western-based postcolonial discourse and narratives of resistance from both the North and the South could collaborate and together contribute to shaping a humane, egalitarian planetary condition. The arguments spelled out above constitute, in my view, a sustainable framework within which to work towards postcolonial emancipation. Postcolonial discourse would be able to gain a critical edge and a role as an anti-hegemonic political agency. Taken together, these reorientations should enable postcolonial theory to become a significant instrument of resistance against global neoliberal power structures. The whole process of emancipation involves a necessary switch from the ethical neutrality and attitude of spectatorship characteristic of diasporic postcolonial discourse to a deep ethical engagement with globality; that is to say, a shift from the kind of intermediate modes of ethicality implied in hybridity discourse and third-space narratives to a radical ethics of insurgency that is needed to fight the global neoliberal structures of domination. With this fundamental shift, migrant postcolonial discourse, so far tamed and incorporated into the hegemonic academic sameness, can be reborn in its radical difference. In the process, postcolonial discourse can use the regained radical difference to articulate an uncompromising ethics of dissidence to the neoliberal/neocolonial world order with which most academic discourses in the humanities are explicitly or implicitly complicit. The decolonization of postcolonial studies is a prerequisite if postcolonial discourse is to become an active participant and, ultimately, producer of social and political global agency. Yet, the question one may ask at this point is: how could the trope of hybridity, thoroughly interrogated in this book, be fitted into this redefined postcolonial sensibility? In other words, where, precisely, does hybridity theory stand in the proposed materialist redirection of postcolonial criticism? What would this materialist conceptualization of hybridity look like? What form would it take? Considering that much of my critical effort in this discussion has consisted in arguing for a materialist, globalized, and diachronic perspective of hybridity, that I have consistently aimed to demonstrate the limitations of the resistive potential of contemporary hybridity discourse as well as its complicity with neoliberal global power structures, it is obvious that the hybridity I advocate is in complete rupture with the assumptions of mainstream postcolonial hybridity 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou

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theory. This alternative notion of hybridity enters the contextualized, globalized, and diachronic frame outlined in this study not as a synchronic novelty detached from all context and diachronic development. Rather, it enters as a re-energized agency deeply aware of the genealogy of both domination and resistance (both historically present in the discourse of hybridity), as well as being prompted by an ethics of urgency and planetary responsibility that demands social, political, and ethical action; this ethics of urgency is not only geared towards ethicizing our modes of production, consumption, and of relating to ourselves, to others, and to nature. It is also underpinned by the more ambitious, idealist project of profoundly rethinking our civilization in the light of more fundamental, enduring values (altruism, a sense of proportion, an ethics of planetary justice, planetary responsibility and solidarity, and so on). This ethical orientation should dissuade us from continuing to measure the grandeur of our entire civilization solely by the yardstick of technological prowess and the ultra-capitalist ethos of immediate gain and gratification of the senses. In other words, it is high time we recognized that there is more to civilization than economic and technological achievement. These are surely important, but their significance is not complete without the fundamental ethical orientation that should underlie every human activity. Sadly enough, in both technology and economics, profit by all means, rather than ethical conduct, has so far been the rule. The scandals of Enron, the suicides of thousands of Indian farmers that can be clearly laid at the door of rapacious global corporate financial and banking systems, and the exploitation of millions of children in developing countries by global capital are grim reminders that the ethicizing of our mode of production, consumption, and conduct has still to remain at the top of our agenda. Overall, the hybridity envisioned in this alternative postcolonial paradigm is a historically informed, multi-rooted ethics of resistance with a global scope and planetary aspirations. It is a global hybridity of dissent and resistance shouldered by all those across the world who are aspiring to a more humane, equitable form of globalization. As becomes manifest, this dissident planetary hybridity is levelled against the global neocolonial hybridities of domination embodied by Western-based neoliberal corporations and comprador groups from the former colonized worlds, working hand in hand to advance their common interests. Worthy of note in this regard is that this dissident planetary hybridity does not take dissent as an end in itself; it is rather fuelled by a transformative impulse which, unlike the one driving neoliberal hybridities, which is interested in catering only for the happy few, 10.1057/9780230305243 - Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, Amar Acheraïou


is geared to achieving a more humane global (material, social, spiritual) condition for all, or at least for as many people as possible. Another important qualification is that, unlike mainstream postcolonial hybridity, the hybridity projected in this discussion is not articulated from the third space; in so far as this space is, as we have demonstrated, co-opted by global neoliberal and neocolonial structures of power, it cannot serve the resistive planetary hybridity I suggest. In other words, it is a hybridity whose foundation is not abstractly spatial, but concretely materialist and profoundly ethical; it is a hybridity with as many centres of consciousness as geographical points of origin; all these converge in the same defining, ever-expanding moment of global resistance, solidarity, and articulation of an alternative ethics of doing and being on a larger planetary scale. As shown in Chapter 9, this planetary ethics of doing and being is expressed by various activist groups, including progressive non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, pressure groups, and writers and intellectuals, such as those involved in the World Social Forum. Yet in order for this planetary hybridity of dissent and transformation to become efficient it has to shift from its actual status as a minor voice of insurgency to that of a major agent of global transformation, reshaping a new form of civilization; one that is based on global solidarity, responsibility, and ethical action.


