Hybridity in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory

                  

Hybridity in Postcolonial Theory

       Hybridity in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory

 

Introduction

At a basic level, Hybridity refers to any mixing of East and Western culture. Within colonial and postcolonial literature, it most commonly refers to the colonial subjects from Asia and Africa who have found a balance between Eastern and Western cultural attributes. Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. Hybridity has frequently been used in postcolonial discourse to mean simply cross-cultural’ exchange’. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding of two species by grafting or cross-pollination to form a third ‘hybrid’ species. Hybridization takes many forms like linguistic, cultural, political racial, etc. Linguistic examples include Pidgin (grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, grammar and vocabulary often drawn from several languages), and Creole (stable natural language).       

Types Of Hybridity        

Racial Hybridity,

Linguistic Hybridity,

Cultural and Religious Hybridity                                                                

 By contrast to mimicry, which is a relatively fixed and limited idea, postcolonial hybridity can be quite slippery and broad. As earlier described hybridity, however, in Homi Bhabha’s initial usage of the term in his essay” Signs Taken For Wonder,” he clearly thought of various forms of oppression (Bhabha’s example is of the British missionaries, imposition of the Bible in rural India in the 19^th century)

Critical Discussion                     

However, the term hybridity, which relies on a metaphor from biology, is commonly used in much broader ways, to refer to any kind of cultural mixing o mingling between East and West. As it is commonly used, this more sense of hybridity has many limitations. Hybridity defined as cultural mixing in general does not help us explicitly account for the many different paths by which someone can come to embody a mix of Eastern and Western attributes, nor does it differentiate between people who have consciously striven to achieve a mixed or balanced identity and those who accidentally reflect it. Hybridity defined this way also seems like a rather awkward term to describe people who are racially mixed such as “Eurasians” in the British Raj in India, or biracial or multiracial people all around the postcolonial world. Fourth, though it is more commonly deployed in the context of Indian and African societies that take on influence from the West, one needs to account for how hybridity, like mimicry, can run in “reverse” that is to say, it can describe how Western cultures can be infected by Asian and African element(“Chutneyfied” as it were) Finally it seems important to note that there can be very different registers of hybridity, from slight mixing to very aggressive instances of cultural clash.

For example, in biology, in the conception of life itself, a child is seen as a hybrid of two natures, male and female. In society, mediation is a hybrid of two polar entities, be they the individual and society, the human and the machine, or other combinations. Accordingly, mediating theories turn out to be hybrids emerging from various polar theories or even from mediating theories themselves. We live today in a hybrid, intercultural society where different and even opposite concepts of identity merge in novel ways. Already Mikhail Bakhtin (1930, rpt. in English translation 1981) noticed that, in modern cultures, the very emergence of meaning derives, among other conditions, from the hybrid nature of language itself, its polyglossia. This awareness of hybridity calls into question the classical dichotomies that shaped our traditional understanding of cultures. In Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold

War Era and After (2001), Marcel Cornis-Pope applies this idea to the cultural and literary creation of the post-World War Two period, pointing out the extent to which the traditional dualities of race, gender, class, and narratological oppositions such as Realism / Formalism, and imitation/invention, are questioned and transcended by post-war writers attentive to hybrid intercrossing.

Artur Matuck takes a similar position in “Tecnologias Digitas e o Futuro da Escrita” (Digital Technologies and the Future of Writing, 2009), arguing that “The de codification of this hybrid reality needs an open and enhanced perception that becomes available only through a reformulation of the fundamental structures that inform human beings, culture, history, the planet, identities, scientific creation, and language itself” (p. 293). In his turn, Peter Anders emphasizes the significance of ‘cybrids’ for contemporary culture, defining them as combinations of physical, symbolic, or electronic digital images; or as hybrids between mediated entities and physical ones; or, finally, as mergers between the physical and the electronic (“Towards an Architecture of the Mind,” 2009). Beyond the blogosphere, a hybrid sphere exists nowadays, in particular inside cyberspace and in cyber time. This emerging and immersive virtual space consist of sites or blogs with a variegated nature. For example, Hybrilog, an experimental blog published since 2006, was built not only from various related media, as a mere hypermedia system, but by using diverse blogs with different natures. What has resulted is a virtual space sui generis, characterized by hybridization of media and not just by the simple hyper-mediatic connection among them (see Andrade, Hybrilog). More specifically, Hybrilog consists of six different types of blog: a classic text blog; a blog including videos, which is named ‘vlog’; a third blog, containing video-poetry, named ‘Pvt-log’ (from the juxtaposition of ‘p’ for poetry and ‘vi’ for video, followed by the abbreviation ‘log’); another blog containing digital art, called ‘art-log’; a fifth blog where hypermedia works were included, called ‘hyp-log’; and finally, a sixth blog displaying games, or ‘game log.’

The significance of the hybridity concept

Post-colonial cultural politics assertions: integration and assimilation to unification
As a result of hybridization, dominant culture becomes diluted and more dispersed; less integrated and can then be negotiated.
The process of cultural hybridization allows greater opportunity for local culture to be emphasized thus presenting a greater likelihood for more people to feel the sense of belonging. (Canclini,1995;Pieterse,2004).
Hybridity needs to be considered as a continuous transaction of renewals and compromise of the practices of identity

Conclusion

Hybridity / Post-colonialism, Hybridity is viewed by several schools of thought and many practitioners of literature to be one of the main weapons against colonialism. This is especially true of theorists of post-colonialism such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, sociologists and anthropologists working in Cultural Studies such as Stuart Hall and Néstor García Canclini, and postcolonial writers or representatives of ‘magic realism’ such as Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and Milan Kundera. For instance, Stuart Hall (1996) has attributed a ‘crisis of identity (pp. 1-17) to our intercultural world, consisting of a decline of traditional identities and the rise of new forms of identification.

Keywords;    Hybridity, Post-colonialism, post-colonial Studies, Post-colonial Theory