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Comparative Hybridities: Latin AmericanIntellectuals and Postcolonialists

Hosam Aboul-Ela

Tracing the discursive history of the term ‘‘hybridity’’ in the work of Nestor GarcıaCanclini manifests the roots of his thought in Latin American intellectual history. Inparticular, the regional tradition growing out of Jose Carlos Mariategui’s writingsinflects Garcıa Canclini’s work with a concern for historical location and questions ofpolitical economy. These emphases contrast with those of Anglo-American post-colonial theory for in this latter discourse, hybridity is understood textually, as alinguistic or psychoanalytic category, just as colonialism is often centered in theconsciousness of the Western colonizing subject. The goal of examining thesecontrasting conceptions of hybridity is not merely to expose the culturalist fetishof much mainstream postcolonialism, but also to suggest a larger contrast betweenintellectual voices in the Global South and mainstream postcolonialist critics who areoften taken to speak for the southern intellectual.

Key Words: Hybridity, Mestizaje, Dependency, Transculturation, Postcolonialism

Nestor Garcıa Canclini and Homi Bhabha have both become inextricably tied to one of

the most often cited terms in the contemporary lexicon of cultural studies: hybridity.

Once the Mexico City�/based Argentine anthropologist Garcıa Canclini had his book

Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (1989) translated

into English and published in 1995 as Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and

Leaving Modernity, it was perhaps inevitable that many readers would associate him

with Bhabha, who had already become established as an author of several key texts

within the bibliography of postmodernism generally, and of postcolonialism in

particular. Bhabha’s work particularly emphasizes what he has often referred to as

‘‘hybridity’’ in order to subvert the rhetorical binarisms*/particularly the one

between ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’*/which he believes enable the combinations of

prejudice and domination that form the foundation of the colonial project.

While Garcıa Canclini has become increasingly well known in the United States as

his work has been translated into English and promoted by scholars including Fredric

Jameson and George Yudice, his fame for the most part has not moved beyond the

boundaries of specialists in the field of Latin American cultural studies. Bhabha, on

the other hand, has become required reading for any scholar aspiring to be current in

contemporary critical theory. Walter Mignolo has recently reminded us that the

geographic and institutional origins of ideas shape how they will be disseminated and

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/04/030261-19– 2004 Association for Economic and Social AnalysisDOI: 10.1080/0893569042000239271

RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 16 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2004)

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understood, and the comparison between these two scholars and their respective

discussions of hybridity illustrate his point. Bhabha, working out of elite institutions in

the United States and invoking European continental thinkers to shape his discussion

of colonialism, is perceived as originary when he is juxtaposed to Garcıa Canclini.1

This specific case illustrates a general tendency in Anglo-American postcolonialism,

which has come to show either disdain or disregard for paradigms from and

intellectual histories of the Global South, preferring instead to understand the

matter of the South via the methods of Euro-America. In this sense, postcolonialism

can be said to have lapped itself by settling in to many of the practices criticized by

Edward Said in his groundbreaking text Orientalism , including the adoption of what

Said criticizes in eighteenth-century Orientalists as a ‘‘textual attitude’’( 1979, 92�/6)

and the reconfiguration of a version of the old colonialist proposition that ‘‘the East

proposes and the West disposes.’’2

Of course, Garcıa Canclini is also a ‘‘Western’’ thinker and should not be understood

as a voice of the subaltern. Rather, he is a scholar located in the Global South,

influenced by Latin American intellectual traditions as much as he is by Pierre

Bourdieu. But the tendency on the part of many critics to erase the conversation with

Latin America’s history of ideas that inheres in his conception of hybridity, and to

make him reductively derivative of Bhabha*/a scholar with whose approach he has

little in common*/is indicative of the creeping Eurocentrism that weighs down

institutional postcolonialism in the Anglo-American academy.

What I will attempt to demonstrate in this study is that Garcıa Canclini, at least in

his use of the term ‘‘hybridity,’’ is in fact working out of a Latin American intellectual

tradition that takes his version of the concept to a very different place than its

destination within mainstream postcolonialism. Specifically, the Latin American

intellectuals within the tradition I am examining insist on a basic relationship

connecting material inequalities between the metropolis and the periphery with

culture in the South. In light of this insistence, they emphasize the economic

foundations of colonialism, the operation of the colonial economy in the Global South

(even in the absence of the actual concrete structures of colonialism), and the

continued struggle with unequal development as the very phenomena which make the

postcolonial world a conceivable category. In other words, material conditions make a

country postcolonial in the first instance because economics is foundational to

colonialism’s deep structure and is its most enduring legacy during the postcolonial

stage. A postcolonialism that suppresses this reality is misdirected.

Latin America has multiple intellectual histories, but the one I find most

determinative for Garcıa Canclini’s work emphasizes colonial economics and includes

1. Rita de Grandis (1997), Roman de la Campa (1994), and Abril Trigo (1996) have all writtenarticles in Spanish comparing Garcıa Canclini to European and American postmodern critics,including Bhabha, and have found few distinctions. Beverly also emphasizes similarities betweenBhabha and Garcıa Canclini (1999, 123, 125, 126).2. The origin of Said’s concept of a critical discourse which stacks its presumptions on top ofitself in a politically interested way is of course Foucault’s notion of discourse as set out inchapter 1 of The Archaelogy of Knowledge. Said (1979, 3) acknowledges as much. Said’s laterwork will adopt a more complicated stand toward Foucault’s method, however.

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Jose Carlos Mariategui, dependency theorists, Angel Rama, and a number of other

intellectuals from the region who are interested in analyses that take into account

the dialectical relationship between cultural production, social issues, and questions

of political economy. I will briefly trace a few key moments in this intellectual history

below, emphasizing Mariategui and political economy’s role in colonialism, post-

colonial imperialism, unequal development, and cultural production in Latin America.

Then I argue for an unmistakable resonance of this local intellectual tradition in the

work of Garcıa Canclini with special attention to his conception of ‘‘hybridity.’’

Finally, I contrast Garcıa Canclini’s use of this term with its use in mainstream

postcolonialism, which I read as a critical discourse that often centers colonialism in

the mind of the Western, colonizing subject.