Notes 1 Métissage, ideology, and politics in ancient discourses 1. For more information on Hellenism, see Ferguson (1973). 2. On Alexander’s imperial expansionism, see Wood (1997). 3. As a number of critics have pointed out, the word ‘syncretism’ was coined by Plutarch who employed it to refer to the alliance of the formerly separated populations of Crete against outside enemies, the Persians in particular. In the Renaissance, Erasmus took up the term ‘syncretism’ and used it to describe the welding of different ideas. This being said, the practice of syncretism is a much older phenomenon, dating back to the ancient Egyptians, if not earlier. Indeed, there is substantial historic evidence that in religious matters the Egyptians found in syncretism a valuable means to manage polytheism and achieve cultic unity. And, according to many observers, the successful integration of the various deities and beliefs into one single theological framework contributed to advancing and strengthening Egyptian religion (see Kraidy 2005, 49). 4. For a detailed examination of the Persian influence on Greece, see Miller (1997). 5. For a thorough study of colonial education in former French and British colonies, see Marston and Schilling (1984). 6. Original: ‘Les formes et les techniques grecques imposées à l’administration égyptienne n’ont modifié ni les problèmes fondamentaux ni l’antique mouvement de la vie égyptienne’ (Préaux 1939, 570). 7. For an elaborate discussion of ‘Perserie’, see Miller (1997, 243–58). 8. A good example is that of the phalanx. The phalanx was a military tactic whereby a group of soldiers stood or moved forward together. Used in ancient Greek and later by Roman armies, the phalanx was also common in ancient Sumerian armies around 2500 BC as well as among Assyrian troops. For more information on ancient warfare, see Hanson (1989), Sidebottom (2005), and Carey (2006). 9. For further information on the influence of the mathematics and geometry of ancient Egypt on Greece, see Gow ([1884] 1968), Heath (1981), and Miller et al. (2009) 10. For a detailed discussion of Sumerian civilization and, more particularly, its writing, see Kramer (1958) and Robinson (2007). On the technicalities of cuneiform, see Kramer (1963, 302–27). 11. With respect to religion in particular, Obenga (1996) argues that most of the ancient Greek and Roman gods were of African origin; they have simply been given European names. According to him, the African god, Amun, for example, was renamed Zeus by the Greeks and Jupiter by the Romans; the African god, Heru (the son of the king of the gods and associated with light and sun) was called Apollo by both the Greeks and the Romans; the African God Imhotep (the god of healing and medicine) was renamed Asclepius by the Greeks and Aesclapius by the Romans. 198


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12. This ambivalence to the Greek legacy is perhaps best illustrated in the ambiguous responses by the Romans to the Greeks as an ethnic group. While the Romans regarded the Greeks as repositories of a higher civilization that demanded admiration and preservation, at the same time, they projected onto the Greeks images of weakness and debauchery usually associated with Orientals. The city of Corinth was often referred to as the locus of this Greek debauchery (see Gress 1999). 13. The connections between hybridity, power, and social privilege are closely examined in Chapter 5. The aim is to show the persistence of ancient conceptions of métissage among postcolonial/postmodern producers and consumers of hybridity. 14. According to Aristotle, slavery was a natural condition of life for some races. He states in The Politics: ‘It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right’ (1988, 17). 15. On racism in ancient Greece, see Bernal (1987), Isaac (2004), and Acheraïou (2008). 16. For more information on Alexander the Great’s conquests in Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, see Briant (2010) and Waldemer (2007). 17. The idea of pure lineage and the fear of mixed marriages were prominent among the Greeks, not least in the works of Aristotle and Plato. Worth mentioning in this respect is the fact that the assumption of Greek purity originated in fifth-century BC Athens and was accepted by most Athenians. It was adopted by the Romans and later taken up by modern colonial authors. Although they did not openly claim racial purity, the Romans, who later colonized the Greeks, also valued pure lineage over mixed ancestry. Writers such as Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) and Tacitus (56–117 AD) warned against racial and cultural corruption resulting from mixing with nonRomans (Isaac 2004).

2 Myths of purity and mixed marriages from antiquity to the Middle Ages 1. In relation to the issue of liberality more specifically, Haarhoff, for example, sharply contrasts ancient Greek and Roman attitudes to ‘barbarians’, arguing: ‘Broadly speaking, the Romans were more liberal than the Greeks. The Romans saw the Barbarians as a class that had something to contribute: the Greeks, on the whole, did not […] The Greeks excluded even the half-Greek Macedonians’ (1951, 128). Haarhoff’s observation needs to be moderated, if only because the liberality of the Romans that he emphasizes was sharply contradicted by the overall Roman rejection of racial mixing and, more specifically, of biological hybridity. 2. Edward Gibbon ([1776] 2004) argued that Rome’s increasing reliance on ‘barbarians’ for the protection of their empire led to the decline and fall of the empire. He also cites Christianity as having contributed to the fall. His argument was that Christian dogma caused the populace to be less interested in the worldly here and now and more willing to wait for the rewards of heaven.


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3. For a detailed examination of the social, economic, and military factors that contributed to the fall of the Roman empire, see Rostovtzeff (1926) and Goldsworthy (2003). 4. Historians and commentators consider the Carolingian dynasty as the founders of France and Germany. This empire can be seen as the later history of the Frankish realm or the early history of France and of the Holy Roman Empire. For more information on the history of the Carolingian empire, see Riche and Allen (1993). 5. The Salian and Ripuerian Franks were descendants of Germanic tribes who lived along the Rhine, in what is today northeastern France and southwestern Germany.

