Diasporic people negotiate multiple, hyphenated identities across cultural difference

Evidence

In diasporic conditions people are often obliged to adopt shifting, multiple, or hyphenated positions of identification. About two-thirds of those from minority communities asked in the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities whether they thought of themselves as “British” agreed, though they also felt that, for example, being British and Pakistani did not compete strongly in their minds (Modood et al. 1997). Black-and-British or British-Asian are increasingly identities the young are willing to answer to. Some women, who believe that their communities have a right to have their differences respected, do not wish their lives as women, their rights to education, or their marital choices to be governed by norms which are wholly communally regulated and policed. Even where the more traditionally oriented sections are concerned, the principle of heterogeneity continues to be strongly operative. In our terms, then, the besuited Asian chartered accountant vividly invoked by Modood (1998), who lives in suburbia, sends his children to private school and reads Readers Digest and the Bhagavad-Gita, or the black teenager who is a dancehall DJ and plays jungle music but supports Manchester United, or the Muslim student who wears baggy, hip-hop, street-style jeans but is never absent from Friday prayers are all, in their different ways, “hybridized.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 355

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines hybridization through vivid concrete examples of diasporic identity negotiation.
• XREF: Connects to Hall’s concept of ‘new ethnicities’ and to later identity-negotiation work in the Islamophobia canon. — connects to: Mainstream conviviality theory assumes negotiation dissolves fixed identities — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 21; Hybridity theorists and conservative commentators both treat ethnicity as rooted identity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 914