THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF HYBRIDITY 69 others - to mark and signify its sense of uniqueness. A plethora of recent scholarly works has examined the constitution of colonial discourse and nationhood by the production, manufacture and circulation of these and other markers of difference. That the lines of demarcation, of civilized and primitive, masculine and feminine, modern and traditional, scientific and superstitious, industrious and lazy, white and black, and so on, were always traversed by ambivalences, doubts and anxieties was an insight that undoubtedly was proclaimed and enacted on by Gandhi, Fanon, and many others. The merit of the work of postcolonial scholars and other critics, such as Ashis Nandy and Ivan Illich, who do not share the vocabulary and idioms of post-structuralist theory which animates postcolonial theory, but have likewise been inspired by the political desire to create the grounds for an ecological plurality of knowledge, has been to deploy the insight about the perils of identitarian thought to initiate further speculation into politics and culture. However, such a move is fraught with political impasses and practical contradictions, or so Robert Young argues in his most recent work, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. The "truth" and "reality" of hybridity, particularly in versions of multiculturalism, cannot be merely secured by its limitation to "cultural pluralism" or "diversity," important as it might be to advance the regrettably episodic victories of even this limited conception of it, as in the revisions of school curriculums and promotions of syncretic histories in the public sphere. The ready acceptance of cultural commingling and hybridity by corporatist powers, most notoriously by United Colors of Benneton in a series of provocative and rather shamelessly adaptive advertisements, should disabuse anyone of the idea that the espousal of hybridity by itself can advance emancipatory projects. x Multiculturalism', for the most part, has merely been appropriated by those corporatist and political forces that have thrived by perpetuating the opiate of 'choice': thus in large American cities people of N cultivated' taste have their choice of a staggeringly wide array of ethnic cuisines, while in France the MacDonalds chain of restaurants, catering to a purportedly more sophisticated clientele, serve wine. The ready promotion of hybridity may be no more than the conceit of the privileged classes that would, in typical fashion, wish to promote their own interests in the guise of what is deemed to be universally desirable and acceptable. These particular objections may be stated as the requirement that hybridity itself needs to hybridized, made heteronomous to itself, by a