3 Interracial relationships and the economy of power in modern empires 1. For more detail on the connections between modern colonial powers and ancient empires, see Acheraïou (2008), Isaac (2004), and Bernal (1987). This rhetoric of Othering served as a template for modern colonialist depiction of the natives. Modern colonial writers borrowed the classical racist stereotypes condensed in the word ‘barbarian’, which is no doubt one of the most obvious legacies of the classical world. The definitions of the natives in modern colonial literature and politics are to a great extent derivative and mimetic. Drawing on the classical characterization of foreigners, these definitions rehearse the image of non-Europeans as backward and inferior. 2. On British indirect rule in India, see Fisher (1991). 3. For a detailed study of British indirect rule in Africa, see Lugard (1928) and Ikime and Osoba (1970). 4. For an in-depth analysis of nationalism and colonialism, see Robinson and Gallagher (1961), Attridge (2003), and Chikendu (2004). 5. For a thorough examination of these linguistic and cultural influences, see Weekley (1935), Garratt (1937), and Rao (1954). 6. On the influence of Arabic and Berber on French, see Cheriguen (2002) and Treps (2003). 7. See also Frank (1998). 8. For a detailed study of Eurocentrism, see Amin (1989). 9. The colonial trope of rape may also be fruitfully read in the light of the figure of virginity. Within colonial discourse the conquered lands are always described as new and virgin, outside time and history. Yet while the virginity of the colonized countries is merely a constructed colonial discourse of domination, the rape of the colonies is a real colonial fact and act of destruction. The Algerian writer, Yacine Kateb offers illuminating insights into this virginity–rape colonial dynamics with regard to Algeria; he shows how in colonial mythologies or discourses the rape of the colony always requires that the colony in question be consistently reconfigured as virgin. After stressing the murky colonial history of Algeria, which was respectively conquered by the Romans, Arabs, Turks, and the French, Kateb, in Nedjma (1956), points to the irony whereby each of these conquerors systematically succumbed to the myth of the virgin colony; a colony which, in Kateb’s words, is seen reborn


Notes

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

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as a ‘virgin after each rape’. For more details on Yacine Kateb’s handling of métissage alongside the tropes of rape and virginity, see Acheraïou (2004). Original: ‘Nos garçons se marieront à vos filles, et nous ne serons plus qu’un peuple’ (quoted by Merlin-Kajman 2008, 77). ‘S’il se peut les y mesler, afin que par la succession du temps, n’ayant qu’une mesme loy et un mesme maître, ils ne fassent plus ainsy qu’un mesme peuple et un mesme sang’ (quoted by Merlin-Kajman 2008, 77). Basically, Tocqueville’s attitude to French imperial politics in Algeria was ambivalent, alternating between humanism and blatant racism and brutality. On his return from Algeria, Tocqueville declared that France made ‘the Muslim society more miserable, more disorderly, more ignorant and more barbaric than they were before our arrival’ ([1847] 2003, 198). Under other circumstances, however, Tocqueville called for brutal methods to quell the indigenous resistance to French colonization. ‘In France I have often heard people I respect, but do not approve, deplore burning harvests, emptying granaries and seizing unarmed men, women and children. As I see it, these are unfortunate necessities that any people wishing to make war on the Arabs must accept [...] I believe the laws of war entitle us to ravage the country and that we must do this, either by destroying crops at harvest time, or all the time by making rapid incursions, known as raids, the aim of which is to carry off men and flocks’ ([1841] 2003; quoted in Barker, 2008, 65). Although a promoter of the racial superiority of whites over non-whites, Gobineau was in no way against métissage. Rather, he saw racial mixing as an opportunity for the white race to improve the ‘inferior’ races by instilling ‘superior’ blood into their veins. See Gobineau ([1884] 1983). On this major colonial topic, see Moses (2008). A Creole was originally the descendant of European settlers in the West Indies, Central or South America or the southern USA. For more information on the lexico-semantic as well as politico-ideological evolution of the Creole, see Toumson (1998, 86–90). For more information on the Creole revolution in New Granada, see McFarlane (2002). It is important to note in this respect that if interracial unions were indeed common in the Caribbean; it is similarly true that colonial governments, as in Antigua for instance, passed laws forbidding sexual intercourse between Christians and non-Christians (see Alibhai-Brown 2001, 41). On sexual violence and exploitation in the Caribbean, see Edwards and Young (1801).

4 The ethos of hybridity discourse 1. Edward Said pointed out the ‘hybrid’, ‘heterogeneous’, and ‘unmonolithic’ aspect of all cultures. He further argued that ‘we have never been as aware as we now are of how odd hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism’ (1993, 115).


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2. On nineteenth-century Western assumptions of racial supremacy, see Gobineau ([1884] 1983). 3. Young discusses Bhabha’s adoption and adaptation of Bakhtin’s theory of linguistic hybridization and dialogism to the colonial context in the following terms: ‘By grafting the Bahktinian notion of the subversive and dialogical force of hybridity onto the ambivalence in the colonial encounter, Bhabha gives a new twist to the meaning of hybridity […]. In an astute move Homi Bhabha has shifted this subversion of authority through hybridization to the dialogical situation of colonialism, where it describes a process that “reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority”’ (1995, 22). Bhabha may well have given a ‘new twist to the meaning of hybridity’, as Young states, but the meaning ascribed to hybridity by Bhabha turns out to be partial and limited, not least because, as will be shown in the course of this study, Bhabha’s conceptualization of hybridity does not take into consideration the conceptual, historical, and ideological ramifications of the discourse of métissage. 4. Bhabha uses the concepts of hybridity and the third space interchangeably: ‘The importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity […] is the “third space” which enables other positions to emerge’ (1990, 211). If, as Bhabha states, the third space allows the emergence of new positions one may rightly wonder what those positions concretely are, or, more to the point, how these positions are articulated in relation to the power structures, national as well as global. 5. On power and knowledge, see Foucault (1980). 6. Throughout history translation has fulfilled various functions. It has often functioned as a means of cultural mediation and linguistic as well as cultural regeneration; it has also served as a channel of ideology collaborating in hegemonic power structures. The links between translation, ideology, and power have received close critical attention over the last two decades by such scholars as Bassnett and Lefevere (1990) and Venuti (1992), who pointed out the impact of ideology on the translator’s choices. Paradoxically, though, in Bhabha’s theory of hybridity the connections between translation and colonial ideology are undermined. 7. In ancient Rome, for instance, the act of translation was intricately linked to cultural, ideological, and political power structures. From the third century BC, Roman poets extensively translated the work of Greek poets and philosophers. Poets such as Cicero or Horace imitated Homer, Aristotle and others both to train themselves in rhetoric and to help them to find their poetic voice. They also sought to regenerate the Latin idiom whose paucity was a central concern within Roman elite circles. These poets’ creative translations were above all underpinned by a striving to build a ‘national’ culture and literary tradition. As a reminder, in Cicero’s Rome, Greek language and culture were the cultural reference par excellence. And Rome’s admiration for and dependence on Greek culture and literature were such that poets like Horace came to see this dependence as a form of cultural imperialism. 8. Linguistic regeneration and cultural emancipation, central to ancient Roman poets, were major concerns for Renaissance poets as well. They, too, translated the ancient Greek and Roman poets in order to find their own poetic voice, to regenerate their national idioms, and establish a national


