Theoretical hybridity dissolves when one’s tax money enables imperial violence

Evidence

So where is home now, and who is at home, and why does it matter? In what she calls “the virtualized demographic frontiers of the modern world”, Gayatri Spivak has opted to be “in both worlds”—India and America—“deeply, without being quite of them. I believe that slight anomaly gives us a certain distance, which may be valuable”. But being in two worlds one is in neither, and the “slight anomaly” is no longer sufficient for the critical affinity we need with where and what we are. If any measure of “anomaly” is to constitute critical distance, then it must be internal to the voice that dissents, not to the accent that alienates. Spivak identifies herself among the “theoreticians of migrant hybridity”. Not any longer. Not when—immigrant or citizen—your tax money builds bombs and drops them on your brothers and sisters halfway around the globe, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. “Theoretical hybridity” dissolves in the face of the income-tax reports one must file every April 15. The only people entitled to “theoretical hybridity” are illegal immigrants, who do not pay taxes. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 643

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The passage redefines critical distance as internal to the dissenting voice rather than external to the migration itself — a genuine reframing of postcolonial hybridity theory worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to Dabashi’s broader project in this book of dismantling the native informer figure, parallel to his critiques of Spivak elsewhere and to core arguments about assimilation in postcolonial theory.