Class, Race, and Postcolonial Hybridity Discourse

Abstract

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).