The Hybrid Church in the City

Third Space Thinking

Christopher Richard Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754655138
• eBook ISBN: 9781351888042
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The era of post-colonialism and globalisation has brought new intensities of debate concerning the existence of diversity and plurality, and the need to work in partnerships to resolve major problems of injustice and marginalisation now facing local and global communities. The Church is struggling to connect with the significant economic, political and cultural changes impacting on all types of urban context but especially city centres, inner rings and outer estates and the new ex-urban communities being developed beyond the suburbs. This book argues that theology and the church need to engage more seriously with post-modern reality and thought if points of connection (both theologically and pastorally) are going to be created. The author proposes a sustained engagement with a key concept to emerge from post-modern experience - namely the concept of the Third Space. Drawing on case studies from Europe and the USA primarily, this book examines examples of Third Space methodologies to ask questions about hybrid identities and methods churches might adopt to effectively connect with post-modern cities and civil society. Particular areas of focus by the author include: the role and identity of church in post-modern urban space; the role of public theology in addressing key issues of marginalisation and urbanisation as they impact in the 21st century; the nature and role of local civil society as a local response to globalised patterns of urban, economic, social and cultural change.

Part 1
Third Space Thinking

Chapter 1
The Significance of the Third Space and Hybridity for Understanding the Postmodern World

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the centrality of the concept of Third Space Hybridity within postmodern discourse under a variety of overlapping headings, with a view to establishing it as a key concept with which theology needs to engage. A key figure in this discussion will be Homi Bhabha, whose book The Location of Culture (1994) is a definitive analysis of the Third Space and its origins in post-colonial hybridity (see Soja, 2000, Brah and Coombes, 2000, Sandercock, 2003 and Papastergiadis, 2000)

This chapter will describe some of the important practical origins of hybridity (derived from biological and colonial discourses) before examining some of the epistemological ones (emerging from literature and post-colonial political philosophy). It is in this latter section that we will explore the close relationship between hybridity and the concept of the Third Space, which emerges as a major conceptual tool in understanding how hybridity works. Having set up the broad parameters of discussion, we will then be able to explore in subsequent chapters the impact of Third Space Hybridity thinking on postmodern urban studies, and on civil society and governance debates.

The Concept of Hybridity

The concept of hybridity, according to Brah and Coombes’s edited collection of essays (2000) is far from a modern one, although its extensive usage since the early 1990s in such disparate fields as music, political science, cultural criticism and planning theory might lead one to think so (Brah and Coombes, 2000: 3–4). It first emerged as a concept in modern Western thought during the eighteenth century with the development of the natural sciences, and in particular, botany and zoology, where it referred to the outcome of a cross between two separate varieties of plant and animal. However, in the nineteenth century it emerged as a form of categorization of the human species into taxonomies of race, with increasingly vigorous debate about the origin of the species itself. For example, the monogenesists held that all humankind belonged to the same species. The polygenesists held that diverse skin colour denoted different species, which they arranged in a racist hierarchy with the white species at the top of the ethnic tree (Young, 1995: 150). These questions were intimately linked, indeed ‘fuelled’, by the needs of Western colonialism and imperialism, and its need to ‘manage’ the colonized subject. Coombes and Brah identify two management strategies that emerge during the nineteenth century: either to promote assimilation of the colonized to the norms and values of the West, or to ensure strict codes of segregation. A particularly shocking example of the former, which survived well into the latter half of the twentieth century, was the practice, required by Australian law, whereby mixed-race Aboriginal children up to the age of four were forcibly taken from Aboriginal homes and placed in adoptive white families. This approach was designed to allow full-blood Aborigines to die out, while the selected mixed-race section would breed with white people whose descendants, over several generations, would ultimately become completely absorbed into the white population. This policy was the subject of a film, Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) directed by Philip Noyce.

