Hybridity
Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology[1] and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century.[2] Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture.[3] Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term.
In linguistics[edit]
Colonialism[edit]
Languages are all hybrid, in varying degrees. For centuries people borrowed from foreign languages, creating thus hybrid linguistic idioms. They did so for commercial, aesthetic, ideological and technological reasons (to facilitate trade transactions, express philosophical or scientific ideas unavailable in their original idioms, enrich and adapt their languages to new realities, subvert a dominant colonial literary canon by deliberately introducing words from the colonized peoples' idiom). Trade and colonization have been the main vehicles of linguistic hybridization across history. Since the classical conquests, both the colonizers and colonized tapped into each other's languages. The Greeks soaked up many mathematical and astronomical concepts from the Egyptians. The Romans, too, absorbed much of Greek culture and ideas. They also drew abundantly from the "barbarians". In Taktika, Arrian (92–175 AD), a Greek historian and philosopher of the Roman period, drew attention to the Romans' indebtedness to their colonial subjects, arguing that "the Romans have many foreign (Iberian, Celtic) terms for formations, for they used Celtic cavalry".[9] In modern times, the French and British resorted to similar linguistic appropriations throughout their conquests. The French language, for example, contains over 200 Arabic and Berber words, most of which were taken up during France's colonization of Algeria. Similarly, hundreds of Indian words entered the English idiom from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, 900 English words are of Indian origin. Linguistic hybridity was manifest in these colonial contexts, but was acknowledged by neither the colonizers nor the colonized. More still, while these linguistic borrowings had, de facto, rendered colonial languages hybrid and therefore impure, the myth of linguistic purity and superiority, inherited from the ancient Greeks’ "linguistic racialism",[6][9] held firmly among the European colonizers. The Greek word ‘barbarian,’ which was used to refer to non-Greek languages’ inferiority, backwardness and inarticulacy, was adopted by the French since the 16th century. It was often applied to the Basque, Breton and Occitan languages and to their speakers. Abbé Grégoire recommended wiping out these "crude idioms" and forcing French on the Basques, Bretons and Occitans to "spread enlightened ideas (...), well-being and political tranquillity".[24] According to him, this would "banish superstition" and "simplify the mechanism of the political machine." It would, above all, "mould the citizens into a national whole"[25] In Britain, this Aristotelian view of language was revitalized by authors like Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Matthew Arnold, who cast respectively the Irish, Scots and Welsh as "rude" and "backward", attributing these peoples’ intellectual and economic "backwardness" to their "inferior" languages.[26]
A dual dynamics[edit]
Linguistic and cultural hybridity is a "dual dynamics" which operates "passively" as well as "actively".[6] Mikhail Bakhtin distinguished two types of hybridity: "organic" or "unconscious" hybridity and "intentional" hybridity. He defines organic hybridity as an "unintentional, unconscious hybridization" and regards it as "the most important mode in the historical life and evolution of all languages".[27] "Intentional hybridization" consists of juxtaposing deliberately different idioms, discourses, and perspectives within the same semiotic space without merging them. Bakhtin states that the language of the novel is "a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other".[28] He adds: "the novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by another, the carving-out of a living image of another language".[27] Further down, yet, he cautions against drawing clear-cut boundaries between these two forms of hybridity, arguing that the "centripetal" forces inherent in "organic hybridity" are also present in "intentional hybridity," in the same way as the "centrifugal" features of "intentional hybridity" may be at play in "organic hybridity."[27][28]
The tree model[edit]
Linguistic hybridity and the case of mixed languages challenge the tree model in linguistics. For example, "Israeli" (a term for Modern Hebrew) has been argued to be a Semito-European hybrid language that "demonstrates that the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows. 'Revived' languages are unlikely to have a single parent."[29]
In the arts[edit]
Presently, human beings are immersed in a hybridised environment of reality and augmented reality on a daily basis, considering the proliferation of physical and digital media (i.e. print books vs. e-books, music downloads vs. physical formats). Many people attend performances intending to place a digital recording device between them and the performers, intentionally "layering a digital reality on top of the real world."[30] For artists working with and responding to new technologies, the hybridisation of physical and digital elements has become a reflexive reaction to this strange dichotomy.[31] For example, in Rooms by Sara Ludy computer-generated effects process physical spaces into abstractions, making familiar environments and items such as carpets, doors and windows disorientating, set to the sound of an industrial hum. In effect, the distinction between real and virtual space in art is deconstructed.[31][32][33] The conditions and processes known as glocalization play an important role in recent forms of hybridity in the arts, since artists commonly seek to negotiate between local and global forces. Several theoretical models have been developed to explain approaches to hybridity in the arts, a phenomenon that is especially common among artists who either identify as multicultural or see their work as situated between “East” and “West.”[34] Such developments demonstrate ways that the arts can both forecast and respond to changing conditions in society.