Hybridity

In biology, a hybrid is the offspring resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms of different varieties, species or genera through sexual reproduction. Generally, it means that each cell has genetic material from two different organisms, whereas an individual where some cells are derived from a different organism is called a chimera. Hybrids are not always intermediates between their parents (such as in blending inheritance), but can show hybrid vigor, sometimes growing larger or taller than either parent. The concept of a hybrid is interpreted differently in animal and plant breeding, where there is interest in the individual parentage. In genetics, attention is focused on the numbers of chromosomes. In taxonomy, a key question is how closely related the parent species are. Species are reproductively isolated by strong barriers to hybridization, which include genetic and morphological differences, differing times of fertility, mating behaviors and cues, and physiological rejection of sperm cells or the developing embryo. Some act before fertilization and others after it. Similar barriers exist in plants, with differences in flowering times, pollen vectors, inhibition of pollen tube growth, somatoplastic sterility, cytoplasmic-genic male sterility and the structure of the chromosomes. A few animal species and many plant species, however, are the result of hybrid speciation, including important crop plants such as wheat, where the number of chromosomes has been doubled ==As racial mixing==

Hybridity is a cross between two separate races, plants or cultures. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture. Hybridity is not a new cultural or historical phenomenon. It has been a feature of all civilizations since time immemorial from the Sumerians through the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to the present. Both ancient and modern civilizations have, through trade and conquests, borrowed foreign ideas, philosophies, and sciences, thus producing hybrid cultures and societies. The term hybridity itself is not a modern coinage. It was common among the Greeks and Romans. In Latin, hybrida`, or ibrida, refers to "the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar" and, by extension, to the progeny of a Roman and a non-Roman. The word hybridity was in use in English since the early 17th century and gained popular currency in the 19th century. Charles Darwin used the term in 1837 in reference to his experiments in cross-fertilization in plants. The concept of hybridity has been fraught with negative connotations from its incipience. The Greeks and the Romans borrowed extensively from other civilizations, the Egyptians and the Persians in particular, and created ipso facto hybridized cultures but regarded unfavourably biological hybridity. Aristotle, Plato and Pericles were all opposed to racial mixing between Greeks and "barbarians" and viewed biological hybridity as a source of racial degeneration and social disorder. Similarly, within the Roman Empire, which is considered as one of the most multi-ethnic empires, cultural difference was usually integrated into the predominant culture, but biological hybridity was condemned. The Romans’ attitudes to racial mixing hardened in the 4th century AD, when Rome embraced the Christian faith. That is manifest in the Codex Theodosianus (AD365), which prohibited marriages between Christians and non-Christians, the Jews in particular, and inflicted death penalty on those who did not obey the law. Contempt for biological hybridity did not end with the fall of the Roman Empire but continued throughout the Middle Ages and well into modern times, reaching a peak in the 19th century with the rise of Europe into an unrivalled imperial power. Hybridity and fear of racial degeneration caused by the mixing of Europeans and non-Europeans were major concerns in 19th century colonialist discourse prompted by racist pseudo-scientific discourses found in such works as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l’inégalité des races and Joseph-Ernest Renan's L’Education culturelle et morale. As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th century. Pseudo-scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans, Asians, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders were racially inferior to Europeans. The fear of miscegenation that followed responded to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race. Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation. Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism; despite the backdrop of the humanitarian Age of Enlightenment, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit. The social transformations that followed the ending of colonial mandates, rising immigration, and economic liberalization have profoundly altered the use and the understanding of the term. ==In post-colonial discourse==

