`between Cultures, Between Pages: Colonial Knowledge And The Social Hybrid`

"People are increasingly ethnically ambiguous. People can choose what they are. Race is not the primary indicator of identity.'' These are the words of Laura Kina, a Japanese-American artist, describing the intention behind her paintings for the 'Under my Skin' exhibition. In our twenty-first century societies the notion of mixed identities - racial or otherwise - still interests us greatly. Throughout the centuries, people have moved from place to place, leaving behind some of their old cultures and at least partially assimilating to new ones. They thus have more than one culture strongly influencing their notions of self-identity. Social-hybrids are therefore interesting figures to look at, because they represent both the meeting point and the product of different cultures meeting upon one another. They are of arguably greater interest when the creation of their hybridity is due to the purposes of colonialism. The most cost-efficient method for colonizers to rule was to have largely willing subjects; to achieve this they needed to first understand the native peoples' cultures before 'civilizing' them to adhere to a Western model. The combination of these actions led to the creation of what the historian and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macauley called ''a class of brown Englishmen.English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.'' This suggests that hybrids are both the intended result of colonialism and the means by which colonial control could be gained. The way these figures used the knowledge they held of both the colonies and Europe will be the focus of this dissertation.

Michael Mann has argued that the term 'civilizing mission' was adopted from the French mission civilisatrice and became part of Britain's official imperial doctrine, particularly after 1895. He states that the civilizing mission ''rested upon the idea of mastery.'' Implicit in this, is not just the implied self-belief that the white race was superior and thus civilizing lesser races was a duty,'' but it also implied a belief in superior knowledge. From the eighteenth century onwards ''officializing'' procedures became an emblem of visible white power. Bernard S. Cohn argued that this was done by, ''defining and classifying space.recording transactions.classifying their populations.it fostered official beliefs in how things are and how they ought to be.'' It is this that C. A. Bayly argues colonialists attributed to there ''fail(ing) to materialize a general alliance against the British.'' This colonialist attempt to codify colonial society is the base of Homi K. Bhaba's argument on the importance of the concept of ''fixity in the ideological construction of otherness.'' Especially in the case of Britain, this fixity was an attempt to understand the colonies through their own value system based on scri pture, law and class. This encouraged stereotypes as a form of 'fixity,' whilst paradoxically accepting that natives could never be fully understood, and therefore were 'fixed' in ambivalence. Bhaba argues that ambivalence was central to the fixity of stereotypes in that it ''ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjectures.''