Cultural Hybridity

“The many colonial novels in English betray themselves as driven by desire for the cultural other” 2-3
Link to papalangi! The desire to be that culture.
‘In between’ or ‘monstrous hybridism’ 3
“This dialogism was emphasized in the colonial area, but it can also be shown to be specific to English cultural identity in general.” 3
The idea that the English culture lacks, therefore, seek the other. 3
“Englishness is itself also uncertainly British, a cunning word of apparent political correctness invoked in order to mask the metonymic extension of English dominance over the other kingdoms with which England has constructed illicit acts of union” 3
“Fixity of identity is only sought in situations of instability and disruption, of conflict and change” 3
“postcolonial critism has constructed two antithetical groups, the coloniser and the colonised, self and Other, with the second only knowable through a necessarily false representation.” 4
“the most productive paradigms have been taken from language. (…) languages constitute powerful models because they preserve the real historical forms of cultural contact.” 5
Mix of languages: hybridity. 5
“In the nineteenth century, as in the late twentieth, hybridity was a key issue for cultural debate” 6
Links cultural differences very closely to racism – a child born from different race parents was considered a hybrid. 5-6\
“British are a mixed and mongrel collection of types and breeds (races) (…), commentators are again invoking hybridity to characterize contemporary culture.” 16
“each language embodies a view of the world peculiarly its own (…) the struggle for the sign. (…) hybridity delineates the way in which language, even within a single sentence, can be double-voiced.” 18
“Hybridity describes the condition of language’s fundamental ability to be simultaneously the same but different.” 19
“It frequently happens that even one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction-and consequently, the word had two contradictory meanings, two accents.” 19