Cultural Preservation Reconsidered

Abstract

Hybrid art forms are emerging more than ever now that advances in global communication link the world’s societies. James Clifford, Trinh T. MinhHa, Valerie Dominguez and other eminent scholars champion such hybrid culture. They argue that it leads to greater acceptance of others and otherness, and destroys notions of ‘others’ as aesthetically unsophisticated. While there is merit in such claims, this article sheds a different light on the nature of hybrid culture. It argues that in some instances, such culture is the by-product of cultural imperialism – first-world socio-economic and cultural policies imposed on ‘Second’ and ‘Third World’ communities. The article concentrates on the dichotomy between native Canadian and Anglo-American Canadian mass culture and adopts Minh-Ha’s claim that a First World and a Third World can exist in the same country.