Social Scientist

Review: The Cultural Politics of Hybridity

Author(s): Anil Lal and Vinay Lal
Reviewed work(s):
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race by Robert J. Young
Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 25, No. 9/10 (Sep. - Oct., 1997), pp. 67-80
Published by: Social Scientist
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517681
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REVIEW ARTICLE/ ANIL LAL AND VINAY LAL*

TheCulturalPoliticsofHybridity

RobertJ. Young.ColonialDesire:Hybridityin Theory,

CultureandRace,London
& New York:Routledge,1995.xiii + 236 pp. $16.95.

The continuing and inevitably incomplete interrogationof modernity's

concepts of objective and scientific knowledge, the nation-state, nature
and culture, and progress,which for a long time had been invested with
universal validity, has intensified greatly over the last two decades, and
most particularly, as far as the American academy is a consideration,
since the publication of Said'sOrientalismin 1978. This resistanceto the
modern West's totalizing grip over knowledge systems has been
countered by new social movements, besides taking the form, in the
language of post-colonial critics, of writing back - to the center, the
metropole, the reigning liberal consensus - by various activists,
intellectuals, and cultural theorists, whether speaking on behalf of
formerly colonized people or disaffected subaltern populations in the
West. To be sure, many of these revisions and contestations follow in
the wake of the disillusion with Marxist-inspiredparadigmsthat have
been felt to lack much purchase on unraveling the persistence of the
affective hold of nation, ethnicity, and race even as class affiliation has
been either deflected or subsumed by the manifestly greater pull and
attractionof such ostensibly particularisticidentities. In one such critical
enterprise,WhiteMythologies: WritingHistoryand the West(1990),Robert
Young offered a synoptic account of the post-structuralistquestioning
of history, "the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the

* Anil Lal is an
independent scholar and has taught English at Truman College and economics at
Roosevelt University, both in Chicago; Vinay Lal is an Assistant Professor of History, University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and former Fellow of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, Washington, D.C.
SocialScientist,Vol. 25, Nos. 9-10, Sept.-Oct.1997
68 SOCIALSCIENTIST

culture of the West."in which the "white man takes his own mythology,
his own logos ... the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that
he must still wish to call Reason" (p.7). Declaring these mythologies as
"white" alerts us to the normative, Archimedean center inhabited by
the white, bourgeois, male subject, through a series of exclusions,
excisions, measurementsof deviations and discriminations,and practices
of othering.
The vanishing of the hopes and expectations of the formerly
colonized, that had been fostered by territorialdecolonization, and had
constellatedaroundnarrativesof progress,development and nationhood,
has led to an insistent questioning of the panoply of political concepts -
sovereignty, history, subject,culture, modernity, citizenship - that have
organized the Western sensibility, and for that matter, in so far as the
history of the formerly colonized cannot be extricatedfrom that of the
West, various "local"predicaments.Notwithstanding the presence and
cogency of earlier dissensions, there has been a marked foregrounding
of the multiple strategies,sites, practices, and knowledges whereby and
wherein the hegemony of the West was and continues to be secured.
And while it might be contested that these revisions have come at the
cost of maintaining the steady thrust of Marxist critiques that have
minimally kept the horizon of capitalism as their point of entry into
social theory, it cannot be denied that the congeries of discourses, now
encapsulated, for better or worse, under the rubric of 'post-colonial'
studies and more generally 'cultural studies', have broadened, at least
for our time, the framework of Marxist critique, which by itself has
inadequately gestured towards any realizable emancipatory projects.
While the reconfiguration of the terrain of social antagonismshas been
theorized in variouspolitical languages,and while the particularlocations
from where post-colonial theory has been staged has vital bearing to its
epistemological and political efficacy, it has indubitably transformed,
howsoever slightly, the study of variousacademicdisciplinesin the West.
In the context of the Western academy,if less certainly elsewhere, White
Mythologies, effectively summarized, its particular shortcomings
notwithstanding, the new cannonicities of interpretive moves and
readings consolidated by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha
and others.
The claiming of nationhood has always been a profoundly cultural
enterprise, and has crucially relied upon the proclaimed verities of the
naturalizingtropes of the "unchosen"- race,history, and ancestry,among
 THE CULTURALPOLITICSOF HYBRIDITY 69

