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Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race
Book Reviews master uncertainty - - and to challenge such attempts (though disappointingly seldom) - - fill in Reconstituting Rurality's chapters covering such topics as housing construction and architectural preservation, minerals development, waste disposal and conversion of farmland into golf courses. Murdoch and Marsden are careful to position their study district in a national context as well, although its existence as a metropolitan commuter region signals the need for study of other kinds of reconstructed ruralities. Some may wrongly dismiss the book with the complaint that hardly anything is heard of the working classes. My concern is not only with the apparent omission of such accounts, but with the possibility that these absences will be taken to signify extermination of such people as rural residents. After all, as Matless has put it, a common feeling is that 'One can claim membership of a place, but not so easily of something deemed almost a species' (Cloke et al., 1994, p. 76). But a more searching gaze ought to attempt an understanding of how distinctions of rural natives from new settlers are being blurred irrespective of what is happening to actual numbers of people retaining more ancestral connection to the countryside. Even as certain class elements manipulate the land development process with more or less skillful success, categorical distinctions between residence, occupation, production, consumption, public, private and so on are increasingly violated and definitions of each of these subjected to considerable (and often quite startling) mutation. Reconstituting Rurality thus moves between claims that it can discern middle-class 'coherence' in Aylesbury Vale (p. 228) and understanding that class is less a matter of distinct economic position than of multifaceted regionalized practice (Cooke, 1985). Writing in the 1830s, de Tocqueville (1959, p. 340) warned that the Americans were 'a wandering people whom rivers and lakes cannot hold back, before whom forests fall and prairies are covered in shade; and who, when they have reached the Pacific Ocean, will come back on its tracks to trouble and destroy the societies which it will have formed behind it.' If Murdoch and Marsden are noticing something of the same kind of phenomenon occurring in rural Britain, then there is insistent need to better appreciate the multifaceted cultural dimension laying beyond (though thoroughly involved with) class relations in which rurality has been and continues to be developed. Control of the land development process may be crucial in the reconstruction of rurality, but its cues and consequences are of at least equal importance. MARK LAWRENCE Department of Geography The University of Iowa References Cloke, P., Doei, M., Matless, D. and Thrift, N. (1994) Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies. Paul Chapman, London. Cohen, J. (1985) Strategy or identity: new theoretical paradigms and contemporary social movements, Social Research 52. Cooke, P. (1985) Class practices as regional markers: a contribution to labour geography. In Social Relations and Spatial Structures, D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds), pp. 213-241. Macmillan, London.
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Dalton, R.J. and Kuechler, M. (eds) (1990) Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies. Oxford University Press, New York. de Tocqueville, A. (1959) Journey to America. Faber and Faber, London. Habermas, J. (1987) Lectures on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press, Cambridge. Latour, B. (1986) The powers of association. In Power, Action and Belief." A New Sociology, J. Law (ed.). Melucci, A. (1985) The symbolic challenge of contemporary movements. Social Research 52(4), 789-816. Melucci, A. (1989) Nomads of the Present. Hutchinson Radius, London. Murdoch, J. and Marsden, T. (1994) Reconstituting Rurality. University College London Press, London. Offe, C. (1985) New social movements: challenging the boundaries of institutional politics. Social Research 52(4), 817-868. Tilly, C. (1985) Models and realities of popular collective action. Social Research 52. Touraine, A. (1981) The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements. Cambridge University Press, New York. Touraine, A. (1983) Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement. Cambridge University Press, New York. Touraine, A. (1988) The Return of the Actor. