Hybridity

Hybridity has become a favorite buzzword in academic circles and in popular reflections on processes of globalization—typically presented in the American media as emanating from the United States—on various parts of the world. Celebratory accounts of transcultural fusion as U.S. businesses spread their fares around the globe have come to dominate this popular discourse. While the term's definition has remained vexingly vague and its meaning varies greatly depending on the context of its use, as generally conceptualized by communication scholars, hybridity relates to processes of racial, linguistic, or cultural mixing that are understood to result in something different from the sum of their discrete parts.

From a historical perspective, the modern notion of hybridity started to take shape in the 18th century, as European imperialist nations had to come to terms with the possible consequences of racial mixing with members of colonized nations. The deep racist anxieties of European colonial powers were manifest in the perception of hybridization as a dangerous process resulting in the contamination of superior (White) races. In this context, racial mixing and its resulting hybridity were to be avoided in order to protect not only the racial purity of colonial powers but also their cultural identity as imperialist aggression spread their influence beyond national borders.

The meaning of hybridity further evolved, however, in the aftermath of postimperialist liberation movements. Reclaimed by newly independent nations needing to come to terms with the racial and cultural legacies of their colonial past, hybridity—and its more culturally specific manifestations in the concepts of mestizaje or creolization, which developed to incorporate the heterogeneous elements of various Latin American cultures into new national identities—took on more positive connotations. Used as a tool for nation building and cultural-identity formation in an effort to revalorize and ultimately embrace the complex consequences of historically imposed transcultural and racial mixing, hybridity was conceptualized as a set of unique and generally positive cultural processes.

More recently, postcolonial scholars have similarly celebrated hybridity as a source of cultural [Page 484]renewal and resistance against imperialist forces and cultural domination. Focusing on the demographic and ideological movements between Europe, Africa, and the Americas in his book The Black Atlantic, British sociologist Paul Gilroy challenges conceptualizations of transcultural exchange that are based on dichotomized perceptions of race and culture that falsely reduce these to some kind of “essence”; he argues for a more complex understanding of intercultural exchange, paying closer attention to the dynamic nature of processes of hybridization. Exploring hybridity in the context of the postcolonial novel, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha emphasizes its potential as a subversive practice used to challenge and reappropriate dominant colonial discourse and create new forms of subaltern agency. Argentinean-Mexican scholar Néstor García-Canclini focuses on border towns between Mexico and the United States to explore hybrid cultural forms such as graffiti and comics as examples of cultural resistance to dominant interpretations of modernity. He sees the notion of hybridity as a useful analytical tool for the investigation of the complex tension between externally imposed definitions of modernity and local traditions in places where the former have rarely replaced the latter in a straightforward manner.

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