Globalization and Cultural Hybridity: Postcolonial Geographies of Asian English Literature

From the late twentieth century on, postcolonialism has contributed English literature toward broadening the scopes of writers and themes from the long dominant white Anglo-American cultural tradition into non-Euro-American traditions, resulting in multicultural literary tradition. Postcolonial studies attempt to reveal the conventional cultural identities through the remnants of colonial influence and precolonial culture to further develop a viable new cultural identity on the levels of both nations and individuals. The popular metaphor or organizing concept for this complex cultural identity is known as hybridity.
Hybridized cultural conditions and cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies have become reinforced and more complicated through the societies' contact or acceptance of global modernity. The postcolonial scholars find examples of this cultural hybridity and cosmopolitan conditions mainly in India or African countries. In a more general sense, Asia has been forgotten territory in postcolonial discourses. Most countries in this area, however, have not only suffered from outside colonial power, but built their national identities in the wake of obtaining independence with distinct cultural hybridity. What distinguishes cultural hybridity of postcolonial Asian countries from postcolonial India and Africa lies in the fact that postcolonial Asian countries have embraced globalization and modernization more forcefully and broadly while they at the same time have reinforced cultural nationalism. In postcolonial Asian societies, the two way campaigns of economic globalization and cultural postcolonial nationalism have led to a dissonant and confusing cultural hybridity of the global and the local over the internal differences and diversity within a society.
It is the global-national, or global-local hybridity and its resultant internal conflicts and problems that postcolonial Asian English writers have paid attention to. Such conflicts and problems are conspicuous especially on the parts of oppressed groups within postcolonial societies who have been neglected or ignored under the colonial rules and subsequent postcolonial state campaigns of both globalization and nationalism. Postcolonial Singapore and the Philippines offer good examples of a contested territory of such cultural hybridity generated and developed through interplay of globalization and nationalism, and Catherine Lim from Singapore and Sionil Jose from Philippines demonstrate such hybridity in their fiction. As a conclusion, this study contemplates on how and why the subject of Asian cultural hybridity is also noteworthy in literary studies in Korea.