Cultural Hybridity #2
1st chapter:
“The current fascination with cultural hybridity masks an elusive paradox.” (no page numbers)
“Hybridity is here a theoretical metaconstruction of social order”
Questions the authenticity of culture and its boundaries, connects cultural objects and ethnicity.
“what are the discourses stressing cultural boundaries?”
Assumptions about social order
Hybrid cultures are ‘monstrosities’ that challenge local cultural order.
“Rather than being open and subject to fusion, identities seem to resist hybridisation.”
“cultural hybridity manages to be both transgressive and normal, and why it is experienced as dangerous, difficult or revitalising despite its quotidian normalcy.”
“It also creates a bridge to earlier modernist approaches, I believe, and thus enables us to draw on the insights developed by these approaches in our attempt to explain why, on a culturally hybrid globe, cultural hybridity is still experienced as as empowering, dangerous or transformative force.”
Surely its because the individualisms of the minority culture get lost in the process of hybridity and that is why it is feared – for losing a single aspect of a culture can alter it completely.
“Organic, unconscious hybridity is a feature of the historical evolution of all languages”
“Intentional hybrids create an ironic double consciousness, a ‘collision between differing points of views on the world’”.
“Such aesthetic interventions are thus critically different from the routine cultural borrowings and appropriations by national and ethnic or migrant groups which unconsciously create the grounds for future social change.”
“Cosmopolitans (…) are multilingual gourmet tasters who travel among global cultures, savouring cultural differences as they flit with consummate ease between social worlds.”
“Transnationals are people who move, often in great swarms, in order to create collective ‘homes’ around them wherever they happen to land.”
“muliticultralism signals the decline of modernism”
“All cultures are hybrid (…). To speak of cultural ‘mixing’ makes sense only from inside a social world. Hybridity is meaningless as a description of ‘culture’ because it ‘museumises’ culture as a ‘thing’.”
“The further step is to argue that there are no clear differences between racism and ethnicity, between essentialising discourses of otherness and multicultural identities.”
“Ironically, hybridity-talk is itself in danger of becoming just such another marketable commodity.”
“But, as we have argued here, there are problems with this celebration of hybridity by post-colonial intellectuals, as well as with the conception of ‘the migrant’ as the exemplary embodiment of this double consciousness.”
“we need to consider precisely what it is that cultural hybridity and essentialism from the margins do in this context.”
“It is this interest in the boundary that makes the experience of hybridity disturbing and shocking for some, while for others it is revelatory.”
“This complexity of process renders multiculturalism an important rhetoric and an impossible practice.”
Chapter 4: Identity and difference in a globalised world (Alberto Melucci)
“The production and reappropration of meaning seem to lie at the core of contemporary conflicts”
Chapter 5: Global crises, the struggle for cultural identity and intellectual porkbarrelling: cosmopolitans versus locals, ethnics and nationals in an era of De-hegemonisation. (Jonathon Friedman)
“The indigenous refers to the original, the aboriginal inhabitants of a nation-state that is historically and, in a sense, wrongly identified with another population, the product of a later invasion or colonisation.”
Identification by ethnicity
“In today’s world, this is related to discussions of cultural globalisation in which cultural flows are seen to meet one another and form new combinations, hybrids, which are assumed to be a real historical product of the increasing general globalisation of the world.”
Cosmopolitan – above any culture in the world
“hybridity, a claim to humanity so fused in its cultural characteristics that no ‘ethnic absolutism’ is impossible.”
Hybrid culture and cosmopolitism is hugely linked to modernism
“Strong cultural identities are the source of cultural creativity, and that nothing is wrong with this as long as it does not lead to racism.”
“if cultures exchanged all their elements with another on a continuous basis, there would no longer be any differences, and thus no mutual attraction.”
“coherence, wholeness and authenticity are relegated to the past, both colonial and, even more so, pre-colonial.”
“The modern world is a cultural mess.”
https://books.google.co.nz/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nxFkDgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT11&dq=cultral+hybridity&ots=NKO49y2S7r&sig=FL9CYIZ_UWpFAxZA3onQCA4gzqw#v=onepage&q=cultral%20hybridity&f=true
