An alternative framing to acculturation is generated via the heuristic device of diaspora. This component of the literature review examines some of the key ideas that sit within the concept of diaspora, transnational relations, historicity, hybridity and double or diasporic consciousness. This is followed by a review of how these ideas have been deployed in relation to Pasifika identities.
The concept of diaspora is understood to bring a historicity (Clifford, 1997) to the position of ethnic minorities who have migrated to new nation states, breaking the minority / majority dichotomy.
Clifford (2006, p. 453) writes, “Diasporist discourses reflect the sense of being part of an ongoing transnational network”. Brah (2006, p. 444) identifies that these transnational networks are characterised and patterned by power relations, writing:
…the concept of diaspora concerns the historically variable forms of
relationality within and between diasporic formulations. It is about relations of power that similiarise and differentiate between and across changing diasporic constellations. In other words, the concept of diaspora centres on the configurations of power which differentiate diasporas internally as well as situate them in relation to one another
(Brah’s emphasis).
For Brah (2006) the concept of diaspora provides a way of examining a transnational configuration of power relations. The term transnationalism (Vertovec, 2007, p. 964) has also been deployed as way of re-thinking “notions of culture in light of global flows and modes of deterritorialization”. Vertovec (2001) argues that the concept of transnationalism ought to be juxtaposed with understandings of identities.
The concept of diaspora requires focus on the slippery process of relocation and cultural continuities. As Appadurai (1991, p. 191) observes,
As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and reconfigure their ethnic “projects”, the ethno in ethnography takes on a slippery, non-localised quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology will have to respond.
Appadurai’s (1991, p. 192) concept of the ethnoscape refers to “transnational, cultural flows”. This emphasises how cultural flows have moved beyond borders of nation states and aims to provide a way of envisioning the dynamics of “changing, social, territorial and cultural reproduction of group identity” (Appadurai, 1991, p. 191). The use of the word “ethnoscape” and the way it shadows notions of landscape is
described as purposive by Appadurai (1991, p.191) who explains that “certain ambiguities” were “deliberately built into it” to capture “dilemmas of perspective and representation”.
Diaspora has also been associated with hybridity. Hall (1990, p. 235) writes: Diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return56… The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.
It is argued that hybrid cultures predominate as new technologies, widespread migration and other social forces have enabled “new phases of intercultural contact” and “the pace of mixing” accelerates (Pieterse, 2001, p. 223). In a context of increasing intercultural contact, Hermans and Kempen (1998, p. 1111) write that “the conception of independent, coherent, and stable cultures” becomes “increasingly irrelevant”. Critiques of “diaspora” as a route to understanding identities argue that, as a heuristic device, it privileges “point of origin” too much in its framing and emphasises transnational bonds at the expense of trans-ethnic solidarity and experience within nation states (Anthias, 1998). The assumption that “points of origin” are stable and not hybrid themselves is also criticised by Anthias (1998).
Clifford (2006, p. 255) also argues that a focus on diaspora “gives a strengthened spatial/historical content to older mediating concepts such as W.E.B Du Bois notion of “double consciousness”.” Double consciousness is the focus of the next part of the review, which is followed by an examination of diasporic consciousness, hybridity and third spaces, and then turns to how these concepts have been approached in the Pasifika literature.
Double Consciousness
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was the first black sociologist and has been credited with single-handedly initiating: “serious empirical research on blacks in America” (Rudwick
1974, p. 46). Lemke (2000, p. 69) observes that Du Bois “anticipated the post-modern discourses of identity formation”.
