Notes of Hybridism (Cultural Studies) (By Nestor Garcia
Canclini). Border Crossing Lectures.
Para Garcia Canclini cuando unos conceptos irrumpen con
fuerza desplazan a otros y, por lo tanto, exigen crear
nuevas reformulacines, como lo que ha sucedido en cuanto a
los diccionarios de los estudios culturales.
Los estudios sobre la hibridación han modificado el modo de
hablar sobre la identidad (política), cultura, diferencia,
desigualdad, y sobre oposiciones como tradición/modernidad,
norte/sur, local/global. Este término ha sido usado a
partir de los noventa en los estudios antropológicos y
sociológicos de arte y literature. Aunque la hibridación es
tan antigua como los intercambios entre sociedades, hoy se
ha extendido para analizar procesos interétnicos y de
descolonización, viajes y cruces de fronteras y procesos
globalizadores, entrecruces artísticos y literarios.
Canclini se refiere a hibridación como a aquellos procesos
socioculturales en los que estructuras o prácticas
discretas, que exisían en forma separada, se combinan para
generar nuevas estructuras, objetos y practicas.
CANCLINI DEFINES HYBRIDITY AS THOSE SOCIO-CULTURAL
PROCESSES WITHIN WHICH STRUCTURES OF INDENTIY AND POWER, AS
WELL AS ‘DISCRETE’ PRACTICES THAT EXISTED SEPARATELY, FUSE
TO GENERATE NEW STRUCTURES, SUBJECTIVITIES, OBJETS AND
PRACTICES.
By this he means ways to negotiate identity construction.
Say, for instance, in Border Crossing, national cultures,
instead of being extinguished, are reconstituted in
transnational cultural interactions. E.G. Home in the
field, soccer evolves from being a discrete practice in the
home country into a subjective mode of identity
construction in the host country. That is, a practice
brought into a space where two kind of cultural codes are
brought into contest.
Another example would be the (re)interpretation of Mozart
by African-Austrian Irakere.
Internet and the overlapping of multimedia and
multicultural information. Etc. Canclini suggests that it’s
a tendency to unify under one mere concept experiences that
are fundamentally heterogeneous. He refers to Latin
American Border Crossing.
The linguistic and social constructions of the concept of
Hybridity have made possible its displacement from and out
of essentializing and bilogistic discourses on identity,
authenticity, and purity.
What he means is that in the same way that the concept of
mestizage undermined the obsession on race and purity
during the XIX century in Latin America, hybridity, today,
allows pluralism and open the (re)reading of historic
fusions, plus, it allows us to rid of any tendency to try
to resolve multidimensional conflicts that result from
“alianzas fecundas.” E.g: the pre-colombian imaginary visá-vis the newhispanism of the colonizers and later the
cultural industries (Bernard, Gruzinski); poular aesthetics
and tourism (De Grandis); ethnic national cultures and
urban centers (Bhabha) and global institutions (Harvey).
Hybridy comes from transnational mobility, economical and
cultural exchanges, but also through individual and
collective creativity in the arts, technology and ordinary
life. ONE WORD: RECONVENTION (Reconvención).For example: A
painter becomes a designer, or the allocation of symbolic
and economic capitals in transnational circuits.
These incessant processes of hybridity lead to relativize
(relativizar) the notion of identity. Even the
anthropological tendency that exists within the Latin
American Cultural Studies to consider the concept of
identities as an object of investigation and study.
A way to free cultural and literary analysis from their
fundamentalist tropisms is to locate hybridty in the
network of concepts such as contradiction, mestizaje,
syncretism, transculturation, creolization and counter
pointing (contrapunteo), and among the ambivalences of
industrialization and globalized massification of symbolic
processes.
Important to note that he suggests the need to object the
idea that the process of hybridity allows easy integration
and fusion of practices, without much contradiction in
those aspects that do not allow space for hybridization
process. There may be contradiction in multicultural
fusions.
Hybridity = transient/mobility/provisionality, as
strategies to enter AND exit modernity.
If we talk of hybridity as a process one can access and
abandon, a process one can be included or subordinated, it
is possible to understand how individuals react to
intercultural relations regarding that which present no
struggle, or that which becomes inconceivable [to
mestizaje].
NB: For Canclini, transnational migrants are not always
willing/able to synthesize diverse sojourns along their
itinerary, even though, as it is evident, it is impossible
to keep them encapsulated and uncommunicated. That is, the
oscillation between the migrant’s identity of origin and
his/her identity in the host destination [host country],
allows for metaphorical transference of elements from one
discourse into another. The individual descentered
himself/herself from his/her own (h)istory, and play
various roles. At times, these roles are incompatible and
create dialectics of contradiction. “El allá y el aquí, que
son también el ayer y el hoy, refuerzan su aptitude
enunciativa y puden tramar narrativas bifrontes y, si se
quiere, exagerando las cosas, esquizofrénicas (Antonio
Cornejo Polar en “Una Heterogeneidad no dialectica, sujeto
y discursos migrantes” Revista Critica Latinoamericana 49
(200):884).
NB: Canclini seems to place more importance in the “process
of hybridity” rather than in Hybridity as a fixed cultural
enunciation, and, at the same time, within these processes,
he cautions on elements which remains “insoluble.”
Edward Said suggested that: Displacing between two or more
cultural codes provides a pluralistic perspective that is
contrapuntística (counter pointing). Say, for an exiled, or
an immigrant, life in the host country occurs, inevitably,
in contrast, with the memories of a life in another
country/environment. It becomes a counter point between the
present life, and the past, and the elements of memory and
nostalgia are also vivid and real.
Los discursos diasporicos y de hibridación nos permiten
pensar en la vida contemporanea como en una “modernidad de
contrapunteo” (Clifford).
Canclini desea tratar este termino como una traducción
entre mestizaje y sincretismo.