Hybrid talk, the rhetoric of hybridity, is fundamentally associated with the emergence of post-colonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. It is the second stage in the history of hybridity, characterized by literature and theory that study the effects of mixture (hybridity) upon identity and culture. The principal theorists of hybridity are Homi Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, whose works respond to the multi-cultural awareness that emerged in the early 1990s. In the theoretic development of hybridity, the key text is The Location of Culture (1994), by Homi Bhabha, wherein the liminality of hybridity is presented as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. The principal proposition is the hybridity of colonial identity, which, as a cultural form, made the colonial masters ambivalent, and, as such, altered the authority of power. Hybridity demonstrates how cultures come to be represented by processes of iteration and translation through which their meanings are vicariously addressed to—through—an Other. This contrasts any "essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures which, when inscribed in the naturalistic sign of symbolic consciousness frequently become political arguments for the hierarchy and ascendancy of powerful cultures." Criticism of hybridity theory The development of hybridity theory as a discourse of anti-essentialism marked the height of the popularity of academic "hybridity talk". However the usage of hybridity in theory to eliminate essentialist thinking and practices (namely racism) failed as hybridity itself is prone to the same essentialist framework and thus requires definition and placement. A number of arguments have followed in which promoters and detractors argue the uses of hybridity theory. Much of this debate can be criticized as being excessively bogged down in theory and pertaining to some unhelpful quarrels on the direction hybridity should progress e.g. attached to racial theory, post-colonialism, cultural studies, or globalization. Sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse highlights these core arguments in a debate that promotes hybridity. Some on the left, such as cultural theorist John Hutnyk, have criticized hybridity as politically void. Dirlik follows in a similar vein, stressing the postcolonial theorists’ propensity to flatten out cultural difference under the umbrella term of hybridity: "Africa, Caribbean, South-Asian literatures come from different places and different histories, and not merely different from France, but different from each other. It is this real sort of difference that disappears in postcolonial studies". In "Signs of our Time" Benita Parry discusses The Location of Culture and criticizes the "linguistic turn" in cultural studies, more particularly, Bhabha's dependence on fuzzy psychoanalytical and linguistic explanations of cultural identities, or what she calls the "autarchy of the signifier". More recently, Amar Acheraiou in Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization challenges Bhabha's theory of hybridity on theoretical as well as ideological and historical grounds. He criticizes Bhabha for examining hybridity from a narrow, "synchronic" perspective confined to the 19th century, instead of adopting a "diachronic" view which renders better this concept's historical depth. Another promoter of hybridity as globalization is Jan Nederveen Pieterse, who asserts hybridity as the rhizome of culture. ==In linguistics==

Colonialism Languages are all hybrid, in varying degrees. For centuries people borrowed from foreign languages, creating thus hybrid linguistic idioms. They did so for commercial, aesthetic, ideological and technological reasons (to facilitate trade transactions, express philosophical or scientific ideas unavailable in their original idioms, enrich and adapt their languages to new realities, subvert a dominant colonial literary canon by deliberately introducing words from the colonized peoples' idiom). Trade and colonization have been the main vehicles of linguistic hybridization across history. Since the classical conquests, both the colonizers and colonized tapped into each other's languages. The Greeks soaked up many mathematical and astronomical concepts from the Egyptians. The Romans, too, absorbed much of Greek culture and ideas. They also drew abundantly from the "barbarians". In Taktika, Arrian (92–175 AD), a Greek historian and philosopher of the Roman period, drew attention to the Romans' indebtedness to their colonial subjects, arguing that "the Romans have many foreign (Iberian, Celtic) terms for formations, for they used Celtic cavalry". According to him, this would "banish superstition" and "simplify the mechanism of the political machine." It would, above all, "mould the citizens into a national whole" In Britain, this Aristotelian view of language was revitalized by authors like Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Matthew Arnold, who cast respectively the Irish, Scots and Welsh as "rude" and "backward", attributing these peoples’ intellectual and economic "backwardness" to their "inferior" languages. A dual dynamics Linguistic and cultural hybridity is a "dual dynamics" which operates "passively" as well as "actively". "Intentional hybridization" consists of juxtaposing deliberately different idioms, discourses, and perspectives within the same semiotic space without merging them. Bakhtin states that the language of the novel is "a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other". He adds: "the novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by another, the carving-out of a living image of another language". ==In the arts==

Presently, human beings are immersed in a hybridised environment of reality and augmented reality on a daily basis, considering the proliferation of physical and digital media (i.e. print books vs. e-books, music downloads vs. physical formats). Many people attend performances intending to place a digital recording device between them and the performers, intentionally "layering a digital reality on top of the real world." For artists working with and responding to new technologies, the hybridisation of physical and digital elements has become a reflexive reaction to this strange dichotomy. For example, in Rooms by Sara Ludy computer-generated effects process physical spaces into abstractions, making familiar environments and items such as carpets, doors and windows disorientating, set to the sound of an industrial hum. In effect, the distinction between real and virtual space in art is deconstructed. The conditions and processes known as glocalization play an important role in recent forms of hybridity in the arts, since artists commonly seek to negotiate between local and global forces. Several theoretical models have been developed to explain approaches to hybridity in the arts, a phenomenon that is especially common among artists who either identify as multicultural or see their work as situated between “East” and “West.” Such developments demonstrate ways that the arts can both forecast and respond to changing conditions in society. == See also ==