,310 MODERNITYAND ITS FWLIRES
6 FUNDAMENTALISM, DIASPORA AND
HYBRIDITY
Where identitiesare concerned, this oscillation between Tradition and
Translation (which was briefly traced above in relation to Britain) is
becoming more evident on a global canvas. Everywhere,cultural
identities are emergingwhich are not b e d , but poised, in transition,
between different positions: which draw on different cultural baditions
'
at the same time; and which are the product of those complicated cross-
overs and c u l k d mixes which are increasingly common in a
globalized world. It may be tempting to think of identity inthe age of
globalization as destined to end up in one place or another: either
returning to its 'roots' or disappearing through assimilation and
homogenization. But this may be a false dilemma.
For there is another possibility; that of 'Trmslation'. This describes
~ o s eidentity formations which cut across and intersect natural
frontiers, and which are composed of people who have been dispersed
forever from their homelands. Suchpeople retain strong links with their
places of origin and their traditions,but they are witbout.the illusion of
a return to the past. They are obliged ta come to terms with the new
cultures they inhabit, without simply assimilatingto them and losing
their identities completely. They bear upon them the Itraces of the
pmkicular cultures, haditions, languages and histories by which they
were shaped. The difference is that they are not and will never be
uniped in the old sense, because they are irrevocably the product of
several interlocking histories and cultures, belong at one and the same
time to several 'homes' (andto no one particular 'home']. People
belonging to such cultures of hybridity have had to renounce the dream
or ambition of rediscovering any kind of 'lost' cultural purity, or ethnic
absolutism. They are irrevocably translated. The word 'banslation',
SalmanRushdie notes, 'comes etymologically from the Latin for
"bearing across'", Migrant writers likehim, who beIong to two worlds at
once, 'havingbeen borne across the world ...are translated men'
(Rushdie, 1991).They are the products of the new diclspoms created by
the post-colonial migrations. They must learn to inhabit at least two
identities, to speak two cultural languages, to translate and negotiate
between them.Cultures ofhybridity are one of the distinctly navel
types of identity produced in the era of late-modernity, and there are
more a d more examples of them to be discovered.
ACTIVITY 3 You should now read Reading C,'Diaspara cultures', by Paul Gilroy.
The author here highlights the question of 'diaspora identities' through
a study of 'black British' culture of the 1980s.
Some people arguethat 'hybridity-d syncretism -the fusion
between different dtural traditions -is a powerful creative source,
CHAPTER 8 THE QUESTIONOF CULTURALI D E W 311
c r e a k g new forms that are rn~re'appro~riateto Iate-modernitythanthe
old, embattled national identities of the past. Others, however, argue
that hybridity, with the indeterminacy,Ydauble consciousness', and
relativism it implies, also has its costs and dangers. Salman Rushdie's
novel about migration, Islam,and the prophet Mohammed, The Satanic
Verses,with its deep immersion in Islamic culture and its secular
consciousness of th6 exiled 'translated man', so offended the Iranian
fundamentalists that they passed sentence of death on him for
blasphemy. It also outragedmany British Muslims. In defendinghis
novel, Rushdie offered a smng and compelling defence of 'hybridity'.
Standing at the centre of the novel is a group of characters most of
whom are British MusJims, or not particularly religious persons of
Musjim background, struggling with just the sort of peat problems
that have arisen to surround the book, problems of hybridization
and ghettoization, of reconciling the old and the new. Those who
oppoSe the novel mast vociferouslytoday are of the opinion that
interminglingwith different cultures will inevitably weaken and
ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses
celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling,the transformation
that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas, pelitics, movies, songs. It rejoices in
mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mdange,
hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the
world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the
world, and I have b5ed to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for
change-by-fusion,change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our
mongrel selves.
(Rushdie, 1991,p.3941.
However, the Sotonic Versesmay well have become kapped between
the irreconcilable forces of Tradition and Translation. This is the view
offeredby the sympathetic, but critical, Bhiku Parekh in Reading D.
ACTIVITY 4 You should now read Reading D, 'Between hoIy text and moral void',
by Bhiku Parekh.
On the other hand,there are equally powerful attempts to reconsmct
purified identities, to restore coherence, 'closure' and Tradition, in the
face of hybridity and diversity. Two examples are the resurgence of
nationalism in Eastern Europe and the rise of fimdamentalisrn,
Inan era when regional integration in the economic and political fieIds,
and the breaking down of national sovereignty, are moving very rapidly
in Western Europe, the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern
Europe and the break-upof the old Soviet Union have been followed by
a powerfuI revival of ethnic nationalism, fuelled by ideas of both racial
purity and religious orthodoxy. The ambition to create new, dturally
312 MODERN~~YAND ITS FUTURES
The tension beta
Tradition and
Translation
teen
and ethnically unified nation-states (which 1have suggested above
never really existed in Western national cultures) was the driving force
behind the break-away movements in the Baltic states of 'Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania,the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the move to
independence ofmany former Soviet RepubIics, from Georgia,the
Ukraine, Russia and Armenia to Kwdistan, Uzbekistanand the 'Muslim'
Asian republics of the old Soviet state,Much the same process has been
taking place in the 'nations' of Central Europe which were cawed out of
the disintegration of the Ausba-Hungarianand Ottoman Empires at the
end of the First WorId War.
