‘Routes rather than Roots’: diaspora, youth cultures, and hybridity

Modern youth cultures are not formed in isolation, but through processes of interconnection, fusion and amalgamation in what Arjun Appadurai (1990) sees as the ‘landscape’ of globalisation (see Chapter 7). For Appadurai, processes of globalisation are constituted through interrelated, worldwide flows of capital, technology, media, beliefs, and peoples. And, for some theorists, the international flow of peoples — or what Appadurai terms ‘ethnoscapes’ — has been a particularly important aspect of modem globalisation. Using the concept of ‘diaspora’ (from the Greek phrase meaning ‘to disperse’), many researchers have analysed the nature and consequences of different people’s travels across borders, and dispersion around the world. According to Avtar Brah, for example, the process of diasporic movement generates new forms of cultural identity that ‘are at once local and global’, being composed of ‘networks of trans-national identifications encompassing “imagined” and “encountered” communities’ (Brah, 1996: 196). Such cultures are not tied down to particular places, but are better conceptualised in terms of motion and contingency. Or, as Paul Gilroy puts it, they are a matter of routes rather than roots — that is to say, they are patterns of movement and diffusion that involve the formation of ‘creolized, syncretized, hybridized and chronically impure cultural forms’ (Gilroy, 1993i: 335). Moreover, Gilroy emphasises the issues of power and conflict that have been central to the development of these ‘diasporic identities’, arguing they are generated through ‘forced dispersal and reluctant scattering’, so that ‘diaspora identity is focused less on the equalising, proto-democratic force of common territory and more on the social dynamics of remembrance and commemoration defined by a strong sense of the dangers involved in forgetting the location of origin and the process of dispersal’ (Gilroy, 1993i: 318).

During the 1980s Gilroy had been a member of Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (see Chapters 4 and 6). His early research represented a multi-layered analysis of the complex struggles around ‘race’, class and nation in modem Britain," but his later work gave particular attention to black ‘expressive culture’ and its relation to processes of diaspora and political struggle. For Gilroy, black culture and experience could only be understood in terms of its trans-Atlantic connections. In his analysis of these relationships, Gilroy eschewed notions of a pan-global, homogeneous ‘Black identity’, but he also resisted notions of distinctly British, American, or Caribbean black culture. Instead, Gilroy introduced the concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ to denote the history of intercultural connections linking globally dispersed black peoples (Gilroy, 1993i). In these terms, Gilroy argued, a series of forced and voluntary migrations (including the slave trade, but also the free movement of people and cultural forms back and forth across the Atlantic) hadspread black people across the globe, though they remained linked by a long history of cultural connection and exchange. In these terms, no one part of the Black Atlantic could be understood without considering its relation to the others. Moreover, Gilroy suggested, this process of cultural dialogue had created a plurality of hybrid identities and cultural forms that emerged between (and within) the various locales of the black diaspora.

These dimensions of cultural dialogue and hybridity have long been highlighted by Caribbean historians. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kamau Brathwaite (1971) has argued, the violent uprooting and re-grounding of African peoples in the slave-based colonies of the New World generated new cultures and identities known as ‘creole’ (a term derived from linguistics). Creole cultures were not merely poor imitations of a European original. Instead, they drew on both European and African influences to forge new, distinctive cultural formations. These formations, moreover, were often marked by a growing sense of self-possession and self-definition that fed into the development of an anti-colonial national consciousness. Indeed, for many postcolonial theorists, this kind of ‘destabilising’ effect is an important feature of ‘creolised’ or ‘hybrid’ cultures.

Cultural hybridity can take many forms, and is interpreted in a number of different ways. For Jan Nederveen Pieterse, hybridy exists on a continuum stretching from an ‘assimilationist hybridity’ to a ‘destabilising hybridity’. An assimilationist form of hybridity, is one in which ‘the centre’ predominates — it ‘leans over towards the center, adopts the canon and mimics hegemony’ (2020: 96). A destabilising form of hybridity, however, has more radical potential; it ‘blurs the canon, reverses the current, subverts the center’ (ibid.). From this perspective, colonial societies — which were based on a binary discourse that defined a dominant Western culture against an inferior ‘Other’ — felt challenged by ‘in-between’, hybrid entities because their existence defied claims that the binary distinctions were fixed, immutable and somehow ‘natural’. Instead, dimensions of hybridity highlighted the way the binary distinctions were social constructs whose boundaries were always contingent and fluid. Hybridity, then, disrupted the dominant cultural discourse by engendering diversity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity. And, for postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha (1990; 1994), these qualities of hybridity are fundamental to the cultural identities forged through modem processes of globalisation.

