Difference Between Multiculturalism And Colonialism

The reading of art’s history has undergone serious transformation with the coming of Post Colonial theory where it has cogently gleaned valuable data and pushed aside many redundant theories. The time has come for post colonialism to have a reassessment of its own methods and taxonomies to question some of the discrepancies within itself.
Of such discrepancies are the notions of Hybridity and Multiculturalism.
Hybridity or hybridization in pure literary terms means intermixing of two different species or races. Hybridity is a problematic matter when it is synthetically coated with academic objectivity and lofty ideals of post colonialism. Multiculturalism,
In both of these dispositions the viewer is fundamental to this cultural subjectivism, since he can be either inferred as a citizen, a migrant or a connoisseur (mostly thought be a Westerner). Annie Coombes and Nestor Garcia Canclini examine this cultural relativism in curatorial and museum practices and how it is stretched to truss over a post colonial rhetoric of decolonization and self determination.

Annie Coombes in her essay takes up the issue of such curatorial practices which tend to create spaces for ‘hybridity’ in a superfluous way. It is superfluous because as Coombes observes,
Like Coombes, Canclini too operates with a historically continuing binary which he calls “disjunction” (Canclini p.498) between classicism - pertaining to market forces, and romanticism - idealizing displacement and forced migration. This divide is maintained by both the artists and the institutions (such as museums, educational institutions, art fairs and biennales, and art market) involved in differentiating between those who continue to practice according to Western aesthetic conventions, and those who seek creativity outside those conventions. An intercultural product born away from the West is ascribed into a national art project to be neatly labeled and displayed under the category of national specimen. There are symbolisms and iconographies associated with a particular art practice emerging from the place of origin which is taken to be symptomatic of the metamorphosis that a non western nation has gone through. In a common international market these nationalities act as agents of othering thus reducing them to a marginal position which is priced much lower than the Western art piece. These