Hybridity and Plurality

Following Said’s enterprise, other writers, such as Homi Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, Wilson Harris or Edward Brothwaite, who proceed from a consideration of the nature of postcolonial societies and the types of hybridization these various cultures have produced, proposed a radical rethinking—an appropriation of the European thinking by a different discourse. Whereas in European thinking, history and the past are the reference point for epistemology, in postcolonial thought space annihilates time. History is rewritten and realigned from the standpoint of the victims of the destructive progress. Hybridity replaces a temporal linearity with a spatial plurality. Salman Rushdie makes this obvious when commenting on the message of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, in an essay called “In Good Faith” as follows:

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. (394)

Even though on the surface postcolonial texts may contain race divisions and cultural differences, they all contain germs of community which, as they grow in the mind of the reader, they detach from the apparently inescapable dialectic of history. Thus, postcolonial literatures have begun to deal with problems of transmuting time into space and of attempting to construct a future. It highlights the acceptance of difference on equal terms. Now both literary critics and historians are recognizing cross-culturality as the possible ending point of an apparent endless human history of conquest and occupations. They recognize that the myth of purity or essence, the Eurocentric viewpoint must be challenged. The recent approaches show that the power of postcolonial theory lies in its comparative methodology and the hybridized and syncretic view of the modern world which it implies.

Of the various points in which postcolonial texts intersect, place has a paramount importance. In his dialogism thesis, Mikhail Bakhtin emphasizes a space of enunciation where negotiation of discursive doubleness gives birth to a new speech act:

The hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented. . . but is also double-languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two individual consciounesses, two voices, two accents, as there are [doublings of] socio-linguistic consciousnesses, two epochs. . . that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance. (Dialogic 360)

Also, Homi Bhabha talks about a third space of communication, a hybrid space or a new position in which communication is possible. In a recent article Bhabha explains that such negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration as it makes possible the emergence of an “interstitial” agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy: “the outside of the inside; the part in the whole” (“Culture’s”). As an example, Bhabha mentions Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved in which cultural and communal knowledge comes as a kind of self-love that is also the love of the “other”. This knowledge is visible in those intriguing chapters where Sethe, Beloved, and Denver perform a ceremony of claiming and naming through intersecting interstitial subjectivities: “Beloved, she my daughter”; “Beloved is my sister”; “I am beloved and she is mine. ” The women speak in tongues, form a fugal space “in-between each other” which is a communal space. They explore an “interpersonal” reality: a social reality that appears within the poetic image as if it were in parenthesis—esthetically distanced, held back, yet historically framed. It is difficult to convey the rhythm and the improvisation of those chapters, but it is impossible not to see in them the healing of history, a community reclaimed in the making of a name (“Culture’s”).

This “new position” Bhabha proposes is closely related to the “homeless” existence of post-colonial persons. It certainly cannot be assumed to be an independent third space already there, a “no-man’s-land” between the nations. Instead, a way of cultural syncretization, i. e. a medium of negotiating cultural antagonisms, has to be created. Cultural difference has to be acknowledged: “Culture does imply difference, but the differences now are no longer, if you wish, taxonomical; they are interactive and refractive” (Bhabha quoted in Rutherford 221). This position emphasizes, contrary to the too facile assumption of world literature and world culture as the stages of a multicultural cosmopolitanism already in existence, that the “intellectual trade” takes place mostly on the borders and in the border crossings between cultures where meanings and values are not codified but misunderstood, misrepresented, even falsely adopted (207). Bhabha explains how beyond fixed cultural (ethnic, gender- and class-related) identities, so-called “hybrid” identities are formed by discontinuous translation and negotiation. Thus, former tribal societies translate their traditional “identity”, their own national text, into Western forms of information technology, of consumption, fashion etc. New hybrid identities arise similarly in the course of the political and cultural reorientation of former colonial societies: “hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge” (211) Hybridity is the key term that marks a sphere in which the cultural other is confronted within the network of cultures and in which different traditions often clash. In this respect, in conclusion, it is worth mentioning here Jacques Derrida’s view on difference:

We all require “culture, ” but let us cultivate (colere) a culture of self-differentiation, of differing with itself, where “identity” is an effect of difference, rather than cultivating “colonies” (also from colere) of the same in a culture of identity which gathers itself to itself in common defense against the other. (Caputo 115)

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