CWM's Network of Theological Enquiry

Future direction: a strategy of hybridity

Kang Nam Soon, one of our Korean hosts here has argued that, like nationalists' dependency on a 'restored' tradition for their recovery of national identities, the emphasis of some Korean theologians – including feminists – on an incorporation of traditional Korean religions and cultures in their theology might serve the interests of the West more than Korean churches themselves. She contends that the recent employment of traditional resources in Korean theology bears a strong tendency of romaticisation and idealisation which lead to a general negligence of the sexism hidden in these resources.

In fact, when they return to some traditional resources, in some cases they play the role of sustaining an existing patriarchal value system.²⁶ Consequently, despite rigorous efforts in a theological reinterpretation of Korean national 'realities', women's issues have hardly been taken seriously enough. Whereas the most important issue on the ecumenical agenda of Korea remains the unification of the two Koreas, women's struggles to improve their status in the family or society is pushed aside as if they were some luxuries which only Western society could afford.²⁷

The fact that very progressive theologians such as Song and other feminist theologians all adopt the same antithetical representation of women of both/either victims and/or heroines in their writings reflect a concern which underlines all Asian theology, namely, the identity of the Asian opposed to the Western. Like Asian theology in general, theology of and/or about women in Asia locates itself in the post colonial context against their former colonial powers. Like Asian theology in general, it is placed in the broad framework of a reconstitution of an identity of Asia. That means Asian feminist theologians, too, identify themselves strongly as Asians, as distinct from Western feminists. For instance, Virginia Fabella, a Filipina theologian, highlights the importance of Asian women's two "disparate" but "interacting" contexts: their Asian-ness and their womanness.²⁸ Well aware of the subordination of women within Asian societies themselves, she begins with a challenge to the insufficiency of an assertion of only Asian-ness for women doing theology in Asia. Rather, she argues that womanness is the more pressing reality to consider. But in explaining this womanness of Asian women, Fabella returns to emphasise that 'womanness' is not meant a mere conglomerate of biological or psychological factors but an awareness of what it means to be a woman in the Asian context today. Suffering, multiple oppression, growing awareness and struggle for full humanity ­ this is all part of being a woman in Asia today.²⁹

In other words, with regard to the "disparateness" (Asian-ness) and the "interactiveness" (womanness) of the two contexts in her argument in doing women's theology in Asia, the latter is overtaken by the former.

There are just too many cases in which the women's movement has been contained and restricted by the 'larger' cause of nationalism or patriotism when the identity of a people was prioritised over the identity of women.³⁰ In Partha Chatterjiee's words, the story of nationalist emancipation is necessarily a story of betrayal,

It could confer freedom only by imposing at the same time a whole set of new controls, it could define a cultural identity for the nation only by excluding many from its fold: and it could grant the dignity of citizenship to some only because the others always needed to be represented and could not be allowed to speak for themselves.³¹

In this sense Stuart Hall argues that on the one hand, cultural identity as defined "in terms or one shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self' played an important role in the anti-colonial struggles of this century and continues to be a very powerful and creative force in emergent forms of representation amongst hitherto marginalised peoples" it is, on the other hand, not to be "fixed" but instead "subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power." From this perspective, identities are not grounded in a mere recovery of the past but rather the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.³²

If it is accepted that the identity of Asian-ness in Asian theology is itself something to be contested and therefore open to negotiation at different times, in relation to different questions among different communities, what then do we mean by doing theology in an Asian way? On what basis might we continue to confront the colonial cultures and ideology which continue to constitute our daily thought and practices in different countries of Asia? I propose that we might consider a strategy of hybridity as resistance

Let me first introduce here a figurative description of such a strategy of resistance by means of a fiction written by a Hong Kong woman writer, Xi Xi. In her story of Yuzhou qicui buwei (A supplement to the Interesting Stories of the Universe), Xi Xi writes about a most humorous hybrid creation of the city called Lese chong, the Garbage Bug. Such a creature is indeed created out of the city's campaign to "Keep Hong Kong clean" in the seventies. In the story, this Garbage Bug is recalled as a creature mixed with both the features of a dragon and a dinosaur³³ which carries an identification number of "5354". This number has the same pronunciation in Cantonese as the colloquial saying of "neither three nor four," meaning a hybrid. As a dragon, which used to symbolise Chineseness by its great qualities such as honour, courage and perseverance, the Garbage Bug was greatly disappointing. "None among my ancestors has been debased to this point," complained the dragon.

