ABSTRACT
Postcolonial theorists indicate that cultural diversity and ethnic cultures should not be understood with binary oppositions of cultural representation. They argue that contemporary intercultural (often transcultural) phenomena are characterised by hybridity, heterogeneity, creolisation, and multiplicity, and these concepts contain both commensurability and incommensurability between cultures. They pay attention to the latter, which engenders irreducible resistance to the coloniser, which is ontological. Postcolonial theorists strive to restore ethnic/cultural authenticity and its unchanging nature by arguing for non-dualistic approaches and articulating the subject position of other ethnic groups. In sum, Said’s latent Orientalism and Bhabha’s Third Space offer an ontological foundation to support authentic (cultural) identity of subalterns or ethnic groups; Spivak’s epistemic violence of othering processes, Hall’s encoding and decoding communication model, and Ang’s together-in-difference clarify how we are trapped in the binary systems and justify why we need to pay attention to other metaphysical aspects; Gilroy’s double consciousness on the rhizomatic network, Vertovec’s super-diversity and methodological innovation, and Amin’s every conviviality and cultural exchange build a methodological basis for value-interaction of cultures. In particular, Gilroy’s rhizomatic network lays the metaphysical foundations for both the culturally diverse world and cultural authenticity. Overall, metaphysical approaches to cultural diversity and intercultural interaction that those theorists hold can be characterised with a non-dualistic or holistic approach. However, it is unstable to use in the learning environment because there is a lack of evidence linking the proposed approaches to ethnic authenticity. In other words, as the attention is on understanding cultural hybridity as an intercultural phenomenon with postcolonial insights, strictly speaking, as a transcultural phenomenon, it is unclear whether their approach is still valid in a reverse way, which is to understand cultural diversity from (ethnic) cultures. Furthermore, its methodological approach is vague on whether cultures can interact with each other without undermining each other’s cultural values, although the literal meaning of cultural hybridity is less concerned with intercultural interaction itself. Alternatively, I have argued for the three dimensions of metaphysics as a non-dualistic, holistic approach to cultural diversity and interculturality: ontological justification, epistemological assumptions and processes, and axiological interaction.
