Hybridity

Definition

Hybridity is the postcolonial concept for the "third space" produced where cultures interpenetrate: Homi Bhabha's "third space" that "enables other positions to emerge," that "sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives" — working "to create 'something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation'" (Bhabha, quoted in Soja 2000, p. 211). Soja deploys it within the globalization discourse: the postcolonial critique (Appadurai, Bhabha, Said, Spivak, Pieterse) reconfigures the homogenization–heterogenization debate "around what is described as multiple scales of hybridity, the places and people most embroiled in the tensions arising from simultaneous cultural homogenization and heterogenization processes, or what might be called cultural glocalization or transnationalism" (p. 211).

Jan Nederveen Pieterse's "continuum of hybridities" gives the concept its political differentiation: hybridity is "part of a power relationship between centre and margin, hegemony and minority" that "indicates a blurring, destabilization or subversion of that hierarchical relationship" — but it ranges from "an assimilationist hybridity that leans over towards the centre, adopts the canon and mimics the hegemony" at one end to "a destabilizing hybridity that blurs the canon, reverses the current, subverts the centre" at the other (quoted p. 211). Hybridity can therefore "also produce submission and alienation." In Soja's architecture of the postmetropolis, hybridity is the cultural-politics counterpart of his trialectic: Bhabha's third space and Soja's Thirdspace are convergent thirdings — both refuse the binary and produce "something new and unrecognisable." It underwrites the Fractal City's "creative new 'hybridities'" and the new cultural politics of difference that moves beyond equality politics.

Key Thinkers

• Homi Bhabha (referenced, not paged — see log) — the third space: "The Third Space" (1991); The Location of Culture (1994); hybridity as negotiation and authority-production.
• Jan Nederveen Pieterse (referenced, not paged — see log) — "Globalization as Hybridization": the continuum from assimilationist to destabilizing hybridity.
• Edward W. Soja — the registration: hybridity as "multiple scales of hybridity" and as the convergent cousin of his own critical thirding (the connection made explicit in Thirdspace, 1996, pp. 139–144).
• Arjun Appadurai (referenced, not paged — see log) — the disjunctive global cultural economy within which hybridity operates.
• Celeste Olalquiaga (referenced, not paged — see log) — the "iconic radicalism" of Latin American parodic hyperrealism, the hybrid practice Soja celebrates against baudrillardian closure.

Related Concepts

• glocalization — the process-scale frame: hybridity as cultural glocalization.
• new-cultural-politics-of-difference — the politics hybridity feeds: Cornel West's and bell hooks's program.
• postmetropolis — the Fractal City's "creative new 'hybridities'" (p. 155).
• cosmopolitanism / cosmopolitics — the debate page adjacent to the cosmopolis discourse.
• otherness — the binary hybridity refuses to stabilize.
• simulation-hyperreality — Olalquiaga's "magical hyperrealism" as hybridity's parodic mode within the Simcity discourse.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — Bhabha's third space and Pieterse's continuum quoted (p. 211); hybridity in the six-discourse preview (p. 155); Tupinicópolis, Superbarrio, and the Latin American "magical hyperrealism" register (pp. 331–332); and the concluding verse's "choosing the margin as a space of radical openness" (p. 394).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Pieterse's continuum spans assimilationist to destabilizing hybridity — which end does the postmetropolis actually produce, and how would one audit a built environment for its hybridity-type?
• Bhabha's third space and Soja's Thirdspace converge deliberately — is the convergence a strength (two independent thirdings) or a conflation (the spatial and the semiotic third doing different work)?
• The wiki's hybrids page holds the Deleuzian hybrid (Deleuze & Guattari's architectural hybrids); is hybridity its postcolonial sibling, and should the two pages be cross-wired or kept distinct?