Name : Makwana Vijay K.
Sem : 3
Roll no. : 34
Email Id : vijaykm7777@gmail.com
Enrollment no. : 2069108420180035
Submitted to : Department of English MKBU
Topic : Hybridity in Post-Colonial discourse
Introduction Hybridity :
Hybridity is to make the new species, in its simple sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the 19th century. It's 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.
Unlike a Mulatto, Hybridity is acceptable in society and religion, and mulatto is not acceptable in some case because it's a mixture of blach father and white mother and white father and black mother. That's why some people can't accepted in society and religion. Hybridity is a cross between two separate races, animals, technologies, plants or cultures. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply like mixture. Hybridity isn't a new cultural or historical phenomenon. It has been a feature of all civilizations since time immemorial, from the Sumerians throught the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to the present. Both ancient and modern civilizations have, through trade and conquests, borrowed foreign ideas, philosophies this thing hybridity, and sciences, thus producing hybrid cultures and societies. The term hybridity itself is not a modern thing. It was common among the Greeks and Romans. In Latin hybrida or ibreda refers to "the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar," and by extention to the progeny of a Roman men and a non-Roman women.
The word hybridity was in use in English at 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.
Hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th century. Pseudo~scientific model of anatomy and craniometry was used to argue that Africans, Asians, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders were racially inferior to European peoples. 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 mandate, rising immigretion, and economic liberalization profoundly altered the use and understanding of the term hybridity it's concept.
Hybridity in post-colonial discourse :
The term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent concepts in postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading contemporary critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer’s ambivalence in respect to his position toward the colonized Other. The simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity.
Homi Bhabha considers the confusion and hollowness that resistance produces in the minds of such imperialist authors as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their colonialist grandiose rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent economic and political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps which are the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book. They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differences which emerge in the colonial discourse as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority.
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 theoretical development of hybridity, the key text is The Location of Culture, by Homi Bhabha, where in 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 ambivalant, and 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 represent by process of iteration and translation through which their meanings are different address 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 and subconsciousness frequently become political arguments for the hierarchy and ascendary of powerful cultures."
The colonial subject is located in a place of hybridity, its identity formed in a space of iteration and translation by the colonise and 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 processes of spliting 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."
Just like mimicry, hybridity is a metonymy of presence. Hybridity open 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 though 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 discriminate turn into the assertion of the hybrid, the sign of authority becomes a mask, a mockery.The original, theoretic development of hybridity addressed the narratives of cultural imperialism, Bhabha's work also comprehends the cultural politics of the condition of being "a migrant" in the contemporary metropolis. Yet hybridity no longer is solely associated with migrant populations and with border towns, it also applies contextually to the flow of cultures and their interactions.
Critical view of Post~Colonial hybridity theory :
Bhabha’s writing The Location of Culture, the concept of “hybridity” has become somewhat controversial and has been subjected to critique within the field of postcolonial theory. Some critics like Antony Easthope engages directly with Bhabha in their critique. Easthope argues that Bhabha’s concept of hybridity relies too strongly on presenting hybrid cultures or identities as existing as adversarial to a nonhybrid cultures or identities, which Easthope does not see existing in reality.
Other critics are skeptical not so much of Bhabha’s specific theory, but of the way the theory has come to be understood and integrated into postcolonial study. R. Radhakrishnan critiques hybridity on the grounds that, like much postcolonial theory, it is the product of First World thinkers, and as such, the theories may still be linked to cultural imperialism. Radhakrishnan raises an interesting question about the value Western society gives to certain kinds of hybridity: “For example, why is it more fashionable and/or acceptable to transgress Islam towards a secular constituency rather than the other way around? Why do Islamic forms of hybridity, such as women wearing veils and attending western schools…encounter resistance and ridicule?”. Other critics like Anjali Prabhu, argue that the political claims of hybridity need to be tested in the real world, not just championed theoretically.
Many critiques about the concept of hybridity seem to primarily take issue with its oversimplification and overuse, and with its applications as a merely descriptive term, not a framework for productive analysis. One of the primary arguments from critics such as Radhakrishnan, Drichel and Steven G. Yao is that “hybridity,” initially conceived of as a challenge to pre-existing categorical descriptions of people and culture, has itself become a fixed, stable, simplified reduction of culture. This critique, however, is really targeted toward misapplications of Bhabha’s theory, as Drichel explains that within Bhabha’s writing, “’hybridity is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures’ but rather one that holds the tension of the opposition and explores the spaces in-between fixed identities through their continuous reiterations”.
The concept of hybridity will undoubtedly continue to be negotiated and rearticulated moving forward. The primary caution or concern with using the term is allowing it to become a fixed, stable identity descriptor itself, rather than employing it, as Bhabha does, to refer to a field or space of productive play between cultures. To use an analogy, hybridity is not the end result of mixing colors of paint, but instead, hybridity is the space of the palette, where combinations and negotiations of colors can be adjusted and altered.
Conclusion :
We see the hybridity is concept of creation and make new things, also shows the world and people also accepted hybrid aspects like animal, plants, technology and other things. Hybridty is the connection between creation and mixture. Post~Colonial hybridity shows change in hybridization and economic change.
