Hybridization and postcolonialism

Abstract

Hybridization refers to a mode of knowledge and action associated with the hybrid. And this last idea denotes the interstices, the network of relationships, the places and instances that, while merging their essences and experiences, generate new productions and reproductions of themselves. Hybridity is viewed by several schools of thought and many practitioners of literature to be one of the main weapons against colonialism. This is especially true of theorists of postcolonialism such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. If hybridity is central to postcolonial studies for reflecting on our intercultural society, it is also true that this school of thought is itself hybrid since their origins. In fact, in our postcolonial age, literary texts and even scientific writing (historical, sociological, etc.) increasingly display a hybrid nature. But how can this Hybrid Studies or Hybridology, through an historian, a sociologist, an anthropologist or a literary critic, detect such hybrid public meanings that lead to a more intense intercultural communication? One of the possible answers can be the following hypothesis: besides the reading and writing of expert knowledges, common concepts (a central term in the sociological phenomenology of Alfred Schutz), used by common people from different cultural origins in a daily basis, may be one of the keys for mutual understanding between different cultures nowadays interconnected within our global postcolonial societies.