Hybridity and Ambivalence
Places and Flows in Contemporary Art and
Culture
Nikos Papastergiadis
C
ULTURAL DIFFERENCE continues to be one of the most explosive
geopolitical issues ­ people are dealing with it constantly in everyday
life and artists are in their various ways exploring its complexity, and
yet we have no coherent or satisfactory framework for addressing the moral
and social problems that have been spawned in its name. At the time when
artists were carefully and imaginatively working with the complex symbols
that circulate in everyday life, developing new ways to combine traditional
and contemporary media, and teasing out the survival of cultural ideas in
alien contexts, there was also a growing backlash against the concept of
hybridity by social and cultural theorists. This backlash coincided with a
resurgence in neo-nationalistic ideologies and the fragmentation of the
nascent forms of multiculturalism in Western states. At this particular
historical juncture, with the global phobia over terrorism and the flows of
migrants, there is greater urgency in developing a new model and language
for understanding the processes and effects of cultural difference. This
pressing need has not been addressed in a satisfactory manner. Scholars
and writers have not proposed a new philosophical framework that can assist
people to make sense of their experience and organize their desire. What
has emerged is a proliferation of competing discourses. The concept of
hybridity will be used to help focus our understanding of these diverse
responses to the question of cultural difference.
Hybridity has been a much abused term. It has been both trapped in
the stigmatic associations of biological essentialism and elevated to promote
a form of cultural nomadology. My concern is to intervene in these extreme
positions and present an alternative theoretical model that can address the
ambivalence towards fixity and mobility in contemporary culture. This dual
 Theory, Culture & Society 2005 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 22(4): 39­64
DOI: 10.1177/0263276405054990
perspective on place and movement is also evident in contemporary art
practice. My argument on the significance of hybridity for cultural identity
is informed by observations of diasporic and indigenous artists who are now
active in the dominant institutions of art. Their practice and status question
the dominant assumption on the relationship between traditional authentic-
ity and contemporary culture and test the limits of artistic agency and insti-
tutional structures. From these new cultural practices in contemporary art
there is a possibility to explore more broadly the impact of hybridity on the
social and political landscape of modernity.
Hybridity is usually associated with the effects of multiple cultural
attachments on identity or the process of cultural mixture. Both the effects
and processes of mixture can also lead to a critical form of consciousness.
These three levels of hybridity are interrelated. At the first level, hybridity
refers to the visible manifestation of difference within identity as a conse-
quence of the incorporation of foreign elements. Recognition of the second
level involves a different level of understanding of hybridity. It refers to the
process by which cultural differences are either naturalized or neutralized
within the body of the host culture. The degree to which this process of
cultural mixture or hybridization has been consciously utilized has varied
over time (Nederveen Pieterse, 2001). In the pre-modern period artists
tended to incorporate these influences into a singular model and develop a
unifying perspective. Since the period of early modernism, artists have
thematized the processes of juxtaposition, collage, montage, bricolage and
displacement. More recently, postcolonial theorists have adopted hybridity
on a third level. It has been used as a perspective for representing the new
critical and cultural practices that have emerged in diasporic life. For
instance, Ien Ang has explained how the mixed origins and multiple attach-
ments of a hybrid identity also produce a critical form of consciousness
(2001: 194). This critical modality, which emerges from a specific type of
biographic experience, has been applied more generally in the context of
cultural engagement. It has found particular resonance among theorists and
curators who have grappled with the practice of contemporary artists. In the
past decade there have been concerted efforts to grasp the expression of
both mobility and attachment in art. These tensions are articulated on two
levels, in both the production of the artworks and within the identity of the
artist.
Hybridity in Contemporary Artistic Practice
The question of cultural identity and the politics of representation for non-
Western cultural practices, which were thrust onto the stage of the inter-
national art world in the 1980s, have been reconfigured in recent years. The
representation of cultural difference, which at first found expression in the
margins, has not only occurred at all levels within the institutional struc-
tures of contemporary art, but has gone beyond the neo-primitivist and
managerialist version of multiculturalism. Most recently there have been a
number of exhibitions that have addressed the question of cultural identity
40 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
in order to find a new perspective for evaluating both the legacies of
modernism and the patterns of global cultural exchange. From global art
events like `Documenta XI' in Kassel (2002), to local interventions like
`Border Panic' in Sydney (2002), we witness a common goal of challenging
the national myths of place and belonging, a rejection of the binary between
purity and mixture, and the incorporation of the political right to both
mobility and attachment into a series of cultural and aesthetic propositions.
`ARS 01', curated by Maaretta Jaukkuri, put the thematic of hybridity at the
centre of its curatorial framework.
In the planning of the exhibition special attention has been paid to the possi-
bilities for mutual understanding between cultures that are now opening up
in many different ways, beyond the discussion of exoticism. One main feature
of these processes is hybridism, which arises in encounters between cultures
and alters traditional, culture-bound visual languages. (2001: 21)
In this exhibition the concept of hybridity was used to redefine the presence
of diasporic or indigenous artists. They were no longer defined in terms of
an exotic alternative or as a belated supplement whose incorporation could
serve to both expand and reaffirm the parameters of the mainstream. The
story of indigenous survival and migrant diasporas, Jaukkuri argues, has
become a crucial perspective in the critique of globalization and the re-
writing of the history of modernism. The concept of hybridity was also under-
stood as offering a critical perspective on the cultural practices and
symbolic meanings that were generated by artists. In this exhibition hybrid-
ity served as a counterpoint to the idealist categories that confined creativ-
ity to either closed forms of tradition or universal forms of abstraction.
Unlike essentialist theories that claim that cultural identity is rooted in a
particular landscape and locked into atavistic values, the concept of hybrid-
ity was used to shift attention towards the acknowledgement of the process
of mixture and the effects of mobility on contemporary culture.
The works in the `ARS 01' exhibition exemplify the three levels that
operate in the model of hybridity. By focusing on the works of four artists
in this exhibition it will be possible to track the flow between the process
of mixture, the effects of mobility and the formation of a critical conscious-
ness. These works neither celebrate the cultural differences in their own
identity nor valorize border cultures. They are hybrid in the way they
examine the complex psychic responses to political structures and the
diverse layers that are enfolded within historical symbols. Through
Kentridge's and Durham's work I will examine how the concept of hybrid-
ity can both elucidate the production of knowledge about the other and
frame the experiences of everyday life. Jungen's and Julien's work on hybrid-
ity will be used to consider the ways in which artists both critique the struc-
tures for representing the past and maintain the creative practice of cultural
translation.
William Kentridge's animated film, Shadow Procession (1999), and
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 41
Jimmie Durham's Arche de Triomphe for Personal Use (1996), are explo-
rations of the fantasies of colonial domination. In Kentridge's film, which is
an evocation of the spiritual and physical degradation of oppressed people
in the apartheid period of South Africa, hybridity operates through the
process of transmogrification. The film depicts the phantasmagoric transi-
tion of human to both commodity and mythic beast by constructing moving
images that have been adapted from the indigenous techniques of `cut-out'
shadow theatre. This splicing of traditional and contemporary technologies
represents one level of hybridity. It is in their combination that one not only
sees the persistence of a specific way of interpreting the world but also a
reconfiguration of the medium for representation. The film shows workmen
stooping with a hump growing on their shoulders that begins to resemble
the outline of a city. Women appear whose identity as domestic labourers is
extended until their head suddenly flips open and reveals crude instrumen-
tal functions. Throughout the film a giant cat looms over all the human
figures. These hybrid representations recall the classical modalities of the
mythical imagination. In the place of centaurs and satyrs, the bestiality of
the apartheid system is represented as a titanic battle that results in the
abomination of the human form as it is mixed with object and animal.
