Hybridity - The Post-colonial Turn

The Post-colonial Turn

The rhetoric of hybridity, sometimes referred to as hybrid talk, is fundamentally associated with the emergence of post-colonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. This second stage in the history of hybridity is characterized by literature and theory that focuses on the effects of mixture upon identity and culture. Key theorists in this realm are Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, whose work responds to the increasing multicultural awareness of the early nineteen nineties. Often the literature of post-colonial and magical realist authors such as Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and J. M. Coetzee recur in their discussions.

A key text in the development of hybridity theory is Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture which analyses the liminality of hybridity as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. His key argument is that colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power. Bhabha’s arguments have become key in the discussion of hybridity. While he originally developed his thesis with respect to narratives of cultural imperialism, his work also develops the concept with respect to the cultural politics of migrancy in the contemporary metropolis. But no longer is hybridity associated just to migrant populations or border towns it is also used in other contexts when there is a flow of different cultures and both give and receive from each other.

This critique of cultural imperialist hybridity meant that the rhetoric of hybridity became more concerned with challenging essentialism and has been applied to sociological theories of identity, multiculturalism, and racism. Another key component of hybridity theory is Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concept of polyphony is employed by many analysts of hybrid discourses in folklore and anthropology.