Together‐in‐difference: beyond diaspora, into hybridity

One of the most urgent predicaments of our time can be described in deceptively simple terms: how are we to live together in this new century—this century that has begun so sadly, so violently? "We" and "together" are the key sites of contestation here. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, the growing global prominence of what has come to be called identity politics has bred a profound suspicion of any universalising claims to "a common humanity". In this climate, the very idea of living "together" becomes hugely daunting. What are the possibilities of a sense of togetherness that can transcend rampant division and fragmentation based on particularist identities, without returning to the old hegemony of an assimilationist, Eurocentric homegeneity? How, in short, can we live together-in-difference? In this paper, I will argue for the importance of hybridity in a world in which we no longer have the secure capacity to draw the line between us and them, the different and the same, here and there, and indeed, between "Asian" and "Western". In Clifford Geertz's words, we now live in a globalised world in which there is "a gradual spectrum of mixed-up differences" (Geertz 1988,148). Hybridity is a necessary concept to hold onto in this condition, because unlike other key concepts in the contemporary politics of difference—such as diaspora and multiculturalism—it foregrounds complicated entanglement rather than identity, togetherness-in-difference rather than separateness and virtual apartheid. It is also, as I will argue, a concept that prevents the absorption of all difference into a hegemonic plane of sameness and homogeneity. Claiming one's difference and turning it into symbolic capital has become a powerful and attractive strategy among those who have been marginalised or excluded from the structures of white or Western hegemony. "Diaspora" has been an increasingly popular name for that symbolic capital in recent years. In light of global power relations, the significance of diasporic identity lies in its force as a symbolic declaration of liberation from the abject position of "ethnic minority" in "an oppressive national hegemony" (Clifford 1997, 255). As James Clifford has remarked, "diasporic identifications reach beyond ethnic status within the