Türk ve Japon Modernleşmesi: 'Uygarlık Süreci' - Birikim

150■Hyphenated identities:Some theoretical and methodological queriesIn refocusing on the social formations and ‘disjunct’ subjectivities of personswith multilocale and translocal attachments, a number of concepts have cometo be celebrated: ‘hybrid’, ‘creolised’, ‘hyphenated’ and ‘diasporic’ identities arethe most prominent among them. These concepts aim to capture the complexityof the practices, cultural configurations, and identity formations of translocaland culturally nomadic groups and individuals. In this paper, the aim is toreexamine the adequacy of concepts such as hybridity critically, and to askwhether they successfully contend with the tendency to reify culture in the discipline.What are the limits of the challenge that creolisation or hybridisationmodels pose to the previous holistic constructs of culture?The question of whether hybridisation, creolisation or hyphenation canbreak with the ontological premises underlying essentialist notions of culture isdiscussed first. Second, I analyse the subversive potential of political and socialprogrammes like multiculturalism that introduce a new politics of identitygrounded in notions of cultural ‘community’. I then go on to ask what themethodological starting point for a project of writing against culture might be.Finally, I suggest that we might find such a starting point in the study of objectpersonrelations.