Community-Based Service Provision and Indigenous self-determination

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Hybridity: exploiting the gap between discourse and reality

For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “Third Space” which enables other positions to emerge. This Third Space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom (Bhabha, 1994c: 211).
In this comment, Bhabha (1994c) discusses how the hybridisation of Oriental and Occidental culture enables other positions to emerge. He suggests that these ‘other positions’ are the product of the gap between colonial discourse and reality. Prior to detailing how these ‘other positions’ can be mobilised by Indigenous peoples to destabilise the West’s hegemony, I will examine the concept of hybridity. Hybridity refers to the way in which “colonial/neocolonial discourse is inherently unstable, ‘split’ in its ‘enunciation’, so that ‘in the very practice of domination the language of the master becomes hybrid’” (Bhabha, 1994a: 33 in Kapoor, 2008). More succinctly stated, hybridity details how cross-cultural exchanges destabilise the absolute cultural categories that are proliferated through colonial discourse. Hybridity is able to reveal the instability of colonial discourse because it interprets cultures as inherently unstable, with “colonial identities – on both sides of the divide … agonised, and in constant flux” (Loomba, 2005: 149). In doing so, hybridity reveals the constructedness of the West’s positional superiority and the ways that its ascendancy can be destabilised.
The concept of hybridity reveals the constructedness of colonial discourse because it is able to demonstrate how the colonial encounter fundamentally alters both colonised and coloniser. Bhabha (1985) uses the case study of the ‘vegetarian Bible’ to affirm this claim. The case study of the vegetarian Bible details how a group of Indian villagers outside of Delhi resisted religious conversion on the grounds that the word of God could not come from the mouth of a meat-eater. Consequently, they demand an ‘Indianised Gospel’ that hybridises Hinduism and Christianity. Bhabha (1985, 160) argues that when the Indian villagers demand an Indianised Gospel they are using hybridity to:
Put the project of conversion in an impossible position. Any adaptation of the Bible was forbidden by the evidences of Christianity … When they make these intercultural, hybrid demands, the natives are both challenging the boundaries of discourse and subtly changing its terms by setting up another specifically colonial space of power/knowledge (Bhabha, 1985: 160).
In the preceding quote, Bhabha (1985) reveals how the hybridisation of cultures that occurs as a result of the colonial encounter between a group of Indian villagers and a British catechist displaces the absolute cultural categories on which imperial authority is founded. Consequently, the encounter between the catechist and villagers was not just “an exchange between a muscular colonial Christianity that was keen to convert and an Indigenous tradition that resisted conversion,” but a colonial antagonism that produces a supplementary discourse (Bhabha, 1995: 114). By producing a supplementary discourse, the Indian villagers reveal the constructedness of the absolute cultural categories that are central to colonial discourse. Within a post-colonial context the concept of hybridity could contribute to Indigenous self-determination because it is explicitly concerned with destabilising the West’s hegemony from within its own discourse.
Kapoor (2008: 121) argues that the strength of hybridity resides in its ability to negotiate “polarisation without acceding to (its) foundational claims.” In his comment, Kapoor (2008) argues that compared to other critiques of colonisation, the cogency of hybridity resides in its ability to destabilise colonial discourse without responding to the superior/inferior binary that is central to imperial authority. Empirical evidence suggests that tactics which respond to superior/inferior binaries affirm colonial discourse because they force Indigenous populations into fixed identities that leave them susceptible to being assigned with a ‘repressive authenticity’ – that is, an identity which is only considered as legitimate if it conforms to caveats defined by the coloniser/settler state
(Wolfe, 1999). Implications within a post-colonial context are significant, with Banerjee and Linstead (2004: 230) arguing that:
The construction of authenticity along with its binary opposite of the inauthentic indigene has both genetic and cultural applications – the anthropological obsession with the ‘full blood Aborigine’ is an example of the former and identity politics surrounding current discourses of indigenous land rights of the latter.
In the preceding quote, Banerjee and Linstead (2004) reveal how responding to binaries affirms the West’s hegemony because it forces Indigenous populations to conform to categories that are defined by the coloniser. Consequently, the ‘authentic’ Indigene is defined in accordance with Western, as opposed to Indigenous understandings of indigeneity.
Increasingly, understandings of ‘Indigenous’ as an oppositional construct to ‘non- Indigenous’ are being abandoned in favour of more nuanced, contextualised and hybridised forms of indigeneity (Merlan, 2009). Weaver (2000: 221 in Escárcega, 2010: 21-22) argues that “Indigeneity weaves not only ideas such as race, marginality, imperialism, and identity, but also the ideas of hybridity, essentialism, authenticity, diaspora, and Third and Fourth Worlds.” Within a post-colonial context, these understandings of indigeneity can contribute to Indigenous self-determination because they reveal that the instability of colonial discourse creates opportunities for Indigenes to destabilise the West’s hegemony. Postcolonial notions of hybridity provide geographers with a conceptual lens that can be utilised to deconstruct asymmetrical power relations between Indigenous and post-settler populations because it reveals that the gap between colonial discourse and reality opens a Third Space. The Third Space refers to an ‘in-between’ space that straddles the divide between coloniser and colonised. It enables other positions to emerge because it opens alternative paradigms of ‘knowing’ by transcending existing categories and narratives (Bhabha, 1994c). It achieves this by displacing the cultural categories from which it emerges. In section 2.3 I will demonstrate the ways that these supplementary positions can be used to destabilise the West’s hegemony.

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Chapter 1: Introduction: Community-Based Service Provision and Indigenous self-determination
1.1 Research rationale, research question and objectives
1.2 The Pākanae Water Supply, Hokianga, New Zealand
1.3 Deconstructing Community-Based Service Provision
Chapter 2: Postcolonial Theory
2.0 Introduction
2.1 An anxious endeavour: (re-)constructing the Other
2.2 Exposing the ambivalence of the West
2.3 Reimagining geographic practice through the Third Space
2.4 Conclusion
Chapter 3: A Postcolonial Critique of Community-Based Service Provision
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Neoliberal Environmental Governance
3.2 The Ambivalence of Devolution
3.3 Community Based Service Provision
3.4 Conclusion
Chapter 4: Methodological and Contextual Framework
4.0 Introduction8
4.1 Research and Indigenous People
4.2 The Qualitative Approach and Discourse Analysis
4.3 National Context
4.4 Regional Context
4.5 Local Context .
4.6 Conclusion
Chapter 5: Examining the influences on the Pākanae water supply
Chapter 6: Postcolonial Insights into the Pākanae Water Supply
Chapter 7: Devolution and the Decolonisation of Local Governance