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Robert J.C. Young, 236 pp., 1995, Routledge, London, £11.99, ISBN 0-415-05374-9 This book is a fascinating, sometimes very insightful account of mostly nineteenth century colonial discourse and a set of suggestions regarding certain impasses in the emergent fields of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies. One of its arguments is also based on a highly problematic analogy. Robert Young argues that contemporary cultural and post-colonial studies share terminology and concepts (notably 'hybridity') with European racism. His argument proceeds frequently by assertion, but not often by a convincing demonstration. Indeed, for a writer so familiar with post structuralist thinking, the way that this argument stresses discursive continuity, where what is striking are conceptual breaks and difference (between, say nineteenth century racism and late twentieth century cultural and literary studies) is odd. According to Young (p. 10): 'in reinvoking this concept [of hybridity], we [in cultural studies?] are utilizing the vocabulary of the Victorian extreme right as much as the notion of an organic process of the grafting of diversity into singularity'. To be sure, hybridity might be the same term and it might even operate on some of the same imaginary racial categorizations which operated in the nineteenth century. But then so would to say, for example, 'I am black', invoke a category defined through racist colonial discourse, or to say 'my friend is Jewish' invoke a category that was also used in Hitler's writings. What neither of these statements necessarily contain is anything like the same signification of Jewishness or Blackness as that carried in Hitler's demagogy or some nineteenth century colonial text. This also holds true for the term hybridity. We are most certainly all hybrids, since as has been argued
328
Book Reviews
by many people, no culture is pure, or identical to i t s e l f - and in claiming so, I am not too concerned that I am using the same word to describe modern cultures as some nineteenth century racist. Hybridity is a matter for some celebration. The evident problems in the analogy (which is anyway considerably more in evidence on the back cover than it is in the text) does not however really impinge upon or undermine an otherwise insightful account of nineteenth century European discourses about race, culture, colonialism and sexuality. Young is not alone in doing this (see for example, McClintok, 1995). In fact, the intertwined discursive and material treatment of 'race', 'sex' and colonial power is one of the most developed themes in a rapidly evolving field of postcolonial studies and colonial discourse analysis. But 'Colonial Desire' (reinforced by the photograph chosen for the cover) is particularly good on showing how imperial practise rested not just on certain highly unstable conceptions of masculinity, but on sexuality. Seven chapters range over the writings of Arnold, Renan and Gobineau amongst others, as well as a good deal of recent cultural and literary critique. In so doing, Young unearths and deconstructs, with considerable wit and sharpness, the arguments and categories of a lot of unsavoury nineteenth century racist texts. Perhaps the value of digging these things up is that, as Robert Young proposes, they can be read both as a salutatory reminder to interrogate and historicize social categories. In this respect, Colonial Desire may serve as a suggestive primer to further critical thought about race,
sexuality, culture in the colonial and putatively 'postcolonial' world. The final chapter in particular is useful for the way that Young tries to relate the material (military, geopolitical and economic) history of colonialism with colonial discourse, via the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Many readers might be wary of this kind of mental gymnastics, but those who are already devotees of their work (and even those who are not, but just interested in thinking critically about colonial history and geography or concerned about the emphasis on texts at the expense of people and places in much recent academic writing about colonialism) should at least have a look at the section of Chapter 7 on 'the geopolitics of capitalism'. Young reads Deleuze and Guattari as valuable for: 'the way in which philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, geography, economics et al. are all brought together in one interactive economy and shown to be implicated in capitalism's colonizing operations' (p. 167). To the extent that this is the case, Young may help us prise them apart. JAMES DERRICK SIDAWAY
School of Geography University of Birmingham Reference
McClintok, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, London.
Book R e v i e w e r s If you would like your name to be added to the book review roster for Journal of Rural Studies please write to the Editor providing your name, address and a resum6 of your fields of interest.