Latin American Intellectuals

The specialist in Latin American intellectual writing might find it counterintuitive to

trace Garcıa Canclini’s conception of ‘‘hybridity’’ back to Peruvian Socialist Jose

Carlos Mariategui (1895�/1930), since discussions of mestizaje , a Spanish term

comparable to ‘‘hybridity,’’ date all the way back to El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,

an early-seventeenth-century Incan with one Spanish parent. By the nineteenth

century, what was usually then called mestizaje had become an even more prominent

topic in the region’s cultural criticism. Mariategui shares with many of the Latin

American essayists who came before him a critical attitude toward the United States

as a destructive hegemon in the region and a corollary insistence on the separateness

of Latin American culture.3 But Mariategui distinguishes himself by being the first

Latin American essayist/critic of the United States to employ Marxist analysis to deal

with Latin American problems. Thus, he pushes the suspicion Latin American

intellectuals demonstrate toward the United States in a new direction, toward a

global anticolonial critique.

The essence of the earlier discussion of mestizaje in Latin American intellectual

discourse is the relationship between indigenous communities and European settlers

in the various regions of Latin America. By the 1920s, Mariategui’s Mexican

contemporary, Jose Vasconcelos, was building a whole conception of the continent’s

future on indigenismo , but Vasconcelos’s notion of a Latin American cosmic race was

very distant from the Peruvian’s analysis of the indigenous problem. First,

Vasconcelos was unable to go beyond the conception of indigenismo as a strictly

racial phenomenon, as his phrase ‘‘cosmic race’’ implies. Second, what becomes

explicitly clear in Vasconcelos’s later work is that the concept of the Latin American

cosmic race was never intended as a celebration of Mexican indigenous culture, even

though Mexican state nationalism has consistently interpreted his ideas in this

3. A generation before Mariategui, Jose Martı of Cuba published a powerful argument tyingmestizaje to the Americas, and Jose Vasconcelos devoted his most famous work The CosmicRace to a pro-Catholic, pro-Spain spin on the concept. Note also the Rodo (1988) essay firstpublished by the Uruguayan in 1900. This essay represents one of the more famous earlypolemics against the negative influence of the United States in Latin America. The author’spolitics were to the right of Martı and Mariategui, but not as conservative as Vasconcelos.

COMPARATIVE HYBRIDITIES 263

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manner. Rather, Vasconcelos saw himself as exploring the benefits that might be

derived from local race and culture mixing with Mexico’s Spanish and Catholic

colonial heritage. In his later writings, including his memoir Ulises criollo (1935) and

polemics that tended toward fascism, Vasconcelos compared this colonial heritage

favorably to the (for him) corrupting influences of Anglo-Americanism (U.S.

imperialism, Protestantism, Judaism, and freemasonry). What Vasconcelos shares

with the other Latin American writers I have mentioned is a clear conception of the

United States as an imperialistic force that is distinct from, and must be resisted by

local cultures. Yet even within the context of discussions of mestizaje , he is extreme

in his emphasis on the racial as the foundation for analyses of culture. In this

emphasis, Vasconcelos is most comparable to Victorian figures like Matthew Arnold

and J. A. comte de Gobineau. Also, Vasconcelos’s racialism, as Luis Marentes has

cogently demonstrated, creates a strong connection between his earlier conception

of the cosmic race, which has come to be erroneously understood*/and even

celebrated by the State*/as pro-indigena , and his later slide toward fascism

(Marentes 2000, 15�/7).

If Vasconcelos represents an isolated example of a Latin American conception of

mestizaje/hybridity that is highly comparable to the racialist Victorian discourse

dissected by Young (1995), Mariategui’s distinctness from him crystallizes the

alternative analytical possibilities. The influence of the Italian Marxist movement

on Mariategui instilled in him an ambition to view the situation of Peru’s indigenous

peoples in connection with the economic, social, political, and historical realities of

that space at that time.4 This led him to conclude that, ‘‘Any treatment of the

problem of the Indian*/written or verbal*/that fails or refuses to recognize it as a

socio-economic problem is but a sterile, theoretical exercise destined to be

completely discredited’’ (Mariategui 1971, 22). In the same essay, he adds (perhaps

to make the contrast with Vasconcelos’s racialism in The Cosmic Race explicit): ‘‘To

expect that the Indian will be emancipated through a steady crossing of the aboriginal

race with white immigrants is an anti-sociological naivete that could only occur to the

primitive mentality of an importer of merino sheep’’ (25).

Furthermore, this interest in the socioeconomic dimensions of Latin American

problems was not limited in Mariategui’s thinking to the indigenous problem. Rather,

it underpinned his method of reading culture, history, and society. Several

circumstances contributed to the originality and continued relevance of Mariategui’s

analyses. First, his work represents the first major attempt from the region to apply

Marxist analysis to Latin American problems. Second, several factors contributed to

his insistence on a flexible application of Marxist principles that*/while grounded in

the socioeconomics of history and culture*/refused to lapse into econometrics. These

factors included his originary position as a Latin American Marxist and his initial

exposure to Marxist thought via the Italian group collected around L’Ordine Nuovo ,

the Italian Marxist weekly to which Gobinetti, Gramsci, and others of their cohort

4. See Melis (1980) and Chavarrıa (1979, chap. 4) for discussions of Italian Marxism’s role as acatalyst in Mariategui’s thinking. Note that from 1919 to 1923, Mariategui lived in Italy in a sortof pseudo exile imposed on him by Peru’s Leguıa dictatorship. Also note Melis’s characterizationof him as the ‘‘first Latin American Marxist.’’

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contributed. His initial interest in Marxism and his emphasis on material history

pushed his readings beyond what had been seen among Latin American thinkers to

that point, but his independence and his Italian-inflected sense of the complicated

relationship between base and superstructure kept his conception of the socio-

economic realm from becoming rigid and reductive.

One consequence of his reading of Latin American history through economics is the

integration of the region*/perhaps for the first time*/into what could have been

called the colonized world at the time, or what Mariategui in several essays often

simply refers to as ‘‘the East.’’ While it is true that the majority of Latin American

nation-states achieved their independence from Spain, Portugal, or France within

fifty years of the United States becoming independent of England, Mariategui’s essay,

‘‘Outline of the Economic Evolution,’’ the first of the seven essays making up Seven

Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), makes clear that for Latin America generally and

Peru in particular national independence did nothing to liberate the region from a

dire economic dependency that in turn fostered other dependencies. Rather, this

dependency was instilled over the course of the nineteenth century by Anglo-

American commercial and financial interests and by the legacy of the colonial

economies of the region that tended to be organized around the export of one

product*/guano, copper, coffee, or others depending on the nation in question.