others- to markandsignifyits senseof uniqueness.A plethoraof recent

scholarlyworkshasexaminedthe constitutionof colonialdiscourseand
nationhoodby the production,manufactureand circulationof these
andothermarkersof difference.Thatthelinesof demarcation,of civilized
andprimitive,masculineandfeminine,modernandtraditional,scientific
and superstitious,industriousand lazy, white and black, and so on,
were alwaystraversedby ambivalences,doubts and anxietieswas an
insightthat undoubtedlywas proclaimedand enactedon by Gandhi,
Fanon, and many others. The merit of the work of postcolonial scholars
and other critics, such as Ashis Nandy and Ivan Illich, who do not share
the vocabulary and idioms of post-structuralisttheory which animates
postcolonial theory, but have likewise been inspired by the political
desireto createthe groundsfor an ecological plurality of knowledge, has
been to deploy the insight about the perils of identitarian thought to
initiate further speculation into politics and culture. However, such a
move is fraught with political impasses and practicalcontradictions, or
so Robert Young argues in his most recent work, Colonial Desire:
Hybridity in Theory,Culture and Race. The "truth" and "reality" of
hybridity, particularlyin versions of multiculturalism,cannot be merely
securedby its limitation to "culturalpluralism"or "diversity,"important
as it might be to advancethe regrettablyepisodic victories of even this
limited conception of it, as in the revisions of school curriculums and
promotions of syncretic histories in the public sphere. The ready
acceptanceof culturalcommingling and hybridity by corporatistpowers,
most notoriously by United Colors of Benneton in a seriesof provocative
and rathershamelesslyadaptiveadvertisements,should disabuseanyone
of the idea that the espousal of hybridity by itself can advance
emancipatoryprojects. 'Multiculturalism',for the most part, has merely
been appropriated by those corporatist and political forces that have
thrived by perpetuating the opiate of 'choice': thus in large American
cities people of 'cultivated' taste have their choice of a staggeringlywide
array of ethnic cuisines, while in France the MacDonalds chain of
restaurants,cateringto a purportedly more sophisticatedclientele, serve
wine. The readypromotion of hybriditymay be no more than the conceit
-
of the privileged classesthat would, in typical fashion, wish to promote

-their own interests in the guise of what is deemed to be universally

desirableand acceptable.
These particular objections may be stated as the requirement that
hybridity itself needs to hybridized, made heteronomous to itself, by a
70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

reconceptualization with the economic sphere. On the one hand, the

recent virulent assertionsof identity in ethnic conflicts world-wide, and,
on the other hand, the politically progressive assertions of difference
against hegemonic structures, obviously also suggests that "identity
thinking" articulatesprofound desiresto empowering knowledge - not
only of who one is, but of what one believes, and what one seeks and
desires- and has to be alternativelycombatedandpromoted. The fixation
on race,ethnicity and gender,whether seen as 'inventions' of modernity,
capitalism, and colonialism, or transformationsof other proto-schemas
of systems of hierarchization, has clearly emerged out of a realization,
whether conscious or otherwise, that the other is not different, but the
same. Just as evidently, for a variety of reasons - economic, sexual,
psychological - this recognition generatesa threat that is contained by
positing difference and mandatingviolence. The positing of 'difference',
which in popular discourses is invariably confused with 'diversity',
proceeds from a desire to maintain cultural community and integrity.
On other occasions, it is the perception of difference that leads to
aggressiveattempts to mobilize and neutralize it into the same. Witness
the evident glee that accompanies frequent reports on how American
culture has taken wing and is being embracedeverywhere, or the evident
amelioration of discomfort at the prospect of the loss of world-wide
American hegemony when a new consumer survey reveals that the
Japaneseare taking to American-style"consumptionbehavior."Identity
or hybridity inhabita "metaleptic"structure,where causesgenerateeffects
and effects generate causes. The theorization of hybridity, which we
may articulate as the various, multiple and incongruous attributes of
persons or cultures and as (in the words of Homi Bhabha)the continual
"catachrestic reinscription of cultural difference in the disjunctive
postcolonial discursive," as neither sameness nor difference nor their
sublation, is clearly an urgent criticalenterprise.This, as we shall shortly
see, is Young's endeavor,and as he suggests,the study of colonial discourse
amply furnishes a body of material for examining earlier theorizations
of hybridity.
The distinguishingfeature of postcolonial theory may be said to lie,
quite simply, in its demonstration of the complicities of systems of
representationsand knowledges, of cultural objects and practices, with
colonialism. If earlier formulations articulatedthe relation of ruler and
ruled in an exaggeratedly dichotomous manner, a charge often (but
mistakenly) laid at Said's door as well, later theorizations have shown
 THE CULTURALPOLITICSOF HYBRIDITY 71

