Hybridity: A Privilege of a Few or the Necessity for All in Amin Maalouf's In the Name of Identity

Abstract

This paper critically engages with Amin Maalouf's understanding of identity in his book In the Name of Identity (1997). Maalouf's intervention in the contentious discussion of identity consists of four principle points. Firstly, identity is composite. Secondly, identity is constructed through dialogic process. Thirdly, the understanding of identity today is predominately ‘tribal.’ Finally there is a need for the prevalence of the universal in the ‘era of globalization’. Maalouf's analysis rightly transcends the limitation of essentialist and singular conceptions of identity—in particular- cultural identity—in today's ‘postcolonial’’ world; however, his proposed alternative, and the assumptions upon which it rests, are equally problematic, especially for ‘postcolonial’ societies and immigrants/migrants in ‘Western’ countries. Maalouf's perspective on hybridity is riddled with contradictions: above all, the contradiction between understanding hybridity as a foundational position and as a deconstructive force of fixed identities and naturalised categories. This confusion arises when, on the one hand, cultures are understood as bounded and territorialised and, on the other, individuals are thought to belong simultaneously to these different, bounded cultures in full composite terms. In the first place there is an argument for sustaining purity, while the subsequent stage of identity formation advocates hybridity. Maalouf rejects purity as well as hybridity by appearing to sustain the two simultaneously. He cannot maintain this contradiction except through individualising the conception of identity. This paper argues that while Maalouf is able to problematise notions of ‘essentialist’ identities—what he dubs as ‘murderous identities’—and presents a moderately plausible case for ‘hybridity’, he fails to depart from a hegemonic and reified notion of a ‘universal’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ definition of identity which in effect operates as a code for Eurocentric ideas of identity and being. Thus, Maalouf's ‘speaking for’ postcolonial and migrant people/cultures and ‘speaking back’ against neo-conservative world-view is never quite able to escape the latter's ideological moorings.