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literature. The cultural patriotism inherent in the act of translation both in ancient Rome and during the Renaissance was to become a prominent feature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 9. This major theoretical slant is influenced by Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, which has become prominent in postcolonial and cultural studies at large. Scholars such as Michaela Wolf, for example, emphatically pleaded for the application of the notion of hybridity in the field of translation. See Wolf and Fukari (2007).

5 Critical perspectives on hybridity and the third space 1. Dirlik calls Bhabha a ‘master of political mystification and theoretical obfuscation’ (1997, 78). We may add here that not just Bhabha, but most postcolonial scholars who endorse the ideology of the third space display similar conceptual and political mystifications. 2. Of course, this postcolonial and postmodern schizophrenic ideological leaning is not new in itself, since it is also a key feature of the modernist ethos against which postmodernism is ostensibly reacting. This is specifically reflected in the ambivalence of modernist writers towards imperialism, more specifically Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, and Albert Camus. For an in-depth analysis of modernist writers’ ideological schizophrenia with regard to empire, see Acheraïou (2008). 3. Barber’s protest is echoed in Puri’s comment that ‘Latin America and the Caribbean (particularly the non–Anglophone Caribbean) have [also] been marginalized from the canon of postcolonial studies still dominated by the English Crown and still often conceived of in East/West binaries’ (2004, 2). We may extend these insightful observations to argue that postcolonial exclusionary politics towards non-canonical literatures and knowledge reflects, to a great extent, the neocolonial mentality predominant in academia in general and in the humanities in particular. 4. While stating that migrant postcolonial scholars are part of imperial culture, Spivak insists that the subaltern subjects are not (1999). 5. In Algeria, for instance, the Congrès Musulman (Muslim Congress) run by the indigenous elite accepted on 7 June 1936 the revised policy of assimilation proposed by Maurice Violette in 1931 and endorsed by Léon Blum in 1936. They saw this new policy as a necessary step towards the achievement of equality. It is true that this updated policy of assimilation was less extreme than the one adopted by the Senatus Consulte in 1865, in the sense that it did not posit the relinquishing of Islam as a prerequisite for those aspiring to French citizenship. Thus, this new policy permitted the candidates to French citizenship to keep their Islamic faith. However, this privilege came at the cost of other segregating factors: education, political role, and honours, all of which were intended to exclude the uneducated indigenous mass from French citizenship, while integrating the elite into the realm of the same. 6. The Loi Jonnart passed in 1919 allocated more political representation to the Berbers and Arabs; most importantly it also made naturalization possible for Algerians willing to give up their Muslim status. But during the 1920s most Algerians viewed naturalization as apostasy. That is why from 1919 to 1936


204

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Notes only 1720 native Algerians applied for French citizenship; by 1962, the year Algeria won her independence, there were about 10,000 naturalized Muslim Algerians (see Ageron 1993). Ferhat Abbas declared: ‘On nous dit: “Naturalized-vous! Qu’est-ce qui vous en coûte? Une simple formalité’’. Mais comment veut-on que nous le fassions? Tous nos morts nous regardent au fond de leurs cimetières. Pouvons nous les trahir? Comprenez-nous, l’islam est déjà usé, envahi de toutes parts par les idées de l’Occident, ne nous demandez pas de le répudier […]. Laissez-nous venir à vous tels que nous sommes, reprendre notre œuvre en commun avec vous’ (quoted by Ageron 1993, 164). (‘We are told: “get naturalized! There is not much to lose! A simple formality, a mere declaration”. But how can we go for such a thing? All our dead are looking at us from their graves. Can we betray them? Please, understand us. Islam is already worn out, invaded on all parts by Western ideas, don’t ask us to forsake it […] Let us instead come to you as we are, and together carry on our common enterprise’ (my translation). From 1918, the Algerians were willing to send their children to school but the colonial administration restricted drastically the number of those who could benefit from this privilege. For more details on French educational policies in Algeria, see Marston and Schilling (1984) and Lorcin (2006). General Daumas (1803–71) declared that the Algerians perceived France’s colonization of their country as a heavenly calamity caused by their diversion from Islamic principles (Ageron 1993). The Algerian writer, Mohammed Dib (1920–2003) in L’Incendie gives vent to this sentiment. He relates his countrymen’s historic fatalism, expressed by the unnamed farmer for whom colonialism is an inescapable, transitory phase, bound to end as soon as the natives’ sins have been purged. Dib’s character further voices the Algerians’ readiness to carry their burdensome sins: ‘It is God who thus ordered our retribution. May the will of the Almighty be accomplished?’ ([1954] 1989, 85). In his essay published in the same volume (Communicating in the Third Space) Bill Ashcroft also discusses the third space from a strictly linguistic perspective, thus neglecting the concrete geopolitical global context which determines texts and discourses (see Ashcroft 2009, 110 and 116). In Ikas and Wagner (2009), Julia Lossau, for example, questions the ‘fixating logic of the spatial metaphor’ of the third space (2009, 69). Regarding the issue of hybridity and global geopolitics, Spivak also casts doubt on Bhabha’s conception of hybridity, arguing that this theory is so ‘macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power’ (1999, 264). It is important to note here that unlike most postcolonial critics, who work with a disembodied, decontextualized notion of space, the French sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, whose book, The Production of Space ([1974] 2004) strongly influenced such postcolonial studies as Edward Soja’s ‘Third Space’ (2009), offers a Marxist and historicized approach to the production of space.