Yet as a dinosaur, which is used in the story as a metaphor for the aggressive world powers, the Garbage Bug gladly humbles itself in order to forsake the power of aggression. The most interesting turn of the story occurs when this supposed-to-be abominable creature becomes the darling of the city, fascinating both adults and children. This outcome contradicts the original intent of its creation and greatly embarrasses its creator who finally decides to destroy the Garbage Bug. Nevertheless, although the creature has "neither a brain nor a hear", it is a modern creation of synthetic fibre which cannot be completely disposed: "Synthetic rubber has overflowed the city, it has become a problem," but "it is also something that will remain there till the end of the earth no matter how hard one tries to destroy it," Thus even "after many many years when one unearths the materials from underground of the City of Rich Soil (a pseudonym for Hong Kong), one must be astonished to find such an embarrassed page in the history of the dragon."

This highly imaginary literature of Xi Xi has in fact engaged fully in the materiality of the culture of the city and effectively demonstrates the multiplicity and contradictions embedded in the identity of being Hong Kong. Xi Xi's clever plot of metonymising the embarrassingly hybrid yet unique reality of Hong Kong in the urban synthetic Garbage Bug, a hybrid creature of East and West, is, in a way, a resistance to the grand, national narrative of one 'Chineseness'. Situated between two dominant powers and cultures – the colonial British and the communist Chinese, the city as captured by the Garbage Bug is a typical product of a mixture of modern urban culture and traditional Chinese values in the Hong Kong way of life.

It consists in its identity of an ambiguity of 'both/and' ­ as well as 'neither/nor' in regard to an authenticity of either British or Chinese. Yet the identity of Hong Kong is not about self-pitying nor self-devaluing; nor is it about its political correctness, ie anti-imperialism (against Britain) or anti-chauvinism (against China). On the contrary, it is about a people who turn their fate into a new beginning of creation in its given limitations. Over the years, Hong Kong has extended its extraordinary uniqueness and vitality by its creative negotiation and appropriation of the contradictions of East and West, tradition and modern; it has explored and developed its own space of survival by building itself into a city of opportunities. Hence, for the people of Hong Kong, the coloniality of Hong Kong is not only about the historical violence committed by the powerful of the world against the powerless, it is also a basic material condition – for many the only condition of value – in which to live, think, and seek changes regardless of a grand national identity.³⁴

According to Homi Bhabha, an Indian-American post colonial critic, 'hybridity' is originally a term designated by the colonists to describe the culture of the colonised which mimics the colonial. But the presence of a discriminatory hybrid in effect renders the recognition of the colonial authority problematic. For in such presence is an ambivalent 'turn' of the discriminated subject into the terrifying object of paranoid classification, allowing other 'denied' knowledge to enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority ­ its rules of recognition. Through the repetition of discriminatory identity, hybridity revaluates and subverts the assumption of colonial identity. It intervenes in the exercise of authority not merely to indicate the 'impossibility' of its identity but to represent the unpredictability of its presence, it is in this sense that hybridity is a strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal.³⁵

In sum, I am suggesting a new site of politics for 'doing' theology in Asia. Rather than a strict demarcation of Asian and Western sources of doing theology in Asia, or a heavy investment in defining and hence confining one 'collective' Asian identity as the victim-hero/heroine opposed to the West, we might build on the rich and creative resources as produced in the reality of 'hybridisation' among Asian societies.

These resources might include indigenous cultural resources as well as religious syncretism as long as it is not positioned as something Asian in opposition to the West. The difference between the previous use of indigenous resources and the present acknowledgement of our hybridity as resistance in our 'doing' theology is that we do not expect a 'pure' indigenous tradition to which one might return; and we might exercise our greatest freedom to explore all possible resources available in our present communities in thinking and practising our understanding of the Divine, whether they are national regional or global. For we must somehow reconcile the fact that Asian-ness is something which lives in us as much as something in which we are living daily; it is fictional reconstruction of our identity as much as a collective transformatory vision in which we all participate to build.

Endnotes

26 Kang Nam Soon, "Creating 'Dangerous Memory': Challenges for Asian and Korean Feminist Theology", The Ecumenical Review, vol 47, no 1, 1995, p 29.

27 Ibid, p 28.

28 Virginia Fabella, "A Common Methodology for Diverse Christologies?" in Fabella and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds, With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1990, p 115.

29 Ibid.

30 Cf Jayawardena, op cit.

31 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp 154-155.

32 Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora", in Mongia, pp 110-112.

33 I believe the original creation meant to imitate the dinosaur. However, in the story, Xi Xi cleverly juxtaposes the Garbage Bug with the image of the dragon, which is quite appropriate given the cultural context of Hong Kong.

34 Chow, "Things, Common/Places, Passages of the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong Author Leung Ping-kwan (Liang Bingjun), in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 5:3, 1993, pp 194, 197.

35 Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1917", in Critical Inquiry 12, Autumn 1985, pp 154-156.