Throughout this battle Kentridge is also demonstrating that the nightmares
of apartheid are not only in the mind of the colonizer. The displacement
effect is, according to Ari Sitas, deliberately unresolved: `We do not know
where they are coming from or whether they are fleeing or in any case, where
they are going, but in their movement we know they are determined to get
there' (2001: 113). Kentridge demonstrates through these disturbing shifts
from human being to mythical monster and crude tools that the political
regime had penetrated the imaginary of all its victims. The horror of
apartheid is symbolically registered through the specific construction of
hybrid monsters, but the whole culture is also re-examined through the
unique splicing of the technologies for representation. Hybridity operates
at both levels.
In a more ironic way, Durham makes a similar point. In his sculpture
Durham has constructed a mini-archway. It is made of cheap wood and
found objects. The imperial function of the archway is ridiculed by its
domestication and diminution in value. In an accompanying text Durham
adds this wry instruction:
It can be folded up and carried on a shoulder, set up as a tent. Whenever the
owner feels that a personal victory has been scored he or she can set up the
arch and march through it, perhaps whistling an appropriate tune. (2001: 68)
By reducing the monumental and public display of power into a personal
item Durham is also referencing the countless strategies of inverting and
displacing political authority through indigenous acts of cultural incorpora-
tion and mimicry. Like Kentridge, Durham is showing not only the inter-
play of different cultural forms and symbols, but also revealing how the
42 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
ideals of one social order are reconfigured as they are internalized by differ-
ent people. However, Durham's ironic gesture does reside entirely in an
affirmative gesture. The happy archway can also take on the more sinister
appearance of a metal detector. This innocent monument designed to
celebrate the micro-conquests of everyday life thus recalls the habituated
vigilance that is now employed to defend internal borders. This suggests
that the innovative effect of a hybrid imagination can have a double-edged
meaning. Hybridity does not necessarily imply conciliatory and harmonious
forms of cultural transformation, it can also sharpen the critique of the
disruptive and exclusionary structures of global culture.
Critics who expect indigenous artists to confine their cultural imagin-
ation to the territorial boundaries and ancestral techniques of their home-
lands will be forever disappointed and disapproving of hybridity. Jimmie
Durham, who is from the Cherokee nation, has openly challenged the view
that his own authenticity is confined to traditional boundaries (1993). His
critical and artistic imagination has roamed across various media and
engaged issues that are pertinent to different locales across the world. This
nomadic sensibility is not necessarily a rootless existence. For in Durham's
case it is also a perpetual questioning of the condition of belonging and the
politics of difference. From this perspective, hybridity is not just a metaphor
for cultural negotiation, it is also a tool for examining the inequalities and
exclusion that are established in the guise of cultural purity.
It is more useful to track the way the `power of hegemonic forces is
felt within hybridity which is none the less experienced as having its own
independent cultural power' (Tomlinson, 1999: 146­7). Hence, in order to
engage with the artworks of artists like Brian Jungen and Isaac Julien, it is
necessary to think with different kinds of spatial models and recognize the
possibility of a different kind of dreaming that comes from non-linear
taxonomies. A more useful response to these artworks is not simply to label
them as hybrid objects but to examine the dialectic between cultural frag-
mentation and critical reaffirmation. If hybridity is to refer to a cultural
process rather than a fixed object, then it will require a different kind of
working through of the zones of interaction, exchange and formation (Hall,
1996: 251).
Brian Jungen's sculptures, Prototypes for New Understanding (1999),
provoked a sense of bemusement when I first approached them in the
context of the `ARS 01' exhibition. From a distance they appeared as
conventional North West American ceremonial masks. They were displayed
in typical ethnographic museum cabinets. The presence of stereotypical
anthropological museum pieces in a contemporary gallery context was
perplexing in itself. On closer inspection the sense of seeing something `out
of place' rebounded. The masks were entirely composed of tongues, soles,
laces and straps from Nike shoes. Even the `made in China' labels were
visible.
These fragments of outsourced labour were re-assembled to both
simulate the icons of a `disappearing culture' and question the funereal
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 43
methodologies for representing the authenticity of indigenous cultures.
Jungen's `prototypes' utilized the red, white and black fragments from Nike
shoes in a way that echoed the improvisational skills of indigenous peoples
and the intrinsic hybridity of their cultural icons. Nike may seek to appeal
to our conscience by publicizing their practice of recycling old shoes to
retread the surface of basketball courts, but Jungen disassembled the new
shoes to construct a replica of the old icons and thereby create a disturb-
ing link between colonial melancholy and global corporatism. This link was
also explored in a text that was offered as an introduction to the work. Jeff
Derkson emphasized that Jungen's cross-weaving between the local and the
global was deliberately staged to refute the claim that either polarity has a
monopoly on authenticity and novelty:
In Jungen's configuration, the spatio-temporal management of globalism is
cross-circuited by its own complex connectivity and conjuncture. The global
­ figured as the dominant and inevitable form of the future ­ is brought into
the local, but in a local which is imagined as the past, bypassed by modern-
ization, and part of a non-consumerist `gift' economy. From the other side
First Nation's culture is launched `forward', straight into the homogenizing
global flow of Nike and out of a bound authenticity that limits its spatial
claims by collapsing it into the local and denying its present dialogic and
dialectic cultural and social influences by holding it in the past. This is not
a tactic of resistance seeking the outside of globalism's ideology or a reifica-
tion of the local, rather it is a strong strategy which brings First Nation's
culture into globalism on a symbolic level in order to rearticulate the spatial
relations within the discourse of globalization. (2001: 101)
The deconstructing of symbolic references, the re-assembling and recycling
of material that is made visible in Jungen's sculpture is also a metaphor for
the linguistic and epistemological processes of hybridity. Isaac Julien's films
offer another strong example of the aesthetic and political process of cultural
mixture. In Vagabondia (2000), a double screen installation, he explores the
complex legacies of colonialism by intertwining historical, architectural and
linguistic elements into a complex narrative. The film is shot in the former
home of Sir John Soane in London. The narration is in French Creole. The
architectural space is loaded with the symbols of colonial wealth. Although
the house is now a national museum it is not structured according to the
classical and linear taxonomies of cultural development. In its collection
one witnesses contradictory styles and diverse `trophies'. There is no
conventional order in which they are arranged. According to Julien it
provides a `space in which we perceive the Empire as a precursor for
globalization' (2004: 150).
The visual narrative which is like an `archaeological expedition' in the
culture of the diaspora is counterpointed by the criss-crossing paths of the
black conservator and the vagabond/trickster figure. These two main char-
acters also provide two different kinds of dreaming. There is a man who
enters the rooms and dances to the rhythm of swaying ships and drunken
44 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
nights. On a parallel screen there is a woman who is the conservator. She
folds the corners and locks the cabinets of the museum. Throughout the film
the woman's gaze gently faces the camera while the dancer's eyes avert any
exchange. She has a caressing voice and speaks in Creole. The film places
these two figures inside the museum, creating a further level of dissonance
between the structures of representation and the cultural life of the arte-
facts. The dancer evokes the memory of a black sailor who formerly busked
outside the house, and the woman's voice affirms the survival of a language
that was formed by colonial contact.