the implausibilityand estrangementof such Manicheandivisionsby

evoking the disturbancesthat haunt the strategiesof classification
deployedby the colonizers.To repeatthe oft-citedaphorismof Trinh
T. Minh-ha,"Thereis a ThirdWorldin every First World, and vice
versa."In one of the morepowerfultheorizationsof subalternrusesand
strategies,formulatedwith such conceptsas sly civility, mimicryand,
most prominently, hybridity, Homi Bhabha has offered a highly
psychoanalyticconceptualframeworkfor the readingof colonialtexts,
caughtand split as the colonialidentitywas between"historicityand
fantasy,"renderingits objectsat once "disciplinary anddisseminatory."
Whethersuch analysiscan be anchoredpalusiblyto multiplesubaltern
its brillianceandtheoretical
historiesor is, in one sense(notwithstanding
density)triviallytrue, it nonethelessremainsmore pertinentto ask if
such a conceptualmodel can be usefullydeployedfor politicalwork
today. Relativeto the days when narrativesof tamingthe savagesor
bringingprogressto ancientcivilizationsgroaningunderthe weightof
stagnationand despotismwere legion, claimsof superiorityand authority
cannot be so brazenly and easily couched in the present. This, of course,
is not altogether true, given the widespread rhetoric of "one world
civilization", the "new world order",and the "end of history". Ignoring
this particular chest-thumping cant and tiresome machismo, it is
indubitably true that claims grounded along some naturalizing and
scientific lines of division between peoples would now have to be
articulatedin far more covert and insidious fashion, though even here it
remains to be said that the likes of Paul Johnson, who recently argued
for the recolonizationof Africa ("Colonialism'sBack- and Not a Moment
Too Soon", New YorkTimes[18 April 1993],Sec. 6), persistin advocating
the view that civilizations can easily be judged along an evolutionary
scale. Given, however, the dissemblanceof the discourse of "mastery,"
it is more problematic to read and undo the ambivalencesthat mark the
newer discourses, say of criminality or character.
Whatever the prospects might be of hybridity as a theoretical tool-
kit, would appearthat some of the most promisingculturaland political
it
projects for our time have seized upon its rhetoric. Thus, the novelist
Salman Rushdie celebrates "hybridity, impurity, intermingling", and
"rejoice[s]in mongrelization and fearsabsolutism of the Pure. Melange,
hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the
world." Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, declaring the
absurdityof notions of high culture and culturalidentity, calls for border
72 SOCIALSCIENTIST

cultureand gringrostroika.Borderculturemeans "boycott,complot,

ilegalidad,clandestinad,
contrabondo,transgression, and
desobediencia",
demandsa new terminologyfor novel hybrididentities and metiers:
"mestizaje,not miscegenation."Such cultural practices move crucially
beyond the assertionof minority identitiesand call for the mutual
recognitionof differencethatcontinuesto dominateprogressivepolitics.
The practiceof "hybridity," as it were,constantlyseeksto undo binary
oppositions that structureauthorityand unpackfetishizedidentities.
Again, whether such processesof resignification,elaboratedin high-
soundingphrases- "liminalityof themigrantexperience," the "split-space
of enunciation," "performativity of the signifyingprocess"- thatattimes
seemto self-validatetheircogencyandpromiseby the accrualof a certain
poetic and seductivetexture,are a prescriptionfor the work of critics
largelyin the academyor are to be readas a charterof action to be
undertakenby the bodypoliticatlarge,is anopenquestion,particularly
in the absenceof a plausibleaccountof how multipleandsplit subjects
areto forgethemselvesin collectivestruggle.Sucha politicaluneaseis
not, however,whatpromptsRobertYoungin his new book, Colonial
Desire:Hybridityin Theory,Cultureand Race,to questionthe critical
weightthat hybriditycarriesin presentculturaltheory.RatherYoung
seemsto believethatouraccountsof hybridity,cultureandraceseemto
-

