HYBRIDITY AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a steady consensus within academic cultural studies concerning the fact that reifications (or ‘essentializations’) of ethnicity, whether literally meant or practically used, like reifications involving gender or national identity, are not good from a political perspective. The common response invokes hybridity as a counter-concept strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic reification and by the same token is able to ground a sufficiently fluid politics of identity/difference that might warrant the cultural redemption of the subaltern. Nevertheless, the political force of hybridity, such as it may be, remains to a large extent contained within a politics of the colour line. Without abandoning it, that is, without altogether abandoning the terrain of a politics of the subject, it would seem necessary to move beyond the theorization of hybridity in cultural studies in order to find ways to articulate subaltern resistance against the terror of dominant identities ...