Homi Bhabha's Theory Of Hybridity

The notable theorists of hybridity are Homi Bhabha, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, whose works respond to the multicultural awareness that emerged in the early 1990s. It is worth noting that the term hybridity has been constantly discussed since Bhabha published his book The Location of Culture in 1994. Bhabha is a key figure in the development of the term in postcolonial studies and many theorists embraced his emphasis on hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence. Before discussing Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, a description of the history of the term is explained.

According to Brah and Coombes, hybridity started life as a biological term, used to describe the outcome of a crossing of two plants or species.

Hybridity is now a term for a range of social and cultural phenomena entailing mixing, and has become a major concept within cultural and postcolonial studies. Hybridity entered the field of postcolonial studies during the 1980s with the studies of Said, Spivak and Bhabha whose works, according to Ackermann, are “concerned with problems of representing ‘the Other’ in literature as well as in academia and thus developed a renewed interest in the hybrid” (in Stockhammer, 2012, 11). Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha, in Kraidy’s words, are often credited with “dislocating the concept of hybridity from the biological domain of miscegenation to the cultural field of power” (2005, 46). Chinua Achebe has written that under colonization “we lived at the crossroads of cultures. We still do today” (in Schwarz and Ray, 2005, 152). Undoubtedly, it is evident that this crossroad for Bhabha is hybridity. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha tries to provide a comprehensive definition of the concept of hybridity. He defines hybridity as what is “new, neither the one nor the other” (1994, 25). It can be seen that hybridity is something in-between. It is worth mentioning that Bhabha’s notion of hybridity does not

In contrast to this notion, Bhabha considers hybridity as a positive trope for expressing the “necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (1994, 112). In the first pages of The Location of Culture, Bhabha provides an eminent definition of cultural hybridity by comparing it to a