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Integral Human Development

Revisiting Reflections on Hybridity

Understood through the notion of mixture or mélange, hybridity encloses a postmodern indisposition: ambivalent monsters of hybrid, carry with them a certain constantly fluid perpetuality in motion that eludes from the myth of uncontaminated culture. 

However, mixedness as hybridity; connected through traveling and translation, serves as a – far too broadly used – umbrella term, that has been used post Bhabha within the notion of the flattering multiculturalism, once criticized within cultural discourses (Rutherford, 1990, cf. Gilroy, 2004).

Hybridity examined as a critical notion juxtaposes the term as creative idea; spaces where new forms are being created; with negative (colonial, power relationships) and positive (creative, transcultural) senses to them. However, how does hybridity describe what is happening in the actual processes, that constitutes how hybrids are created? Questions of agency, identity, accidental and/or deliberate forms of transgression – complex questions remain to be answered.

Cape Verde was the first European contact with Africa in terms colonisation. The islands mainly served the Portuguese as an interim station for the transportation of slaves overseas. It was at such an early time, that the church hadn’t gained much power yet. As a result, mixed marriages led to a complete mixture of race and colour, so many people until today have the genetic information to get a child of almost any colour. Former independence leaders like Amílcar Cabral or Sékou Touré had subsequent big visions for postcolonial Africa, but many Cape Verdean people in the world must live outside of their own country. It was the hard droughts and the complete missing of any industry on the islands that forced people to migrate. Most of them here living in the suburbs of Lisbon, very connected to African communities, but often demarcated from true opportunities, as scholars have suggested:

“Those who have settled for a longer period, and whose descendants were born in Lisbon, seem to have been relegated, banned, to non-places, the banlieues, the banned sites, where housing project is the privileged location for reporters to invent sensationalist news about criminality, violence and difference, in order to divert a bored and impoverished ‘white’ middle class during torrid Lisboan summers from other social preoccupations” (Ribeiro Sanches, 2010).

I went to the suburbs a few times, where you sometimes had the feeling of being in Africa with the street foods, the music, the atmosphere. Of course, it was also the various forms of Creole that connected every Cape Verdean with other people from their country, Guinea Bissau, or Angola, in a kind of subversive way, because it was their own language, which they could code switch into easily any time.

While Bhabha acknowledges that “it is actually very difficult, even impossible and counterproductive, to try and fit together different forms of culture and to pretend that they can easily coexist” (Rutherford, 1990: 209), this feature cannot entirely be associated with the term hybridity. That of course, is based on a form of hypocrisy in contemporary discourse, that is in constant need of new labels to negotiate current and currently rising new problematics of the so-called globalized culture. If “culture is a signifying or symbolic activity (…) all cultures are symbol-forming and subject-constituting, interpellative practices” (Young, 1994: 210), the question remains, if interpellation signifies how pre-existing social structures constitute people in socio-cultural realms (cf. Althusser, 1971), in what way can there be an articulation to work around abandonment, societal demarcation, lack of perspective, cultural alienation, overload, precarity, disorientation, challenges of intersectionality, and cultural conformity?

References:

  • Althusser, Louis (1971), “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation”, trans. by Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Press, pp. 127-86.
  • Gilroy, Paul (2004), After Empire? Melancholia or Convivial Cultures? London: Routledge.
  • Ribeiro Sanches, Manuela (2010), “Drawing the lines, postcolonial Lisboa and other modern fortresses Europe”, Buala, available online: https://www.buala.org/en/city/drawing-the-lines-postcolonial-lisboa-and-other-modern-%20fortresses-europe last accessed April 3rd, 2023.
  • Rutherford, Jonathan (1990), “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha”, Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 207-221.
  • Young, Robert J. C. (1994), Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race Hybridity and Difference, London: Routledge.

OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
dzifapeters (29 de Abril de 2024). Revisiting Reflections on Hybridity. Desenvolvimento Humano Integral. Recuperado em 22 de Março de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/zib5


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