When two different things are brought together – when plants or animals are ‘crossed’, when two identities are fused, when literary genres are mixed, when a building combines the features of different architectural styles – something new results. This new thing is a hybrid. Today the idea of hybridity has largely positive connotations as it is articulated in esthetics or in cultural theory using postcolonial models (Bhabha, Young) and cyborg theory (Haraway). Mixed identities and creative interference are positively valued for their power to innovate and surprise, to express new emotions and ideas, to reflect changing sociocultural realities. In French, a similar revaluation of the term “métissage” has been undertaken. However, the idea of hybridity carries with it a long history of negativity. Consider the words mongrel or half-breed, which share the same semantic field. During the 18^th and 19th centuries hybridity was regularly associated with the abnormal, the monstrous or the grotesque, and the term was implicated in some of the more somber episodes of scientific history having to do racist ideas of ‘polygenesis’ – which postulated the existence of more than one human species. For those who defended pure forms of expression, hybridity was a form of contamination – in the same way as religious syncretism was and continues to be rejected by defenders of authoritative dogma.

References

Bhabha, Homi

1994 The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge.

Gentzler, E

2008 Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. London/New York: Routledge.  BoP

Godayol, P

(ed.) 2001 Veus Xicanes. Vic: Eumo Editorial.

Haraway, Donna

1991 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge.

Laplantine, F. & Nouss, A

2001 Métissages, de Arcimboldo à Zombi. Paris: Pauvert.

Leclerc, Catherine

2005 “Between French and English, Between Ethnography and Assimilation: Strategies for Translating Moncton’s Acadian Vernacular.” TTR 18 (2): 161–192.  TSB

Simon, Sherry

(ed.) 1995 Culture in Transit. Montreal: Véhicule Press.  TSB

Tymoczko, Maria

2003 “Enlarging Western Translation Theory: Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation.” http://​eslking​.com​/library2​/collections​/language​/translation​/tymoczko​_translation​_theory​.pdf [Accessed 14 June 2011]

Wolf, M

2007 “The location of the ‘translation field. Negotiating borderlines between Pierre Bourdieu and Homi Bhabha.” In Constructing a Sociology of Translation, Michaela Wolf & Alexandra Fukari (eds), 109–119. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins  TSB.

Young, Robert J.C

1995 Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York/London: Routledge.

Further reading

Pratt, Mary Louise

1991 “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91: 33–l40.

Schäffner, Christina & Adab, Beverly

2001 “The Idea of the Hybrid Text in Translation: Contact as Conflict.” Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2): 277–302.  TSB

Simon, Sherry

1999 Hybridité Culturelle. Montréal : Editions Ile de la Tortue.

Wolf, Michaela

2000 “The ‘Third Space’ in Postcolonial Representation.” In Changing the Terms. Translating in the Postcolonial Era, Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre (eds), 127–145. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.