On hybridity, the politics of knowledge production and critical language studies

Silvia Cusicanqui provides an incisive critique of the ironic appropriation of radical scholarly thinking grounded in local political concerns by ‘first world’ centers of theoretical production and their subsequent reification. Underlying her argument is a sense of deep disquiet and trenchant critique of theoretical sophistry that renders critique apolitical and irrelevant. In this brief response I begin by critiquing the notion of hybridity – because it resonates with a postmodernist wave in current language scholarship – which was once a key concern in postcolonial theory; the futility of trying to find an analytical position outside the legacies of modernity and the enlightenment; and a reflection on the implications of both these positions to critical language studies. By critical language studies I particularly mean those branches of socio-linguistics that engage with a range of sociopolitical concerns such as power, ideology and gender. I first encountered and experienced a sense of disquiet about the theorization of hybridity in the 1990s as a young undergraduate. In the 1990s, the big name in postcolonial studies was Homi Bhabha and his framework of hybridity (Bhabha, 1990, 2004). As a young scholar attempting to come to terms with the complexities of ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka, the paradigm of hybridity seemed to offer exciting theoretical and political possibilities. However, when I began to apply hybridity, even at the level of textual analysis, I found myself struggling. How could hybridity, for instance, critically respond to the politics of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka whose struggle for selfhood was built upon a notion of cultural and historical self-hood which could be conceptually undermined through an anti-essentialist argument informed by hybridity? Or how could the postmodern relativity that informed hybridity (Bhabha, 1990, 2004; Young, 1990, 2001) respond to the arguments marshalled by majoritarian Sinhala nationalists that if all frameworks of knowledge are relative, why could not there be a nativist or indigenous framework through which Sri Lanka could be understood – which by default means a Sinhala majoritarian worldview? Hybridity and the dominant discourse of postcolonial studies (Ashcroft, 2002; Bhabha, 1990, 2004; Young, 1990,