Du Bois described “double consciousness” as “a double life, with double thoughts, double duties and double social classes” (Du Bois cited Zuckerman, 2004, p. 168). Du Bois describes double consciousness as the competing of two inner consciousnesses. He stated:
One ever feels his twoness as an American and as a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois cited Zuckerman, 2004, p. 24)
Du Bois identified that a “double-life” was the “life every American ‘Negro’ must live… From this must arise a painful self consciousness” (Du Bois cited Zuckerman, 2004, p. 168). Du Bois describes this as:
To merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world. He would not bleach his Negro soul, for he knows the Negro blood has a message for the world. (Du Bois cited Zuckerman, 2004, p. 24)
This is the crux of “double consciousness”: the ability to transcend contradiction, the desire “to merge” without loss57 to co-exist without integration or absorption. Du Bois also writes that an aspect of this double consciousness involves being explicitly racialised and ‘othered’ by another ethnic group:
A world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (Du Bois cited Zuckerman 2004, p. 8)
Du Bois’ term “double consciousness” evokes a “third person” perspective of self, as well as describing the situation of internal “doubleness”. It is Frantz Fanon (1925-61)
57 Gates (2003) is critical of the negativity inherent in the concept of “double consciousness”
writing: “Du Bois yearned to make the American Negro one, and lamented that he was two. Today, the ideal of wholeness has largely been retired. And cultural multiplicity is no longer seen as the problem, but as a solution -- a solution to the confines of identity itself. Double consciousness, once a disorder, is now the cure” (Gates Jr 2003, p. 2). I do not agree that Du Bois constructed double consciousness as solely a malady, but rather that the concept also incorporated hope and positive aspirations.
who famously wrote of “third person consciousness” which has some parallels with double consciousness.
Fanon’s (1992) third person consciousness describes the experience of forming identity influenced by a third person’s perspective. He stated: “As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor conflicts, to experience his being through others” (Fanon 1992, p. 220). Yet he recognises that when operating within white-dominated societies, “Not only must the black man be black. He must be black in relation to the white man.” (Fanon, 1992, p. 220) This extract specifically focuses on the prejudices and impact of racism and racialisation, and its influence upon identity.
Richard Wright (1908-1960), another early black scholar, wrote of the condition he called “double vision”. Wright stated:
My point of view is a Western one but a Western one that conflicts at several vital points with the present, dominant outlook of the West. Am I ahead or behind the West? My personal judgement is that I'm ahead (cited Gilroy, 1993, p. 161).
This comment by Wright suggests, as Du Bois, that he has access to more than one outlook or worldview (in one body). However, he clearly perceives this to be an advantage. Gilroy (1993, p. 161) describes Wright’s concept of “double vision” as a “special condition, not a disability, nor a consistent privilege” that was partially characterised as inner ambivalence. He also infers that he is in a position to manage different points of view. One point of view (derived from a different belief system) conflicts and breaks with the other.
Gilroy (1993, p. 188) suggests that concepts which emphasize “doubleness” and “split consciousness” have had limited currency against unitary conceptions of ‘blackness’ which operate politically as organising tools with strategic potency. He writes, “this option is less fashionable” and that “appeals to the notion of purity as the basis of racial solidarity are more popular”. Gilroy (1993) suggests that such splitting disrupts the (political) project of unitary blackness. “Splitting” and hybridity as a threat to the ethnic group ‘as project’ is a theme that arises repeatedly within this literature review.
Diasporic Consciousness
Diaspora “as type of consciousness” or diasporic consciousness (Cohen, 1997, p. 184) focuses on the way that “enduring group consciousness about the homeland, and
feelings of solidarity more or less shared by the members of a diasporic collectivity in the host country” influence and shape the construction of identities. A recent study of diasporic consciousness among Brazilians in Australia argued that four interrelated patterns were indicative of an emerging diaspora consciousness (Duarte, 2005). These were described by Duarte (2005, p. 319) as,
the co-presence of ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Clifford 1999, p. 264); the re- creation of ‘Brazilian spaces’ in Australia; ‘othering’ in relation to the dominant culture; and increased reflexivity about the homeland.