6 Class, race, and postcolonial hybridity discourse 1. A number of scholars have referred to Bhabha, Spivak, and Said as the postcolonial ‘Holy Trinity’ (see for example, Ikas and Wagner 2009).


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2. Even Said did not integrate Marxism into his postcolonial critique. On postcolonial studies and Marxism, see Bartolovich and Lazarus (2002). 3. Gilroy considers the diaspora, which he identifies with impurity and fluidity, as the only alternative to racial thinking. He writes: ‘diaspora is a useful means to reassess the idea of essential and absolute identity precisely because it is incompatible with that type of nationalist and raciological thinking […] Diaspora disturbs the suggestion that political and cultural identity might be understood via the analogy of undistinguishable peas lodged in the protective pods of closed kinship and subspecies being’ (2000, 125). Stuart Hall, too, conceives of the diasporic ‘impure’ aesthetic in similar terms (1999, 8). Although Gilroy and Hall’s perception of diaspora as enabling anti-essentialism is, in absolute terms, appealing, the contours of the concept of the diaspora itself are far from clear. The diaspora is, as I perceive it, merely an imagined collectivity, if not a phantasmagoric construction pregnant with utopian projections as well as misconceptions. Overall, one may wonder if the identification of the ‘irretrievably impure’ (Hall 1999, 8) diaspora as the only viable antidote to racism and racial essentialism is not, paradoxically, a claim to ethical supremacy, if not simply to another form of purity or essence. 4. For detailed discussions of race as a social reality, see Daynes and Lee (2008), Bonilla-Silva (1997), and Miles (1987). 5. For more information on race and genetics, see Koenig et al. (2008). 6. More recent studies similarly tend drastically to limit the historical dimension of the notion of race. Sarah Daynes and Orville Lee, for instance, declared: ‘Although race might not have a biological reality, it surely has a historical reality that runs from the discovery of the New World for Europe, the conquest of African lands, the importation and incorporation of indigenous peoples within the modern world system’ (2008, 8). Daynes and Lee, here, locate the reality of race in the fifteenth century, thus overlooking the fact that the history of race and racism reaches back, at least, to fifth-century BC Greece. 7. On race and racism in antiquity, see Isaac (2004) and Acheraïou (2008). 8. Among the government agencies designed to report and fight racism in Europe are the National Focal Points and the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency. The persistence of all forms of exclusion and racism is clearly confirmed in a report issued by FRA in 2007; a report which reflects deficient legislation and the ambivalence of governmental handling of structural racism in Europe (see Huggan and Law 2009, 201). 9. In twenty-first century France, for example, racism is most virulent towards immigrants from North Africa, particularly Algeria, and this racial prejudice is often spelled out in an Orientalist rhetoric that is continuous with French colonial representations (see Ben Jelloun 1997; Fysh and Wolfreys 1998). 10. Unlike scientific racism, which was an elite racialist discourse based on calculated, politically-oriented pseudo-scientific theories, mass or workingclass racism in the past as well as in the present has rarely been articulated in the form of a coherent theory or ideology. 11. In his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech delivered at a West Midlands Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on 20 April 1968, Powell declared: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to


206

12.

13.

14.

15.

Notes see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the states itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.’ The apocalyptic scenario anticipated by Powell is a brazen fear tactic meant to compel the British to retreat into phantasmagorical notions of culture and race. In the aftermath of his racist declarations, Powell, as pointed out earlier, was evicted from Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet; however, Powell’s xenophobic ideas gradually gained popular support and were influential from the late 1960s on. Thatcherism, as many have noted, is the progeny of Powell’s supremacist political and ideological project. The Front National programme explicitly stated that ‘no people can assimilate and integrate a large number of foreigners belonging to civilizations totally different from its own’ (quoted by MacMaster 2001, 194). But the anxiety of seeing French culture and race swamped by immigrants could also be detected in the discourses of less extremist politicians such as Giscard d’Estaing or Jacques Chirac. Fearing the threat of an immigrant ‘invasion’, d’Estaing proposed that France ‘return to the traditional conception of the acquisition of nationality that is based on the right of blood’. Charles Pasqua, Minister of the Interior from 1986 to 1988 and then in 1993, remarked: ‘Yes, there are a few extremists in the National Front, but, basically, the National Front has the same preoccupations, the same values as the majority. It merely expresses them in a more brutal, noisy way’ (quoted by MacMaster 2001, 200). If these various politicians’ arguments indicate the predominance of racist prejudice among French political leaders, Pasqua’s comment in particular reveals how far ‘common sense racism’ is engrained within the French social fabric. On racism and academia, see Piliawsky (1982), Reddy and TuSmith (2002), and Henny and Tator (2009). With regard to North America, particularly Canada, the issue of academic structural racism, so far overlooked or deliberately silenced by Canadian academics and institutions, has recently been receiving increasing scholarly attention. On structural racism in Canadian universities, see Eisenkraft (2010). Among other critics, Toumson (1998) remarks that the Latin American aesthetics of métissage is continuous with the seventeenth-century artistic traditions of Latin America; traditions in which indigenous literary, pictorial, and architectural styles were blended with colonial Portuguese and Spanish styles. For more information on baroque aesthetics in Latin America, see also Henri and Anne Stierlin (1994).

