I would like to thank everyone at the Vancouver Art Gallery for their hard work in enabling this transatlantic collaboration to take place. I would also like to express our gratitude to the Canadian Embassy in The Hague and to the Department for Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada for their support. Thank you also to the writers who have contributed to this publication and to Brian Jungen, without whom this project would never have existed.
Interview with Homi K. Bhabha
Solange de Boer and Zoë Gray
ZG: The term “cultural hybrid” is increasingly widely used whenever two or more cultures come together, applied with almost the same ease as the label “Asian fusion” is to cuisine. In your writing, however, you have highlighted the need to examine the specific context of each culture involved and stressed that hybridity does not occur when one culture simply absorbs another, but only when there is an ongoing process of entanglement between cultures. This interaction is rarely harmonious – as many proponents of multiculturalism would have us believe – yet it is during this struggle that a third space is created where new forms and new cultures can be invented. With the increasing visibility of cross-cultural and non-Western artists over the past decade, do you see a serious broadening of this third space in contemporary visual art and the emergence of new forms and cultures?
HB: Let’s start with what you said about questions of hybridization. Before you can make any claims about the hybrid nature of any object or any location, or any practice, I want to make one qualification. Very often hybridity is now used to describe an identity: somebody is half Caribbean, say, or part Italian; it is used as an identity issue. I never meant it that way or elaborated it as such. The concept was not meant to address people’s identities, but has become used in that way because people are eager to bring up multiculturalism and multiple identities – both issues of which I have some problems with. When I said that before you make any judgments of claims to hybridization, you have to look at specific situations, what I meant was that hybridization does not simply assume two given cultures coming together. Rather, for any culture, practice, locale, space, or site that we might consider as unitary, I wish to emphasize that it, too, is the product of a range of hybridizations. That then brings up the question: isn’t this counter intuitive to what I am saying?
When I spoke of hybridization, I was referring to the negotiation of differences – and differences are very slippery and snaky things. You might have a unifying sign of nationality: we may all be British, say, but within that Britishness you still have differentiating signs of race, class, gender, poverty or degree of access. Hybridization, then, should not simply be seen as a way of thinking about cultural differences. It has to be understood as an ongoing process through which questions of difference and discrimination are being negotiated. So when you say: Homi, are you basically saying that wherever there are differences, they have to negotiate with each other when they are spatially proximate, or politically advantageous? Are you basically saying that hybridization is the way in which one thing begins to resemble something else – or appropriates a part of that other thing in something else? And then I would answer: No, that is not simply what I mean. It is not hybridization in a naturalistic sense, where you take one bit of one plant, one bit of another, put them together, and then are capable somehow of tracing the genealogy.
If we go back to one of my earlier expositions of hybridization, it can be seen to have emerged out of an archival narrative I was working on while thinking about cultural transmission in nineteenth-century India. 1 The question really was: how did missionaries disseminate their Christian knowledge and the English language at the same time – the word of man and the word of God? And how did the Indian natives, or colonial subjects, to whom this was addressed, at once resist and absorb this transmission? You can see in this historical situation a rich ground-plan for the hybridizing of knowledges and cultures; and what I discovered was something quite interesting. The Bible was widely distributed as a book amongst the peasants in North India. In Hindu communities, to own the book of God was something for the priesthood; it was not simply given out. So it was a very great honor if you were brought up in the respectful traditions of Hinduism to hold the book of God of another culture, whereas your own book of God was in the hands of the Brahmin. When you went to the temple, they would expose it, but they were the ones who read it. This missionary enterprise began after 1814; before then, missionaries were not allowed to convert Indians into Christians, according to the East India Trading Company, the governing body. It was a very unsuccessful mission, even though much money was given by Dutch and Scottish missionary bodies. They weren’t getting the converts – although they were distributing Bibles, setting up classes, teaching languages, setting up small clinics and schools. Indian colonial subjects had no problem sending their children to the schools or drawing upon the medical benefits, but they would not convert. This phenomenon got me quite interested in the whole process, so I investigated one particular case. What I found was that the converted Hindu – one of the earliest converts who then worked for the Church of converts – would go around and speak to the Indian peasants in great detail. And they would say “Oh this is wonderful, the words of your Christian God are so wonderful, just to listen to them makes us feel so pure, what a wonderful God you have,” etc. Then the local head of the Mission as well as the people back in Amsterdam or in England or wherever would say, “But you have no conversions!” So finally the converted Indian would say to the peasants, “You have received all these books and so praised our Lord, wouldn’t you think about converting?” And they said, “Well, we would love to convert, of course we would, who wouldn’t want to convert to your religion? Look what a marvelous person you are, how you have helped us. But you know there is one problem: you are a meat-eater and the truth of God cannot come from the mouth of people who eat meat.” They were making a demand for a vegetarian Bible! To which, of course, the convert would answer, “No, that is irrelevant. It is not what goes in a person’s mouth that is important, it is what comes out.” And they would say, “Well, that’s the difference between us. This is no reason for us not to live together, not at all.”
So, what is happening there? This is the scenario I took to explore the notion of hybridization as a third space. It is also a form of thinking about a resistant knowledge, counter knowledge in a context of hegemonic power. They don’t simply say, “Yes, thank you very much, we will take some of your Christian ideas and some of our Hindu ideas and we will put it together and we will have a coat of many colors.” No, they do participate: they send their children to a missionary school, they make use of the medical offerings. They are not fundamentalists at all. Yet what they want to resist is the colonial practice of conversion. At that point, they make a demand that cannot be satisfied by their colonial masters. That is the opening up of a third space, another area of negotiation, where they take a particular cultural idea of theirs, impose it on a practice that cannot absorb it, display their own agency in relation to it. That is what I call the third space.
Cultural power is often imagined as a clash between two forces, akin to the “clash of civilizations” idea. Each civilization comes equipped with its own ideas, philosophies, values, etc, and clashes with the other; somebody wins and somebody loses. What I’m interested in is what happens when they clash. They are negotiating – however asymmetrically – different forms of power and authority. Doesn’t something open up and get taken in, which was not something they were already equipped with? They come armed with certain knowledges, but when contact is made, a space opens up that will not let either of them return to where they started. Hybridization is therefore all the meanings, positions, movements, negotiations around difference and power generated in that space. It is a particular strategy – and a strategy in the context of a larger struggle for authority.
ZG: But to bring that – as you do yourself in a lot of your writing – to contemporary culture, do the same to-ing and fro-ing of negotiations happen now with writers or artists who are not colonial subjects?
HB: Unquestionably