It is argued by Duarte (2005, p. 334) that the liminality of being in-between is a typical condition of diasporic consciousness and he concludes:
The findings of the study indicate that ‘dwelling in displacement’ is a complex process that entails negotiation and re-conceptualisation of cultural identity in order to adjust to life away from the homeland. It also entails persistent attempts to create a suitable habitus in the host country, and to come to terms with the inevitable ambiguities of living ‘in the betweens’.
These conclusions are uncannily foreshadowed by Du Bois, the negotiation, the ambiguity, the “contradiction” of double aims (Du Bois cited Zuckerman 2004, p. 168) and the striving for a merger without loss. The sense of in-between, splitting, and experiencing liminality are recurring themes which will be further explored later in the literature review.
Hybridity and Third Spaces
Hybridity is according to Young (1995, p. 69) “the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One nor the Other but something else besides which contests the terms and territories of both” (Young’s emphasis). Thus, hybridity always involves the union of two distinctive elements to produce a third. Bhabha (1990, p. 211) writes:
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 by received wisdom.
However, as Pieterse (2001, p. 226) points out, hybridity is “meaningless without the prior assumption of difference, purity, fixed boundaries… without an existing regard for boundaries, it would not be a point worth making… Without reference to a prior
culture of purity and boundaries, a pathos of hierarchy and gradient of difference, the point of hybridity would be lost”
Similarly, Gilroy’s invocation of hybridity demands the production of something new: “A mix, a hybrid, recombinant form, that is indebted to yet reproduces neither of the supposedly anterior purities that gave rise to it in anything like unmodified form” (Gilroy 1997, p.323). Hall (1992, p. 258) writes that the “black experience is a diaspora experience”, the consequences of which carries a “process of unsettling, recombination, hybridisation and ‘cut-and-mix’ – in short, the process of cultural diaspora-ization (to coin an ugly term)”.
The term hybridity involves a re-imagining and fresh deployment of a term rooted in nineteenth-century eugenicist and scientific-racist thought (Young, 1995). The ‘baggage’ associated with the term hybrid, which signifies a grafting of two, otherwise disparate, elements into a new fusion, has provoked some strong reactions. Papastergiadis (1997, p. 258), however, counters these, questioning: “should we use only words with a pure and inoffensive history, or should we challenge essentialist models of identity by taking on and then subverting their own vocabulary?”
Approaching a definition of hybridity from an alternative angle, Meredith (1998) defines hybridity as what happens when colonisation and Western appropriation is not successful in assimilating non-Western culture. He writes that within a postcolonial context, “Hybridity is the process by which the colonial governing authority undertakes to translate the identity of the colonised (the Other) within a singular universal framework, but then fails to produce something familiar but new” (Meredith 1998, p. 2). In a similar vein, Ang (2001) writes that hybridity marks the irreconcilability of Chinese-ness and Western-ness. For Ang (2001, p. 30), “Hybridity (in-between-ness) is not the solution, but alerts us to the incommensurability of differences, their ultimately irreducible resistance to complete dissolution” in a context of “complicated entanglement”.
There are many possible responses to the issues which the notion of hybridity raises. Can any culture ever be conceptualised accurately as pure and not-hybrid? And based on the premise that all peoples and all societies are culturally specific and culturally marked, that is local, is it not a vital function of all cultures to adopt and adapt by incorporating new experiences, new technologies and new influences within ever- evolving systems of meaning? Surely, the survival and potency of cultural meaning
requires the ability to negotiate and incorporate change. Does hybridity refer to what cannot be assimilated easily, to what, as Ang (2001) and Meredith (1998) imply, must be spat out rather than swallowed? It is also useful to consider Bhabha’s (1994, p. 2) observation that:
The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.
This recognises the role of authorising, the function of power, legitimacy and recognition. Whereas some hybrid combinations may be rejected as outside the parameters of cultural boundaries, others are granted inclusion and are recognised as new cultural developments. Noble (1999, p. 343) writes that for the second generation the struggle to be recognised “is felt in acute ways”.