In this socioeconomic sense, Peru and the rest of Latin America (by extension) were

still colonized for Mariategui in very concrete and measurable ways. What other

essayists in the region had perceived as a threat, he was able to describe and analyze.

Thus, not surprisingly, Mariategui’s writing includes an underrecognized acknowl-

edgment of solidarities between politically independent Latin America and the parts

of ‘‘the East’’ continuing to languish under direct colonial administrative rule.5 In

fact, Mariategui’s sense of the importance of decolonization seems to have trumped

even his strong commitment to the principles of socialism, if passages like the

following are any indication: ‘‘Socialism was international in theory, but its

internationalism ended at the borders of the West, at the boundaries of Western

civilization. The socialist and syndicalist spoke of liberating humanity, but in practice

they were only interested in Western humanity’’ (1996, 36). This sense of local

solidarity with decolonization movements, expressed by Mariategui in Peru in the

midtwenties, is particularly interesting in light of the suggestion by Mary Louise Pratt

that (with the exception of certain Afro-Caribbean icons) mainstream postcolonial

studies has had difficulty figuring out how to understand Latin America’s relationship

to its overwhelmingly Anglophone canon of writing from Africa and the Indian

subcontinent.6 As Pratt explains, ‘‘When the Americas are brought into the mapping

of the nineteenth century, alongside colonialism and imperialism, a third category of

analysis surges into view: neocolonialism. For of course in the Americas, the

nineteenth century begins not with colonialism but with independence, the break

5. His clearest statement on this point can be found in the opening of the essay ‘‘Anti-ImperialistViewpoint’’ (Mariategui 1996, 130)6. On the question of postcolonial studies’ relationship with Latin American studies, see Mignolo(2000, 105 ff.) and Karem (2001) although, unlike Pratt, these treatments show little interest inthe role of political economy in the discussion.

COMPARATIVE HYBRIDITIES 265

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up of the empires established during the first wave of European imperialism in the

sixteenth century’’ (1994, 4). The introduction of this category of neocolonialism

explains Mariategui’s strong sense of solidarity with parts of the world that were still

officially colonized in the 1920s. He saw a deep similarity in South America’s own

predicament, resulting from the postindependence economic colonization of the

region by British and North American finance.

If Mariategui differed with orthodox Marxists of his time on the importance of

decolonization movements, this was certainly not the only debate in which he took an

independent stand. Other commentators describe his deviations from Marxism as

evidence of the continuing influence of the intellectual hero of his youth, French

philosopher Georges Sorel. But in fact, Mariategui’s relationship to Eurocentric

Marxism is comparable to that of many Latin American intellectuals writing before

and after him in his insistence on at least amending and at most radically revising

Euro-American analytical methods in order to account for crucial local differences.

This revisionist tendency to emphasize the local (in which Garcıa Canclini fully

participates) is a significant trait of this Latin American intellectual history that a

Eurocentric postcolonialism might bypass.7

In what other ways does Mariategui distinguish himself from European Marxism? He

also felt compelled to offer a Peruvian answer on the question of the peasantry’s role

in the international socialist movement. In accordance with his empirical observation

of Peruvian reality, he saw it as impossible to create a revolutionary movement with

an urban proletariat at the forefront, since this class was minuscule in Peru,

especially in comparison to the masses of exploited peasants. Since it was this latter

group that was in the most immediate need of liberation, he argued for their

foundational role in the movement for change*/even if this argument flew in the face

of orthodox theory.8 Also, Mariategui distinguished himself from orthodox Euro-

Marxism in his very conception of the movement of history, which orthodox Marxists

insisted unfolded in a teleological materialist dialectic. While Mariategui did apply a

predominantly materialist conception of history, he was skeptical of easy teleologies.

Thus, Jesus Chavarrıa, his biographer, paraphrases him as saying: ‘‘Human progress

evolves in stages . . . stages that are not entirely linear’’ (Chavarrıa 1979, 86).

The strong connection between Mariategui’s writings and the later work of the

Latin American dependency theorists provides evidence of the longevity of the

Peruvian’s influence in Latin American social thought.9 The dependency theorists

were a group of academics, economists, and intellectuals who addressed issues of

7. See as an excellent example Garcıa Canclini’s homage to*/cum critique of the limitsof*/Bourdieu (Garcıa Canclini 1993b, 17�/9).8. See an elaborated discussion of Mariategui’s argument in Arico (1980, xl�/xliii).9. Becker attempts to outline Mariategui’s influence on leftist revolution in Latin America andthe Caribbean, but scholars have paid too little attention to how his ideas influence the writingsof the region’s intellectuals. This question is one of the more difficult dimensions of thegenerally complicated question of the Mariateguian legacy. Mariategui was an opposition figurein Peru who was persecuted throughout his life but celebrated as a national hero upon his death.Immediately after his funeral, his most adversarial rivals (men whose names are scarcelyremembered) replaced all his closest followers at the head of the political party he helpedfound.

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economic development and had a huge impact on thought in Latin American

intellectual, political, and cultural movements for several decades beginning in the

fifties.10 Dependency theory essentially started as a critique of the classical

conception formulated in the United States in the 1950s of how poorer countries of

the Global South could develop economically. It emphasized the global nature of the

capitalist system in the modern era, strongly rejecting the notion that national

economic policy could lead to the growth and development of a national economy in

the countries of the Third World, which they preferred to refer to as the ‘‘periphery’’

in juxtaposition to the industrialized Western powers which they called the ‘‘core.’’

For the dependency theorists, the relationship between the core and the periphery

was a predetermined relationship riddled with stuctural prejudices that ensured that

there would be no development allowing the poorer countries to catch up with the

metropolitan ones. As in Mariategui, the dependency theorists’ reading of history

understood Latin America’s economic underdevelopment as a condition instilled by

colonialism and imperialism rather than an historical accident or the result of local

policies or the laziness of the ‘‘natives.’’