The trickster figure is inspired by two sources. Julien claims that he
was referencing the trances that Jean Rouch captured in his film Les Maîtres
Fous (1955). Rouch's surreal documentary captured the bizarre perform-
ances of a mixture of immigrant and local labourers on the outskirts of
Lagos. These men would gather on weekends and play out a frenzied
concatenation of ritual trances that mimicked the colonial induction service
of the governor-general. Rouch saw these events as an inversion of the
colonial order. Julien also found fascinating the 1815 cartoon of `two black
London beggars notorious for their costumes' (2004: 151). One is depicted
wearing a grand hat that resembled a ship. The trickster figure in Vagabon-
dia recalls both the trance-like state of colonial cultural adaptations and the
nautical experience of swaying melancholy. Mixture seems to come together
in a drunken haze and loose kneed swagger. Beside the wild and gangling
gestures of the trickster we are also witness to the restrained and knowingly
deliberate steps of the conservator. The narrator's voice is that of Rosemary
Julien, mother of Isaac Julien. The steady tonalities in her narration are
lifted by a seductive musical score. Paul Gladstone-Reid, the composer of
the soundtrack, fused gentle and ghostly sounds from African and Oriental
sources. He sought `to evoke the ghosts of past energies who have graced
the portals of the decadently grand house of Sir John Soane, although the
presence of the African and Oriental contingent may have served only to
subvert the context' (Julien, 2004: 153).
Between these architectural, gestural and sonic narratives there is a
tender evocation of both the violent appropriation and the implied desires
that exist in the folds of postcolonial history. The untranslated Creole narra-
tion also serves as a reminder of the gaps in the colonial consciousness.
While the colonized had to learn the words and ways of the colonizer, this
learning process was not always reciprocated. In the language of Creole
there are traces, innovations and combinations that testify to the complex
contacts between the colonizer and the colonized. The statues in Sir John
Soane's collection remain silent. Nobody speaks back in the language of the
black conservator.
These small gestures, undoing Nike shoes to make masks, making a
film that is destined only for galleries and museums, are in themselves minor
acts in relation to the machinations of global culture. However, they do pose
powerful questions about the effects of difference within cultural objects,
the process of incorporating foreign symbols or utilizing different media and
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 45
the articulation of a critique against domination. Much of the debate around
these kinds of artistic practices has tended to take an absolute position, with
critics either celebrating the mobility of culture or mourning the loss of
authenticity. The melancholic disposition that clouds the classical anthro-
pological imagination confines its engagement to the salvation of damaged
or weakened cultures. This has not only confined our appreciation of
aesthetic innovation but also obscured the understanding of the different
modes of cultural survival in the context of both colonialism and globaliz-
ation.
These examples of hybrid art could not be classified within the conven-
tional art historical categories. They work within a context that neither corre-
sponds to the boundaries of a national school nor conforms to the strict
principles of formalist movements. In mainstream art criticism there is both
a lag in the conceptual development of the vocabulary for representing the
global context of art, and a reluctance to engage with the political forces
that shape the flows of exchanges. On the one hand, there has been a con-
flation between the avant-garde's universalism and the rhetoric of globaliz-
ation, while on the other hand, there is the new dogma that there is no longer
a need to understand the role of context in the meaning of art. For instance,
Thomas McEvilly observed that the begrudging critical response to Okwui
Enwezor's curatorial propositions in his groundbreaking `Documenta XI' was
symptomatic of a deeper wish that all the unresolved political and intellec-
tual issues that have `dogged' the art world since the 1980s would have just
vanished by now (2002: 82).
While large-scale exhibitions like `Documenta XI' contribute to the
debates on the legacies of colonialism and the polarizing effects of globaliz-
ation, a fundamental question still haunts the context of art: `What is the
place of art in contemporary culture?' Art history has provided a rich body
of texts that answered this question within the parameters of national
identity and formal art movements. However, in the epoch of globalization,
this methodology would limit the sphere of interpretation. The question of
the place and function of art has to be asked in a different way. How can
the question of the context of art be posed in a way that tracks the inter-
action of the local with the global? Do the examples drawn from these hybrid
art practices offer any insight into the broader social changes in everyday
life?
One of the difficulties in defining the sense of place in the context of
art is the strategic use of boundaries in new kinds of artistic practice. The
juxtaposition of different signs and the contrast of alternative perspectives
are not only recurring features in the composition of artworks but also strate-
gies that artists utilize in order to provoke new forms of cross-cultural
communication. In this context, where does the work of art end and the
function of culture begin? A generation ago it was proposed that the work
of art completes itself in the mind of the viewer. Today, this proposition can
be reformulated. The work of art exists in the unfinished task of translation.
In this paradoxical conjunction of the material manifestation of an object
46 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
and the endless process of interpretation, the bridging function of hybrid-
ity becomes more visible. It requires that we can witness the simultaneous
use of all three levels of hybridity. Hybridity, in this sense, goes beyond the
description of the differences within art and between cultures as it engages
the need to make sense of their mutual relation. Hybridity challenges the
binary that separated the containment of meaning within an artwork and the
establishment of a framework for making meaning within culture, by
suggesting that both art and culture are in a reflexive process that is co-
constitutive. If culture can be seen as a translation machine, then art is like
a compass where every act of representation doubles as a tool for naviga-
tion.
Anti-hybridity Theory and the Political Backlash
Hybridity has been used to expand the aesthetic categories of creativity
(Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1996; Mercer, 1994), but also to provoke discussion of
the relationship between the new cultural elites of globalization, and the
commodification of cultural difference in the free market of globalization
(Ahmad, 1992; Araeen, 2000; Friedman, 1999; Žižek, 1997). This opposi-
tion has crippled our understanding of cultural transformation. The
presumption of guilt or innocence has blocked a closer scrutiny of the levels
of responsibility between theory and politics, obscured the more specific
links between novelty and the logic of capital, as it conflates the symptoms
of increasingly polarized societies with the philosophical triumph of
perspectivalism over universalism. It is now necessary to determine whether
hybridity can elaborate the dialectics of cultural transformation or cloak the
subordinate position in repressive binaries that ultimately allow purity to
triumph. Between the utopian promises of a new cultural harmony and the
apocalyptic declaration of an unending colonization of the imagination,
there needs to be a third position from which it is possible to grasp both the
uneven formations of identity and the creativity in contemporary society.
The practice of contemporary artists like Jimmie Durham demon-
strates that the creativity of hybridity cannot be reduced to the same level
of the `advertising of MTV', or dismissed as a hollow illustration of an
academic abstraction (Friedman, 1999: 239). Kentridge and Jungen's
practice also confronts the methods by which traditional media for cultural
representation are spliced together with new forms. Along with Julien's
representation of the ambivalent expressions of desire in the architectural
legacies of colonialism we can see that there is a need to develop a critical
discourse that can address such complex forms of cultural exchange.
It is critical to note that consciousness of hybridity is not confined to
artists who operate within the global art circuit. At one level, these artists
are making visible strategies that already exist in everyday life. This demon-
strates that while traditional and peripheral cultures are often damaged by
the force of globalization, or held in a secondary position due to the belat-
edness of information flows, this does not extinguish the operation of creativ-
ity and innovation. The metropolitan centres of the West have for too long
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 47
lived with the illusion that progress is driven by forces that are concentrated
within their own boundaries. There is a profound arrogance in this self-
belief and in the accompanying presumption that members of indigenous
societies, whose knowledge systems have been violently dismantled by
colonialism, are now lacking the capacity to confront the challenges of
contemporary life.