be imprisonedin the conundrumsthat these concepts led to in the

nineteenth-century, andhe asksus to contemplateoverthe ironythatin
"reinvokingthis concept"of hybridity,"weareutilizingthe vocabulary
of the Victorianextremerightasmuchasthe notionof anorganicprocess
of the graftingof diversityinto sngularity"(p. 10).Whereverhybridity
emerges in Victorian discourse, argues Young, it "suggests the
impossibilityof essentialism",and in deconstructingessentialism,we
may be only repeatingthe pastratherthan"distancing ourselvesfromit
or providinga critiqueof it"(p.27).Thereforethe promiseof aninquiry
suchas he conductsostensiblylies in the cautionit mightserveto us in
invoking and deploying hybridity as a clarion call to "cultural"
transformation.This is largely a ruse, for Young does not really
demonstratethroughany analysisof presentsituationsanddebateswhy
we shouldbelievethat we needto examinethe genealogies that he does
trace.Thereis no reasonwhy, ipsofacto,genealogiesshouldcommand
the forceof a culturalandpoliticalcritique,nor is it certainthat terms,
concepts, and ideas are so overwhelmingly burdenedby their past usage
so as to be irrevocably comnpromisedin their present use. If that were
 THE CULTURALPOLITICSOF HYBRIDITY 73

the case,languagewouldeverbe a prison-house,andwe couldnot hope

to investold ideas,howsoevercontaminated,with morepromisingand
emancipatorysignification.So, for example,Gandhitransformedthe
practiceof fasting,which in Indiahaduntil his time been recognizedas
a purelyexpedientmeasureto gainredressor humiliateenemies,into a
moralforcefor the questfor truth.If Gandhihadbeencontentto take
the view that fastingwasnothingmorethanduragraha, or the 'force of
falsehood', he would not have dared to experiment with it as the most
fiery elementof satyagraha, the 'force of truth':the practiceof fasting
was not to be containedby its past.
Nonetheless, should anyone wish to follow the trajectoryof debates
on culture and race that were waged in the heyday of imperialism, he or
she would find enough engaging materialin ColonialDesire that would
lay to rest any residual belief in the possibility of defining any stable
notion of culture. Speaking of Britain alone, it can scarcely be doubted
that discourses of nation, culture, and race played an intricate role in
extending colonialism, consolidating the gains of empire, and shaping
relations with colonized subjects, besides being used by the capitalist
classes and governing elements to order subalternpopulations at home.
But was identity as a consequence a stable concept? The diverse
philosophical work of Derrida, Bakhtin and many others has shown
how identity, whether of self, culture,or raceis rivenwith an ineliminable
alterity. In his examination of the colonial context, Young shows how
the attempt to secure identity through the categories of culture, which
must always and necessarilybe raciallyand sexually inflected, floundered
on the logical and empirical contradictions that were fueled by the
simultaneousaxes of desireand aversionthat characterizedthe very drive
to both master and expel the other. Though filled with horror at the
possibility of miscegenation,Count Gobineau, one of the breedof master
European theorists of racism, was himself married to a creole woman,
and was convinced that, "fromthe point of view of beauty",the "happiest
blend" was made "by the marriageof white and black" (pp. 114-15). If
the sexual attraction white males experienced for the women of other
races was the reason for the fall of civilizations (there being no other
civilizationsexceptthose peopled by whites), Gobineauwas also prepared
to concede that the Aryan nations had risen to greatnessin this fashion.
-
Everything hovered around the twin poles of attraction and repulsion.
The self-assuranceof culture's categories was always subject to a
certain corrosion by the hybrid object which in its visibility
74 SOCIALSCIENTIST

