Unremarkable hybridities and metrolingual practices (original) (raw)

5 Unremarkable Hybridities and Metrolingual Practices

TheGlobal-Local Interface and Hybridity, 2013

This paper starts with the assumption that hybrid language use is unmarked. That is, we take hybridity as the starting point rather than viewing it as a ramification of the interaction between pre-given discrete 'languages'. This argument is a response to several different concerns with the notion of hybridity, which has been critiqued along various lines, from its botanical and colonial origins (Young, 1995), or its almost fetishistic status within some areas of postcolonial and cultural studies (Hutnyk, 2005), to the ways in which it potentially maintains the prior purities it claims to overcome (Gilroy, 1993). The notion of hybridity, as Hutnyk (2005) argues 'is a usefully slippery category, purposefully contested and deployed to claim change' (p. 80). All too often it assumes dichotomous relations even as it claims to supersede them, reassigning 'fixed identity into what becomes merely the jamboree of pluralism and multiplicity' (Hutnyk, 2005: 99). Hybridity has been mobilized to oppose what are seen as essentialist accounts of culture and identity. Rather than people being assumed to adhere to ascribed identities (Indian, Singaporean, man, woman, teacher, linguist) whose characteristics are pregiven and known,

The global-local interface and hybridity : exploring language and identity

2014

Introduction 1. Rani Rubdy and Lubna Alsagoff: The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization: Problematizing Hybridity Part I: Interrogating the Canon 2. Christina Higgins: When Scapes Collide: Reterritorializing English in East Africa 3. Rani Rubdy: Hybridity in the Linguistic Landscape: Democratizing English in India 4. Beatriz P. Lorente and T. Ruanni F. Tupas: (Un)Emancipatory Hybridity: Selling English in an Unequal World 5. Emi Otsuji and Alastair Pennycook: Unremarkable Hybridities and Metrolingual Practices 6. Ofelia Garcia: Countering the Dual: Transglossia, Dynamic Bilingualism and Translanguaging in Education Part II: Hybridized Discourses of Identity in the Media 7. Rakesh Mohan Bhatt: Reading Gender in Indian English Newspapers: Global, Local, or Liminal? 8. Elizabeth Martin: Linguistic and Cultural Hybridity in French Web Advertising 9. Anjali Geri Roy: What's Punjabi Doing in an English Film? Bollywood's New Transnational Tribes 10. Jamie Shinhee Lee: Hybridizing Med...

On hybridity, the politics of knowledge production and critical language studies

Language, Culture and Society

Silvia Cusicanqui provides an incisive critique of the ironic appropriation of radical scholarly thinking grounded in local political concerns by 'first world' centers of theoretical production and their subsequent reification. Underlying her argument is a sense of deep disquiet and trenchant critique of theoretical sophistry that renders critique apolitical and irrelevant. In this brief response I begin by critiquing the notion of hybridity-because it resonates with a postmodernist wave in current language scholarship-which was once a key concern in postcolonial theory; the futility of trying to find an analytical position outside the legacies of modernity and the enlightenment; and a reflection on the implications of both these positions to critical language studies. By critical language studies I particularly mean those branches of socio-linguistics that engage with a range of sociopolitical concerns such as power, ideology and gender. I first encountered and experienced a sense of disquiet about the theorization of hybridity in the 1990s as a young undergraduate. In the 1990s, the big name in postcolonial studies was Homi Bhabha and his framework of hybridity (Bhabha, 1990, 2004). As a young scholar attempting to come to terms with the complexities of ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka, the paradigm of hybridity seemed to offer exciting theoretical and political possibilities. However, when I began to apply hybridity, even at the level of textual analysis, I found myself struggling. How could hybridity, for instance, critically respond to the politics of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka whose struggle for selfhood was built upon a notion of cultural and historical self-hood which could be conceptually undermined through an anti-essentialist argument informed by hybridity? Or how could the postmodern relativity that informed hybridity (Bhabha, 1990, 2004; Young, 1990, 2001) respond to the arguments marshalled by majoritarian Sinhala nationalists that if all frameworks of knowledge are relative, why could not there be a nativist or indigenous framework through which Sri Lanka could be understood-which by default means a Sinhala majoritarian worldview? Hybridity and the dominant discourse of postcolonial studies (

Hybridization, Heteroglossia and the english Language in Postcolonial Literature

Annales Universitatis Apulensis. Series Philologica, 2007

The present paper aims at analysing the forms and functions of the English language today, seen from the perspective of its evolution from the language of the British Empire to the most important means of expression in the literature of English expression nowadays.