Within colonialist discourse therefore, hybridity is seen as a potentially dangerous condition that needs to be carefully managed. Strong warnings were issued on the dangers of weakening genetic purity and cultural identity through the persistence of ethnic assimilation due to sexual unions between Western peoples and those of other ethnic or social origins. People from such unions were thought to be more infertile because they had crossed ‘species’ boundaries. Thus warnings against interracial union voiced by British colonial rulers in the Caribbean in the 1770s and French administrators in South East Asia in the 1930s (Brah and Coombes, 2000: 4) finds its current counterpart in the language of ‘swamping’ within British politics and the tabloid press in debates about immigration policy. In the United States, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has raised serious anxieties about the erosion of American culture and identity by the ‘persistent inflow’ and much higher fertility rates of Hispanic populations from Mexico and other Latino communities, which threatens to divide America into two nations. Hispanic families average 3 children compared to 1.8 in non-Hispanic white communities, and he estimates that by 2050, 25 per cent of the US population will be of Hispanic origin. More particularly, Huntington is concerned that the foundational purity of American identity will be lost:

America was created by seventeenth and eighteenth century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British and Protestant … Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil.

(Huntington, 2004: 2)

Meanwhile, there emerges from the UK some disturbing research into how young people who define themselves as Mixed (see discussion of the 2001 Census in the Introduction, p. 000) are treated by the wider society. Because they have, say, one black parent, it appears that society expects them to think of themselves as black, which some are willing to do, but others are not. However, all mixed race young people are subject to deep-seated racial discrimination, epitomized in such phrases as ‘peanut’, ‘yellow-belly’, ‘half-breed’ and ‘redskin’, which are not used of children with two black parents. And it is also apparent that they experience racist discrimination at the hands of black as well as white people, despite efforts from some of them to identify with black culture and ways of life (Brah and Coombes, 2000: 89).

From this brief overview, it is possible to say how ‘anxieties about miscegenation [that is, interbreeding] and the preservation of racial purity’ (Brah and Coombes, 2000: 4) remain at a high level and reflect negative notions of hybridity.

The Legacy of Colonial Anthropology

The previous relationships between the West and the world ‘colonized’ by European powers had been characterized by statements about culture that appeared neutral, universal and self-evidently true. In fact, according to Homi Bhabha, they designated ‘institutional power and ideological Eurocentricity’ in what he refers to as the ‘familiar traditions and conditions of colonial anthropology’ (Bhabha, 1994: 31). By this he means the constant framing of the colonized as the Other, the object of study, thus exacerbating the difference, otherness and often supposed ‘inferiority’ of the object as a case study in cultural difference – a mindset dubbed ‘orientalism’ by Edward Said (1978) for its frequent application to societies in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Far East.

The purpose of this colonial anthropology was threefold. First, it justified the main tenets of colonial capitalism as the antidote to the ‘primitivism’ that was supposed to have existed in colonized cultures before the advent of the white man’s rule. Within this propaganda, major ideas concerning the nature and purpose of human history were held as self-evident. For example, the linear and predictable progress of history which, as it unfolds, produces increased understanding in technology, culture, democracy and economics – ‘gifts’ of understanding that the West ‘passed on’ to the East. It is a heroic and rationalistic view of history that Bhabha and others call ‘historicism’ (Bhabha, 1994: 194); a grand narrative of nineteenth-century colonialization predicated on ‘evolutionism, utilitarianism, evangelism … the technologies of colonialist and imperialist governance’(Bhabha, 1994: 194).

Second, the close study and evaluation of the Other supplied the justification for colonial anthropology to evolve into cultural anthropology as a respectable and credible discipline within the overall genealogy of social sciences. Bhabha describes the process thus:

This is a familiar manoeuvre of theoretical knowledge, where having opened up the chasm of cultural difference, a mediator or metaphor of otherness must be found to contain the effects of difference. In order to be institutionally effective as a discipline, the knowledge of cultural difference must be made to foreclose on the Other; difference and otherness thus become the fantasy of a certain cultural space …

(Bhabha, 1994: 31)

In other words, cultural anthropology functions in a monopolistic way by choosing an unnecessarily stark and binary analysis of indigenous histories and cultures and then proposing itself as part of the solution to the cultural problematic it has identified.