Therefore the term hybridity itself is subject to manipulation in the politics of cultural reproduction (and the term may be deployed to describe change that falls outside the parameters of more acceptable, less threatening and sometimes incremental change). Noble (1999) deploys the concept of “strategic hybridity”, for example, which does not mark all cultural choices and orientations by a second generation population as hybrid. Instead, cultural multiplicity and fluidity is recognised and “strategic hybridity” is recognised as a tactic of mixing “often in contradictory ways” alongside tactics of “strategic essentialism” which involves “assertions” of an “irreducible otherness” (Noble, 1999, pp. 29, 31).
Bhabha (1990, 1994) is recognised as a key author in the hybridity literature, particularly his concept of third space. Bhabha (1994, p. 39) argues that “it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture”. This is the third space, which Bhabha (1995, p. 209) describes:
It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space’, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.
It is here, that “the overlap and displacement of the domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated”. Bhabha (1995, p. 211) argues that this third space, “gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of
negotiation of meaning and representation.” The emphasis on negotiation is clearly articulated by Bhabha (1994)
While Bhabha (1995) deploys the term hybridity, it is the concept of the “third space” and the in-between (rather than hybrid) that Pasifika scholarship has concentrated on. I turn now to the ways that these ideas have been used or rejected in the Pasifika literature.
Diaspora, Hybridity and Third Spaces in the Pasifika Literature:
Diaspora as metaphor, as imaginary, it is argued, is one of the most useful ways to deploy the concept (Anthias, 1998). This brings to mind Hau’ofa’s (1998, p. 391) vision of an enlarged and expanded Oceania. Hau’ofa (1998, p. 411) has put much effort and work into re-conceptualizing the Pacific as a social imaginary by using the metaphor of the Ocean and invoking Oceania as “our common heritage”, “our major source of sustenance”, our “pathways to each other and to everyone else”. He writes,
Most of us are part of this mobility, whether personally or through the movements of our relatives. This expanded Oceania is a world of social networks that crisscross the ocean all the way from Australia and New Zealand in the southwest, to the United States and Canada in the northeast. It is a world that we have created largely through our own efforts (Hau’ofa 1998, p. 391)
Hau’ofa’s (2008) vision of a much enlarged Oceania does not require one to have plans to return. The concept of diaspora allows Pasifika peoples to be positioned and imagined as part of an enlarged Oceania, often configured in transnational family networks (Gershon, 2007) rather than as small ethnic minorities within the confines of one nation state. The concept of Pasifika peoples maintaining va relationships across national boundaries has been explored (Lilomaiava-Doktor, 2009, Ka’ili, 2005, 2008). The shift from identities rooted in land, genealogies and relational networks to new diasporic identifications has been framed as a “roots versus routes” dynamic (Diaz and Kauanui, 2001, Clifford, 1997, Teaiwa, 2001). This not only encapsulates a rather decisive shift in the traditional ‘identity story’ but also examines the epistemic challenges of identity constructions as “rooted” in genealogy, land and relationship. Plummer (1995, p. 160) writes that:
Traditional identity stories of gender stability, age boundaries, religious tribalism, family lineage and moral character start to shift ground dramatically for some people. Once clear and fixed, identities are dramatically destabilised.
What is the impact of “routes” upon ideas about “roots” and what are the associated issues for identities? One of the diasporic challenges for Pasifika peoples in Aotearoa is not being indigenous to the land they live in. Makasiale (2007, p. 79) writes:
For Pacific peoples, identity has traditionally been drawn from a rootedness in the land and a sense of belonging to the kainga (extended family)… The challenge for us is to weave something new and fresh out of the position of ambivalence and landlessness here.
Identities are “rooted” in ancestral land in Pasifika nations. In Aotearoa, the Pasifika population lives predominantly in urban centres (Statistics New Zealand, 2007). Macpherson and Macpherson (1999, p. 279) question:
the portability of forms of social organization which originally