metonymicallydisturbedalsothe orderedeconomyof the classificatory

schemas.As the hybridemergedfromthe couplingof thatwhichwasto
be keptseparate, it borethetraceof bothdesireanditsdisavowal.Cultural
theoriescould not but be articulatedalong racialdivisionsand these
racialdivisions,in turn,couldnot but be covertavowalsanddisavowals
of desire.The promiscuouscrisscrossingof the discoursesof culture,
raceandsexuality,unpackedatthe siteof addressandenunciation,allow
us to almostrenameculturalstudiesitself with the trope of hybridity.
ColonialDesiresetsout,then,to tracethe "emergence of desirein history,
its genealogyin the historyof racializedthought."As the "impresario
thatstagesthispatriarchal drama"is culture,a trackingof "theconflictual
structuresgeneratedby its imbalancesof power,consistentlyarticulated
throughpoints of tension and forms of difference...superimposedon
each other",leads to an analysisof "racialtheory"which inevitably
"transmutesinto expressionsof the clandestine,furtive forms of colonial
desire: a covert but insistent obsession with transgressive,inter-racial
sex, hybridity and miscegenation"(pp. xi-xii). Young's project is carried
out quite impressively,though many of its exegeses,such as of the raging
debates between the monogenists and polygenists on the question of
racial origins and threats of degeneracy, or the ventriloquism of sexual
desirein the modalities of the primitivismor exoticism, have been amply
examinedby others, sometimesin more nuanceddetail.It might be added
parenthetically,with respectto style, that the book suffersfrom a certain
persistent repetition, in some places very literally. This may have more
to do with the copy and paste technique that computer writing allows
and the sloppy editing that results from the over-production of books.
Nonetheless, the book serves to remind us of the impossibility of
examining colonial rule without a sustainedlook at how the knowledge/
power nexus always rides on the perilous pull and fear of desire.
If, in its origins, the concept of civilization marked the progressive,
secular, refining development of society, then the concept of culture
marked the sense of intellectual development, whence the present terms
cultivated and cultured, which still speak to that genealogy. Needless to
say, the concept of civilization depended crucially on what it excluded,
more so than on the positive attributes that could be claimed on its
behalf. John StuartMill, for instance, declaredin his essay Civilization
[1836] that "whateverbe the characteristicsof what we may call savage
life, the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it
throws off these, constitute civilization" (p. 35). The challenge posed by
 THE CULTURALPOLITICSOF HYBRIDITY 75

Herderandotherstalwartsof the Romanticreactionto the grandclaims

madefor civilization,withits attendantindustrialization,
mechanization,
andignominiousmaterialism,revealsthe innerdissensionthathasfrom
the outsetmarkedthe conceptof culture.Herder'suniversalhistoryof
-

cultureattackedethnocentrism,allowingthat eachcultureis distinctive

-

and
-
contributesin its own mannerto the developmentandrichnessof
the humanspecies.Yet the culturalrelativism,evenincommensurability,
- -

that arisesfrom the recognitionof the uniquepropertiesof language,

environment,traditionand folkloreof eachculturalvariantis vitiated
by a historicismthattracesthe cultureconceptfromthe earliestmoments
of humankind,only to discoverthat culturesdevelopincrementallyby
graftingand hybridity.The teleology of such a historicismentailsan
anthropometry,a measurementschema,for the rankingof moreor less
advancedcultures.ForHerder,colonizationandthe enlargement
- -
of states
is unnatural,as is "the wild mixtureof racesand nationsunder one
-

sceptre", since such unnatural families are destitute of "internal

vivificationandsympathyof parts"(p. 39).Yet, asHerderwasto allow,
the "educationof the species,"indeedits veryprogress,restson a model
of cultural diffusionism, mixing and communication. The fatal
-

