dergi

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Hyphenated identities:
Some theoretical and methodological queries
In refocusing on the social formations and ‘disjunct’ subjectivities of persons
with multilocale and translocal attachments, a number of concepts have come
to be celebrated: ‘hybrid’, ‘creolised’, ‘hyphenated’ and ‘diasporic’ identities are
the most prominent among them. These concepts aim to capture the complexity
of the practices, cultural configurations, and identity formations of translocal
and culturally nomadic groups and individuals. In this paper, the aim is to
reexamine the adequacy of concepts such as hybridity critically, and to ask
whether they successfully contend with the tendency to reify culture in the discipline.
What are the limits of the challenge that creolisation or hybridisation
models pose to the previous holistic constructs of culture?
The question of whether hybridisation, creolisation or hyphenation can
break with the ontological premises underlying essentialist notions of culture is
discussed first. Second, I analyse the subversive potential of political and social
programmes like multiculturalism that introduce a new politics of identity
grounded in notions of cultural ‘community’. I then go on to ask what the
methodological starting point for a project of writing against culture might be.
Finally, I suggest that we might find such a starting point in the study of objectperson
relations.