Cultural Hybridity and Modern Binaries: Overcoming the Opposition Between Identity and Otherness?

2008

This working paper addresses the debate on cultural hybridity. Hybridity, as it is understood in postcolonial theory, is perceived as having the potential to go beyond the sort of modern binaries from which, as Ulrich Beck suggests, contemporary social imaginaries have to find a way out. According to Jan Nederveen Pieterse, hybridity is precisely that: "Hybridity is to culture what deconstruction is to discourse: transcending binary categories." Yet, as it is pointed out in many works discussing cultural hybridity, the term and the vast array of concepts it encapsulates has raised already long-running discussions and debates. The paper explores some tropes inspired by the debate between Homi Bhabba and Jonathan Friedman on cultural hybridity. As Friedman sets his critique of hybridity in opposition to what he considers "true" cosmopolitanism to be, we will show how his understanding can be considered as flawed and how hybridity can in turn be considered as being ...

The Conceptualizing Hybridity: Deconstructing Boundaries through the Hybrid

The contemporary cultural landscape is an amalgam of crosscultural influences, blended, patch-worked, and layered upon one another. Unbound and fluid, culture is hybrid and interstitial, moving between spaces of meaning. The notion of cultural hybridity has existed far before it was popularized in postcolonial theory as culture arising out of interactions between "colonizers" and "the colonized". However, in this time after imperialism, globalization has both expanded the reach of Western culture, as well as allowed a process by which the West constantly interacts with the East, appropriating cultures for its own means and continually shifting its own signifiers of dominant culture. This hybridity is woven into every corner of society, from trendy fusion cuisine to Caribbean rhythms in pop music to the hyphenated identities that signify ethnic Americans, illuminating the lived experience of ties to a dominant culture blending with the cultural codes of a Third World culture.

Words, Rhythm and Meaning: Language and Hybridity

European Scientific Journal, 2014

The subversion of Western epistemological ideas and the problem of identification have been major concerns of postcolonial theory and writers. However, the extent to which postcolonial writers succeed in their endeavor to write back to the episteme is largely determined by the effectiveness of the language or their discourse. This paper deals with how language as used by postcolonial writers can unintentionally reveal a deeper or different meaning from their initial aims of answering back to an 'Other' culture that has labeled them as uncivilized and inferior. The heterogeneity of their language reveals contradictions and also points to the development of a hybridity capable of coping with a postcolonial identity crisis. In the course of this study that includes texts by Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the native discursive medium of Tayeb Salih's novella, Season of Migration to the North, would also be analyzed for gaps, silences, and contradictions. A Kristevan semanalysis is applied to draw attention to the fluidity of the language, the repressed unconscious, and the semiotic disposition of the novelists and protagonists. Hence, these novels can offer a practical demonstration of how language can reveal the "indistinct music" and meaning of authors' memories to produce texts whose originality lies in their diversity.

Postcolonial Literature, Hybridity and Culture

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Studies, 2014

Forming one of the central themes in the discourse on postcolonial culture/s and indentity/ies, hybridity is an operative verbalization of ambivalence and mutability illustrating a dynamic stride of remonstrate and resistance in opposition to a domineering ideological and cultural colonial hegemony. As a prime mace against oppressive imperial power and ―grand narratives,‖ hybridity locates and echoes the in-betweenness of the self and the other offering a rupture at the binarial and oppositional dissertation fashioned by the dominant authority. Often consequential of indecisive passages and incursions of identities, hybridity is at once plural, complex, subversive, intricate and sometimes contradictory cultural interaction. Emerging from this potential creative space is the discourse of postcolonial literature as hybrid that voices and reflects the nuances of hybridity beyond creative and critical realms as understanding to elaborate upon the interconnections between identities, experiences and cultures that are inert and monolithic bestowed by the colonial and hierarchical. This paper is an attempt to discuss the varied aspects of hybridity, the manner in which it is part of a culture yet influences the emergent cultures and its association to postcolonial literature as hybrid. Key words: hybridity, postcolonial literature, Third Space, culture