heterogeneitythus introduceddemanded,if not as much by Herderas

by thosewho readhim as articulating the virtuesof nationhoodandthe
integrityof cultures,a rankingof cultures,andcertainlyplayedinto the
handsof the polygenists,the proponentsof the thesisthat humankind
havingstemmedfromseparateorigins,eachracewasdestinedto follow
-

its own 'genius'or courseof history,andthat nothingcouldbe doneto

-

arrestthe differences,whetherin abilityof reasonor propensityto moral

feelingandaction,that developedbetweenthe races.
Monogeneticor polygenetic, it was uniformly held by cultural
theorists,evolutionists,paleontologists,and other scientiststhat racial
difference articulatedthe crucial differencebetween cultures. The
monogenists,arguingfor the commonoriginandunity of humankind,
reliedon a thesisof degenerationfrom a supposedlypurewhite origin
to explainthe variationin cultures.The polygenists,though fervently
inclinedto theviewthatblackandwhitepeople,slavesandslave-holders,
savagesandChristians,werenot originatedfromthe samespecies,could
not countenancea relativismthatallowedfora mutualityandreciprocity
of relations.Quite perversely,to posit the acuteseparatenessof black
andwhitepeople,the racesdeemedto be furthestapart,theyhadperforce
to beginwith the oppositefact of the sexualconjunctionof thesetwo
 76 SOCIALSCIENTIST

races, a conjunction that, so their thesis stated, led to the gradual

degeneration and 'degradation'of the progeny of such union (pp. 101-
2). The polygenists also had the burden of offering a plausible account
of cultural advanceand the obvious mixing of races.In the melancholic
and pessimistic account expounded by the notorious Gobineau, in his
Essayon theInequalityof Races,where fusion and hybridity are both the
motor of civilizationaladvanceandyet produce "septicaemia,"decadence
and decline, sex, emerges as the key term that marks this simultaneous
attraction to the other and the disavowal since it also marks the
deterioration of oneself. Sex as adultery, as ad + alterity, "the mixture
of self and other" (p. 104), marksthe return of an unexpungablealterity.
The desire to stem the disgusting ill effects of hybridity are in constant
-
battle with the desire and longing for the other. The easy elision of
-
cultural, racial, and sexual differences into one another, whether along
openly racial divisions or resting on cultural divides, suggests that we
cannot be so assured of an untroubled assertion of cultural or ethnic
identity, even when such identity is asserted innocuously and
progressively. Considering that Young's enterprise is intended as a
cautionary tale for the historically uninformed who are inclined to
overlook the ponderous instability of notions of culture, it might have
been fruitfulfor him to have providedan accountof how other principles,
such as that of merit, now form the principalaxes for the articulationof
difference by the dominant classes. But, it remains unclear from the
large detours into Victorian race theory that principally form Colonial
Desire,that Young has provided strong reasonsfor us to rejectthe claims
for the assertionof differenceby subalterngroups,when they areasserted
in a democratic spirit and as claims for respect and access to power.
Undoubtedly, assertions of identity and difference have to be situated,
understood and evaluatedin particularhistoricaljunctures,and it hardly
seems likely that any generalizedtheory can substitute for the labor of a
constant translation of these assertions in the multiple contexts of
corporate governance and still too many existing noxious hierarchies.
Given the detailed analyses that Young offers of the operations of
colonial discourse,effected on the site of racializedand eroticized bodies,
and overdeterminedperhapsby opposing tropes, it is puzzling to know
how to assesscertain claims he makes regardinghybridity. Much of the
book is an elaboration of the logic of hybridity, which, as he says,
"Derrida isolates in the term 'brisure', a breaking and joining at the
same time, in the same time: difference and sameness in an apparently
 THE CULTURALPOLITICSOF HYBRIDITY 77