Nestor García Canclini rejects the validity of both the concentric and
linear models of cultural development that privilege the metropolitan
centres of the West. In his work on the border culture of Tijuana and San
Diego, he has observed that street vendors and fine artists alike tend to draw
from a complex mixture of cultural iconography and utilize a diverse range
of visual technologies in order to articulate their own underlying condition
of hybridity (Canclini, 1995). Some of the most innovative examples of
cultural mixture are occurring on the streets of Third World cities. This
suggests that cross-cultural dialogue does not require that all speakers have
equivalent political and economic resources. Rather than expecting that the
victims of colonialism must reclaim their `original' history and glue back
together their authentic culture before they can be admitted into the present,
it might be valuable to recognize the horizontal forms of exchange that are
already occurring. As Gayatri Spivak suggests, an alternative modality of
coexistence and mutual understanding may occur if the dominant partner
is prepared to cede a degree of openness to learning from the other and
dispenses with the vertical presumptions of cultural evolution that would
condemn pre-capitalist systems to an unending game of `catch-up'. The
challenge is not whether the formerly colonized can make rapid advances
forward, but whether the dominant can address the ethical register of other
cultural systems (2003: 33).
This process of decolonizing the imagination and developing more
inclusive modalities for relating different cultural systems would require a
more vigorous understanding of hybridity. It is now beyond dispute that the
concept of hybridity has broken out of its agricultural etymology and
surpassed its historical association with the pseudo-science of eugenicism.
While the agricultural ideas of maximizing yield, the biological anxieties of
impotence and the figuration of the hybrid as monstrous have never dis-
appeared from the popular imaginary, there is now a general recognition
within the theoretical debates on cultural identity that all identities and
cultures are formed through negotiation with difference. The debate should
therefore move from a dispute over whether purity has priority over hybrid-
ity to an examination as to whether hybridity can either provide a critical
perspective on aesthetic, moral and political questions, or simply describe
the general condition of mixture in cultural identity. The criticality or banality
of these terms has been hotly contested because they are at the centre of
competing strategies for defining the link between culture and politics.
The contest over the conceptual and political frame of hybridity is
underscored by an unresolved anxiety over authenticity. The contemporary
theoretical debates have not resolved whether authenticity is bound to the
48 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
`roots' of traditional forms of attachment, intimacy and proximity, or whether
the multiple `routes' of modernity are the only pathways to freedom, criti-
cality and innovation. Does authenticity demand stillness? Does innovation
require restlessness? To what degree do the physicality of place and the
experience of the journey play a critical role in the achievement of these
states? Is it possible to have authentic attachments to a place and develop
a form of cultural identity that is influenced by movement? Is a critical and
innovative perspective available from the confines of the home? These ques-
tions have been at the centre of the critical evaluation of the agency that is
attributed to artists and theorists who define their subjectivity and practice
as hybrid.
While essentialist positions on culture and identity seem to have been
discredited theoretically, there is still no consensus on the broader impli-
cations of cultural mixture. Among many scholars there is still a profound
reluctance to link hybridity to anything other than a banal rejoinder to the
essentialist position on identity formation. The anthropologist Jonathon
Friedman (1999: 232) has disputed both the mobility of cultures and the
capacity of diasporic agents to create hybrid cultures. The literary theorist
Ania Loomba has challenged the celebration of hybrid subjectivity in post-
colonial theory for being `curiously universal and homogenous' (1998: 178).
The artist and critic Rasheed Araeen has also argued that an artist's critical
practice is unrelated to their experience of displacement (2000: 5). It is not
my purpose to respond to all these criticisms. However, by focusing on
Friedman's argument there is an opportunity not only to unpack the link
between hybridity and corporate globalism but also to examine the
consequences of the deadlock over the processes and effects of cultural
difference.
The Limits of Culture
To understand the resistance to hybridity requires a closer look at the
classical conception of culture. According to this model, culture was the
means by which a society defined criteria for coordinating symbolic prac-
tices that affirmed a coherent identity and differentiated its way of life from
that of others. The ideas and values that were perceived as unique to a
specific community were also mapped within territorial boundaries.
Symbolic practices were supposedly confined to the physical and territorial
boundaries of a given place. The classical model of culture therefore
stressed two interrelated features: that identity was premised on differenti-
ation from others and the capacity to map out its mindset onto a specific
place.
Jonathon Friedman is an anthropologist who adopts this classical
conception of culture. He has argued that the location of culture only occurs
within traditional or national boundaries. This immediately poses the issues
of mobility and mixture as a problem. For if culture can only find susten-
ance when it is rooted in a specific place, then what is the fate of those
cultures that must coexist in a common space and what is the cultural
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 49
identity of people who are on the move? According to Friedman, when an
individual is disconnected from place this has the dire consequence of him
or her being severed from the whole set of identifications. Cultures that have
been disembedded from a specific sense of place are similarly unmoored.
This negative assessment of the impact of mixture and mobility is consist-
ent with the assumptions of the classical model of culture. If culture and
cultural identity are defined by an exquisite and inextricable relationship
between place and practice, then to drift beyond one's place is to risk
cultural exclusion and the attempt to transfer elements of one culture to
another place is doomed.
The application of this classical conception of culture has led to a
number of negative conclusions on hybridity. Friedman has interpreted
hybrid cultures and identities not only as lacking authenticity, but also sees
them as the exemplars of the new culture of global corporatism and rootless
cosmopolitan subjectivity. Hybridity is therefore not only represented as
lacking in culture but also as part of a force that is attacking traditional and
national cultures. In a final sweeping claim Friedman states that the theor-
etical representation of hybridity as a form of `cultural globalization is the
correlative to the argument for economic globalization' (1999: 234).
Friedman plays hard and fast in the game of politicizing academic debates.
Before one accepts this linkage, it would still be necessary to establish
evidence of how work conducted in one sphere serves the interests, repro-
duces the worldview and promotes the same values of the other. There is an
even deeper question that is being avoided by focusing on the complicity
of hybridity: what is the residual force of the claims for cultural purity in
contemporary politics?
There is a fundamental contradiction in the way scholars like
Friedman have adopted the classical model of culture for the purpose of
anthropological investigation and in defence of national cultural formations.
First of all there is a reliance on cultural values of distinction and taste that
presuppose a hierarchical differentiation between high culture as the
embodiment of cultivation and reason, and low culture as a sort of compost
bin for all other forms of populist activities. This vertical hierarchy is
anathema for anthropologists because it is also the basis by which Western
culture was privileged over and above all other cultures. Anthropologists
like Friedman have sought to challenge such ethnocentric assumptions, but
in his disdain towards the populist forms of hybridity he has also repro-
duced some of the elitist values that are embedded in classical culture.
Even when anthropologists have adopted a horizontal model of culture
and levelled all the criteria for ranking cultural values, this has left the
problem of cross-cultural judgement untouched. How do we judge between
competing claims of cultural authority when both forms seek to exist in the
same place? The answers offered by relativism would be impotent.
Friedman's response is equally disabling because it questions the very
authority of a minority culture to assume the right to speak as a cultural
entity. Friedman's position on diasporic and hybrid culture returns us to the
50 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
problem of the degree to which a cultural formation needs to be embedded
in a specific place and maintain continuous practices in order to develop a
coherent and distinctive worldview. Fragments and mutations that have split
from the original are, in his view, inadequate forms to provide the basis for
a new cultural identity. This test, if applied universally, would in fact
disqualify most national claims to cultural autonomy and coherence. Who
today can claim to represent a whole and unique cultural identity? While
Friedman claims that immigrant societies in places like the United States
and in Europe are becoming less multicultural because immigrant com-
munities are losing their distinctive grasp on linguistic and social practices,
this does not lead us to the conclusion that these societies are becoming
more homogeneous and assimilated. Loss of certain boundaries has not
meant the disappearance of cultural differences, but rather the appearance
of new forms of mixture and more complex patterns of differentiation. The
challenge is to distinguish between compliant and critical hybridity.