327
Dalton, R.J. and Kuechler, M. (eds) (1990) Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies. Oxford University Press, New York. de Tocqueville, A. (1959) Journey to America. Faber and Faber, London. Habermas, J. (1987) Lectures on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press, Cambridge. Latour, B. (1986) The powers of association. In Power, Action and Belief." A New Sociology, J. Law (ed.). Melucci, A. (1985) The symbolic challenge of contemporary movements. Social Research 52(4), 789-816. Melucci, A. (1989) Nomads of the Present. Hutchinson Radius, London. Murdoch, J. and Marsden, T. (1994) Reconstituting Rurality. University College London Press, London. Offe, C. (1985) New social movements: challenging the boundaries of institutional politics. Social Research 52(4), 817-868. Tilly, C. (1985) Models and realities of popular collective action. Social Research 52. Touraine, A. (1981) The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements. Cambridge University Press, New York. Touraine, A. (1983) Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement. Cambridge University Press, New York. Touraine, A. (1988) The Return of the Actor. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Robert J.C. Young, 236 pp., 1995, Routledge, London, £11.99, ISBN 0-415-05374-9 This book is a fascinating, sometimes very insightful account of mostly nineteenth century colonial discourse and a set of suggestions regarding certain impasses in the emergent fields of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies. One of its arguments is also based on a highly problematic analogy. Robert Young argues that contemporary cultural and post-colonial studies share terminology and concepts (notably 'hybridity') with European racism. His argument proceeds frequently by assertion, but not often by a convincing demonstration. Indeed, for a writer so familiar with post structuralist thinking, the way that this argument stresses discursive continuity, where what is striking are conceptual breaks and difference (between, say nineteenth century racism and late twentieth century cultural and literary studies) is odd. According to Young (p. 10): 'in reinvoking this concept [of hybridity], we [in cultural studies?] are utilizing the vocabulary of the Victorian extreme right as much as the notion of an organic process of the grafting of diversity into singularity'. To be sure, hybridity might be the same term and it might even operate on some of the same imaginary racial categorizations which operated in the nineteenth century. But then so would to say, for example, 'I am black', invoke a category defined through racist colonial discourse, or to say 'my friend is Jewish' invoke a category that was also used in Hitler's writings. What neither of these statements necessarily contain is anything like the same signification of Jewishness or Blackness as that carried in Hitler's demagogy or some nineteenth century colonial text. This also holds true for the term hybridity. We are most certainly all hybrids, since as has been argued
328
Book Reviews
by many people, no culture is pure, or identical to i t s e l f - and in claiming so, I am not too concerned that I am using the same word to describe modern cultures as some nineteenth century racist. Hybridity is a matter for some celebration. The evident problems in the analogy (which is anyway considerably more in evidence on the back cover than it is in the text) does not however really impinge upon or undermine an otherwise insightful account of nineteenth century European discourses about race, culture, colonialism and sexuality. Young is not alone in doing this (see for example, McClintok, 1995). In fact, the intertwined discursive and material treatment of 'race', 'sex' and colonial power is one of the most developed themes in a rapidly evolving field of postcolonial studies and colonial discourse analysis. But 'Colonial Desire' (reinforced by the photograph chosen for the cover) is particularly good on showing how imperial practise rested not just on certain highly unstable conceptions of masculinity, but on sexuality. Seven chapters range over the writings of Arnold, Renan and Gobineau amongst others, as well as a good deal of recent cultural and literary critique. In so doing, Young unearths and deconstructs, with considerable wit and sharpness, the arguments and categories of a lot of unsavoury nineteenth century racist texts. Perhaps the value of digging these things up is that, as Robert Young proposes, they can be read both as a salutatory reminder to interrogate and historicize social categories. In this respect, Colonial Desire may serve as a suggestive primer to further critical thought about race,
sexuality, culture in the colonial and putatively 'postcolonial' world. The final chapter in particular is useful for the way that Young tries to relate the material (military, geopolitical and economic) history of colonialism with colonial discourse, via the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Many readers might be wary of this kind of mental gymnastics, but those who are already devotees of their work (and even those who are not, but just interested in thinking critically about colonial history and geography or concerned about the emphasis on texts at the expense of people and places in much recent academic writing about colonialism) should at least have a look at the section of Chapter 7 on 'the geopolitics of capitalism'. Young reads Deleuze and Guattari as valuable for: 'the way in which philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, geography, economics et al. are all brought together in one interactive economy and shown to be implicated in capitalism's colonizing operations' (p. 167). To the extent that this is the case, Young may help us prise them apart. JAMES DERRICK SIDAWAY
School of Geography University of Birmingham Reference
McClintok, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, London.
Book R e v i e w e r s If you would like your name to be added to the book review roster for Journal of Rural Studies please write to the Editor providing your name, address and a resum6 of your fields of interest.