impossiblesimultaneity.Hybridity thus consists of a bizarrebinate

operation,in which eachimpulseis qualifiedagainstthe other, forcing
momentary forms of dislocation and displacement into complex
economiesof agonisticreticulation" (pp.26-27).Thispresumablyshould
enable,atthe least,the conceptualdislodgingof the discoursesthatwould
fetishizedifferenceand fix othernessas a symbol so as to impedethe
circulationof othernessasa sign.Acceptinghybriditymightproductively
estrangethe basisof one's own identity.However, we are cautioned
that such a criticalperspectiveunjustifiablyassumesa greaterdistance
betweenhybridityand the "older,essentializingcategoriesof cultural
identity or of race."From the historicalperspectivethat the book
elaborates,it can be said that "the identificationof hybridity with
carnivalizationand creolizationas a meansof criticalcontestationof a
dominantculturesuggeststhat the threat of degenerationand chaos
incipient upon a 'raceless chaos' has not yet been redeployedand
reinflected" (p.25).Ifthe dangerof hybridizationascreolizationinvolves
fusionthatwouldsimplybe a new fixedformwhichthen retroactively
positsits own foundinggesturesso as to establishitself in the garbof a
new identityand,worse, marginalizewhat foreverescapesit, then the
point is well taken.Presumablythe discourseof hybridityin much of
LatinAmericahasfollowedsucha trajectory,wherehybridityhasbeen
harnessedto the ornateelaborationof classificatoryforms, 128 words
being employed in Spanish to designate the progeny of various
combinationsof mixedraces(pp.176-77).However,hybridityas"raceless
chaos"would, in Young'sown formulation,produce"no stablenew
form but something closer to Bhabha'srestless,uneasy, interstitial
hybridity: a radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, the permanent
revolutionof forms"(p. 25). If that is so, we are left to wonderwhat
makespresentculturaltheory so complicitouswith the forms it has
inherited,which appearsto be the brunt of Young's animusagainst
currentcelebrationsof hybridity!
A gesturetowardsone sourceof the uneasethatYoungfeelstowards
the preeminenceenjoyedby hybriditylies in the claimthat "hybridity
as a culturaldescriptioncarriesan implicitpoliticsof heterosexuality"
(p. 25). Insofaras anxietyabouthybriditywas focusedon the offspring
of mixedraces,homosexuality,thoughat times identifiedas a form of
degeneration,was at one level absent;at the sametime, the imperial
game, as has been pointedout by many, was also an implicitlymale
bondinggameand homo-eroticpractice.This claimis regrettablynot
78 SOCIALSCIENTIST

developedin ColonialDesireandreaderswill haveto turnelsewherefor

illumination,for exampleto JennySharpe'sreadingof Foster'sA Passage
to India in her Allegoriesof Empire(1991),where it is arguedthat the
eruptionof homosexualdesiredisruptsthe heterosexualeconomy of
rapein thenarrative.A similarpointis madeby SaraSuleriin TheRhetoric
ofEnglishIndia,who alsofocuseson the relationshipof Aziz andFielding
in A PassagetoIndia,andone canalsoadvertto the work of DianaFuss,
who, in her readingof Fanon'stheoryof sexualperversionsin "Interior
colonies:FrantzFanon and the Politics of Identification"(Diacritics,
1994,pp. 20-24),illustrateshow Fanon,in his resistanceto colonialism's
castratingrepresentationsof blackmalesexuality,elidesthe abjectification
of femininityand homosexuality.Furthermore,the accountof sexual
desirethatis offeredby Youngis not particularlynuancedor attunedto
the fine detailsof geographyand historicity.Such is not the burden
perhapsof the book,but,by the sametoken,the absenceof a richaccount
of desirelessensits appeal.How wasdesiremanufactured? In whatway
was it productive of class, status and bourgeois self? Must desire always
be sexual, as Young appearsto suggest?What was to be the relationship
of European representations of Oriental harems to European sexual
practicesin the colonies?Were the colonies merely a stagefor unleashing
of represseddesire or did they contribute towards new representations
of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality? How did these developing
discourses work alongside other discourses of the body? If sexuality is
not a given, then what sets of prohibitionsandincitementswere generated
and whose purposes did they serve? How was the development and
enactment of desire modulated along class and gender divisions?
The colonial enterprise fed on a boundless and voracious appetite
for possession of land and wealth. The desiring, narcissisticsubject has
always had the aim of incorporating the other through processes of
externalization and mimesis. As Young reminds us, towards the
conclusion of Colonial Desire, the history of the word 'commerce'
includes the exchange of both merchandise and bodies in sexual
intercourse. Much critical energy has been spent, indeed productively,
in showing how mimetic subversion and the ambivalencethat marked
the colonial demand generated a continual mutation in the discursive
constructs whereby identity and authority were maintained. It remains
a challenge to the history of desire to capitalism,the forms of biopower
to macropower. The theoretical apparatus that would expose the
boundless fantasiesof wealth that capitalismenacts and sponsors remains
 THE CULTURALPOLITICSOF HYBRIDITY 79

