Reference: Hybridity
Reference information:
The postcolonial turn
The rhetoric of hybridity, sometimes referred to as hybrid talk is fundamentally associated with the emergence of postcolonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. This second stage in the history of hybridity is characterised 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 postcolonial 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 (1994) 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. 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 (see Theorizing the Hybrid).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybridity
Der Fremde in this case should be translated as 'the Other'.
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Note added at 56 mins (2009-09-14 14:37:04 GMT)
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There are two kinds of identity, identity as being (which offers a sense of unity and commonality) and identity as becoming (or a process of identification, which shows the discontinuity in our identity formation.) Hall uses the Caribbean identities, including his own, to explain how the first one is necessary, but the second one is truer to their/our postcolonial conditions. To explain the process of identity formation, Hall uses Derrida's theory differance as support, and Hall sees the temporary positioning of identity as "strategic" and arbitrary. He then uses the three presences--African, European, and American--in the Caribbean to illustrate the idea of "traces" in our identity. Finally, he defines the Caribbean identity as disapora identity. http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postcolonism/Ha...
Worth clicking on this link for the additional information provided.
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Note added at 58 mins (2009-09-14 14:39:29 GMT)
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I think I would be tempted to translate the 'Eigene' as 'self' - one is neither strictly self nor Other.
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Note added at 1 hr (2009-09-14 14:48:12 GMT)
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By rethinking the Self in terms of the Other, previously stable and unified notions of identity are irrevocably altered. As Flores de otro mundo goes to show, these shifts occur not only for those who migrate from one part of the world to another. They also take place in terms of the local, forcing adaptations in practices and perspectives in previously isolated communities that have been weakened by modernity's urban drifts. As the experience of migration renders identity plural, a multi-sited and multidimensional imaginary evolves, presenting both fragmentation and possibility. As encounters with otherness increasingly become the cultural norm, distinctions between Self and Other are clearly blurred or complicated.
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The concept of transculturality [...] is able to cover both global and local, universalistic and particularistic aspects, and it does so quite naturally, from the logic of transcultural processes themselves. The globalizing tendencies as well as the desire for specificity and particularity can be fulfilled within transculturality. Transcultural identities comprehend a cosmopolitan side, but also a side of local affiliation. Transcultural people combine both. [...] People can make their choice with respect to their affiliations. (205)
Consequently, as Welsch points out, difference needs to be refigured not in terms of distinct or isolated categories, but rather in terms of transcultural networks, which may overlap while also being different in other respects. Transculturality, thereby, underlines the multidimensionality of identities in late modernity. Thus, the relationship between Damian and Patricia succeeds largely because each is able to overstep the conventional boundaries of their 'native' cultures and to determine a mutually convenient course.
http://www.allbusiness.com/educational-services/business-sch...
| Helen Shiner
United Kingdom
Works in field
Native speaker of: English
PRO pts in category: 34
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