Hybridity, So What?: The Anti-hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition

OPENING UP to identity politics and politics of difference is one ofthe changes of recent times, and recognition further widens thisframe. As the goalposts are shifted towards recognition and difference new problems arise. As identity politics comes to the fore, does interest politics fade into the background? What is the relationship between identity and class, between recognition and social justice? What about recognition of the steepest difference of all, which is the world’s development gap? These questions are explored elsewhere in this volume. This inquiry probes a different set of questions. If we recognize ‘others’, according to which bound-aries do we identify ‘others’? If we recognize difference, what about ‘differ-ence within’? What about those who straddle or are in between categories and combine identities? To what extent is recognition a function of the available categories of knowledge and cognitive frames in which self and others are identifiable and recognizable? Can it be that recognition is an exercise in reproduction, re-cycling the categories in which existing social relations have been coded while stretching their meaning? Recognition, then, stretches or revalues social boundaries but does not transgress them. To what extent is the politics of recognition a politics of musical chairs – as one more identity is acknow-ledged, another is left behind? As the spotlight turns to one identity, does another fade into the shadow? To what extent does the politics of recognition chase the social horizon which ever recedes as one comes closer? To what extent is ‘progress ’ (such a difficult word) measured not simply in attainment (because any attainment is partial and entails a price) but in process and motion? And then what would such acknowledgement of process entail?