to be developed.In whatmannerdoesthe structure,unitaryor divergent,

of desireoperateandsecureits affects?If fantasyalwaysstructuresthe
socialfield, what might enableus to distinguishbetweenfantasiesthat
arebenignandthosethatwe mustcontestin the fold andimperativeof
the ethical?
ColonialDesirescarcelyaspiresto be a socialhistory,but it would
nonethelesshavegainedby a morenuancedandtexturedconsideration
of the social,cultural,andpoliticalmilieu of the set of writersYoung
discusses.ThoughMatthewArnold'splacein theestablishment of English
studiesis now well recognized,and ErnestRenanwas a majorFrench
public intellectual,many of the other figureshe discussesare now
altogetherobscure.How widelywerethesebiologists,evolutionists,and
racialtheoristsread,andwhatbearingdidtheirwritingshaveon colonial
policy? Was the debate between monogenists and polygenists, for
example,of suchwide currencythat it helpedin delineatingthe nature
of 'nativecriminality',or in categorizing certaincastesandtribesin India
as'criminalby birth'?Whatrelationship didthey haveto a readingpublic
and to the organs of public opinion? The3e are not pedantic
considerations,givenYoung'sconvictionthat hybridityis an ideawith
boundlesspolitical and culturalramifications,mostly unsavory. He
concludesratherwith a ringingendorsementfor the "nomadthought"
of GillesDeleuzeandFelix Guattari,as expoundedin their book Anti-
Oedipus,VolumeI of Capitalism andSchizophrenia (1972).At firstglance,
it all seemsratherpromising:as Youngsays,Said,Bhabha,andGayatri
Spivakhave carriedus thus far, but post-colonialstudiesnow seem to
have stagnated.Much of the bestwork was done on India,andthough
onecanlegitimatelyspeakof colonialismasa whole,as(inDavidTrotter's
words)a "textwithoutanauthor",one canjustasreasonablydistinguish
betweenFrenchand Britishcolonialism.In the work of Deleuze and
Guattari,Young seessome light at the end of the tunnel.After all, the
projectof Anti-Oedipusis conceivedas a broadanti-colonialproject;
Oedipusis definedby Deleuze and Guttarias colonizationby other
means:it is the interior colony. Their work "produceda theory of
capitalismto which the operationof colonialismas a form of writing
geographyis central",and they theorized"thematerialgeopoliticsof
colonial history as, at the sametime, an agonisticnarrativeof desire"
(pp. 170, 174). But the explication of their account of rhizomes,
multiplicities,and so on, that Young offers as a
deterritorializations,
criticalparadigmfor "post-identity" is much too cursoryto allow for
80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

any sustainedcritical engagement. For all the emancipatorypossibilities

that Deleuze and Guattaripromise, Young devotes less critical attention
to them than to obscuremonogenistsandpolygenists.One getsthe feeling
that the author felt obliged to stitch together, howsoever hastily, an
ending that would speak to the present. While the impulse is laudable,
the same cannot be said of the execution.

NOTES
1. Bhabha, Homi. TheLocation of Culture. London: Routledge, 1995.
2. Gomez-Pena, Guillermo. Warrior for Gringostroika. St. Paul, Minnesota:
Graywolf Press, 1993.
3. Johnson, Paul. "Colonialism's Back - and Not a Moment Too Soon", New York
Times[18 April 1993], Sec. 6).
4. Minh-ha,Trinh T. Woman,Native, Other. WritingPostcolonialityand Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
5. Rushdie, Salman. TheSatanic Verses.New York: Viking, 1989.
6. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London:
Routledge, 1980.