These new wouId-be 'nations' by to construct states that are u s e d in
both ethnic and religious terms, and to create political entities around
homogeneous culturaI identities. The problem is that they contain
within their 'borders' minorities who identify themselves with different
cultures. Thus,for example, there are "ethnic' Russian minorities in the
Baltic Republics and the Ukraine, ethnic Poles in Lithuania, an
Armenian enclave (Nagorno-Karabakh)in Azerbaijan, Tukic-Christian
minorities amongst the Russian majorities of Moldavia, and large
numbers of Muslims in the southern republics of the old Soviet Union
who share more, incultural and religious terms, with their MiddIe-
Eastern Islamicneigbbours thanwith many of their 'countrymen'.
CHAPTER 8 THE QUfSTlON OF GULTUAAL IDENTrlY
The other sigdcant form of the revival of par~icularisticnationalism
and ethnic and religious absolutism is, of course, the phenomenon of
'fundamentalism'. This is evident everywhere (for example, in the
revived little-Englandismreferred to earlier),though its most s a n g
example is to be found in some Islamic states in the Middle East.
Beginning with-theIranianRevolution, fundamentalist Islamic
movements, which seek to create religious states in which the political
principles of organization are aligned with the religious doctrines and
laws of the Koran, have arisen in many,hitherto secular I s ~ m i c
societies. In fact, this trend is difficult to interpret. Some analysts see it
as a reaction to fhe 'forced' character of Western modernization;
certainly, Iranian fundamentalism was a direct response to the efforts of
the Shah in the 1970sto adopt Western models and cultural values
wholesale. Some interpret it as a response to being left out of
'globalization'. The reaffirmation of cultural 'roots' and the return to
orthodoxy has long been one of the mest pawerful sources of counter-
identihation amongst many Third World and past-colonial societies
and regions (onethinks here of the roles bf nationalism and national
culture in the Indian, African and Asian independence movements].
Others see the roots of Islamic fundamentalism in the failure of Islamic
states ta throw up successful and effective made^ leaderships or
secular, modern parties. hconditions of extensive poverty and relative
economic under-developmerlt [funilamentalismis strongerin the poorer
Islamic states of the region), a restoration of the Islamic faith is a
powerful mobilizing and binding political md ideological force,
especially where democratic traditions are weak.
The bend towards 'global homogenization', then, is matched by a
powerful revival of 'ethnicity', sometimes of the more hybrid or
symbolic varieties, but also frequently of the exclusive or 'essentialist'
-._
varieties citeda&ve. Bauman has referred to this 'resurgence of .
ethnicity' as one of the main reasons why the more extreme, free-
ranging or indeterminate versions of what happens to identity under the
impact of the 'global post-modern' requiresserious qud5cation.
The 'resurgence of ethnicity' ...puts in the forefront the
unanticipated flourishing of ethnic loyalties h i d e national
minorities. By the same token, it casts a shadow on what seems to
be the deep cause of the phenomenon: the growing separation
between the membership of body politic and ethnic membership
(ormare generally,cultural conformity)which removes much of its
original attmction from the programme of cultural assimilatim. ... ,
Ethnicity has become one of the many categaries or tokens, or
' ~ b dpoles', around which flexible and sanction-free communities
are formed and in reference to which individual identities are
constructed and asserted.There are now,therefore, [many]fewer
centrifugal forces which once weakened ethnic integrity. There is
instead a powerful demand for pronounced, though symbolic
rather than institutionalized, ethnic distinctiveness.
(Bauman, 1990, p.167)
'314 MODERNITYAND ITS FUTURES
The resurgence of nationalism and other forms of pariicularism at the
end of the twentieth century,alongside and intimately linked to .
globalization, is of course a remarkable reversal, a mast unexpected turn
of events.Nothing in the modernizing Enlightenment perspectives or
ideologies of the West -neither liberalism nor indeed Marxism, which
for all its opposition to liberalism also saw capitalism as the unwitting
agent of 'modernity' -foresaw such an outcome.
Both liberalism and Marxism, in their merent:ways, implied that the
attachment te the local and the particular would gradualIy give way to
more'universalistic and cosmopolitan or internatianal values and
identities; that nationalism and ethnicity were archaic foms of
attachment -the sorts of thing which would be 'melted away' by the
revolutionizing force of modernity.According to these 'rnetanarratives'
of modernity, the irrational attachments to the local and the pxrticular,
to tradition and roots, to national myths and 'imagined communities',
would eadually be repIaced by more rational and universalistic
identities, Yet globalization seems to be producing neither simply the
triumph of 'the global' nor the persistence, in its old nationalistic form,
of 'the local'. The displacements or distractions of globalization turn out
to be more varied and more contradictory than either its protagonists or
opponents suggest. However, this also suggests that, though powered in
many ways by the West, globalization may turn out to be part of that
slow and uneven but continuing story of the de-centring of the West.
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