For postcolonial theorists, the importance of cultural hybridity lies in its potential to question and subvert dominant notions of the world. According to Bhabha, cultures are never fixed or complete, but exist in a continuous process of collision, interaction, and reinvention. These processes of intersection, he argued, created a distinctive ‘Third Space’ - a metaphorical space in which two or more disparate social or cultural forces interacted to form new, hybrid ways of thinking or being. As Bhabha explained:

This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately

Global media, local youth, and hyhridity 157 understood through received wisdom. The process of cultural hyhridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of meaning and representation.

(Bhabha, 1990: 211)

Bhabha’s Third Space, then, denoted the way that - through processes of interface and fusion - new, hybrid cultural identities are formed, reformed, and in a constant state of becoming. From this perspective, hyhridity is not merely a blending of cultural elements, nor the simple fashioning of ‘glocal’ products to appeal to a local market. Rather, hyhridity is a Third Space, or an in-between zone where new forms of cultural meaning and production occur, blurring the limitations of existing boundaries and calling into question the established classifications of culture and identity. The video Somewhere in America #Mipsterz (see above) can be seen as an apt illustration of Bhabha’s arguments.

In a widely circulated critique of the Mipsterz film, journalist Sana Saeed argued it was a shallow attempt to assimilate young Muslim women into mainstream US culture. The video, Saeed suggested, seemed to have little purpose ‘aside from showing well-dressed, put together Muslim women in poses perfect for a magazine spread’ (Saeed, 2013). Others, however, contended the video was a meaningful attempt to blur the lines between the cultures of ‘traditional’ Islam and the contemporary West, and construct an identity that — in Bhabha’s terms — was ‘a new area of meaning and representation’. Golnaraghi and Daghar, for instance, argued that the women featured in Mipsterz were ‘claiming power and agency’ in the way they ‘attempted to discursively construct their own identities and resist binary oppositional frames informed by Orientalist and traditionalist discourses’ (2017: 121). Drawing on Bhabha’s ideas, they argued that the Mipsterz women were carving out a new, distinctively ‘hybrid’ cultural space:

... the Mipsterz women exist in the third space, and have attempted to transcend the dichotomies by resisting the oppressive and romanticized ideals often imposed on them, that serve to ‘other’.

(2017: 120-121)

Communications theorist Kristin Peterson took a similar view. According to Peterson, the women in the Mipsterz video were using fashion to ‘communicate something about their identities and their membership within a cultural group’:

These young women create an innovative, hybrid style that blends Islamic modesty and piety, hip and fashionable styles, and the creativity and anticommercialism of the hipster movement. Through the visual display of fashion, the Mipsterz video provides the opportunity for young Muslims to subtly critique other Islamic fashion movements — such as social media fashion gurus and online Islamic fashion magazines that focus mainly onconsumption — and to more forcibly overthrow mainstream stereotypes of Muslim women as submissive and oppressed.

(Peterson, 2018)

More broadly, Imene Ajala (2017) points to the way fashion trends among young Muslims living in the West are also indicative of their heterogeneous, hybrid cultural identifications. As Ajala observes, Muslim youth represent a huge and growing global market that has spurred the growth of a burgeoning fashion industry that was valued at around S266 billion in 2013 (Ajala 2017: 4). ‘Modest’ women’s fashions, for example, are geared to consumers who enjoy elements of Western style, but who also want to observe Islamic religious practice — and it is catered for by a coterie of online ‘modest fashion influencers’, sometimes dubbed ‘hijabistas’ (a phrase formed through fusing the words 'hijab' and 'fashionista") (4). ‘Cool’ Muslim streetwear, meanwhile, is promoted by brands such as the German-based Styleislam and the France-based LSA (Le Savoir est une Anne) and is, Ajala explains, ‘a style of urban clothing which takes into account Islamic prescriptions in terms of dress and occasionally conveys Islamic messages’ (6).

Appealing to youngsters from Europe, and also Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, the success of such brands testifies to the economic significance of Muslim youth as an international market. But, more than this, Ajala argues that the rise of Islamic Dress and ‘Cool Islam’ challenges any essentialist view of Islam as ‘a homogeneous sphere immune to change and to any external global dynamic’ (Ajala, 2017: 2). Instead, while such styles appeal to young people keen to self-identify as Muslim, they are also influenced by the forces of global consumerism and growing individualisation. The result, Ajala contends, is a fusion of cultural influences that ‘deconstructs and makes explicit the assertion of young Muslims in Europe adopting these products: the pride of being Muslim, but also [of being] Western, modern and cool’ (7). In these terms, then, the popularity of Islamic fashion and Muslim streetwear points towards young, Muslim identities that are not immutable and ‘closed’, but are complex, heterogeneous, and dynamic. These are qualities, moreover, embodied in global youth cultures more generally. Through the social, economic, and cultural flows of globalisation, youth cultures have become characteristically fluid, multi-layered, and hybrid.