Cultural Hybridity Analysis

Hybridity is an enticing prospect, particularly in today’s shrinking globe. Though the notion of hybridity in the contemporary theory dates back to Mikhail Bakhtin‘s Discourse in the Novel, it was Homi K.Bhabha who, in his seminal work The Location of Culture(1994), developed the critical terms ‘hybridity’, ‘interstitial‘ and ‘the third space’ . Marwan M. Kraidy considers hybridity as one of the emblematic notions of our era (1). In his view, it captures the spirit of the times with its obligatory celebration of cultural difference and fusion, and it resonates with the globalization mantra of unfettered economic exchanges and the supposedly inevitable transformation of all cultures (1). He favors the term “hybridity’’ and,

For him, hybridity is primarily a mace against oppressive imperial power and grand-narratives, since it locates and echoes the in- betweenness of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ offering a rupture at the binarial and oppositional dissertation fashioned by the dominant authority (125). For Anjali Prabhu, the hybrid is a colonial concept not merely because the term was coined during the period of high colonialism, but that it served certain interests, which were central to the colonial enterprise (xii). Hybridity, in Prabhu’s view, is first and foremost a “racial” term (xii). Similarly Marwan M. Kraidy has seen hybridity as a risky notion as he believes that it comes without guarantees (vi). Rather than a single idea or a unitary concept, hybridity, as he says, is an association of ideas, concepts, and themes that at once reinforce and contradict each other and the varied and sometimes contradictory nature of its use points to the emptiness of employing hybridity as a universal description of culture (vi). According to him, it is therefore imperative to situate every analysis of hybridity in a specific context where the conditions that shape hybridities are addressed

In its most politically articulated guises, hybridity is believed to reveal, or even provide, a politics of liberation for the subaltern constituencies in whose name postcolonial studies as a discipline emerged(Prabhu xi). Based on its diverse meanings and conceptualizations, hybridity, therefore, must be understood historically in a triple context: (a) the development of vocabularies of racial and cultural mixture from the mid–nineteenth century onward; (b) the historical basis of contemporary hybrid identities; and (c) the juncture at which the language of hybridity entered the study of international communication (Kraidy