7 Postcolonial discourse, postmodernist ethos: neocolonial complicities 1. For a detailed account of the Eurocentrism of Hegel, Husserl, Weber, and Gramsci, see Slater (2004, 10–133 and 160–70) and Jones (2006, 179–80 and 192). 2. Fredric Jameson does not display the same Eurocentric inclinations as his postmodernist peers. Rather, he acknowledges the significant contribution


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of the South, especially in terms of struggles against neoliberal globalization, to the global resistance against resurgent imperialism embodied by the USA (1990). It is also worth adding that Latin American postmodernists, unlike most Western postmodernists, encourage a postcolonial insurgency (see Slater 2004, 155). 3. Many French historians of note, including Pierre Nora, Elizabeth Badinter, and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, have protested against the law 2005-158, circulating a petition that strongly condemned such biased, distorted representations of colonial history.

8 Hybridity discourse and binarism 1. It is worth pointing out that Bhabha, for example, does not forthrightly condemn Fanon’s Manichean colonial politics. As shown in his essay, ‘Remembering Fanon’, Bhabha, through his characteristic psychoanalytical approach, which works to undermine the historical and political dimensions of Fanon’s works, attempts to ‘domesticate’ Fanon by presenting him as an ambivalent, split figure rather than as a vocal, uncompromising historical as well as political agency demanding the liberation of all the oppressed. In Bhabha’s own words, Fanon is the ‘purveyor of transgressive, transnational truth. He may yearn for the total transformation of Man, but he speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical change’ (1994, 57). To say the least, there looms in Bhabha’s perception a tendency to turn Fanon’s radical anti-colonial ethics into an intermediate, consensual politics. 2. French social scientists and philosophers such as Gaston Bachelard ([1958] 1994), Jacques Derrida ([1967] 1976), Michel Foucault ([1967] 1980), Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 2004), and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ([1980] 1987) fuelled this spatial impulse. The spatial thinking that pervades their works is focused on social space and the ideological and political power structures informing it. In Bhabha’s work, on the other hand, the trope of the third space is primarily harnessed to the analysis of culture and identity politics. 3. On empire and humanist ethics, see Acheraïou (2008). 4. Original : ‘La civilisation idéale ne saurait être que métisse’. Senghor’s idea of a universal metis civilization is reiterated by the French philosopher and sociologist, Edgar Morin, who declared in 1980: ‘Le métis doit être l’homme de demain. C’est l’homme qui peut fonder son identité directement sur la notion d’humanité’ (quoted by Toumson 1998, 11). (The métis must be the man of the future. It is the one who can precisely found his identity on the idea of humanity’ – my translation). 5. Commenting on the writing of Bhabha, Peter Childs and Patrick Williams rightly observed: ‘While all discourse is resistant, because ambivalent and hybridized, there is no discourse of resistance because he does not treat anticolonial movements’ (1997, 145). Parry (2004) reiterates this critique, arguing that in Bhabha’s works and more generally in postcolonial theory there is a manifest neglect of, if not contempt for, anti-colonial resistance. We may extend these interesting observations by suggesting that this consistent neglect within postcolonialism of resistant discourses may proceed from both the scholars’ political conformism and professional opportunism.


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9 The global and the postcolonial: uneasy alliance 1. In his praise of the virtues of commerce, the Marquis de Mirabeau declared in 1758: ‘Everything in the universe […] is commerce because by commerce one must understand all the natural and indispensable relationships of the entire species, which are, and will always be those between one man and another, between one family and another, one nation and another’ (quoted by Pagden 2001, 92). The notion of trade as a means of nurturing fraternal, peaceful relationships between nations expressed by the Marquis de Mirabeau was also central to Richard Cobden’s speech in Manchester on 15 January 1846: ‘I believe that the physical gain will be the smallest gain to humanity from the success of this principle. I look farther; I see in the Free-trade principle that which will act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe, – drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace’ (1870, 362–3). On the Victorians and free-trade, see Brink (2001). 2. The neoliberal discourse of modernization had two interrelated purposes: to have a grip on the countries of the South in order to maintain a neocolonial world order and to contain the threat of Communism. 3. I am referring here to Joseph Conrad’s protagonist, Kurtz (‘Heart of Darkness’, [1899] 1998), whose cupidity and megalomania are beyond description. In a sense, Kurtz may be said to prefigure today’s global neoliberal rapacity. 4. This is the motto adopted by the World Social Forum in Brazil in January 2001 (see Sen and Waterman 2009, xix). 5. Several scholars have argued that this type of globalization is rapacious and homogenizing; whereas globalization from below is geared towards diversity and universal solidarity (see Slater 2004; Sen and Waterman 2009). 6. Thomas Jefferson’s imperialistic impulse and desire for internal and external territorial expansion are straightforwardly articulated in his declaration of 1801: ‘However our present situation may restrain us within our limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, where our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not southern continent, with people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface’ (quoted by Gardner et al. 1973, 64). 7. For the Zapatistas the struggle for economic and social justice on a national level is not distinct from the struggle for equal rights on a global scale. Slater correctly notes: ‘The Zapatistas treat the national level as one sphere among many, and their claims and proposals do not envisage the national level as separate from the global, supra-national or regional and local’ (2004, 205). Curiously enough, the interlocking of the local and the global, highlighted in the Zapatistas’ anti-neoliberal ethics completely eludes the postcolonial scholars. 8. Historians usually divide globalization into four categories: archaic, proto, modern, and postcolonial (see Hopkins 2002, 3). 9. Critics such as Ahmad (1992), as we have seen, argue that postcolonial scholars’ sole contribution to the field principally lies in their appropriation of postmodern concepts and ethos.