Friedman's opposition between cultural discourses that supposedly
promote the dynamics of the global market and the traditional forms of
culture can have the unintended effect of giving succour to nostalgic
fantasies of communitarianism and fuelling fundamentalist ideologies. By
stressing that difference presupposes inequality and defining the dynamics
of mixture according to the logic of appropriation it provides ballast for the
extremist fears that hybridity inevitably dilutes the strength and contami-
nates the purity of local culture. This argument leaves little room for
manoeuvre in the cultural responses to globalization. The defensive reaction
of border protection and cultural purity in communitarian and fundamen-
talist ideologies thus converges with Friedman's assault on the promiscuity
and vacuity of hybridity. Friedman's linkage of hybridity with globalization
has blinded him to the other causes of violence and oppression in the
modern world. Traditional cultural values are under assault not just from
the globalizing force of economic liberalism but also the associated reactions
of neo-nationalism and cultural fundamentalism. While it is important to
critique the commodification of cultural difference, we should not forget that
some of the greatest disasters of the 20th century were orchestrated in the
name of nation, ethnicity and religion. As Tourraine has noted, we should
be mindful of the fact that the logic of capital and the myth of the nation
share the same dream of cultural unity (2000: 166).
While I believe that equating the critical role of difference in hybrid-
ity with the competitive function of difference in capitalism is a gross over-
simplification, it is necessary to examine the ways that hybridity can be
promoted as a specific kind of cultural formation, and consider whether this
can be distinguished from national and traditional cultural spaces. It is not
enough to simply dismiss hybridity as the new cultural lap-dog of globaliz-
ation without establishing a correspondence of interests between the
cultural formation of hybridity and the new cultural institutions of globaliz-
ation. In Friedman's case hybridity is not seen as being part of a new form
of cultural practice and critical consciousness, but as an extension of an
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 51
earlier trajectory of cultural coercion and domination. However, even the
historical alignment between hybridity and power is contradictory. Hybrid-
ity is represented, on the one hand, as an extension of the violent and
exploitative face of dominant culture. On the other hand, he rejects it as the
aberrant manifestation that has been appropriated by the new global elites.
Such loose dismissals and exaggerated elevations of hybrid subjectivities
and hybrid critical practices would offer little purchase on contemporary
culture. The difference between Friedman's argument and Kentridge's and
Durham's artistic practice, is that the former condemns hybridity for being
a cultural abomination, while the latter utilize hybridity for reworking the
contradictory trajectories within culture.
The examples of hybrid practices by contemporary artists and the
changes within the institutions of art point to the limitation within the
classical models of culture. In this model all external agents must divest
their differences before they can enter. Hence, the inclusion of artists and
curators from non-Western backgrounds and the incorporation of the
concept of hybridity within the dominant institutions of contemporary art is
reduced to another sign of appropriation. This model allows no space for the
negotiation of cultural difference. It repeats the oppositional mentality of
rival forces that are set upon either maintaining the status quo or staging a
violent revolution. The critical task is not confined to this locked binarism.
There is also a third position that can measure the form and trajectories of
changes that occur when cultural difference is articulated within the
dominant institutions. This challenge is far more demanding than simply
dismissing the saliency of cultural difference when it is articulated through
the concept of hybridity. For instance, why is Rasheed Araeen so strident
in his effort to neutralize any difference offered by a new generation of artists
and curators? This dismissal of the difference that hybridity can make
reflects a deeper insecurity over the ideological measures for registering
political agency that can occur within the mainstream institutions of art
(Papastergiadis, 2003). To doubt the mobility of culture, and discard experi-
ence from criticality, is to reinstate the concept of authenticity in a classical
view of cultural embeddedness and Western idealism. This effectively
admits that cultural mixture may be the consequence of mobility but not
part of the formative dynamic of contemporary culture. When Friedman
condemns hybridity for masking economic oppression and Araeen dismisses
it for failing to overhaul institutional structures, neither offers any new
insight into how cultural mixture is related to social change. The totalizing
methods of their arguments risk introducing economic determinism through
the back door of cultural idealism. Cultural mixture is reduced to being
merely the result of the external force of economic domination and politi-
cal will. The driving force of cultural mixture is therefore left outside of the
field of social change. However, the critical task that confronts cultural
theorists is not to expose hybridity as a mask that hides the oppressive forces
of globalization but to track the dynamism between the process and effects
of cultural mixture.
52 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
Hybridity presents itself as a problem for both the classical and the
relativist models of culture. The classical model sought to develop a precise
definition of culture by stressing the way elements were organized in a
coherent and unified manner. The relativist model is more flexible and
hands over the task of cultural definition to every organization irrespective
of its specific structure and content. Critics have rejected the classical
model because its pursuit of precision was achieved at the expense of a wide
spectrum of cultural forms. However, the relativist model is also flawed
because in its expression of tolerance there is no framework for discrimi-
nation. This is a long-standing conundrum ­ how to offer judgement when
there are competing cultural claims. Is there a way of achieving precision
without the violence of exclusion, and do open forms of inclusion imply the
abrogation of a fixed framework of judgement?
Theorists who have upheld the classical conception stress the absolute
role of place. They rightly reject the utopian dimensions of cultural hybrid-
ity because of the exaggerated claims of the benefits of mobility and the
autonomy of the diasporic agent. However, I argue that the premise of the
absolute centrality of place in contemporary culture has blurred the under-
standing of complex spatial attachments that are created by new forms of
communication and deprecated the creative force that flows from the
ambivalent attachments of diasporic agents. This is not to presume that
culture can be transferred ­ like commodities or abstract concepts ­ from
one place to another, but to question its dependence on an absolute and
fixed sense of place. In other words, I would like to go beyond the binaries
that confine culture to either a `way of seeing the world', that is as a capacity
that can be internalized and transported by an agent, or a practice that only
exists as it is performed in a specific time and place. Hybridity could offer
a broader modality that exceeds the limitations of the materialist and
perspectival views on cultural transformation.
According to the classical conception of culture, to leave home is not
only to lose the quotidian contacts with family and friends, but also holds
the threat of being severed from the cosmological forces that link an agent
to ancestral memories and binds them to a place in the centre of the world.
This perspective stresses the dangers of mobility and it is no coincidence
that the cultural discourses of modernism have been founded on this primal
narrative of exile and alienation. The majority of the canonical texts of
modernity have been told through the eyes of migrants and exiles. The frag-
mentation of earlier cultural codes and their distinctive perspective on the
experience of novelty has shaped the culture of modernity. However, the
impact of displacement is always double. It cuts both ways, creating an
absence in the homeland and a presence in the place of arrival. The ambiv-
alence of this rupture is often neutralized by either stressing the benefits of
mobility or minimizing the risk of losing authenticity. We now need a
discourse that can address this state of cultural ambivalence and help
people find a new sense of place in the world and thereby short-circuit the
appeal of both the neo-nationalists and corporate globalism.
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 53
The backlash against the concept of hybridity seems to be provoked
by the corporatist rhetoric of rootless mobility and the idealist illusions of
unbounded creativity. However, it has also failed to address the complex
links and multiple journeys that are a common feature of contemporary life.
