Multiculturalism And Hybridism

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Originally, drawn from genetics to characterise an end product created out of the mixture of two species (Stross, 1999; Baaz and Palmberg, 2001), in colonial discourse, the term hybridity has often a derogatory connotation because it is imbued in nineteenth-century eugenicist and scientific-racist thought (Young, 1995). Pieterse argues that hybridity is often held as inauthentic because it problematises boundaries (2001: 220). However the problematic associations with this term did not prevent academics celebrating it as the conceptual apparatus for eradicating essentialist notions of culture.
The term ‘hybrid’ became popular in discussions of ‘globalisation’, multiculturalism, cultural criticism, and postcolonial theory since the 1990s (Brah and Coombes 2000:1). Post-colonial studies emerged as a reaction to the fixity of identities within the binary colonial thinking. For instance, hybridisation receives further development in Bhabha’s (1994) notion of ‘third space’ with regard to cultural exchange. Bhabha’s ‘third space’ is an ambivalent site where cultural meaning and representation have no ‘primordial unity or fixity’ (1994: 21) and ‘enables Other positions to emerge’ (Bhabha in Rutherford, 1990: 211). Bhabha argues that the new hybrid constructions contain multiple voices, practices and feelings and set up ‘new structures of authority, new political initiatives’ (1990: 211). Thus the third space is not a physical space but a ‘separate space’ through which ‘newness enters the world’ (Bhabha, 1994: 227). It opens up ‘the negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances’ (Bhabha, 1994: 25) and becomes a space of complex negotiations, where polarities are blurred and different discourses emerge continuously.
Accordin...

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...rom here and there, now and then (Werbner, 2004: 897).
Thus in relation to the diaspora, hybridity is not seen as a mixture or impure but celebrated ‘as a kind of superior cultural intelligence owing to the advantage of in-betweeness, the straddling of two cultures and the consequent ability to negotiate the difference’ (Hoogvelt, 1997: 18). Papastergiadis argued that hybridity is ‘not the combination, accumulation, fusion or synthesis of various components, but an energy field of different forces’ (1997: 258).
Hybridity is not the solution, but alerts us to the difficulty of living with differences as argued by cultural theorist Ien Ang (2003: 8). Similarly, hybridity has been a key part of this new modelling which is entwined within the coordinates of migrant identity tackling differences and linking the host connections as agreed by cultural theorist Rita Felski

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