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Article Excerpt
IN HER ESSAY TITLED "'BORDER' STUDIES" THE INTERSECTION OF GENDER AND COLOR," Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo/Sioux/Lebanese) describes the road to self-determination for oppressed peoples: "The way to liberation from oppression is to focus on one's own interests, creativity, concerns, and community" (1995: 43). Self-determination, the right of a community of people to determine their own political, economic, and cultural systems, continues to be of primary concern for many American Indians, and this concern is clearly reflected in contemporary American Indian art. In its mission statement, Atlatl, a national organization established in 1977 to support indigenous artists of the Americas, states that it "promotes the vitality of contemporary Native American art through self-determination in cultural expression" (www.atlatl.org). Atlatl's objective reflects the artistic goals of many contemporary American Indian artists, in which the subject of self-determination is regularly examined and explored. Indeed, American Indian artists working from the 1990s to the present have consistently created politically charged art in an effort to define American Indian culture on its own terms. These artists use a variety of strategies to (re)define their traditions, values, and cultural identities, from celebrating indigenous cultures and values to exploring the meaning of sovereignty and nationhood for Indian peoples within the United States, while exposing institutional oppression that prevents indigenous peoples from achieving their ultimate goal of self-determination. One strategy for self-determination that gained prominence in the 1990s is that of engaging the postcolonial concept of hybridity. In this essay, I will consider the ways in which a key group of contemporary American Indian artists have explored hybridity as a vehicle for the redefinition not only of themselves as individuals, but also of their culture as a whole.
Theories of Hybridity
Renato Rosaldo (1995: xi) provides a useful definition of hybridity: "Hybridity can be understood as the ongoing condition of all human cultures, which contain no zones of purity because they undergo continuous processes of transculturation (two-way borrowing and lending between cultures)." Robert Young (1995) historicizes the term in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, explaining that the concept of hybridity was firmly established in the 19th century to describe miscegenation and the creolization of language. Hybridization became the concern of biologists, sociologists, and anthropologists alike, in which nomenclature such as syncretism in religion, fusion in music, and creolization of language was employed to describe specific types of cultural contact. But Young (Ibid.: 5) points out that terms such as syncretism and creolization do not adequately consider cultural contact as a process of "interaction and counter-interaction" between dominant and traditional cultures because they tend to emphasize assimilation into the dominant culture or the continued isolation of traditional cultural groups. Similarly, in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Nestor Garcia Canclini (1995: xxxiv) explains that these terms "are generally used to refer to traditional processes or to the survival of premodern customs and forms of thought in the early modern period." This limitation is significant for Garcia Canclini, who is specifically concerned with the meeting of cultures at the marketplace and under the constraints of the culture industry. For this reason, Garcia Canclini (Ibid.) believes that "the word hybridization seems more ductile for the purpose of naming not only the mixing of ethnic or religious elements but the productions of advanced technologies and modern or postmodern social processes."
In Hybridity and Its Discontents, Avtar Brah and Annie Coombes (2000: 1) recognize the now pervasiveness of hybridity as a "key concept in cultural criticism, in post-colonial studies, in debates about cultural contestation and appropriation, and in relation to the concept of the border and the ideal of cosmopolitanism." Not surprisingly, the pervasive use of hybridity in postcolonial discourse has yielded competing definitions and applications of the term. For example, in The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (1994: 36-39) uses hybridity to describe cultural contact between the colonizer and the colonized that yields an interdependent relationship between the two, creating a "third space of enunciation," by which he means a space that negates the dominance of the colonizer and allows the colonized to "emerge as the others of our selves." Negotiating this third space of enunciation, the hybrid subject neither becomes the colonizer nor remains the colonized, but emerges as "neither the One ... nor the Other ... but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both" (Ibid.: 13). John Kraniauskas (2000:241) challenges the limitations to Bhabha's use of hybridity because he believes it does not adequately allow for agency and thus "undermines any attempt at narrative closure or cultural self-constitution on the part of the subject." He contrasts Bhabha's construct of hybridity, grounded in psychoanalytical and literary theory, with Garcia Canclini's anthropological and sociological approach (Ibid.: 235-256). Kraniauskas credits Garcia Canclini with reading cultural hybridity politically, providing "intellectual resources" for "'taking charge of' the more recent configurations of modernity" (Ibid.: 249). Indeed, one of the most consistent and compelling critiques of hybridity has been what Brah and Coombes (2000: 1) describe as its "uncritical celebration of the traces of cultural syncretism which assumes a symbiotic relationship without paying attention to economic, political, and social inequalities."
In spite of its discontents, the postcolonial concept of hybridity has been widely utilized in discussions of cultural exchange between European Americans and oppressed peoples throughout the Americas. Garcia Canclini (1995) has focused on the process of hybridization in Latin America. Similarly, Gloria Anzaldua (2002:...
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