Hybridity

Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers 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. Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term. Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers 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. Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term. Hybridity is a cross between two separate races, plants or cultures. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture. Hybridity is not a new cultural or historical phenomenon. It has been a feature of all civilizations since time immemorial, from the Sumerians through the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to the present. Both ancient and modern civilizations have, through trade and conquests, borrowed foreign ideas, philosophies, and sciences, thus producing hybrid cultures and societies. The term hybridity itself is not a modern coinage. It was common among the Greeks and Romans. In Latin hybrida or ibrida refers to 'the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar,' and by extension to the progeny of a Roman man and a non-Roman woman. The word hybridity was in use in English since the early 17th century and gained popular currency in the 19th century. Charles Darwin used this term in 1837 in reference to his experiments in cross-fertilization in plants. The concept of hybridity was fraught with negative connotations from its incipience. The Greeks and Romans borrowed extensively from other civilizations, the Egyptians and Persians in particular, and creating ipso facto hybridized cultures, but regarded unfavourably biological hybridity. Aristotle, Plato and Pericles were all opposed to racial mixing between Greeks and 'barbarians' and viewed biological hybridity as a source of racial degeneration and social disorder. Similarly, within the Roman Empire, which is considered as one of the most multi-ethnic empires, cultural difference was usually integrated into the predominant culture, whereas biological hybridity was condemned. The Romans’ attitudes to racial mixing hardened from the 4th century AD when Rome embraced the Christian faith. This is manifest in the Codex Theodosianus (AD365) which prohibited marriages between Christians and non-Christians, the Jews in particular, and inflicted death penalty on those who did not obey this law. Contempt for biological hybridity did not end with the fall the Roman Empire, but continued throughout the Middle Ages and well into modern times, reaching a peak in the nineteenth century with the rise of Europe into an unrivalled imperial power. Hybridity and fear of racial degeneration caused by the mixing of Europeans and non-Europeans were major concerns in 19th century colonialist discourse prompted by racist pseudo-scientific discourses found in such works as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l’inégalité des races and Joseph-Ernest Renan's L’Education culturelle et morale. 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. Pseudo-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 miscegenation 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 liberalization profoundly altered the use and understanding of the term hybridity. Hybrid talk, the rhetoric of hybridity, is fundamentally associated with the emergence of post-colonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. It is the second stage in the history of hybridity, characterized by literature and theory that study the effects of mixture (hybridity) upon identity and culture. The principal theorists of hybridity are Homi Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, whose works respond to the multi-cultural awareness that emerged in the early 1990s. In the theoretic development of hybridity, the key text is The Location of Culture (1994), by Homi Bhabha, wherein the liminality of hybridity is presented as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. The principal proposition is the hybridity of colonial identity, which, as a cultural form, made the colonial masters ambivalent, and, as such, altered the authority of power; as such, Bhabha's arguments are important to the conceptual discussion of hybridity. Hybridity demonstrates how cultures come to be represented by processes of iteration and translation through which their meanings are vicariously addressed to—through—an Other. This contrasts any 'essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures which, when inscribed in the naturalistic sign of symbolic consciousness frequently become political arguments for the hierarchy and ascendary of powerful cultures.' This also means that the colonial subject takes place, its subaltern position inscribed in that space of iteration. The colonial subject is located in a place of hybridity, its identity formed in a space of iteration and translation by the colonizer. Bhabha emphasizes that 'the discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance, do not simply or singly refer to a ‘person’… or to a discrimination between mother culture and alien culture…the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation.' Like mimicry, hybridity is a metonymy of presence. Hybridity opens up a space, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the colonizer nor the Other, properly defies our political expectations. However, like Bhabha's concept of mimicry, hybridity is a doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two places at once. This turn in the effect of hybridity makes the presence of colonist authority no longer immediately visible. Bhabha includes interpretations of hybridity in postcolonial discourse. One is that he sees hybridity as a strategic reversal of the process domination through disavowal. Hybridity reevaluates the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. In this way, hybridity can unsettle the narcissist demands of colonial power, but reforms its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the colonist. Therefore, with this interpretation, hybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the subject into the anxiety-causing object of 'paranoid classification—a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority'. The hybrid retains the actual semblance of the authoritative symbol but reforms its presence by denying it as the signifier of disfigurement—after the intervention of difference. In turn, mimicry is the effect of hybridity. First, the metonymy of presence supports the authoritarian voyeurism, but then as discrimination turns into the assertion of the hybrid, the sign of authority becomes a mask, a mockery.