This shortcoming is particularly evident in the limited examination of the
combined, but not necessarily parallel forces, of cultural commodification
and the new technologies of communication. If the mediated practices of
communication and interaction were fundamental features of culture in
contemporary society, then we would need to question the absolute function
of place and the primacy of face-to-face interaction. Are all these contem-
porary modes of interaction and communication inauthentic? Is culture still
confined to a specific territory? Or conversely, can one be close to a
community but physically distant from it?
Towards a Hybrid Universalism
Looking at it with hybrid eyes, contemporary culture would resemble a
`moving collage'. Unlike the classical model, which presumes that a cultural
agent can only speak from their own terra firma, or an idealist position that
restricts cross-cultural dialogue to that wonderful moment in the future when
all cultures have advanced to the same level, a critical hybridity would be
open to the range of voices that arise from the cultural fragments of the
present. In the classical model, culture was defined as a totalizing frame-
work that enabled subjects both to make sense of their place in the world
and to grasp the uniqueness of the place in which culture was embedded.
I am suspicious of the view that confines culture to a singular and fixed
place. There is no doubt that the ideology of the nation-state was founded
on such a centralizing construction, but, as Hobsbawm and others have
argued, these forms of tradition and attachment were not atavistic
expressions of connection to place, but `inventions' that were designed to
serve specific socio-political functions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). This
insight does not justify the relativist conclusion that traditional culture had
no `deep' forms of attachment to place and that all cultural forms are inter-
changeable. It does, however, compel deeper awareness of the dialectic
between continuity and mixture. The recent acceleration of cross-cultural
flows and processes of cultural mixture has produced new forms of identity.
The intensification and diversification of the flows in cultural traffic have
put into question many of the earlier models for understanding the bound-
aries of culture and the configurations of identity. It is the failure to recog-
nize this that makes `the classical model of culture not only descriptively
unserviceable, but also normatively dangerous and untenable' (Welsch,
1999: 195).
The classical geopolitical frameworks are buckling under the
combined pressure of internal fragmentation and external crossings. New
anxieties are being forged by the competing desires to divide within or
extend across traditional boundaries. In the past, people made sense of their
place in the world by defining themselves as being central to a specific
54 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
locale. With the advent of nationalism in the late 19th century this frame-
work was radically extended and reconfigured within new social structures
and territorial boundaries. The acceleration and diversification of migration
patterns in the late 20th century challenged many of the nationalist ideals.
As migrants entered the metropolitan spaces they became agents of cultural
and social changes that would reverberate along many different dimensions.
Their movement was an indication that borders were not fixed and exclus-
ive. By maintaining aspects of their original culture, or through the process
of adapting to the dominant culture, they presented a break with the earlier
order and produced new cultural forms. While living in a foreign place
disrupted the foundations of cultural authority, it also provoked a re-
thinking as to the inherent superiority of different value systems, and of
potential forms for their coexistence. Migration irretrievably altered the idea
of home and nation. It both intensified and weakened bonds, but, after the
experience of displacement and its attendant demands of cross-cultural
comparison and evaluation, or through the vertiginous immersion in the flux
of modernity, the image of home was fundamentally altered.
The contradictory cultural forces of globalization have thus both
contracted and expanded the frameworks with which people can make sense
of their place in the world. Traditional notions of the local often fail to
capture the specific details of community life and the national structures
are not flexible enough to accommodate the breadth and diversity of cultural
affiliations. It is not only that the boundaries of attachments have progres-
sively expanded, but also that the nodal points of connections are increas-
ingly complex and diverse. Despite the ubiquity of this experience the
geopolitical structures that govern everyday life are still trapped within
national frameworks. Artists and scholars have in recent times recognized
that cultural identities are at the cross-roads of local and global forces. Their
efforts at trying to both rework the available categories and imagine new
structures represent a deeper shift in the need to make sense of our place
in the world. Examples of hybrid artistic practice and the theoretical
disputes over the consequences of hybridity are not just another hollow
academic exercise but part of the struggle of making meaning.
A recent attempt at developing a framework for addressing the cultural
contradictions of globalization was the symposium on `creolite' staged by
`Documenta XI' on the Caribbean Island of St Lucia. Okwui Enwezor and
his curatorial team invited some of the leading writers, scholars and artists
to discuss the need for a new conceptual vocabulary that could address both
the specific historical formations and the global forces that are shaping
cultural identity. The aim of the symposium was not purely a defensive
reaction against the structures of neo-nationalism and the homogenizing
pressures of globalization, but also an affirmative gesture that sought to
create a dialogue between intellectual and aesthetic models which might
lead to a new interpretive perspective and construct a new space for the
production of social and historical knowledge. This was an ambitious project
and it began with the bold assumption that terms like `hybridity' and
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 55
`métissage' were no longer `adequate as vectors through which to understand
and articulate the critical issues of difference and asymmetry of contempor-
ary culture today' (Enwezor et al., 2004: 13). The symposium sought to
examine whether the term `creolite', drawn from three Martinican intellec-
tuals Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, could be
put forward as a concept that could not only describe the consequences of
cultural transformation but also provide a new relational perspective, which
the Martinicans described as an `ethics of vigilance, a sort of mental
envelope in the middle of which our world will be built in full conscious-
ness of the outer world' (Enwezor et al., 2004: 13).
Despite its worthy goals the symposium on creolite did not end with
a new consensus over the critical vocabulary or the outline of an all-
encompassing framework for representing the broad processes of transcultur-
alism. In one of the most lucid and comprehensive responses Stuart Hall
examined the terms `creolite', `diaspora' and `hybridity'. He expressed caution
against over-extending concepts of creolization and to a lesser extent he was
cautious over the universal applicability of diaspora, because they both refer
to specific historical circumstances in which communities were formed (2004:
193). Hall's distinction between these terms hangs on the difference between
the excessive conditions of violence and massive disparities of power that
shaped creolization, and the degree of choice that framed both the historical
consciousness and the conditions of reception in the diaspora. In Hall's
typology, hybridity has the most general application because it is neither
bound to the `specific historical circumstances' of colonialism nor linked to
the migration patterns of a particular community. Of the many theoretical defi-
nitions of hybridity, Hall acknowledges that he was influenced by the essays
written by Homi Bhabha in the 1980s (see Bhabha, 1994).
Bhabha's main concern was to find a way for representing the impact
of a minority within a dominant culture. He was attempting to overcome the
assumption that a minority position was entirely damaged by its displace-
ment or inevitably consumed within the new structures. Bhabha was not the
first to use the concept of hybridity to refer to the dynamics of cultural trans-
formation. In the earlier theories of semiotics and culture developed by
Bakhtin and Lotman, the concept of hybridity was also developed to repre-
sent the transformative processes of language, culture and knowledge
(Papastergiadis, 2000). They found evidence of this dynamic at all levels of
cultural production and intellectual engagement. They concluded that inno-
vation and improvisation intensify along the border zones of cultural contact.
More recently, Thomas McEvilly has argued that the commonality in the
methodology of the modernist avant-garde and thought in ancient Greek and
Egyptian art (1991), and what Michel Serres (1982) calls the problem-
solving capacity of scientific knowledge can be defined as hybridity.
These definitions of hybridity project it beyond the diasporic and
colonial context and utilize it at the most general level of creative and scien-
tific practice. Hybridity is now also used as a methodological concept. The
crucial feature in this method is the re-direction of an object's trajectory
56 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
into a `third space', or the reconfiguration of previous arrangements by the
incorporation of a `third figure'. These switches and shifts always involve
movement and re-alignment. By taking matter out of one place and putting
it in another, there is both the disruption and reordering of the conventional
codes and structures. Displacement can lead to either confusion or insight.