The dependency theorists, like all the other Latin American intellectuals I have

mentioned so far, can be understood as critics of Eurocentrism in the discourse of the

United States and other Western powers. But they are also (along with Mariategui) a

counter to the mestizaje discourse of essayists like Vasconcelos. They approach the

issue of Latin American reality from a perspective of political economy. Consequently,

they also share with the Peruvian a clear sense of their region as neocolonial,

belonging more to Africa and Asia in their economic underdevelopment than to the

West.11

The dependentistas continued the march begun by Mariategui away from a

discourse of race and toward a focus on the problem of unequal development.

Furthermore, dependency theorists had a broad influence on their Latin American

contemporaries across disciplines and walks of life in a way that Mariategui could not.

In this sense, they solidified a trend in Latin American intellectual history begun by

Mariategui and continuing to influence the work of Garcıa Canclini, even if the latter

represents a new and distinct moment in this tradition.

Hybridity in the Work of Nestor Garcıa Canclini

With the Spanish-language publication in 1991 of Garcıa Canclini’s Culturas hıbridas:

estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad , Latin American and North American

terminology for describing a particular postmodern phenomenon began to coincide.

However, Garcıa Canclini remains in conversation with the Mariategui tradition that I

10. For overviews and general discussions of the movement see Chilcote (1974), Palma (1978),and Lindstrom (1991). Also see Aboul-Ela (1998) for a discussion of dependency theory’sinfluence outside the region.11. See Dos Santo (1971) in comparison with Mariategui’s previously mentioned ‘‘Outline of theEconomic Evolution’’ for a clear illustration of the latter’s prominent influence on thedependentista school of thought. It is just such parallels which inspire Lindstrom to describeMariategui’s work as ‘‘avant la lettre dependency analysis’’ (1991, 118).

COMPARATIVE HYBRIDITIES 267

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have been tracing in this essay, as I shall demonstrate in this brief discussion of his

work. In reading Garcıa Canclini’s book we realize that his use of the Spanish word for

‘‘hybridity’’ (‘‘hibridacion ’’) only partially designates the ‘‘hybridity’’ of U.S.-based

theorists of postcoloniality. Garcıa Canclini still owes much to a Latin American

intellectual tradition which he seeks to push forward, even though he no longer uses

the same term*/mestizaje*/employed by Vasconcelos, Martı, and others. Garcıa

Canclini delineates his terminological preference in a note in the book’s introduction:

‘‘Occasional mention will be made of the terms syncretism, mestizaje, and others

used to designate processes of hybridization. I prefer this last term because it

includes diverse intercultural mixtures*/not only the racial ones to which mestizaje

tends to be limited*/and because it permits the inclusion of the modern forms of

hybridization better than does ‘syncretism,’ a term that almost always refers to

religious fusions or traditional symbolic movements’’ (1995, 11 n.1). For Garcıa

Canclini, the poles being mixed or hybridized are not racial or even purely cultural.

Diverse networks of hybridizations criss-cross in his analyses, but primary among

these intersections is the mixture of the traditional and the modern. Coming to Garcıa

Canclini from the postcolonialist discourse of hybridity often leads readers to ask why

he is even bothering with the loaded terms ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘modern’’ and why he

cannot merely acknowledge a la Bruno Latour that Latin America, like the rest of us,

was ‘‘never modern.’’ It is clear, though, once he is recontextualized as a thinker

operating between the work of a Bourdieu and that of a Latin American intellectuals

discussed here that Garcıa Canclini does not view the terms ‘‘traditional’’ and

‘‘modern’’ as evaluative since he is operating within the semantic field I described in

the section above, and this discourse presumes a thoroughgoing suspicion of the

benefits of modernization. Strictly speaking, these are not temporal categories, since

the author argues for a continuation*/even evolution*/of the ‘‘traditional’’ alongside

the emergence of the ‘‘modern.’’

These categories carry more economic resonance here than they might for Garcıa

Canclini’s fellow social theorists to the North, even though he refuses to ignore

complications glossed over by earlier and more monolithic Latin American theories. In

the following introductory passage, we see the full complexity of the dynamic that

Garcıa Canclini will set out to examine, just as we see both his relationship to earlier

discourses and the singularity of his own vision.

Neither the ‘paradigm’ of imitation, nor that of originality, nor the ‘theory’that attributes everything to dependency, nor the one that lazily wants toexplain us by the ‘marvelously real’ or a Latin American surrealism, are ableto account for our hybrid cultures.

It is a question of seeing how, within the crisis of Western modernity*/ofwhich Latin America is a part*/the relations among tradition, culturalmodernism, and socio-economic modernization are transformed. For that, itis necessary to go beyond the philosophical speculation and aestheticintuitionism that dominate the postmodern bibliography. The scarcity ofempirical studies on the place of culture in so-called postmodern processeshas resulted in a relapse into distortions of premodern thought: constructingideal positions without any real difference. (6)

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Garcıa Canclini is distancing himself from the dependentistas of the seventies in

this passage, but it is not their attention to the political economy of development

that he finds faulty. Garcıa Canclini objects to an overly theorized approach to Latin

American problems that must efface contradictions in the matter it analyzes. Clearly,

he also believes that local intellectuals who translated the work of Mariategui and

dependency theory to the study of Latin American culture did so in an overly facile

manner. These aspects of his argument are illustrated in the following passage.

The analysis presented in this book does not allow the establishment ofmechanical relations between economic and cultural modernization. Nordoes it allow this process to be read as one of simple backwardness–althoughit is, in part, with respect to the international conditions of development.This unsatisfactory modernization has to be interpreted in interaction withpersistent tradition. (266)

If Garcıa Canclini’s respect for dependency theory is qualified, his view of the

usefulness of Euro-American cultural theory*/of the discourse of postmodernism, the

magically real, Latin American master narratives, and even certain discussions of

hybridity itself*/is equally qualified. Thus, in the same passage quoted above, he

dismisses not only an overreliance on dependency as a foundation for explaining Latin

American reality, but also criticizes the ‘‘philosophical speculation and aesthetic

intuitionism that dominate the postmodern bibliography.’’12 Both approaches suffer

from an overtheorization of phenomena that do not often lend themselves to

monolithic explanations.

Garcıa Canclini emerges from his study a paradoxical figure: an empirical

theoretician. The matter he analyzes lends itself to this approach since Latin

American culture is neither completely dependent nor completely premodern.

