Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations University Graduate School 4-20-1998 Imperial hybrids in the age of colonialism : Maintaining dominance over and negotiating desire for the native Ronald Bolisay Florida International University DOI: 10.25148/etd.FI14051184 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Bolisay, Ronald, "Imperial hybrids in the age of colonialism : Maintaining dominance over and negotiating desire for the native" (1998). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1722. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1722 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Miami, Florida Imperial Hybrids in the Age of Colonialism: Maintaining Dominance Over and Negotiating Desire for the Native A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH by Ronald Bolisay 1998 To: Arthur W. Herriott College of Arts and Sciences This thesis, written by Ronald Bolisay, and entitled "Imperial Hybrids in the Age of Colonialism: Maintaining Dominance Over and Negotiating Desire for the Native", having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for judgement. We have read this thesis and recommend that it be approved. Lisa Blansett Meri-Jane Rochelson Bruce Harvey, Major Professor Date of Defense: April20, 1998 The thesis of Ronald Bolisay is approved. Dean Arthur W. Herriott College of Arts and Sciences Dr. Richard L. Campbell Dean of Graduate Studies Florida International University, 1998 11 ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Imperial Hybrids in the Age of Colonialism: Maintaining Dominance Over and Negotiating Desire for the Native by Ronald Bolisay Florida International University, 1998 Miami, Florida Professor Bruce Harvey, Major Professor Hybridity is typically formulated in post-colonial theory as a means of resistance, subversion, or liberatory strategy in the hands of the present-day post-colonial subject or theorist. This project, however, demonstrates hybridity as a means of securing dominance and maintaining control when wielded by the imperialist in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), Kipling's Kim (1901), and Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1914). The strategic deployment of hybridity in these texts also serves as an opportunity to negotiate the ambivalence and desire for the native that slips out of that hybrid space-- not necessarily sexual desire that flows between two polarized bodies, but rather, triangulated through other mediating terms such as class, nationality or manliness. Across these novels, the location of the native shifts, until it settles within the white body itself in Tarzan. Desire for the native, then, is returned to the white body in a narcissistic circle of self-glorification. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION . i II. Eradicating the Native Through Violent Desire in The Last of the Mohicans ................................................................. 6 III. The Secret Pleasure of Going Native Altogether Diffused and Defused in Kim ............................................................. 35 IV. Denying the Native in the Desirable White Body in Tarzan of the Apes ........................................................ 59 V . C onclu sion .................................................................................... 9 7 Works Cited ....................................................................................... 100 iv -I- Introduction Hybridity, as it has been most recently formulated in post-colonial theory, is typically employed as a powerful tool of resistance, subversion or liberatory strategy. An effective means of escaping binaries such as Self/Other, East/West, centre/periphery, it carries, like deconstruction, tremendous conceptual and explanatory power. In his essay "Interrogating Identity" (1990), Homi Bhabha elaborates upon these deconstructive properties of hybridity: Cultures come to be represented by virtue of the process of iteration and translation through which their meanings are variously addressed to-- through-- an Other. This erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures which, when inscribed in the naturalistic sign of symbolic consciousness frequently become political arguments for the hierarchy and ascendancy of powerful cultures [italics in text]. (58) Amrohini J. Sahay, in a review of Bhabha's Location of Culture, in which "Interrogating Identity" is reprinted, encapsulates more simply: "the binary of colonizer/colonized is no longer understood as existing in a hierarchical relation, but, rather, as in a relation of (Derridean) supplementarity" (228). With such leveling and equalizing power, hybridity is often used by the post-colonial theorist to dismantle imperial edifices of authority that rely upon the fixity of identities and roles such as colonizer/colonized, civilized/savage to preserve the uneven distribution of power between them: "as with all supplemental relations the 'identity' of the first term (colonizer) is destabilized and rendered undecidable through demonstration of the fact that it is actually inclusive of its 'other' (colonized)" (228). This conceptual subversion can then be expanded outward so that the hybrid space becomes a site of strategic resistance: "the power of cultural (colonial) hybrids lies in their capacity to manipulate the 'in-between space,' 'the Third Space of enunciations,' or the interstice' " writes Patricia Geesey in a critical argument that utilizes Bhabha's theories (2). From out of this manipulation all sorts of new, liberating,potentialities emerge. In "The Commitment to Theory" (1989), Bhabha extols the virtues of hybridity: 1 the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the "inter"-- the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space-- that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti- nationalist histories of the "people". And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves [italics in text]. (38-9) With such possibilities shimmering about it, hybridity, pregnant with promise, has about it an air of newness, the potential to reconfigure post-colonial relations on the critical and political horizon. By taking aspects from each of the halves that make up the hybrid, this newborn thing becomes revolutionary in the context of colonialism: Such assignations of social differences-- where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in- between-- find their agency in a form of the "future" where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is . an interstitial future, that emerges in- between the claims of the past and the needs of the present [italics in text]. (219) The above quote is taken from Bhabha's appropriately titled essay, "How Newness Enters the World" (1994). In these instances, hybridity is conceived as a conceptual tool available to the present-day post-colonial theorist or subject. Martin F. Manalansan's "(Re)Locating the Gay Filipino: Resistance, Postcolonialism, and Identity" (1993), implies another use for it as well: People, ideas, and objects are in constant flux in a postmodern world. Perpetual diasporas, mass communication, and mass transportation establish what is called a "global ethnoscape." "Tourists, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving groups and persons" occupy this terrain in an increasingly unprecedented degree (Appadurai 192). In such a world, space and identity become increasingly problematic (Gupta & Ferguson 6-23). (55) Hybridity is often times the only means of negotiating the unstable and constantly shifting terrain that identity politics and cultural studies situate themselves upon to elaborate and explore. "We must assume, first of all, that all cultural experience and indeed all cultural forms are historically, radically, quintessentially hybrid . .. " says Edward Said in "Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture" (1990) (48). It would certainly seem, then, 2 amidst all this hullabaloo, that hybridity is the theory of the moment. Not just this moment, so fleeting and already past, but all of the moments to come from now on as well within that nebulous temporal space of "the interstitial future." This may explain why it has this feeling of enduring presence about it, of relevance to today: this is what we are, right now, and what we will continue to be in this world where people come and go through mass transportation, immigration and tourism, where television, telecommunications and the Internet connect us all together. Hybridity applies to the world today and can be applied conceptually and materially by the post-colonial theorist or subject to address the multiplicities of identity and questions