Engagement, Hybridization and Resistance

The preceding two chapters presented an analysis of a set of texts that form(-ed) part of an emergent canon of knowledge in ICCM. Our analysis illuminated a persistent series of ethnocentric, universalizing, essentializing and appropriating representational practices that very often rest upon and reproduce Orientalist tropes. The focus on Western and predominantly American texts may have conveyed the impression that the engagements with the Other in this corpus of work are unidirectional, homogeneous and monolithic and that the non-West has simply been a passive recipient of these practices and their effects. This is assuredly not the case. In what follows we give recognition to the fact that we are dealing with an engagement, an interaction, and not a unilateral relationship between centre and periphery. We therefore examine the nature and consequences of that engagement and the various modes of action/reaction that the non-Western Other, conceived as active agent, has adopted, or might adopt. Such actions/reactions might include inter alia: assertions of indigeneity; modes of hybridization; forms of mimicry; reappropriation and return; avoidance and isolationism; silence. In this chapter, we illuminate and provide a theoretical discussion of instances of these different responses to the representational practices of the Western centre, and thus consider their role in resisting, challenging, altering and/or subverting the cultural hegemony and the dominant power relations that support it. We turn first to theoretical matters.