Rather, it is unequally developed, containing both traditional elements (folklore,

‘‘crafts’’) and avant-garde, postmodern elements (the novels of Gabriel Garcıa

Marquez and Carlos Fuentes). Garcıa Canclini’s study seeks to take up these

contradictions in all their complexity. He emphasizes market forces in the arts and

critiques definitional arguments (e.g., the distinction between ‘‘arts’’ and ‘‘crafts’’)

which no longer adequately explain cultural realities. High postmodernism may

overlap with popular culture, in North America when The Name of the Rose becomes

a best seller and puts Umberto Eco on the cover of Newsweek , or in Latin America

when poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz signs an exclusive deal with the Mexican

television network Televisa. Garcıa Canclini builds on the work of his previous book

(1993b) by focusing on the Mexican ‘‘craft’’ industry. Pottery, statuettes, and other

traditional media may signify differently to different audiences at the same time,

with each group partially grasping different essences of the craftwork phenomenon.

For the North American tourist or even the museum curator in the United States, the

12. Garcıa Canclini comments on the distinction between his approach in Culturas hıbridas andthe North American postmodernist method in an interview with Patrick Murphy (Murphy 1997,86�/7). In this comment one particularly sees the emphasis on a distinctness of Latin America’slocal situation that I traced in the previous section of this essay as it develops in the work ofother Latin American intellectuals.

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traditional form represents a reassuring image of Mexico’s antiquity and back-

wardness, while the government of a Latin American country may unabashedly

promote traditional forms as a gesture toward a monolithic, imaginary cultural

nationalism. The North American interpretation may be critiqued by a dependen-

tista , while the state promotion of the traditional would readily be deconstructed by

a theoretician of the postmodern. For Garcıa Canclini, both groups are missing the

fact that these forms continue to evolve, have power, and do cultural work among

large groups of Latin Americans generally ignored by theoreticians of whatever

predilection or national origin.

Garcıa Canclini is working out of a Latin American intellectual tradition that he would

clearly like to make more flexible and more open to certain outside influences. At the

same time, his skepticism toward the ‘‘bibliography of postmodernism’’ and other

attempts to create elegant contemporary essentialisms about Latin America suggest

that those commentators in Spanish who attempt to exaggerate the extent to which he

absorbs influence from European and U.S. cultural theory have contextualized Garcıa

Canclini incorrectly. In other words, the attempt to view him as a translator of Euro-U.S.

cultural theory into the Latin American context misses the extent to which he both

builds on earlier Spanish-American discourses of dividedness and critiques the aery

nature of the postmodern theory these commentators associate with him.

The superficial equation of Garcıa Canclini with key figures in Euro-American

postmodernism by his Latin American peers is often complicated by these same

writers’ association of his concept of hybridity with the theory of transculturacion as

elaborated from the late 1960s to the early 1980s by Argentine literary critic Angel

Rama (see n. 1). The comparison to Rama, a contemporary of the dependentistas and

(like Garcıa Canclini) an anthropologist from the Southern Cone, in fact suggests how

unlikely it is that Garcıa Canclini is unaware of the roots of his ideas in Latin American

intellectual discourse, as some Latin American critics have suggested. This is

particularly true since Angel Rama develops the notion of transculturacion via an

exhaustive overview of the recent novelistic and intellectual traditions of Latin

America, including reference to Mariategui (Rama 1982, 23).13 Abril Trigo traces a

development from Rama’s transculturacion to Garcıa Canclini’s ‘‘hybridity,’’ also

designating the former as having ‘‘reformulated the concept [of transculturation]

within the framework of dependency theory’’ (1996, 101).14 Trigo’s overview of

13. Rama’s concept of transculturacion borrows a term coined by Cuban anthropologistFernando Ortiz and develops other older discussions of a regional split reality, although Ramanarrows the broad category ‘‘reality’’ down to narrative. He argues that novelists make purelyaesthetic choices but that their final product is inevitably reflective of concerns that go beyondan isolated aesthetic realm to reflect realities that are broadly cultural, social, political, andhistorical. Thus, his criticism exemplifies one way that the cultural critic can invoke questions ofpolitical economy without resorting to economic determinism. See also Rama’s earlier LosPoetas Modernistas En El Mercado Economico . Another example of such an awareness ofpolitical economy in cultural criticism is found in Susan Willis’s (1979) use of Latin Americandependency theory to read Faulkner’s The Bear.14. The number of critical discussions of Rama within Latin American studies is large andgrowing. The emphases of these studies are various. For other discussions that emphasize hisconnection to dependency theory, see Lindstrom (1991) and Beverly (1999).

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transculturation as a predecessor to hybridity in the Latin American context fills in a

substantial amount of Latin American intellectual history. Still, the essay concludes

with a brief conflation of the use of hybridity in the work of Garcıa Canclini and in the

work of Homi Bhabha, even though the subject matter analyzed by the former as well

as his terminology make clear that his criticism bears the stamp of Latin American

intellectual history.

In the final sentence of his study, Garcıa Canclini sees the challenge of

understanding modernity from an Americas-based perspective as a question of

‘‘how to be radical without being fundamentalist’’ (281). My understanding of

this formulation is that being radical equates to foregrounding persistent

inequalities, while ‘‘fundamentalism’’ means unwillingness to constantly revise and

update the categories of spatial politics through which inequalities manifest

themselves. From the analysis that has preceded, we might conclude that a corollary

to the question for the author is the issue of how to be theoretical and still be

empirical.

Garcıa Canclini’s work first appeared in English in 1993. In this year, his book

Transforming Modernity appeared in English translation as did an essay entitled

‘‘Memory and Innovation in the Theory of Art.’’ This essay focuses more exclusively on

high art, but otherwise forms a sort of microcosm for the arguments of Hybrid

Cultures . When compared to essays about hybridity by Anglo-Ameican postcoloni-

alists, it also effectively delineates the difference between the use of the term

‘‘hybridity’’ in Latin American and Euro-American theoretical discourses.

Garcıa Canclini begins the essay with a salvo toward the hegemonic critical

discourse of the postmodern theoreticians. ‘‘While, in the realms of economics and

politics, the dominant nations pressure us to integrate modern development*/in

subordinate places, of course*/into art and culture, they prefer our traditional

countenance. In any case, they are fascinated by a certain way of combining the

ancient with the modern that is almost always seen as our incapacity to stop being

primitive’’ (Garcıa Canclini 1993a, 424). He goes on to critique the idea (which he

points out is sometimes even propagated by Latin American voices of officialdom as

well as Eurocentric critics) that the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘traditional’’ pole in Latin

American art is a changeless realm that does not experience the dynamism of history.