Hybridity not only refers to the ambivalent consequences of mixture but also
the shift in the mode of consciousness. By mixing things that were previ-
ously kept apart there is both a stimulus for the emergence of something
new, and also a shift in position that can offer a perspective for seeing
newness as it emerges.
The critical task that is facing us now is to build new cultural and
political frameworks that connect the hybridity in a local identity to a trans-
national discourse on universal social justice. We need to reaffirm the politi-
cal frameworks that promote diversity over uniformity, inclusivity over
exclusivity, merit over privilege, dialogue over dogma. However, the very
fact that these principles now sound banal and `exhausted' also demands
investigation. Why do these worthy goals sound commonplace, while
evidence of their reality is still so hard to see? Why do these valuable prin-
ciples seem tired even before they have been put to work? Reflecting on the
emergence of black art in Britain during the 1980s, Kobena Mercer warned
against the `burden of representation' that faced artists who were not only
asked to stand in the place of `their' culture but also speak for an essential-
ist and fixed notion of culture (1990: 63). After a decade of artists jostling
for space within the dominant institutions and the emergence of a vibrant
debate on diasporic cultural formations Mercer was to shift his warning away
from the pitfalls of an essentialist heritage and towards the allure of the
market that appropriates cultural difference under the sign of cultural
novelty. The position of black artists as symbols of cultural diversity and
their success within the market had changed dramatically in a short space
of time but, as Mercer predicted, at the cost of historical and cultural
consciousness:
The pendulum swung to the opposite extreme, such that difference was
unmentionable. What arose was a trade-off whereby the `excess visibility'
associated with both multicultural exhibitionism, and its sublation into
corporate internationalism, was offset by a mute or evasive positioning on the
part of the younger artists who no longer felt `responsible' for a blackness
which was itself increasingly hyper-visible in the global market of multi-
cultural commodity fetishism. (1999: 57)
What got lost between the swing between fixed essences and visibility? It
appears that there was neither structural transformation nor discursive shift
to accommodate the critical hybridity of black artists in Britain. According
to Mercer the political implications of incorporating black artists into the
dominant British art institutions were achieved by a form of silencing and
neutralizing hybridity.
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 57
The discourse on hybridity in the art world has tended both to exag-
gerate the transgressive power of creative acts and elevate the autonomy of
the artist. By stressing the individualism of the artist there was a conven-
ient celebration of mobility and diversity. Every new artist from whatever
corner of the world was used as evidence of the greater flows in cultural
exchange and the inclusivity of the art world. This image of diversity
created, in Stuart Hall's words, a very ambivalent kind of globalization.
There is now no shortage of artists like Kentridge and Durham, Julien and
Junger, who actively participate in the context of the dominant art insti-
tutions. Does their presence illustrate the accomplishment of a new global
culture that pulls images, ideas and people out of one context, cuts out the
critical edges and then absorbs the remaining information to produce a new
standardized version of a cultural delicatessen? In Brazil they have a
metaphor for this kind of cultural domination: `The lion is comprised of
ingested sheep' (Santiago, 2001: 36) ­ does their presence present a starting
point for a re-thinking of not only the origins of a specific cultural identity
but also the shape of a new common humanity? In cultural terms, can the
sheep within the belly of the lion challenge our notion of the beast?
Hybrid art practice is, in my view, a crucial starting point for the
urgent task of rebuilding a new kind of universalism. This would involve a
closer examination of the levels of agency and the structures in which this
practice operates. In the past, artists and scholars sought to enlighten the
minds of the public and reshape the structures of society. In this way they
served as legislators. Today, as Bauman (1987) noted, the position has
shifted to the role of interpreter. Artists and scholars do not just analyse,
define and propose, they must also develop collaborative strategies through
which knowledge is produced and disseminated in a collective manner.
Artists increasingly understand their agency in terms of this interpretive
and collaborative modality. However, while the legislative intellectual as a
model for cultural agency is in crisis, at an institutional level there is the
persisting expectation that artists can represent the nation, and, in excep-
tional cases, even transcend all specific cultural constraints. The context in
which artists and scholars seek to actualize their ideas is caught between
the residual structures of the state and the barely emergent formations of a
new cultural globalism.
The critical challenge of hybridity is not an unending celebration and
display of difference but rather a critique of the conditions that constrain
the complexities and exclude the totality of cultural exchange. While the
context of cultural exchange appears to have been expanded and recon-
figured, we should not be duped by the hype that now `everything comes'
and `everything goes' in the new marketplace of globalization. There are
restrictions. Filters and barriers operate in more ways than ever. Bauman's
dismissal of multiculturalism `as intellectual gloss on the human condition
shaped under the twin impacts of power-through-disengagement and regu-
lation-through-excess' (2001: 133) gives too much credence to the rhetoric
of rupture and only pays lip service to the complex flows in contemporary
58 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
life. Not everything is picked up from everywhere, and the range of
commodities and values that circulates within the dominant structures does
not represent the totality of the global cultural condition. However, Bauman
is correct to observe that there is a crisis in the frameworks that can guide
judgement when different cultural values collide. Tolerance of cultural
difference is at best a crude balance when there is no conflict or competi-
tion but, as he suggests, this does not equip a person to act in a time of
crisis. Tolerance of difference can also lead to an indifference to the politi-
cal inequalities and social injustices that push cultures further and further
apart. Indifference in the face of opposing or even diverging claims can only
fuel grievance and compound hostility. To address this issue of reconcili-
ation or resolution there needs to be a political process that can reflect the
equal rights of different cultural perspectives and the shared obligation to
develop a dialogue within which an ethical understanding of common needs
is developed.
In the antagonistic framework of institutional politics, hybridity is
usually confined to a negative position. Hybridity demands a re-evaluation
of the modes of cultural and political affiliation. It highlights the oppor-
tunities and risks of multiple attachments. If the ambiguities and contradic-
tions of hybridity are immediately categorized as problems that demand
instant clarification and definitive resolution, then this will diminish the
space for understanding. Hybridity has been too easily neutralized by politi-
cal discourses that seek either to exaggerate its creative potential or to
simplify its conceptual range. When hybridity exposes us to uncertainty,
this does not necessarily reveal new forms of duplicity or demonstrate a lack
of commitment to core principles.
To acknowledge the constitutive force of hybridity would demand that
scholars confront the unconscious and ambivalent forces that artists invari-
ably face when they delve deeper into their creative practice. At this level,
we would have to consider the uncomfortable suspension of moral markers
in order to witness the compelling forces that drive some elements of attrac-
tion and repulsion in the cultural field. Within this zone, we can see that
mixtures occur that defy the conventional codes of normative behaviour and
cultural propriety. Hybridity cannot therefore be fully explained if the model
of interpretation does not allow for both transgressive and relational modes
of practice. When driven by this husky desire, hybridity can exceed the
boundaries of moral codes and political processes, but this does not mean
that it ultimately has no ethical value or social responsibility. This associ-
ational and disruptive modality that defies convention will invariably swerve
back to form a new worldview.