Work cite :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybridity
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/mimicry-ambivalence-and-hybridity/
https://blogs.stockton.edu/postcolonialstudies/hybridity-and-comics/hybridity/critiques-of-hybridity/
Sem : 3
Roll no. : 34
Email Id : vijaykm7777@gmail.com
Enrollment no. : 2069108420180035
Submitted to : Department of English MKBU
Topic : Hybridity in Post-Colonial discourse
Introduction Hybridity :
Hybridity is to make the new species, in its simple sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the 19th century. It's 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.
Unlike a Mulatto, Hybridity is acceptable in society and religion, and mulatto is not acceptable in some case because it's a mixture of blach father and white mother and white father and black mother. That's why some people can't accepted in society and religion. Hybridity is a cross between two separate races, animals, technologies, plants or cultures. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply like mixture. Hybridity isn't a new cultural or historical phenomenon. It has been a feature of all civilizations since time immemorial, from the Sumerians throught the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to the present. Both ancient and modern civilizations have, through trade and conquests, borrowed foreign ideas, philosophies this thing hybridity, and sciences, thus producing hybrid cultures and societies. The term hybridity itself is not a modern thing. It was common among the Greeks and Romans. In Latin hybrida or ibreda refers to "the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar," and by extention to the progeny of a Roman men and a non-Roman women.
The word hybridity was in use in English at 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.
Hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th century. Pseudo~scientific model of anatomy and craniometry was used to argue that Africans, Asians, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders were racially inferior to European peoples. 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 mandate, rising immigretion, and economic liberalization profoundly altered the use and understanding of the term hybridity it's concept.
Hybridity in post-colonial discourse :
The term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent concepts in postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading contemporary critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer’s ambivalence in respect to his position toward the colonized Other. The simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity.
Homi Bhabha considers the confusion and hollowness that resistance produces in the minds of such imperialist authors as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their colonialist grandiose rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent economic and political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps which are the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book. They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differences which emerge in the colonial discourse as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority.
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 theoretical development of hybridity, the key text is The Location of Culture, by Homi Bhabha, where in 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 ambivalant, and 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 represent by process of iteration and translation through which their meanings are different address 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 and subconsciousness frequently become political arguments for the hierarchy and ascendary of powerful cultures."
The colonial subject is located in a place of hybridity, its identity formed in a space of iteration and translation by the colonise and 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 processes of spliting 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."
Just like mimicry, hybridity is a metonymy of presence. Hybridity open 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 though 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 discriminate turn into the assertion of the hybrid, the sign of authority becomes a mask, a mockery.The original, theoretic development of hybridity addressed the narratives of cultural imperialism, Bhabha's work also comprehends the cultural politics of the condition of being "a migrant" in the contemporary metropolis. Yet hybridity no longer is solely associated with migrant populations and with border towns, it also applies contextually to the flow of cultures and their interactions.
Critical view of Post~Colonial hybridity theory :
Bhabha’s writing The Location of Culture, the concept of “hybridity” has become somewhat controversial and has been subjected to critique within the field of postcolonial theory. Some critics like Antony Easthope engages directly with Bhabha in their critique. Easthope argues that Bhabha’s concept of hybridity relies too strongly on presenting hybrid cultures or identities as existing as adversarial to a nonhybrid cultures or identities, which Easthope does not see existing in reality.
Other critics are skeptical not so much of Bhabha’s specific theory, but of the way the theory has come to be understood and integrated into postcolonial study. R. Radhakrishnan critiques hybridity on the grounds that, like much postcolonial theory, it is the product of First World thinkers, and as such, the theories may still be linked to cultural imperialism. Radhakrishnan raises an interesting question about the value Western society gives to certain kinds of hybridity: “For example, why is it more fashionable and/or acceptable to transgress Islam towards a secular constituency rather than the other way around? Why do Islamic forms of hybridity, such as women wearing veils and attending western schools…encounter resistance and ridicule?”. Other critics like Anjali Prabhu, argue that the political claims of hybridity need to be tested in the real world, not just championed theoretically.
Many critiques about the concept of hybridity seem to primarily take issue with its oversimplification and overuse, and with its applications as a merely descriptive term, not a framework for productive analysis. One of the primary arguments from critics such as Radhakrishnan, Drichel and Steven G. Yao is that “hybridity,” initially conceived of as a challenge to pre-existing categorical descriptions of people and culture, has itself become a fixed, stable, simplified reduction of culture. This critique, however, is really targeted toward misapplications of Bhabha’s theory, as Drichel explains that within Bhabha’s writing, “’hybridity is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures’ but rather one that holds the tension of the opposition and explores the spaces in-between fixed identities through their continuous reiterations”.
The concept of hybridity will undoubtedly continue to be negotiated and rearticulated moving forward. The primary caution or concern with using the term is allowing it to become a fixed, stable identity descriptor itself, rather than employing it, as Bhabha does, to refer to a field or space of productive play between cultures. To use an analogy, hybridity is not the end result of mixing colors of paint, but instead, hybridity is the space of the palette, where combinations and negotiations of colors can be adjusted and altered.
Conclusion :
We see the hybridity is concept of creation and make new things, also shows the world and people also accepted hybrid aspects like animal, plants, technology and other things. Hybridty is the connection between creation and mixture. Post~Colonial hybridity shows change in hybridization and economic change.
Work cite :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybridity
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/mimicry-ambivalence-and-hybridity/
https://blogs.stockton.edu/postcolonialstudies/hybridity-and-comics/hybridity/critiques-of-hybridity/