Garcıa Canclini wishes to propose a heightened occurrence of hybridity in Latin

America due to its historical experience: ‘‘The multi-temporal heterogeneity present

in Latin American culture is the consequence of a history in which modernization

scarcely ever completely succeeded in substituting itself for the traditional and the

ancient. There were ruptures provoked by industrial development and urbanization;

although they occurred after similar ones occurred in Europe, these ruptures were

more accelerated’’ (429).

At the same time, Garcıa Canclini not only sees Latin American hybridity as the

product of the region’s particular cultural, political, and economic history, but also

sees the phenomenon as continuing to change with history in both the traditional and

the modern dimensions being hybridized. Thus, he criticizes those commentators for

whom traditional expressions are ‘‘in no sense . . . seen as part of social organization

much less as sources of new production’’ (428). Working within the Latin American

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intellectual tradition but aware of Anglo-European discourse, Garcıa Canclini’s

discussion of hybridity is more informed by development categories than by racial

or semiotic/linguistic ones. While he never allows any of the terms that he puts into

play to become static, neither does he celebrate fluidity for its own sake. Rather, he

regularly reinvokes concrete issues relating to underdevelopment, traditionalism, and

Eurocentrism.

Hybridity in Anglo-American Postcolonialism

While Garcıa Canclini’s discussion of hybridity is interfacing with the Latin American

intellectual tradition I have delineated, much postcolonial theory has used the term

as part of a discourse springing from a very different source*/namely, the

‘‘postmodern bibliography’’ of semiotics, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis.15

For example, Robert Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity, Theory, Culture and Race

describes one of the term’s origins in its contemporary use by drawing a line back to

racial theories of Victorian England. While Young’s analysis is intelligent and

meticulous, its emphases locate the center of the colonial project in the mind of

the colonizer, as does much of postcolonial theory. Just such a centering is suggested

by Young’s opening which uses a cultural text to illustrate the colonizer’s

psychological reaction to the specter of mixed ‘‘race’’ procreation. The author,

recalling being enraptured as a boy by the lush orientalism of the film South Pacific ,

comments, ‘‘I had seen the film as a child but not understood its plot turned around

the question of children’’ (1995, xi). Young points out a doubling in the two romances

that make up the story. At approximately the same moment in the film, each of these

romances is threatened by an irrational fear of mixed race children: first, when

Ensign Nellie Forbush of Little Rock discovers to her horror the half-Polynesian

children that the romantic Frenchman Emile de Becque has fathered, and later when

Bloody Mary, the mother of Lt. Joseph Cable’s Polynesian sweetheart, talks to Cable

of a day in the future when he will father children by her daughter. Young’s preface

reads this dimension of the film as a portrait of the tension between desire for

‘‘exotic’’ sexual pleasure and antipathy toward interracial procreation that plagues

over a century of Anglo-European colonial ambitions.

Young’s reading provides not only insight into an enduringly popular*/albeit

orientalizing*/musical; it also prepares the reader for his survey of the psychosexual

underpinnings grounding the term ‘‘hybridity’’ as it emerges out of Victorian racialist

and colonialist thought. Such a study is very much in the mainstream of the large

‘‘empire studies’’ wing of Anglo-American postcolonialism. As such, it manifests the

basic prejudices of this critical school. South Pacific , even in its very orientalism,

becomes a story of Westerners confronting their prejudices. The Polynesian islands

(and their inhabitants) play the role of ‘‘an exotic locale in which [the Western

subject’s] own spiritual problems . . . can be addressed and therapeutically treated,’’

as Said famously describes Camus’s Algeria (Said 1993, 183).

15. For hybridity’s centrality as a concept in mainstream postcolonial studies, see Beverly (1999,86) and Ashcroft et al. (1995, 183�/4).

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In addition to this prefatory reading of South Pacific and his more extensive

analysis of Victorian race theory, Young also sheds light on the roots of ‘‘hybridity’’ in

theories of language by briefly describing its relationship to Bakhtin’s notion of

linguistic heterogeneity. He then brings the discourse up to the present day by

describing Homi Bhabha’s appropriation of Bakhtin in postcolonial discourse. ‘‘Homi

K. Bhabha has shifted this subversion of authority through hybridization to the

dialogical situation of colonialism, where it describes a process that ‘reveals the

ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority.’ For Bhabha,

hybridity becomes the moment in which the discourse of colonial authority loses its

univocal grip on meaning and finds itself open to trace complex movements of

disarming alterity in the colonial text’’ (Young 1995, 22).

Bhabha begins his essay, ‘‘The Commitment to Theory,’’ by complaining that

committed criticism is always forced into choosing between a binarism of politics and

theory. Bhabha rejects this binary almost explicitly on the grounds that it is a binary:

‘‘Must we always polarize in order to polemicize?’’ (1994, 19). He refers in passing to

the imperialist nature of contemporary global capitalism and to national struggles

against histories of domination. But he expresses concern that black and white

understandings of such problems have led to a prejudiced view of Western critical

theory and its role in this global polysystem. ‘‘What does demand further discussion is

whether the ‘new’ languages of theoretical critique (semiotic, poststructuralist,

deconstructionist and the rest) simply reflect those geopolitical divisions and their

spheres of influence. Are the interests of ‘Western’ theory necessarily collusive with

the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc?’’ (20).

On the contrary, Bhabha argues, deploying theory has many of the possibilities of

resistance contained in nationalist struggles of independence. Through the very title

of the essay, he sets forth a challenge to the traditional binarism between action and

reflection in discussions of activism and commitment. For Bhabha, theory is one of

the most viable forms of commitment, because it is a commitment without the

potentially totalizing nationalist consequences. ‘‘I want to take my stand,’’ he

declares, ‘‘on the shifting margins of cultural displacement*/that confounds any

profound or ‘authentic’ sense of a ‘national’ culture or an ‘organic’ intellectual*/and

ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once the

cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic

place of departure’’ (21).

