Bhabha, hybridity and identity

Antony Easthope

In his collection of essays, Bhabha claims there is a space 'in-between the designations of identity' and that 'this interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy' (p. 4). 341
Hybridity can have three meanings - in terms of biology, ethnicity and culture. In its etymology it meant the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar, and this genetic component provides the first meaning. 341
A second definition of hybridity might be understood to mean an individual 'having access to two or more ethnic identities', somebody like Homi Bhabha himself who is brought up as a Parsee in a predominantly Hindu culture and who then takes an identity within Western Anglophone culture. But again there are problems here. Does hybridity in an ethnic definition suppose that the two ethnic identities joined together were formerly pure in themselves? 342
Would hybridity in this usage specify someone like myself who had an English father and an Irish mother? Or someone born into a working-class background who went on to university, acquiring two cultural identities? As Alan Sinfield remarks, 'it is quite hard to envisage a culture that is not hybrid'.8 lose definition, for who or what is not hybrid? And if everything's hybrid, the term would cancel all the way through.342
Homi Bhabha develops his notion of hybridity from Mikhail Bakhtin, who uses it to discriminate texts with a 'single voice' (lyrical poems) from those with a 'double voice' (such as novels, whose narrator cites characters speaking in their own voice — these texts are hybridic). 342
The non-hybridic has two related features. One is a commitment to 'unitary' or 'originary' identity, identity as 'presence', identity therefore represented by the supposedly transcendental ego. 342
A preliminary way to put this would be to say that whenever there is a signified there must be a signifier; whenever there is anything like a coherent meaning it is possible to point up the linguistic and discursive strategies on which such meaning depends. 343
Bhabha says, 'the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference' (p. 107). 343
Bhabha's hybridity is essentially Derridean difference applied to colonialist texts - the presence of a dominant meaning in a dominant culture can be called into question by referring to the hybridity or difference from which it emerges. 343
What articulates cultural differences is defined as 'in-between' spaces. 343
If Bhabha's hybridity-seeking mission can be as easily applied to any text which affirms a truth, one has to ask in what sense does it apply specifically to colonialist texts? By substituting 'hybridity' for 'difference' Bhabha makes us think we are solidly on the ground of race, ethnicity and colonial identity, but if the form of his argument is ubiquitous, what special purchase does it have on the particular content of colonialism? 344
either full identity or no identity at all, only difference. 345

Easthope, Anthony. “Bhabha, hybridity and identity.” Textual Practice, vol.12, no.2, 1998, pp. 341-348. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, doi: 10.1080/09502369808582312