Hybridity
Encyclopedia
Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology
and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture
. This article explains the history of hybridity and its major theoretical discussion amongst the discourses of race, post-colonialism, Identity (social science)
, anti-racism
& multiculturalism
, and globalization
. This article illustrates the development of hybridity rhetoric from biological to cultural discussions.
that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race. Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation. Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment
, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit. The social transformations that followed the ending of colonial mandates, rising immigration, and economic liberalisation profoundly altered the use and understanding of the term hybridity. (For the history of hybridity as a concept, see Robert J.C. Young
's Colonial Desire, 1995)
. This second stage in the history of hybridity is characterised by literature and theory that focuses on the effects of mixture upon identity and culture. Key theorists in this realm are Homi Bhabha
, Stuart Hall
, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy
, whose work responds to the increasing multicultural awareness of the early nineteen nineties. Often the literature of postcolonial and magical realist authors such as Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez
, Milan Kundera
, and J. M. Coetzee recur in their discussions.
A key text in the development of hybridity theory is Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) which analyses the liminality
of hybridity as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. His key argument is that colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power. Bhabha’s arguments have become key in the discussion of hybridity. While he originally developed his thesis with respect to narratives of cultural imperialism, his work also develops the concept with respect to the cultural politics of migrancy in the contemporary metropolis. But no longer is hybridity associated just to migrant populations or border towns it is also used in other contexts when there is a flow of different cultures and both give and receive from each other.
This critique of cultural imperialist hybridity meant that the rhetoric of hybridity became more concerned with challenging essentialism
and has been applied to sociological theories of identity, multiculturalism, and racism. Another key component of hybridity theory is Mikhail Bakhtin
, whose concept of polyphony is employed by many analysts of hybrid discourses in folklore and anthropology (see Theorizing the Hybrid).
(2004) highlights these core arguments in a debate that promotes hybridity. Some on the left, such as cultural theorist John Hutnyk, have criticised hybridity as politically void.
, who asserts hybridity as the rhizome
of culture. He argues that globalization as hybridization opposes views which see the process as homogenising, modernising, and westernising, and that it broadens the empirical history of the concept. However neither of these scholars have reinvigorated the hybridity theory debate in terms of solving its inherent problematics. The term hybridity remains contested precisely because it has resisted the appropriations of numerous discourses despite the fact that it is radically malleable.
in linguistics
. For example, according to Zuckermann (2009:63), "Israeli" (his term for Modern Hebrew
) is a Semito-European hybrid language and "demonstrates that the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows. 'Revived' languages are unlikely to have a single parent."
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
. This article explains the history of hybridity and its major theoretical discussion amongst the discourses of race, post-colonialism, Identity (social science)
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
, anti-racism
Anti-racism
Anti-racism includes beliefs, actions, movements, and policies adopted or developed to oppose racism. In general, anti-racism is intended to promote an egalitarian society in which people do not face discrimination on the basis of their race, however defined...
& multiculturalism
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
, and globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
. This article illustrates the development of hybridity rhetoric from biological to cultural discussions.
Hybridity as racial mixing
Hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used to classify the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture. As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century. Scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans, Asians, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders were racially inferior to Europeans. The fear of miscegenationMiscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race. Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation. Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit. The social transformations that followed the ending of colonial mandates, rising immigration, and economic liberalisation profoundly altered the use and understanding of the term hybridity. (For the history of hybridity as a concept, see Robert J.C. Young
Robert J.C. Young
- Life :He was educated at Repton School and Exeter College, Oxford where he read for a B.A. and D.Phil., taught at the University of Southampton, and then returned to Oxford University where he was Professor of English and Critical Theory and a fellow of Wadham College. In 2005, he moved to New...
's Colonial Desire, 1995)
The postcolonial turn
The rhetoric of hybridity, sometimes referred to as hybrid talk, is fundamentally associated with the emergence of postcolonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialismCultural imperialism
Cultural imperialism is the domination of one culture over another. Cultural imperialism can take the form of a general attitude or an active, formal and deliberate policy, including military action. Economic or technological factors may also play a role...
. This second stage in the history of hybridity is characterised by literature and theory that focuses on the effects of mixture upon identity and culture. Key theorists in this realm are Homi Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has coined a number of the field's neologisms and...
, Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy
-Biography:Born in the East End of London to Guyanese and English parents , he was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at Sussex University in 1978. He moved from there to Birmingham University where he completed his Ph.D...
, whose work responds to the increasing multicultural awareness of the early nineteen nineties. Often the literature of postcolonial and magical realist authors such as Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
, Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...
, and J. M. Coetzee recur in their discussions.
A key text in the development of hybridity theory is Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) which analyses the liminality
Liminality
Liminality is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes, as defined in neurological psychology and in the anthropological theories of ritual by such writers as Arnold van...
of hybridity as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. His key argument is that colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power. Bhabha’s arguments have become key in the discussion of hybridity. While he originally developed his thesis with respect to narratives of cultural imperialism, his work also develops the concept with respect to the cultural politics of migrancy in the contemporary metropolis. But no longer is hybridity associated just to migrant populations or border towns it is also used in other contexts when there is a flow of different cultures and both give and receive from each other.
This critique of cultural imperialist hybridity meant that the rhetoric of hybridity became more concerned with challenging essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
and has been applied to sociological theories of identity, multiculturalism, and racism. Another key component of hybridity theory is Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
, whose concept of polyphony is employed by many analysts of hybrid discourses in folklore and anthropology (see Theorizing the Hybrid).
A rhetorical cul-de-sac
The development of hybridity theory as a discourse of anti-essentialism marked the height of the popularity of academic "hybridity talk". However the usage of hybridity in theory to eliminate essentialist thinking and practices (namely racism) failed as hybridity itself is prone to the same essentialist framework and thus requires definition and placement. A number of arguments have followed in which promoters and detractors argue the uses of hybridity theory. Much of this debate can be criticised as being excessively bogged down in theory and pertaining to some unhelpful quarrels on the direction hybridity should progress e.g. attached to racial theory, post-colonialism, cultural studies, or globalization. Sociologist Jan Nederveen PieterseJan Nederveen Pieterse
Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology in the Global & International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara . He specializes in globalization, development studies and cultural studies...
(2004) highlights these core arguments in a debate that promotes hybridity. Some on the left, such as cultural theorist John Hutnyk, have criticised hybridity as politically void.
The cultural effect of globalization
The next phase in the use of the term has been to see hybridity as a cultural effect of globalization. For example, hybridity is presented by Kraidy (2005:148) as the ‘cultural logic’ of globalization as it ‘entails that traces of other cultures exist in every culture, thus offering foreign media and marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities’. Another promoter of hybridity as globalization is Jan Nederveen PieterseJan Nederveen Pieterse
Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology in the Global & International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara . He specializes in globalization, development studies and cultural studies...
, who asserts hybridity as the rhizome
Rhizome
In botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes...
of culture. He argues that globalization as hybridization opposes views which see the process as homogenising, modernising, and westernising, and that it broadens the empirical history of the concept. However neither of these scholars have reinvigorated the hybridity theory debate in terms of solving its inherent problematics. The term hybridity remains contested precisely because it has resisted the appropriations of numerous discourses despite the fact that it is radically malleable.
Hybridity in linguistics
Linguistic hybridity and the case of mixed languages challenge the Tree ModelComparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
in linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
. For example, according to Zuckermann (2009:63), "Israeli" (his term for Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew , also known as Israeli Hebrew or Modern Israeli Hebrew, is the language spoken in Israel and in some Jewish communities worldwide, from the early 20th century to the present....
) is a Semito-European hybrid language and "demonstrates that the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows. 'Revived' languages are unlikely to have a single parent."
See also
- Cross-culturalCross-culturalcross-cultural may refer to*cross-cultural studies, a comparative tendency in various fields of cultural analysis*cross-cultural communication, a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate...
- Post-colonial theory
- Migrant literatureMigrant literatureMigrant literature, that is, writings by and to a lesser extent about migrants, is a topic which has commanded growing interest within literary studies since the 1980s...
- Intercultural theatreIntercultural theatreIntercultural theater also known as Cross-cultural theatre may transcend time, while mixing and matching cultures or subcultures.-Imitational Theatre:...