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Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization Culture is not a one-time event; it is a living organism which has its own dynamics of evolution and continuity. In the age of post-nationalism, as cross-cultural movements increase and communication channels become global in their reach and access, the insularity or the interiority of the Self can no longer be valorised. Kraidy’s book is an endorsement of the global flows that hybridise cultures irrevocably, and to an extent de-fundamentalise them as well in the process. The atavistic returns to originary pasts do disrupt the growing ‘intercontextuality’ of cultures at times, but the author underplays their potential for he believes that the aspirations of ‘local capitals’ would be well negotiated by the rising tide of transnational capitalism.
While championing ‘hybridity’, the author forewarns his readers on two counts: one, hybridity should not be used only for corporate profitability, it should really become a process of culture from below; two, it should not flow from one side only. The ‘poor’ South or the strange ‘East’ should not be used as laboratories of cultural mixing. Unfortunately as the author comes to his conclusion, he realises that hybridity is not ‘posthegemonic’ for it still contains the structural inequalities across cultures. Unequal intercultural relationships shape most aspects of cultural mixing. The ethnic communities that travel or migrate from one culture to another are never allowed to integrate with the ‘host’ culture’, these communities end up settling in their well-marked out ghettoes or shanty towns, their own little beehives. The so-called multiculturalism does not really translate into a dialectical and a dialogical process of mutual exchange. Kraidy draws a distinction between ‘cultural pluralism’ and ‘critical transculturalism’; the latter evinces greater degree of syncretism and synthesis; the former is at best a paradigm of ‘resistance and adoption’. Within the frame of ‘critical transculturalism’, the process of mixing is built in the social practices itself; individual need not be the sole agent of cross-cultural affiliations. Such distinctions are indeed fundamental to the theory of hybridity, but they were amply suggested long back by Bakhtin, Bhabha and Said. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘carnival’, Bhabha’s idea of the postcolonial subject as ‘mimic’, and Said’s distinction between ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’ in a way offer subtler nuances of the processes of hybridisation. Except for the fact that Kraidy marshals his evidence from the lesser-charted terrains of Lebanon and Mexico, the book does not offer any significant theoretical thread. Rather it seems to milk the extant notions of hybridity. The book concentrates largely on the cultural politics and economics of hybridity, but is silent on its history — one area which could have lent some vertical depth to the issue of hybridity. If ‘origins’ are indeed fictional, and all genealogies are constructed, hybridity surely no longer remains a contemporary condition of culture. Even the title of the book takes after Fredric Jameson’s title Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. If serious doubts are raised on the future of cultural theory today; such books, bereft as they are of new insights, only precipitate ‘the end of theory’ of debate. Why should Pearson publish Indian reprints of such theoretical works, which are derivative in nature and are mere academic exercises in pointless explication? Is India the safe dumping ground of theoretical surplus?
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The
book incorporates a thorough discussion of paradigms, configurations and
mechanisms that have often been invoked to map the processes of cultural
mixing. Hybridity is suggested as an umbrella term that can account for
culture-specific processes of mixing such as ‘creolisation’, ‘mestizaje’,
‘syncretism’, etc. The four patterns suggested towards the
evolutionary growth of the concept of hybridity are catchy indeed. The
‘parrot pattern’ involves mimicry of the foreign; ‘amoeba pattern’
involves an uncritical adaptation of the foreign; under ‘coral pattern’
the foreign becomes a distinctly visible part of the host culture; and
the last is ‘butterfly pattern’ in which the foreign and the native
become indistinguishable.