Hybridity Discourse and Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism

Abstract

As we have seen, the very ambivalence or indeterminacy of postcolonial discourse, specifically hybridity discourse, allows for it to be co-opted for both emancipatory and oppressive uses. The way in which neocolonial structures of power, embodied by ultra-liberalism and such institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have appropriated and accommodated hybridity to achieve their own goals reveals the limitations of hybridity discourse as a counter-hegemonic agency. Asad argued in this respect: ‘Neither the invention of an expressive youth culture (music, dance, street fashions, etc.), as Gilroy seems to think, nor the making of hybrid cultural forms, as Bhabha supposes, holds any anxieties for the holders of the status quo’. Rather, these cultural forms have been ‘comfortably accommodated by urban consumer capitalism’ (1993, 266). In a similar vein, Ahmad also assimilates hybridity discourse to a means of endorsing neoliberalism’s logic and objectives: ‘Speaking with virtually mindless pleasure of transnational cultural hybridity, and of politics of contingency, amounts, in effect, to endorsing the cultural claims of transnational capital itself’ (1995, 12). Epifanio San Juan follows suit, arguing that ‘postcolonial discourse generated in the “first world” academies turns out to be one more product of flexible, post-Fordist capitalism, not its antithesis’ (1999, 8)As we have seen, the very ambivalence or indeterminacy of postcolonial discourse, specifically hybridity discourse, allows for it to be co-opted for both emancipatory and oppressive uses. The way in which neocolonial structures of power, embodied by ultra-liberalism and such institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have appropriated and accommodated hybridity to achieve their own goals reveals the limitations of hybridity discourse as a counter-hegemonic agency. Asad argued in this respect: ‘Neither the invention of an expressive youth culture (music, dance, street fashions, etc.), as Gilroy seems to think, nor the making of hybrid cultural forms, as Bhabha supposes, holds any anxieties for the holders of the status quo’. Rather, these cultural forms have been ‘comfortably accommodated by urban consumer capitalism’ (1993, 266). In a similar vein, Ahmad also assimilates hybridity discourse to a means of endorsing neoliberalism’s logic and objectives: ‘Speaking with virtually mindless pleasure of transnational cultural hybridity, and of politics of contingency, amounts, in effect, to endorsing the cultural claims of transnational capital itself’ (1995, 12). Epifanio San Juan follows suit, arguing that ‘postcolonial discourse generated in the “first world” academies turns out to be one more product of flexible, post-Fordist capitalism, not its antithesis’ (1999, 8).