Postcolonial theory replaced rigid East-West opposition with hybrid, permeable identity discourse.

Evidence

If the transition from orientalism to postcolonialism has left important elements of our topic of orientalism and the Jews by the side, the same is true of another (and related) switch from Said’s original reading of orientalism as positing a rigid structural opposition between East and West, to a new recognition that here as elsewhere boundaries are flexible and permeable. Recent work has focused in Turnerian fashion on the “liminal” region between Occident and Orient as a most productive source of orientalist discourse (and performance) and the counterdiscourses it generates. Following upon the work of Frantz Fanon and drawing on the Lacanian process of subjectification through the incomplete singling out of an Other, Homi Bhabha has been perhaps the most effective proponent of the thesis that Western and colonial/postcolonial subjects define their selfhood through the same set of discourses—in our case, orientalism. The result are “hybrid” discourses of identity that may reflect social and cultural patterns that are no longer easily recognized as “purely” occidental or oriental. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 88

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the key postcolonial concept of ‘hybridity’ as stemming from Fanon and Lacanian subjectification via Bhabha.
• XREF: The Turnerian liminal region echoes Victor Turner’s ritual liminality; the Lacanian incomplete Other-recognition connects to broader subject-formation theory. — connects to: Postcolonial Anglo-American academy discourse erased a structural split between revolutionary and national-bourgeois decolonization. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 177