International Relations of Post-Hybridity: Dangers and Potentials in Non-Synthetic Cycles

Abstract

The term hybridity is losing its critical potential in the study of globalization, both because no one is not hybrid anymore and because awareness of hybridity might encourage violence. Whereas hybridity initially appeared as either cosmopolitanism or post-coloniality, it has however turned into a subversive celebration of unavailing indoctrination of any orthodoxy or canon. It is also the evidence of sited subjectivity or agency, whose unique genealogy cannot be entirely subsumed by simulating the sanctioned orthodox. This paper instead advocates the emergence of post-hybridity, which is different from hybridity in its assumption of multilayeredness, memory, reconnection, and, most importantly, non-synthetic and yet cyclical historiography. It uses the example of Hong Kong, where both dialectical and cyclical modes of existence are central, to clarify post-hybridity. The paper is primarily a pedagogical reminder of, and a remedy to, the problem of the term hybridity for the teachers and students of International Relations.

Keywords:

• hybridity
• post-hybridity
• sited-identity
• cyclical historiography
• Hong Kong

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These possible sites that can reproduce existent and generate new borders include, for example, India, the Caribbean, Eurasia, the Andes, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia (Tickner & Blaney, 2013).

2 For a comparison between these specially separate Confucianisms, see Richey (2013).

3 A case for such practical use of memory through ‘the balance of relationship' or ‘the balance of role' has already been presented through the example of Urban Chinese. See Shih (2013, p. 88).

4 The post-colonial literature usually enlists words that indicate our existence in any spatial sense—such as ‘site', ‘displace', ‘home (and the world)', ‘unhome', ‘space', and so forth.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Ministry of Science & Technology Project 103-2420-H-002-043-MY3, Taiwan (Shih), JSPS Kakenhi grant [numbers 26882042 and 15H01855] as well as the Hokuriku Bank Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists [AY2015], Japan (Ikeda).

Notes on contributors

Chih-Yu Shih

Chih-Yu Shih teaches anthropology of knowledge, cultural studies, and civilizational IR at National Taiwan University. His recent Publications include Civilization, nation and modernity in East Asia (2012), Sinicizing international relations: Self, civilization, and intellectual politics in subaltern East Asia (2013), Harmonious intervention: China's quest for relational security (2014), and Post-western international relations reconsidered: The premodern politics of Gongsun Long (2015).

Josuke Ikeda

Josuke Ikeda is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Human Development, University of Toyama, Japan. His latest publications include ‘The idea of the “Road” in International Relations Theory’, Perceptions (2014) and co-edited book of Eikoku Gakuha no Kokusai-Kankeiron (The English School of International Relations, in Japanese from Nihon Keizai Hyouronsha) (2013).