Video: Pangalay dance of the Sama Dilaut and Tausug community, Southern Philippines. The Sama and Tausug are indigenous people living in the Tawi-Tawi and Sulu islands; they are also Muslims. Often classified as a "Muslim" dance, the pangalay tradition pre-dates the arrival of Islam in the Philippines, and the silk sawal and baju lapi attire have heavy Chinese influence from 10th-14th century trading.
Hybridity deals with identity within the post-colonial and global contexts. Kapchan detects hybridity: “whenever two or more historically separate realms come together in any degree that challenges their socially constructed autonomy” (Kapchan 242). Hybridity is the product and the process of mélange itself. It seeks to disrupt the colonial binary and oppositional positioning of colonizer and colonized (and the fixity and fetishization that accompanies it) in order to position the ever changing subject as emergent within the liminal reality, which Homi Bhabha terms the Third Space: “neither a new horizon nor leaving behind of the past...[...]the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.” (Bhabha 1-2) As an intercultural community of migrants from elsewhere, or hybrid individuals, we find ourselves in a threshold of possibilities that challenges us to participate in cultural engagements in performative ways.
This interstitial space blurring the origins (if such thing can be identified), and consequently leading to an uncertain “destination”, worries “classic reason” and the socio-political process of categorization it entails; its power lies in its transgressive potential. On the other hand, to what extent can this anti-essentialist set of ideas (Canclini) resist recuperation and hierarchization (Bhabha, Visweswaran)? What are the ethical ramifications of cross-identification? To which extent can a culture protect its identity?: “Hybridity turns into a difference-easing concept, negating the foreignness of the foreign [...].[it] neutralize[s] the political claims of culture [and] subverts any normativity compelling non-instrumental grounds for preserving cultural differences and [...] endangered cultural resources.” (Kompridis 321) Can we still talk about societies which have not undergone any kind of hybridization, or as Samuels’ notes it[1], doesn’t hybridity exist only in the “outsider’s perspective”?
Video: London-based dub/electronic composer Gaudi remixes "Bethe Bethe Kese Kese", a Qawwali song by Pakistani artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and adds a Jamaican reggae vibe in this contemporary "chill-out" recording.
[1] After having been a participant-observer in a rock and roll Apache group, “Samuels critiques what he calls a philological approach to hybridity, that is, a concern with ‘heritage’ and ‘persistence’ that he identifies with an outsider’s perspective.” (in Kapchan 250) In other words, Samuels asks if there is a real disjunction between Apache music and rock and roll or if it is a mere construction of the outside (and ignorant) observer.
Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, (1994; 2004).
Canclini, Nestor Garcia, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1995; 2005).
Kapchan, D. A., et. al., “Theorizing the hybrid”, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, no.445, pp.239-253, (1999).
Kompridis, Nikolas, “Normativizing hybridity/neutralizing culture”, Political theory, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 318-343, (2005).
Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, (1994; 2004).
Canclini, Nestor Garcia, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1995; 2005).
Kapchan, D. A., et. al., “Theorizing the hybrid”, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, no.445, pp.239-253, (1999).
Kompridis, Nikolas, “Normativizing hybridity/neutralizing culture”, Political theory, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 318-343, (2005).