Bhabha makes two important moves as his argument continues to develop. First, he

refers to John Stuart Mill, whose ‘‘On Liberty’’ he finds useful, primarily because it

understands politics as rhetoric by defining ‘‘political judgement as the problem of

finding a form of public rhetoric able to represent different and opposing political

‘contents’ not as a priori preconstituted principles but as a dialogical discursive

exchange’’ (23). Thus, the disagreeable aspects of a less theorized notion of politics

(nationalism, perhaps even atavism) are subverted through an understanding of

politics as discourse*/contested and fluid. Theory, by deconstructing binarisms,

allows for a challenging of the representational truisms about the subaltern subject

that create a particular type of domination.

At the same time, Bhabha acknowledges that this has not always been the type of

work that theory has done. Rather, the prevalence of an Other as a point of

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departure (‘‘Montesquieu’s Turkish Despot, Barthes’s Japan, Kristeva’s China,

Derrida’s Nambikwara Indians, Lyotard’s Cashinahua pagans’’ [31]) proves a

commonplace among Bhabha’s theoretical predecessors.

However impeccably the content of an ‘other’ culture may be known,however anti-ethnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as theclosure of grand theories, the demand that, in analytical terms, it bealways the good object of knowledge, the docile body difference, thatreproduces a relation of domination and is the most serious indictment ofthe institutional powers of critical theory.There is, however, a distinction to be made between the institutionalhistory of critical theory and its conceptual potential for change andinnovation. (31; my emphasis)

It is this distinction which allows Bhabha to see theory as empowering. Only through

theory and the politics of representation can we engage in the location of culture,

rather than allow ourselves passively to be presented with its location.

This essay demonstrates Robert Young’s point that language theory is the primary

semantic field in which Bhabha operates. Both his reference to Mill’s equation of

politics and discourse and his list of logocentric theoreticians who engage in the

locating of cultures show as much. Culture is almost always discussed in this essay

in terms of language, utterance, enunciation, and textuality.

Also, poststructuralism’s particular take on linguistic issues inspires Bhabha to display

a relentless commitment to the breaking down of binaries. Finding and celebrating in-

between, interstitial, hybrid spaces is the essence of cultural resistance here. The

essay’s concluding passage exemplifies these two characteristics.

A willingness to descend into that alien territory*/where I have ledyou*/may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space ofenunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture,based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures,but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that endwe should remember that it is the ‘inter’*/the cutting edge of translationand negotiation, the in-between space*/that carries the burden of themeaning of culture. (38)

In his very poststructuralist emphasis on in-between spaces, Bhabha’s contrast with

Garcıa Canclini crystallizes. For Bhabha, not being fundamentalist is the same thing as

being radical.

Anthony Easthope has challenged the philosophical viability of Bhabha’s emphasis on

hybridity, suggesting that Bhabha ‘‘treats hybridity as a transcendental signified,’’

adding that Bhabha’s emphasis on the term ‘‘remains an act of inversion rather than

deconstruction’’ (1998, 345). But it is Easthope’s critique of the political possibilities of

Bhabha’s theory that most illuminates the distinction between Bhabha’s hybridity and

the term (and its equivalents) as deployed in the Latin American context. Theory may

feel empowering for some but to Easthope, ‘‘No ultra-leftist ‘politics of heterogeneity’

based in a ‘privileging of difference’ can substitute for the possession of state power’’

(346). Similarly useful is Easthope’s questioning of Bhabha’s unwillingness to limit the

scope of hybridity’s application: ‘‘By substituting ‘hybridity’ for ‘difference’ Bhabha

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makes us think we are solidly on the ground of race, ethnicity and colonial identity, but if

the form of his argument is ubiquitous, what special purchase does it have on the

particular content of colonialism? (On this, Bhabha is a long way from Said, whose

analysis of colonialism at every point indicates a historically specific content)’’ (344).

Not only does this universalization contrast with Said, but it also draws a marked

distinction from the insistence on local specificity (no matter how global the question)

that we have seen Latin American intellectuals*/from El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all the

way to Garcıa Canclini*/insisting upon.

Elsewhere, Homi Bhabha himself has compared the two semantic fields whose

diverging use of the term ‘‘hybridity’’ I have contrasted in this essay. At one point in

the essay ‘‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,’’ he states that ‘‘the postcolonial

perspective*/as it is being developed by cultural historians and literary theo-

rists*/departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or

‘dependency’ theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalist

or ‘nativist’ pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a

binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at

holistic forms of social explanation’’ (1994, 173). While Bhabha’s critique of ‘‘holistic

forms’’ and master narratives harmonizes with much critical and theoretical practice

after structuralism and clearly exemplifies his commitment to Derrida and French

poststructuralism, it should be clear at this point in my essay that his reference to

dependency theory is a straw man. Set aside for a moment Bhabha’s circumvention of

the fact that theories of ‘‘underdevelopment’’ and ‘‘dependency’’ were in the first

instance economic theories. While the terms themselves may sound vaguely

condescending, surely there is no advantage in pretending economic inequalities do

not exist. Even so, one is hard pressed to find a thinker among the Latin American

intellectuals I have discussed who limited his analysis to asserting a straightforward

binary opposition between the core and the periphery.

Certainly, a contemporary thinker like Garcıa Canclini, who has read dependency

theory and has no compunction about deploying much of its language, is not

restricting himself to global binarisms. Neither does he allow his sensitivity to

interstices and fluidity to keep him from focusing on the unequal material

circumstances of the postcolonial world. On the contrary, we find Garcıa Canclini

making a statement about hybridity that we could never imagine Homi Bhabha

accepting: ‘‘The hybrid is almost never something indeterminate because there

are different historical forms of hybridization’’ (Garcıa Canclini 1995b, 79). On

the other hand, postcolonialism’s commitment to linguistics has allowed it to efface

the role unequal development plays in the hybridization of postcolonial societies.

Both Easthope and Young describe Bhabha as deploying the linguistic theories of M.

M. Bakhtin in reading postcolonial culture, but the connection to Bakhtin does not

seem to be based on textual reference.16 In The Location of Culture Bakhtin is

16. Compare Rita de Grandis’s tracing of Garcıa Canclini’s use of the term ‘‘hybridity’’ back toBakhtin, which is consistent with the Latin Americanist association of Garcıa Canclini and Euro-American postmodernism discussed in the previous section of this essay. As in Young’s andEasthope’s readings of Bhabha, de Grandis admits that her reading is not based on any directreference to Bakhtin by Garcıa Canclini (de Grandis 1997, 46).

