Sunday Afternoon Thinking Project: Of Cultural Hybridity and the Jump Off Booty Shaking Contest

Well damn! The Brits have got it going on.

Where else can one see South Asians, Afro-Caribbeans, East Asians, and white Europeans all participating in a shared culture? Yes, New York and LA have their charms, but I have never seen anything like this (except for maybe Korean and Chinese sisters in the Bay Area loving up the brothers and the Latinos) except in videos of the UK.

Random thought: is our Sikh brother paralyzed by pleasure or fear?



Just as the old neurons were firing in an effort to resolve my hot dog dilemma, in seeing the wonderfully lascivious mix of gyrating women, ill timed improvisational dancing, and sweating bodies, I kept thinking of how globalization has been both for worse (lost jobs)...and in this case also for the better in the form of a beautiful multiracial melange of women for me to take on a ride to space mountain.



As you enjoy the power of the Jump Off, do keep the following keywords and concepts in mind:

• Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all kinds of human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism. Cosmopolitanism may entail some sort of world government or it may simply refer to more inclusive moral, economic, and/or political relationships between nations or individuals of different nations. A person who adheres to the idea of cosmopolitanism in any of its forms is called a cosmopolitan. The cosmopolitan community might be based on an inclusive morality, a shared economic relationship, or a political structure that encompasses different nations. In its more positive versions, the cosmopolitan community is one in which individuals from different places (e.g. nation-states) form relationships of mutual respect.
  

• Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), marks a turning point in the study of diasporas[1]. Applying a cultural studies approach, Gilroy provides a study of African intellectual history and its cultural construction[2]. Moving away from all cultural forms which could be deemed ethnic absolutism, Gilroy offers the concept of the Black Atlantic as a space of transnational cultural construction[3]. In his book, Gilroy makes the peoples who suffered from the Atlantic slave trade the emblem of his new concept of diasporic peoples. This new concept breaks with the traditional diasporic model based on the idea that diasporic people are separated by a communal source or origin, offering a second model that privileges hybridity[4]. Gilroy's theme of Double Consciousness involves Black Atlantic striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency being absolutely transformed[3].