The third reason is more subtle and complex, and reflects later developments within post-colonial studies. Although at one level post-colonial disciplines are more conscious of past issues of power and exploitation, they still define the Other. They still seek to explain and speak on behalf of those who experience marginalization and exploitation. Bhabha is critical of moves towards liberal notions of multiculturalism. This focus on cultural diversity uses pre-given cultural contents and customs on the assumption that cultures are separated and live uncorrupted by other influences, ‘safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique, collective identity’ (Bhabha, 1994: 34). The limitations of this approach are exemplified for Bhabha when the rhetoric of cultural diversity is held within the ‘well-intentioned moralist polemics against prejudice or stereotype, or the blanket assertion of individual or institutional racism’ (Bhabha, 1994: 35), which he claims describes the effects of the problem rather than its structure.

Despite these trappings of tolerance and post-colonial cultural sensitivity, the Other is still the object of its own experience rather than the subject. The liberal Enlightenment project of categorization and objectivization continues as part of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the ‘symbolic capital’ of the West, which ensures that new cultural openness and tolerance never actually upset the cultural dominance of the West (see Bhabha, 1994: 21). The very language and theory of cultural anthropology and post-colonialism can be used as a ‘power-ploy of the culturally privileged Western world … a discourse on the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation’ (Bhabha, 1994: 34). The effect Bhabha is conveying is a notion of static preservation; the supremacy of the West is represented by its power to culturally represent others, while its ‘authoritative address’ relies on the codification of experience in its desire to reflect culture and history as ‘a homogenizing unifying force’ (Bhabha, 1994: 35).

There are close parallels between these processes of cultural commodification by the West and modernist planning, as identified by Leonie Sandercock, whereby planners attempted to create homogeneous urban space via masterplans reflecting the concept of a ‘common good’ or common identity. These masterplans created zoned spaces and high-density public housing that suppressed plurality and diversity, or simply reinforced structural inequality and prejudice. We shall explore the impact of these modernist masterplans, and the alternative discourses proposed by postmodernist planners, in Chapter 2.

The rise of Postcolonial Hybridity and the Emergence of the Third Space

Homi Bhabha identifies the Third Space as the space produced by the collapse of the previously defining narratives of modernity based on colonialism, class and patriarchy. These narratives labelled and defined the Other on grounds such as race, gender and sexual orientation. The epistemological and cultural collapse of the hegemony of the West has been brought on in the latter half of the twentieth century, says Leonie Sandercock, by four interconnected socio-cultural processes. She defines these as:

• International migration, which has been intensified since the 1980s by the growing inequalities of wealth between the North and the South, thus impelling people to search for work opportunities, as well as ethnic and religious struggles, political, ecological and demographic pressures, and the creation of new free trade areas.
• The resurgence of indigenous peoples, after colonial planning and farming policies had displaced or excluded indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. This spatial displacement was never successful, and semi-permeable arrangements emerged whereby individuals or groups found their way into the edges or unincorporated parts of the city. Since the 1970s, there has been a global justice movement on the part of indigenous peoples to reverse the original displacements, with land claims being lodged on behalf of sites that were once sacred or ancestral.
• The rise of organized civil society, which emerged during the 1970s and 1980s from feminist inspired social movements demanding better access to transport, child care, community facilities, safe public spaces etc. Other movements also emerged during this period to combat racism, homophobia and environmental issues and these movements have become increasingly influential.
• The discourse of post-colonialism, which has exposed the persisting historical connections between empire, immigration, labour markets and racism, and the inherent racialism of liberal democracies. This legacy makes the growing diversity of populations faced by globalizing cities of the twenty-first century more problematic because of the embedded nature of the ‘already-racialized western liberal democracies’ in these cities, that have been used to seeing ‘race relations’ as a problem, and through a sequence of policies ranging from assimilation to multiculturalism, have attempted to integrate the ‘inferior, less civilized’ Other.

(Sandercock, 2003: 20–27)

The combined impact of these four processes has led to the rise of the Other as the carrier of its own self-liberating story. The Other is now no longer willing to be labelled and defined by the West. Rather the Other has become the subject of its own experience, which has created a process by which new identities and cultures have been forged.