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referred to at the beginning of the eighth and at the end of the ninth essays, but if we

take the example of the former (an essay entitled ‘‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative

and the Margins of the Modern Nation’’), the brief references to Bakhtin are made in a

seven-page section which refers with equal attentiveness to Jacques Derrida, John

Berger, Fredric Jameson, Julia Kristeva, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, Edward

Said, Partha Chatterjee, Ernest Gellner, Louis Althusser, John Barrell, Houston Baker,

Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, and Johann Wolfgang van Goethe. Obviously, Bhabha

is not particularly interested in historicizing any one of these thinkers, nor is his goal

to make fine distinctions between them in working out what each really believed.

Rather, Bhabha sees himself entering into a conversation, participating in a sort of

communal discussion of theory, a discussion in which Derrida, Kristeva, and Lacan

play perhaps the most important parts, aside from Bhabha’s own role as the shaper of

the discussion he engenders. Bhabha’s thought roots itself firmly in the dimension of

discourse that French poststructuralism virtually locks him into. Is it not ironic that

Bhabha’s discussion of the hemispheric South would be almost totally inscribed in

theoretical categories derived from French poststructuralism, while Nestor Garcıa

Canclini would be seen by so many of his Latin American critics as too Westernized in

spite of his clear affinities with aspects of Latin America’s own intellectual history?

The point is not that too many of Bhabha’s citations are to Euro-Americans. Although

he is often considered part of an exclusive group of founders of postcolonialism

including himself, Said, and Gayatri Spivak, he contrasts with Said in the way he

dismisses Gramsci (see his previously quoted circumvention of the ‘‘organic

intellectual’’) and with Spivak, who regularly declares her (admittedly hybridized)

commitment to Marxism.17 Bhabha’s primary commitment is not just to theory, but to

a theory of language, which he seems to believe can do almost anything.

Conclusion

In a recent interview Garcıa Canclini makes the following contrast between the

disciplines of cultural studies in the United States and in Latin America: ‘‘Latin

American work is more preoccupied with the social base of cultural processes, and of

course, this has a lot to do with its emergence out of anthropology and sociology;

whereas, in the United States and in other places . . . there is more of a connection to

the humanities and so studies appear more concerned with texts than with social

processes’’ (Murphy 1997, 81). In some ways, his remarks about contrasting methods

on opposite sides of the U.S./Mexico border parallel the observations of a Chicana

17. A potential qualification to this distinction of Bhabha from Said and Spivak might be found inBhabha’s regular reference to and discussion of Frantz Fanon. But this exception actually provesthe rule when we consider Bhabha’s hyperemphasis on Fanon as a theorist of the psychoanalyticsof race to the systematic neglect of him as advocate of Marxist Third World liberationmovements (see Moore-Gilbert 1997, 144�/8; Lazarus 1997, 40�/3). The recent publication of abook by Robert Young (2001) that historicizes postcolonialism with particular emphasis on ThirdWorld (or tricontinental in his terms) Marxist thinkers diverges from the intellectual genealogieshe describes in his earlier discussions of postcolonial theory and suggests a very recent trajectorycomparable to those of Said and Spivak.

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activist involved in attempting to bring together women’s groups on opposite sides of

the border: ‘‘Chicanas and Latinas in the United States have focused on questions of

race and ethnicity while Mexicanas have focused on class issues and survival’’ (Carrillo

1998, 394). In both quotations, Latin Americans working in Latin America insist on

methods that maintain a heightened awareness of material inequalities. Bhabha’s

hybrid is certainly about much more than simply race and ethnicity. Yet, he conceives

of the term as a method that can understand colonial discourse even as it

deemphasizes colonialism’s concrete histories, structures, and economics.

Intellectuals of the Global South, however, consistently emphasize the material

inequalities inherent in the discourse and the institutions of colonialism. Their

potential contribution to North American and European discussions of postcolonialism

in particular, cultural studies and Marxism, more generally, will become even more

significant as Marxist and cultural studies criticism increasingly turns its attention to

discussions of ‘‘globalization.’’ It is beyond the scope of this essay to analyze the

explosion of commentary on this topic. Yet by way of conclusion I might call attention

to the very different directions pointed to by recent comments on the topic of

globalization by Jameson, Hardt and Negri, on the one hand, and Samir Amin, on the

other. While the former group finds thinkers like Hegel and Machiavelli essential to

the understanding of contemporary processes of globalization, Amin argues that the

very centering of Europe’s philosophical canon is a result of the emergence of

capitalism and that Marxism’s own Eurocentrism can only be circumvented through an

emphasis on ‘‘the universal dimension of historical materialism’’ (xiii). Furthermore,

within postcolonial studies itself, the role of intellectuals from the Global South is

still contested and fluid, as Young’s (2001) recent revisionary history suggests.18

Postcolonialists may indeed have their attention called back to the importance of a

vision based on a universalist materialist understanding of colonialism’s history and

legacy.

This reminds me of a scene in South Pacific not mentioned by Young. When three

American officers corner Emile de Becque and try to persuade him to change his mind

about helping the United States on a dangerous spying mission, a frustrated Joseph

Cable resorts to impugning him as selfish and irresponsible. The Frenchman’s

response is indignant: ‘‘I was exiled from my home and came to this island as a

young man. Since that time I have asked for help from no one . . . I have asked for help

from no country.’’ The Americans all accept his narrative of self-made manhood, as

though French and other European colonies were places in which there was no

systemic subjugation of the locals by the colonial economy, allowing even an exiled

Frenchman a level of race privilege that guaranteed his economic success. Rodgers

and Hammerstein wrote musicals for a living, and they probably perceived (at some

level) a far better possibility of their own economic success by authoring a play whose

plot turned on the question of interracial sex and systematically veiled the racist and

patriarchal operations of the colonial economy. Thus, South Pacific , like many

Orientalist narratives, camouflages the systemic racism of colonial economies by

focusing instead on the racist preconceptions of particular individuals. While we

18. See note 17.

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might expect as much from a 1950s Hollywood musical, the tendency to suppress the

workings of the colonial economy in contemporary postcolonialism is both surprising

and discouraging and should lead to a revision of postcolonial studies that works

harder to incorporate intellectual histories of the Global South.

Acknowledgements

This article greatly benefited from suggestions by Margot Backus, David Mazella,

David F. Ruccio, Sabina Sawhney, and Peter Tamas. All errors are my own.

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