The hegemonic social structures that have invested in the states of
coherence, unity and exclusivity are inevitably committed to eliminating,
silencing and disavowing the unpredictable effects of hybridity. However, a
social system that effectively excludes the hybrid also tends towards atrophy
and entropy. Perhaps because the origin of the concept of hybridity is
drenched in the shame-soaked ideology of miscegenation and cut through
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 59
with stigmatic associations to eugenicist theories, the attempts to popular-
ize the concept have tended to overcompensate for this dubious past by
stressing its benefits and virtues. Theorists have been at pains to stress the
cultural benefits of being an anti-essentialist ­ the expansive aesthetic of a
kaleidoscopic consciousness, the social security that can be guaranteed by
pluralism, the historical surplus that lurks within hybrid genealogies, the
ethical propensities that are found in inclusive and non-hierarchical
relations with the other ­ and even extolled the unique ingenuity of hybrid
entrepreneurs. The ambivalence of hybridity has almost been crushed by
this strenuous effort to promote its positive value. But the real fear should
not be the risk of reverting to an earlier monstrous type but the loss of
complexity. Hybridity is not a new form of virtue and purity. Hybrids are
not saints. If hybrids are shorn of their ambivalence then this will not only
create a false sense of harmony but also preserve the original fear of differ-
ence. The identity of hybrids is structured by ambivalence. We should not
fear reverting to a situation of `warring tribes', just as it is untenable to hope
that it is possible for us to transcend all forms of violence.
The vivacious energy of hybridity leads it towards risky encounters.
The identity and trajectory of hybridity are driven by the simultaneous desire
for both separation and connection. In the spirit of the moving collage, it
gathers form through a mixture of theft and gift, creation and destruction.
The place of hybridity should not be justified in relation to the competitive
drive towards maximizing production and the progressivist ideologies of
Western modernization, but rather in its capacity to invent a modality for
living with difference. Unlike those who scornfully dismiss hybridity and
mournfully predict the end of multiculturalism, I believe that the lessons of
hybrid and multicultural experiences have barely begun to be learnt.
Hybridity thinking compels us to address the complicities and inter-
dependencies in cultural exchange and identity. The mode of thinking that
I am proposing does not proceed by making clear-cut and absolute distinc-
tions. It acknowledges that hybridity is dependent on the very things it
strives to overcome. Boundaries are a necessary part of the modern world.
Any form of identity and hybridity would be meaningless without them. The
critical task is not to strive for a utopian space beyond boundaries, but to
re-engage the sphere of possibilities that are permitted or excluded by
boundaries. Hybridity thinking has been criticized for focusing too heavily
on cultural interventions by diasporic agents and thereby failing to attend
to the political inequalities of globalization (Brah and Coombs, 2000;
Hutnyk, forthcoming; Parry, 1987; Shohat and Stam, 1994; Young, 1995).
Yet these criticisms have not only conflated the critical modality with the
commodification of hybrid objects and the co-option of depoliticized hybrid
agents, but in themselves they also failed to address the very issue of how
power and resistance operate throughout the contemporary cultural
networks. This criticism presumes that hybridity focuses too much attention
on the cultural and thereby provides an alibi for ignoring the links to
economic and political inequalities.
60 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)
I argue that the problem is not that the cultural discourse on hybrid-
ity provides a screen for injustice, but rather that the classical concept of
culture inadvertently provides an alibi for neo-fundamentalism and avoids
the more complex task of understanding the dynamic of difference in
contemporary society. There are genuine problems that come with the bound-
less, incomplete and contradictory meanings of hybridity. However, the fact
that we are not all hybrids in the same way does not justify either a new
hierarchy of hybridity or the negative claim that the saliency of hybridity is
not significant in any way. Without careful attention to the specific ways in
which hybridity is constituted, there is the possibility that the hegemonic
political and economic forces can exploit the ambiguities of a muted version
of hybridity to produce what Canclini calls a `tranquillizing hybridization'
(1995: 48). The critical path in cultural theory needs to steer clear of the
new moralistic competition for supreme victimhood, and the resurrection of
an outdated form of economic determinism. Finding such a critical path is
more difficult than unleashing a backlash against hybridity.
A critical understanding of hybridity is also dependent on a more
nuanced construction of the relationship between the process of ambiv-
alence and the forms of resistance in contemporary culture. In the broader
view of cultural transformation, resistance is not a transitional phase, and
there is no final destination called emancipation. There are degrees of
dependency and levels of autonomy. Nothing exists in an absolute state. The
concept of the `third space' that is linked to hybridity facilitates an exten-
sion of the paradigms for understanding cultural transformation. It does not
refer to a sequential advance from the rigid polarities of a binary opposi-
tion. The third space does not point to an ideal stage of accomplishment,
but rather to the process of critical interaction that occurs within and against
the structure of a binary. Hybridity thinking is never beyond the classical
structures of identity and culture, but the re-negotiations and insertions
within and between these identities can transform an understanding of the
dynamics of these categories.
This brings us to the crux of the aporia between hybridity and ethics.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse was right when he stressed that hybridity thinking
is dependent on the hegemonic forms of border thinking. In an optimistic
conclusion to his rejoinder in the recent backlash against hybridity thinking,
he suggests that this dependency can develop its own critique.
Acknowledging the contingency of boundaries and the significance and limi-
tations of hybridity as a theme and approach means engaging hybridity
politics. This is where critical hybridity comes in, which involves a new
awareness of and new take on the dynamics of group formation and social
inequality. This critical awareness is furthered by acknowledging rather than
by suppressing hybridity. (2001: 239)
Hybridity thinking is driven by the dual desire of connection and separ-
ation. To create something new involves ripping it out of one context,
Papastergiadis ­ Hybridity and Ambivalence 61
pushing against existing boundaries, rearranging the order of things. These
disruptive acts of mixture can lead to new forms of awareness and construct
new networks of agency, however, there are no guarantees that mixture will
always entail equality. Hybridity, mobility and difference show us the other
side of things, takes us to foreign destinations, provide a new perspective ­
this in itself is not liberatory. It is just different. When war breaks out in a
place like Bosnia hybridity is not enough. History has shown that neither
the material presence of hybrid symbols nor the perspective of cultural rela-
tivism is sufficient to offer a solution when there is conflict. When violence
erupts, the historical signs of hybridity offer little resistance. However, the
resolution of conflict also requires more than brute force, it demands a
creative modality for living with difference.
Why are artists drawn to such conflict zones? In a subtle way
Kentridge and Durham, as well as Jungen and Julien, are all working with
the contradictions of hybridity. Where logic would demand an unequivocal
answer they suggest a pause, and then direct attention to the way that
opposing views can be held together to form a third. Similarly, we can see
how logic of social justice would demand that the rights of difference should
be subordinate to equality. But the two terms should not be thrust upon us
in the form of a competition. They are in fact co-constitutive. Without one
the other is meaningless. For artists, the tension between difference and
equality is productive. They do not demand the absolute resolution of one
over and against the other. They recognize that holding on to this ambiv-
alence produces what the three Martinican intellectuals, Jean Bernabe,
Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant called a `nontotalitarian
consciousness of a preserved diversity' (cited in Enwezor, 2003: 51). In an age
where global power defines itself through the convergence of cultural signs
and consolidates legitimacy through the standardization of codes of practice,
they stressed that cross-cultural dialogue can only proceed in the dialectic
that simultaneously addresses the modalities for representing the persistent
and mutating forms of identity as well as the struggle to transform the univer-
salist frameworks for social justice.
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Nikos Papastergiadis is Associate Professor and Acting Director of the
Australian Centre. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and
the University of Cambridge. Formerly Head of the Centre for Ideas at the
Victorian College of Arts, lecturer in sociology, the recipient of the pres-
tigious Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester and visiting
lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2005 he is the Willy Brandt Guest
Professor of International Migration and Ethnic Relations at Malmo
University in Sweden. His major publications include Modernity as Exile
(1992), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration
(2000), Complex Entanglements (2003), Metaphor and Tension (2004).
64 Theory, Culture & Society 22(4)