Abstract
Any interdisciplinary effort to conceptualize hybridity or hybridization has to take into consideration potential differences between the disciplines, and this entails not only a reflection on the term’s translation from natural into social sciences, linguistics or the humanities, but also – within the humanities – a recognition of the different fields of literary and cultural studies in which the term was popularized most successfully. Thus, in the first part of my essay, I will briefly reconstruct the emergence of American studies from its inception in the myth and symbol school to the current attempts at dismantling and deconstructing static conceptualizations of “America” by the so-called New Americanists. Thriving on a strong democratic ethos from the very beginning, American studies has aimed at a progressive political function, and hybridity is among the latest entries in its critical vocabulary. Yet, how does the terminology, with its poststructuralist affiliations, fit into such an engaged scholarly agenda? Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (Bhabha 1993) has had, and continues to have, a strong impact on the academic understanding of American society, its contradictory epistemological and political claims, as well as its underlying aesthetic connotations. Comparing Bhabha’s efforts to Wolfgang Iser’s conceptualization of an aesthetic “in-between state” (Iser 1990) in theory of aesthetic response, I will tackle the widely-held critique that Bhabha offers an aesthetic perspective on culture rather than a political one.
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Notes
- 1.
Even though there are interdisciplinary departments like the John F. Kennedy-institute at the FU Berlin that bring in the expertise of different fields, offering their students a varied curricula, American studies by and large is dominated by literary and cultural studies today. Historians specializing in US American history do have a hard time qualifying for jobs in either American studies or history departments, as the former, at least in Germany, tend to focus on aesthetic communications that cannot be neatly reduced to a historical interpretations, whereas history departments seem to be skeptical about this specialization. It is institutional realities like these that will have to be kept in mind in order to not lapse into a blind celebration of interdisciplinarity.
- 2.
A simple indicator for this tendency is the absence of any real aesthetic criteria in the influential reader Critical Terms for Literary Studies, which features entries for race, class, and gender. Apart from the difficulties of defining terms like “art” or “literature”, this lacuna is owed to the fact that questions of aesthetics in cultural criticism have been reduced to the normative value they seem to transport. Art, then, would be nothing but a symptom for boundary maintenance, a representation of (upper-) middle-class decorum. Instead of an aesthetic experience in its own right, there is a return to a collective expressivist line of thought. Alternatively, art and literature are seen as merely another social site of interpellation or subject-constitution. This, as Fluck (Fluck 2002, 84) explains, is the logic behind “representation” as key concept, “the most neutral, the most ‘dehierachized’ term one can find to describe the form in which the object (and its ideology) appear.”
- 3.
In fact, instead of heuristically distinguishing two alternatives, one could read this fuzzy institutional atmosphere as an instance of institutional hybridization. See Schinko (2007) for further thoughts on this institutional complexity.
- 4.
I am well aware of the problematic notion of “America” here, when the reference is solely to the United States. The reason I stick to this politically incorrect labeling is (a) because it is maintained by scholars even when they would criticize US policies or mentalities, and (b) because it is, as semantics and iconography, part of the popular appeal. And “America” is evoked in the founding documents of the discipline, e.g. the early three-volume study Main Currents in American Thought (1927–30) by historian Vernon Parrington, or Constance Rourke’s American Humor. A Study of the American Character (1931).
- 5.
This engaged criticism is one of the reasons cultural studies has been received with quite some delay and reservation in Germany. Here, as Aleida Assmann (1999) argues, the more sober Kulturwissenschaften reacted to the co-optation of scholars in the Third Reich. Seeking to “cool rather than ignite, they ward off rather than encourage political action” – a “barrier against fatal politicization” (91). Evidently, the cultivation of disengagement is a form of engagement in its own right, e.g. one that accepts functional differentiation, and the semi-autonomy of academic discourses, and thus follows a different route where processes of democratization are concerned.
- 6.
The religious overtones in this rhetoric cannot be missed, and in almost every single inauguration speech of American Presidents one of the key metaphors will re-emerge: the “City Upon a Hill” that Puritan settler John Winthrop projected.
- 7.
The seminal work here is Bercovitch and Jehlen (1986).
- 8.
This is, of course, not to deny that imperialism and nationalism continue to be a problem that needs to be addressed. The question, however, is how to address these phenomena both on epistemological and stylistic levels. Urs Stäheli has made one of the most promising attempts, offering poststructuralist re-readings of systems theory, e.g. Stäheli (1998).
- 9.
I am using these terms – irony, self-fashioning – for their playful connotations; it is exactly the accusation of a certain light-heartedness that Bhabha has had to face from the beginning of his intellectual career. Obviously, it is a general charge against poststructuralist politics and ethics whose reliance on performance and textualism will have to irritate materialists and idealists alike. However, the fact that Bhabha is interested in both a description of the postcolonial situation and a more normative form of engaged criticism has raised the stakes in his writings,.
- 10.
See Niklas Luhmann (2000b), who argues that the function of the political system is the production of collectively binding decisions. Even if this seems to be a narrow functional view that could be supplemented by other functions, e.g. the production of visible collectives (Nassehi 2002), one should refrain from reducing literature to politics. The very fact that there still is no convincing definition of “literature” might confirm this finding. We simply lack a meta-language for this rather unique language use, i.e. we cannot pinpoint the uniqueness of this mode of language use successfully and are at a loss when trying to grasp its social function.
- 11.
If Bhabha insists on the engaged mode of his criticism, Iser’s literary theory, according to Fluck, is not “a flight from commitment, therefore, but quite the contrary, as a consequent application of the idea of negation, one that also embraces negation itself.” (181)
- 12.
While at the same time these destabilizations are stabilized by a set of institutional patterns of expectations. We usually know when, say, picking up a “novel” that we are leaving the realm of the everyday, that there is a fictional world that might not correspond to the familiar routines in cognitive, emotional, or moral terms.
- 13.
In contrast to this basic cultural sense-making activity, our exposure to literature is, apart from the assigned reading in schools and university curricula, a voluntary act, and we could easily stop taking part in literature.
- 14.
This should not be taken to suggest that Bhabha has failed in his attempt to offer an interesting study of postcolonial dilemmas, or that his ethics are flawed; nor am I suggesting that one should stop reading books like The Location of Culture. Far from it; all I would maintain, however, is that his eager attempt to update a fundamentally Derridean poststructuralism to meet the postcolonial situation, he jumpily juxtaposes writers as different as Fanon and Foucault. One a keen observer of the psychosocial dynamics of interactions, the other the clever analyst of institutional micro-power and archival control, there is no simple link between the logic these writers respectively describe.
- 15.
This basic element of aesthetic experience is not a privilege of modernist or postmodernist texts that have given up the securities of realist writing. Negativity, as Iser would argue in his later writings, is a general feature of literature, regardless of questions of aesthetic programs or distinct writing styles.
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Schinko, C. (2012). From Myths and Symbols to Culture as Text: Hybridity, Literature and American Studies. In: Stockhammer, P. (eds) Conceptualizing Cultural Hybridization. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21846-0_11
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