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10. Globally, farmers are hardest hit by the competitive behaviour of neoliberal global corporations. Rising debts that could not be met led to despair and alarming rates of suicide within the agricultural community, in both developed and developing countries. According to surveys, in Britain, for example, one farmer takes his/her life every week; in India it is one suicide about every 30 minutes. In rural India alone, as many observers have pointed out, over 100,000 farmers have committed suicide. For more information on farmers’ suicide in India, see Gyanmudra (2007) and Davis (2002). For a broad account of suicide and stress among farmers, see Hawton (1998).

10 Hybridity discourse and neoliberalism/neocolonialism 1. The USA’s promotion of global democracy was also, as pointed out in Chapter 9, intended to counteract the spread of Communism worldwide. 2. Such ‘hybrid’ regimes have been termed by many political scientists as ‘low intensity democracy’, ‘illiberal democracy’, ‘pseudo-democracy’, ‘restricted democracy’, ‘mechanical democracy’, and ‘delegative democracy’. Some of the common characteristics of ‘hybrid’ regimes include unstable government, a weak party system, economic insecurity, and shallow democratic institutions. Russia, Azerbaijan, Peru, Croatia, Haiti, Paraguay, Mozambique, and Ghana are examples of such regimes. These regimes organize periodic elections to gain democratic legitimacy but systematically violate democratic norms and institutions (see Singh 2005, 110). 3. Jones speaks of international relations as being ‘driven by an anti-imperialism and […] a pale postcolonialism’ (2006, 38). Because paleness is usually a sign of illness or poor health, it is, then, the postcolonial theorist’s responsibility to help postcolonial studies to gain vigour and colour.

11 Decolonizing postcolonial discourse 1. Roger Toumson (1998) discusses the notion of ‘créolité’ in the light of the trauma of slavery and refers to the discourse of hybridity as a ‘wilful amnesia’, a phrase taken up by Sankaran Krishna in Postcolonialism and Globalization. More generally, the postmodern era can be fittingly called an age of intentional forgetting. Postmodernism’s amnesiac practices have been addressed in Chapter 7. Jones also discusses at some length these amnesiac practices in contemporary scholarship related to international relations studies. She recommends that international relations studies engage more with Fanon, Cabral, and Gandhi, rather than focusing only on Gramsci, Adorno, and Habermas (2006, 12). 2. For further discussion of Latin American dependency theory, see Slater (2004, 85, 117–21, 129–30, and 139).


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Index Abbas, Ferhat 114, 204n Aeneas 31, 51 Agricola 35 Ahmad, Aijaz 6, 108, 110–12, 115, 120, 179, 208n Aiskhylos 42 Alaric I 55 Alexander the Great 2–3, 14, 17, 19–21, 23, 24, 34, 38–9, 40, 41, 43–50, 51, 57, 58–9, 60, 67, 70, 101, 112, 143, 198n, 199n Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 80, 82–3, 135, 137 Apuleius 53 Archimedes 28 Aristotle 2, 3, 4, 15, 25, 26, 28, 38, 41–3, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 87, 100, 128, 142, 182–3, 199n, 202n Arrian 34 Asad, Talal 115, 179 Bachelard, Gaston 90, 151, 207n Bakhtin, Mikhail 36–7, 89, 102, 177, 202n Bala, Arun 28, 64–5 Ballantyne, Anthony 175 Barber, Karin 109, 115, 203n Bassnett, Susan 93, 202n Baudrillard, Jean 146, 147, 148–9 Ben Jelloun, Tahar 89, 205n Benveniste, Emile 89, 117 Berlusconi, Silvio 132 Bernal, Martin 26, 27, 28, 65 Bhabha, Homi 5–6, 89–96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108, 111, 113, 115, 116–17, 118, 124, 144, 150–1, 157–9, 160, 161, 175, 179, 181, 182, 191, 194, 202n, 203n, 204n, 207n Boehmer, Elleke 93–4 Bolívar, Agostura Simón 139 Bourdieu, Pierre 93 Boxer, Charles 75 Brah, Avtar 171–2

Brand, Christopher 127, 135 Briant, Pierre 19 Burns, Thomas 56, 57 Bush, George W. 170, 180 Callimachus 29, 30 Camus, Albert 182–3, 203n Cassiodorus 56, 57 Cato 30 Césaire, Aimé 7, 90, 150, 151, 152, 161 Champlain, Samuel de 67, 68–9 Charlemagne 57–8 Chrisman, Laura 115 Clive, Robert 76 Cobden, Richard 164, 208n Colbert 67, 68–9, 114 Colton, Joel 26 Conrad, Joseph 101, 152, 203n, 208n Coombes, Annie 171–2 Cyrus, the Elder 53 Dahl, Robert 181 Dalrymple, William 76–7 Darwin, Charles 63, 88 Coulanges, Fustel de 32 Deleuze, Gilles 146–7, 177, 191, 207n Derrida, Jacques 89, 177, 207n Diop, Cheikh Anta 26, 28 Dirlik, Arif 6, 107, 110–12, 115, 120, 144, 203n Djebar, Assia 89 Dougherty, Carol 14, 24, 40 Ennius 29 Euclid 25, 26, 28, 64 Eudemos 28 Euripides 2, 41, 43 Fanon, Frantz 7, 80–1, 82, 90, 125, 150–2, 160–1, 207n, 209n Fink, Jennifer 95

