- Title
- Hybridity
- Creator
- Nilan, Pam
- Relation
- Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges p. 252-257
- Relation
- http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415874120/
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- For the past three decades hybridity has been a key concept in cultural studies, postcolonial theorizing, and youth studies. This loan term from biology informed social science and language discourses regarding the outcomes of cultural mixing. In the 18th century public opinion feared racial mixing or hybridity would lead to a weakening of White races, producing minimized distinctiveness and subsequent loss of superior status. Similarly, language hybridity threatened a country's national language through the introduction and adoption of foreign terms.At the end of the 20th century influential social theorists including Donna Haraway (1985) and Stuart Hall (1993) reinvented the concept. For Homi Bhabha (1994) hybridity implied a discursive "third space" of identity/subjectivity characterized by ambivalence in the postcolonial moment. Currently, hybridity or hybridization describes cultural synthesis or mixing, in relation to transnational practices, identities, and diaspora, implying the conflation of culture and nation. Hybridity critically engages with power relations between different nations and cultures in the world by acknowledging nonhegemonic or subaltern knowledges. As a mode of analysis it examines spaces of resistance and reinvention in transnational engagements, and in colonial and postcolonial encounters (Anjali, 2007). Coining the term "hybrid cultures," Garcia Canclini (1995) maintains that all late modern identities involve border-crossings. In youth studies, we find the somewhat romantic idea that youth are the cultural leaders of hybridity as a form of subversion and resistance. In the hybrid space of youth culture, forms, practices, identities, and meanings are "appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew" (Bhabha, 1994). Hybrid youth cultures point to "new conceptions of subjectivity and identification that articulate the local and the global in novel and exciting patterns" (Gilroy, 1993). The creative, dynamic nature of youth culture (Willis, 1990) means that young people are a particularly seductive population to attach to the vanguard of hybridity.
- Subject
- youth culture; identity; global
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1053079
- Identifier
- uon:15517
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780415874120
- Language
- eng
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