remixing hybridity

I had a few issues with the Franklin and Lyon article, Remixing Hybridity. After I finished reading it, I couldn’t help but wonder to myself – when will it be enough? When will certain theories or certain people’s statements regarding culture or hybridity be exclusive enough? I understood their arguments and the points they were trying to make, but at the same time, I just wondered if their points could ever be fully met. For instance, they take their time critiquing postcolonial studies and how they use “transnationalism, globalization, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora in interchangeable ways that frequently insist on a ‘postnational’ formulation of citizenship and subjectivity” (Reader 172). They comment on how indigenous people insist on belonging, not just abstractly, but also belonging to certain lands – which, by their argument, renders all the terms used by postcolonial studies to be inadequate. But I can’t help wondering if there will ever be terms adequate enough to describe that sort of belonging? Can they, themselves, come up with exclusive enough terms to describe that sort of belonging? This is what I have a problem with when I’m reading this article – is that they criticize and critique, but ultimately, Franklin and Lyons don’t really come up with a solution. They just flat out say that they disagree because the terms we have cultivated thus far are “inadequate” or that certain writes or scholars have written up texts that are apparently denying aspects of Hawaiian history.

My problem with this article is that the writers are claiming that they don’t want to speak for native Hawaiians, but by using that as a disclaimer, inadvertently makes it seem like they are trying to speak for the natives. It feels as though they are on this pedestal, wagging their finger at these writers and scholars for not being inclusive enough. Who allowed them to step onto that pedestal and to have the power to criticize? It just feels like by criticizing others for not being inclusive enough, they, themselves, do not recognize their own privilege. They have the privilege to publish this article…to wag the finger…to criticize others for not being sensitive enough to Hawaii’s history – but, at the same time, these writers do not see their position of power. How many native Hawaiians would be able to publish works like these? To speak for themselves? (Not as a whole group labeled “Native Hawaiians” but for themselves, the individual)

I feel like the article wanted to deal with challenging the “binary opposition upon which hybridity theory rests” but really, fell into binary thought themselves. It became WE (the writers) arguing against THEM (the people they were criticizing) and then there was another group simply labeled NATIVES.

All of postcolonial theories is so complicated…and I felt that it was really unfair to the various people critiqued within the article. I don’t think Franklin and Lyons should have simplified postcolonial theory into such chewable bits and pieces. It’s just one of those things that is too complicated…to intertwined with other theory to be easily cut up and digested like that.

-- Tanya Tsoi