221


222

Index

Forster, E.M. 152, 203n Foucault, Michel 89, 90, 146–7, 151, 202n, 207n Ganguly, Keya 118 Gibbon, Edward 55, 199n Gide, André 152, 203n Gikandi, Simon 174, 175, 176 Gilroy, Paul 89, 98, 100, 101, 111 Glissant, Edouard 89, 98–100, 101, 102, 111 Gloning, Thomas 58 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur 63, 70, 201n, 202n Gramsci, Antonio 145, 206n, 209n Guattari, Felix 177, 191, 207n Haarhoff, T.J. 45, 47, 199n Hadrian 29–30 Hall, Jonathan 42 Hall, Rupert 64 Hall, Edward 191, 193 Hardt, Michael 116, 181, 184 Hawley, John 9–10, 122, 173–6, 178 Hegel, Friedrich 145, 206n Held, David 65, 168 Herodotus 26, 28 Herrnstein, Richard 127, 135 Hingley, Richard 33, 34, 35 Hippocrates 28, 128 Homer 26, 29, 202n Horace 30, 202n Huntington, Samuel 132 Husserl, Edmund 145, 206n Ibn al-Haytham 64 Ikas, Karin 116–17, 194, 204n Isocrates 28, 100 Jefferson, Thomas 170, 180, 208n Joseph, May 95, 103 Kipling, Rudyard 100–1 Kraidy, Marwan 115, 142–3 Krishnaswamy, Revathi 9–10, 122, 173–6, 178 Kurke, Leslie 14, 24, 40

Lacan, Jacques 89, 115, 116, 177 Larsen, Neil 111, 112 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 128, 152 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 132, 134 Lefebvre, Henri 90, 151, 204n, 207n Lefevere, André 93, 202n Lionnet, Françoise 89, 98, 100, 101, 102, 111 Livius Andronicus 29 Loomba, Ania 8, 9, 172, 173 Lucian 15–17 Lyotard, Jean-François 145–8, 149 MacMaster, Neil 129–30, 132–3 Manning, Gilbert 19, 21, 23 Martel, Charles 57 Marti, José 139 McAlister, Lyle 75 McGrew, Anthony 65, 168–9 Memmi, Albert 150–2, 161 Metzger, Marcel 58 Miller, Margaret 14, 24, 40 Mirabeau, Marquis de 164, 208n Modelski, George 168 Monroe, James 170, 180 Montaigne, Michel de 152 Morris, Ian 21 Murray, Charles 127, 135 Musset, Lucien 58 Naevius 29 Napoleon Bonaparte 46, 112 Nasr, Hossein 65 Nederveen, Jan Pieterse 106, 107 Needham, Joseph 65 Negri, Antonio 116, 181 Nilsson, Martin 55 Obenga, Théophile 26–7, 28, 198n Odoacer 55, 57 Olympia, Princess of Epirus 43–4 Palmer, R.R. 26 Parrhe¯siade¯s 16–17 Parry, Benita 115–16, 120, 158, 207n Pericles 2, 3, 41, 42, 43, 48 Philip II, King of Macedonia 43 Pirenne, Henri 58


Index Plato 2, 3, 4, 15, 25, 26, 27, 28, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48–50, 100, 199n Plutarch 42, 47, 198n Powell, Enoch 132–4, 136, 205–6n Prabhu, Anjali 113 Préaux, Claire 21–2 Ptolemies 2, 14, 19–23, 34, 38–9, 44, 60, 101 Puri, Shalini 121, 123, 203n Pythagoras 25, 28 Rabelais, François 152 Rancière, Jacques 149 Reagan, Ronald 164, 170, 179–80, 181 Renan, Ernest 63, 67, 70 Retamar, Roberto Fernández 140–2 Romulus Augustus 55 Ronan, Colin 28, 64 Roosevelt, Franklin 170 Rostovtzeff, Michael 22 Runciman, Walter 23 Rushdie, Salman 89, 97–8, 100, 101, 102, 111, 113, 192–4 Rushton, Philippe 127, 135 Said, Edward 89–90, 93, 146–7, 201n, 204n, 205n San Juan, Epifanio 120, 179 Sardar, Ziauddin 6, 146 Sarraut, Albert 67 Sartre, Jean-Paul 150, 151, 152 Schirmer, Dominique 106 Seleucus 44 Senghor, Leopold Sédar 156–7, 207n Sepúlveda, Ginés de 71, 128 Shohat, Ella 119, 138

223

Singh, Kavaljit 165, 166, 182 Slater, David 165, 167, 208 Smith, Adam 164 Spivak, Chakravorty 89, 111, 146–7, 203n, 204n Starr, Chester 14, 23–4 Strabo 33–4 Tarn, William 46 Tatian 15–16 Thales 25 Thatcher, Margaret 132, 134, 136, 164, 206 Theodoric the Great 55–7 Thomas, David 22 Tilly, Charles 168 Tocqueville, Alexis de 67, 69, 201n Toner, Jerry 13 Trollope, Anthony 80 Vargãs, Pedro Fermín de 70–1 Vasconcelos, José 140–2, 156 Virgil 2, 3–4, 31, 51–2, 53 Wagner, Gerhard 116, 117, 194, 204n Walcott, Derek 89, 96–7, 100 Weber, Max 145, 206n Williams, Patrick 115, 207 Young, Christopher 58 Young, Robert 102–3, 106, 117–18, 124, 144, 150, 151, 159, 160, 191, 202n Zachary, Pascal 180 Zapata, Emiliano 171


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