Copyright © 1999 by Adrian Fielder, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
the very notion of hybridity may be generated by a dominant nostalgia for authenticity and homogeneity. Some people are perceived as participating in different cultures (African "and" French, or Muslim "and" French, for example), although they may feel that their (one and unique) culture is simply . . . a combination of what others think of as different and sometimes incompatible cultures. . . . [a misconception generated by an] inability to understand culture as one complex and internally divergent whole. (174-75)
Where The Ends of the Earth attributes the social catastrophe of a progressively nonreproductive global capitalism to "natural" factors external to its logic, postcolonial theory misreads this logic itself as if the globalized exchange of culture and identities were not bound to the same acutely dysfunctional system that replaces older, bad forms of cultural-nationalist "essentialisms" with newer, ever more sinister ones. Postcolonialism forgets, or never grasps, that the flip-side of "hybridity," "diasporic consciousness," etc. is the post-catastrophic holocaust of "monetary subjects without money." ( 7, para20)
Larsen's implied antidote to this allegedly poststructuralist aporia is, of course, a concrete Marxist-materialist framework capable of acknowledging "the full, contemporary historical reality of global capitalism" (6, para. 15, my emphasis).
For insightful commentaries on this debate, see McClintock and Shohat. Back
See, in particular, the first chapter in Autobiographical Voices. Back
For an application of systems theory to this problematic, see Jessop. Back
On this note, see Kortenaar, who provides a useful admonition against the celebration of hybridity as a necessarily liberating discursive strategy in postcolonial texts. Back
As described by Mauss, potlatch is an elaborate system in which social relations are articulated and affirmed through the exchange of gifts that carry with them the expectation of return; see especially The Gift. Back
See chapter III, 68-69, but especially the analysis of largitio in chapter I. Back
Of course, once a given market has been thoroughly indoctrinated into this "culture-ideology of consumerism," it is hoped that the strategy for that region will change to that used in the industrialized world: "suggestive advertising," which assumes that the target audiences have already been instilled with the urge to purchase superfluous products, but need only have that urge channelled toward specific products; see Sklair, chapter V. Back
This term is offered by Williams in her book about the rise of consumer culture in Europe and the U.S., and it describes the ways in which consumerized spaces produce fantasies (on the part of the patrons) of absolute availability/accessibility of the items being marketed (strategies which, as she argues, were first developed at exhibits of the Expositions Universelles and in department stores such as La Samaritaine in Paris). Back
On Glissant's notion of "La Relation" (his term for the totality of cultural convergences to which the modern world is witness), a concept that certainly does not assume all intercultural contact on the model of a dialogue among equal social agents, see his Le discours antillais and particularly his Poétique de la Relation. Back