“Hybridity makes difference into sameness and sameness into difference but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the difference no longer simply different. In that sense it generates according to the form of logic that Derrida isolates in the term “brisure’, a breaking and joining at the same time, in the same place: forcing momentary forms of dislocation and displacement into complex economies of agonistic reticulation.”
Robert Young “The Cultural Politics of Hybridity”
Questions, especially those regarding one’s social identification, desire to be answered and ones that aren’t hover uncomfortably in non-positionality. With the physical withdrawal of colonial presence, nations that had been under the guidance and control of for hundreds of years, if not formed by this presence, struggle not only in unearthing a cohesive history before foreign arrival but also for an acceptable space in a now post-colonial world. Manichean discourses of oppressed vs. oppressor, the Other vs. West, colonized vs. colonizer are considered too limited in their dualist parameters, in their denial of diversity and hybrid cultures. Thus the representation of these hybrids, whether they be diasporic ethnicities in “native” countries or individuals of mixed heritage, becomes a potential to deconstruct binary definitions, to dissolve the power differences prescribed and most importantly, to function as an equalizing effect.
However, before hybridity can be assigned as a process or a method, it must be assessed in effectiveness and attributed with value. Furthermore, it must be defined independently for what stands problematic is the context the term hybrid is defined within, its fluid cultural, ethnic and national context. The abuse and role of national and cultural communities as power institutions in the colonial situation has incurred necessary attention to the formation of and claims to long-standing identities. Here, Benedict Anderson’s concept of national identity as imagined political and economic communities , Edward Said’s Orientalism that the Orient is defined by exclusion from the West, and Leo Ching’s analysis of Japan’s cultural essentialism to align themselves apart from the rest of Asia in Yellow Skin, White Masks demonstrate the ease with which national and cultural identity is formed and exploited as vehicles of domination. If we define hybrid as in-between or a mix of national and cultural identity (mother country and host country or in post-colonial studies, colonizing country as well) and we recognize the instability or impossibility of national essentialism, how can one’s identity as a hybrid even be established, much less be dealt with before employment as a counterbalance? At the same time, what would it mean to forgo the search for a position in a frighteningly, rapidly changing world, even if the foundations of this search rests upon the very instability it attempts to avoid?