Third Space Theory — the Difference Between the Saying and the Said

The above terms are based on the structure of linguistic theory and symbolic representation. Bhabha uses them (1994: 36–37) to describe the cultural position of the object of enunciation (the cultural Other or énoncé). Its cultural position always lies outside the statement; that is, its specificity can never be fully covered by the generality of what is assumed by the proposer (or the one doing the enunciating – usually the colonizer). Rather, the way the two parties of the proposition are related (that is, the I and You designated in a statement) is through being mobilized in the passage of the Third Space, ‘which represents both the general conditions of language, and the specific implication of the utterance’ (Bhabha, 1994: 37 – emphasis mine). In other words, the linguistic liminality of the Third Space is an area where neither the general nor the specific hold sway, but any symbolic, cultural or linguistic interpretation is an ‘ambivalent’process that needs to be negotiated between the two.

Bhabha appears to be strongly influenced by the work of the Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, who, following his experience as a prisoner during World War II, was keen to develop an anti-universalist and non-prescriptive ethics derived from a respect and responsibility for the Other. He became disillusioned with the dialectical and ontological nature of Hegelian philosophy, which saw reality as separated by sharp edges and ordered into hierarchical categories. He saw how this philosophical position could validate a political ideology like fascism. Instead he advocated an understanding of reality based on face-to-face encounter, whereby the essential unknowability of the Other is affirmed and respected. According to this world view, whenever we encounter the Other – another individual, another culture, even God – we attempt to define that encounter for ourselves, for our own consumption. For Lévinas, this attempted definition represents the Said (Lévinas, 1969). The Said strives for universality and solidity. But the nature of speech and language is that it is fluid and unstable, and the Other is an unknowable mystery. Therefore our striving for complete definition always falls short. This is the Saying. There is always a residue of the Other that resists the Said, but this relationship between definition and the attempt to define is itself a fluid one; a to-and-fro conversation that hopefully becomes a dialogue.

The erosion of national and cultural identity caused in the last twenty years by the upheaval of so many of the world’s populations has also been instrumental in causing a transitional feeling in many of our cities. Leonie Sandercock identifies a fundamental ambivalence about these ‘post-colonial’ times. Are we living in a postcolonial era, she asks, characterized by a rejection of racism and ethnic stereotyping and an embracing of plurality, diversity and equality? Or is the spirit of colonialism still lurking within our supposedly more tolerant and diverse cities? She finds plenty of evidence to support the latter view, giving examples of fortified zoning against the poor and the migrant in northern US cities, São Paulo, and Cape Town (Sandercock, 2003: 115–22) as well as the rise of the far right in European countries such as the UK, France, Denmark and the Netherlands (Sandercock, 2003: 22). Previously dominant cultural discourses are being eroded and adapted by ‘insurgent discourses’ (Sandercock, 1998: 129) emanating from newly confident and insistent groups that were previously marginalized. Insurgent discourses are those stories and practices of planning and civil society that emerge from outside the control or influence of the state and represent the perspectives of disempowered communities. They also acknowledge ‘the politics of difference … a belief in inclusive democracy … and the diverse claims of social justice’ (Sandercock, 1998: 44).

The location of these new discourses is often from what Sandercock calls the ‘Voices from the Borderlands’; those already living in the marginal spaces of our globe who have been uprooted or have chosen to settle in host urban spaces that would often prefer not to acknowledge their presence. These voices belong to women, people of colour, gay and lesbian communities, those of mixed ethnic heritage, children, the elderly, the poor and homeless, those living with physical or mental disability; in other words, any group whose experience has been ‘marginalized, displaced, oppressed or dominated’ (Sandercock, 1998: 110).

The ambivalence and instability caused by the enunciation of experiences and identities from insurgent practices and borderland voices has created the conditions necessary for the growth of hybridity; the fusion of identity and practice between old and new, colonizers and colonized, Occident and Orient. Within our postmodern culture, we now have stories, theories, cultures and urban spaces that are fusions of gender, sexuality and different degrees of mobility as well as race, culture and ethnic identity.

Some Examples of Entering the Third Space

We now explore a little further what it means to leave the confined ‘space’ of a colonial past and enter into a Third Space that is controlled by neither a colonial power nor a mythic traditionalist identity (both of which are predicated on notions of pure identity). This will be done with reference to new understandings of ‘being at home’ and examples of hybrid literary protagonists from US and UK literature. It will also feature an exploration of black British Christian experience and ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART 1 THIRD SPACE THINKING
• PART 2 PUBLIC THEOLOGY IN THE THIRD SPACE
• Bibliography
• Index