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Theories of hybridity have served to weaken arguments that privilege cultural origins and notions of cultural purity. The scholarship on hybridization in postcolonial studies has been varying, namely, cultural, political, racial, and linguistic and the like. For instance, cultural theorist Bakhtin (1981) asserts the notion of linguistic hybridity where he demonstrates the ways in which the disruptive and transfiguring power of double-voiced language operates. This idea of many voices in the society is also
implicated in Bakhtin’s Middle Age concept of the carnivalesque when “boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture” (Clark and Holquist 1984, 4).
Postcolonial theorists of hybridity like Anzaldúa (1987), Hall (1990), and Bhabha (1994) have invoked these concepts of mixture as way of analyzing new identities and subjectivities that emerged from colonization and continued projects of racial
domination. Bhabha presents a notion of hybridity that emerges from literary and cultural theory where he argues that the governing bodies (colonizer) interpret the identity of the “Other” (colonized) in conjunction with essentialist beliefs. The colonizer’s “translative”
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project creates a hybrid that is neither familiar to the colonizer nor the colonized (Papastergiadis, 1997).
Bhabha characterizes the colonizer’s relationship to the colonized as
interdependent and mutual in their construction of their subjectivities. Bhabha (1994) problematizes the danger in attempting to study cultural diversity under the notions of universal concepts or labels, such as “ “human being”, “class”, or “race”, which he sees as both dangerous and limiting in trying to understand the ways in which cultural
practices construct their own systems of meaning and organization” (209). He argues that all cultural systems and practices are constructed in the contradictory and ambivalent space that he calls “Third Space of enunciation” (ibid, 37). He asserts that the
controversies in a multicultural society are unavoidable and inevitable in that the acceptance of this fact helps us to overcome the exoticism of cultural diversity:
It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory…may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity (Bhabha 1994: 38)
In sum, for Bhabha, the significance of the notion of hybridity lies in the ambivalent space that carried the burden and meaning of culture. In instances where hybridity has been used in post-colonial discourse to indicate cross-cultural exchange, the term has been criticized for failing to account for the imbalance of power in relations implicated. Where hybridity emphasizes the transformative, political and linguistic impact on the colonizer-colonized relation, the use of hybridity in this way has been criticized for reproducing assimilationist policies by obscuring cultural differences. Moreover, where
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hybridity has been used to delineate cultural mutuality as in processes of cultural synergy, syncretism and transculturation, proponents of decolonization and anti-colonialism, the use of the concept in this way has been cited to deemphasize oppositionality in favor of postcolonial dependence.
Here, my primary concern is with constitutive interactions between the dominant power and oppressed. Within the confines of power relations, I am interested in the extent to which the colonizer’s translative project of the “Other’s” identity is imbricated in the enunciated practices of the oppressed that simultaneously challenge and reproduce the essentialist constructed identities. My point here is not to coerce the reader to
perceive the discursive formation of the othered identity as a deliberate project. Instead, it is to point to the sliding ambivalent nature of power dynamics that impacts
epistemological othering in colonialist discourse. Moreover, I suggest a close
examination of the ways of knowing that constructs hybrid cultures and identities that are not always seen as resistance.
Yet another critique of how hybridity has been conceptualized is where it has discursively been used to show a shared post-colonial condition. Employing hybridity in this way has been seen as a broad or abstract generalization where cultures have been dislocated and dishistoricized from their geographical, temporal, linguistic and spatial contexts. However, this critique can also be criticized in that it in highlighting how colonial discourse is constructed, one does not seek to mask other ways of investigating culture. Young (1995) supports this reasoning by pointing out that other forms of analysis are already embedded in the contribution of colonial discourse analysis:
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“[Colonial discourse analysis] provides a significant framework for that other work by emphasizing that all perspectives on colonialism share and have to deal with a common discursive medium which was also that of colonialism itself...Colonial discourse analysis can therefore look at the wide variety of texts of colonialism as something more than mere documentation or “evidence”. (Young 1995, 163)
Nevertheless, Young (1995) also provides several objections to the arbitrary use of the term hybridity. He emphasizes how at the turn of the century in imperial and colonial discourse accounts, hybridity was used to portray the mixing of disparate races as requiring attention because of their tendency to reverse to primitiveness. While noting the difference between hybridizing processes such as creolization that occurs
unconsciously and in politically motivated and deliberate processes that consciously disrupt homogeneity, Young is particularly concerned with the dangers of using the term hybridity in ways that were previously imbedded in racist assumptions. Young (1995) engages Bahktin’s use of hybridity by pointing out how hybridity is politicized but also made contestatory in ways that allows for challenge of division and separation. He states that Bakhtin’s uses of the term “sets different points of view against each other in a conflictual structure, which retains “certain elemental, organic energy and open-
endedness”” (Young 1995: 21-22). Young (1995) also elucidates how Bhabha accounts for structures of domination in the colonial situation as follows:
“Bakhtin’s intentional hybrid has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant colonial power…depriving the imposed imperialist culture, not only of the
authority that it has for a long imposed politically, often through violence, but even of its own claims to authenticity (23).
Additionally, Young is concerned about the unconscious process of repetition that is associated with the contemporary use of term hybrid. He argues that in contemporary
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cultural discourse, scholars are often inclined to make connections with historical categories of race with very particular meanings. Consequently, Young insists that the connections to past racial categories is inevitable such that in “deconstructing such essentialist notions of race today we may be repeating the past than distancing ourselves from it, or providing a critique of it” (27).
In general, in arguing for an active decolonizing project especially in relation to national culture and pre-colonial traditions, theories of hybridization of post-colonial culture have averred models of resistance by locating the subversive counter-discursive practices as implicit in the colonial ambivalences in the national cultures and pre-colonial traditions. In decolonizing of discourse analysis, my main interest here in engaging with theories of hybridization is to examine what constitutes “resistance” or “agency” in the dialogic interactions between the political and cultural discourses of dominant entities such as state power and responsive enunciative practices and traditions of the oppressed, especially in the performance of race and culture.