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Abstract
In this article, Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity is being discussed from the point of view of its impact on persons' capacity for agency. Bhabha emphasized the emancipating and anti-authoritarian potentials of hybridity. In this paper it is argued that this positive evaluation does not hold for all cases of hybridity. It is also argued that the value of hybridity will depend on whether it expands or diminishes persons' capacity for agency. A limited empirical study of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands will illustrate this hypothesis.
Keywords: Agency; Homi Bhabha; hybridity; identity; Turkish immigrants
Hybridity: Good or Bad?
In his discussion of the concept of hybridity, Homi Bhabha famously observed that '[h]ybridity ... is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the "pure" and original identity of authority)', bringing with it a 'revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity' and thereby constituting 'a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority' (Bhabha, 1994: 112-113). Bhabha's idea is that colonial oppression presupposes a belief in distinct cultural identities, separating colonizer and colonized. Hence, to the extent that a colonized people can challenge this belief by asserting themselves as 'hybrids', having aspects of their identity in common with the colonizers, they can also liberate themselves from the identity-based hierarchy imposed on them by the colonizers:
To see the cultural not as the source of conflict - different cultures - but as the effect of discriminatory practices - the production of cultural differentiation as signs of authority - changes its value and its rules of recognition. Hybridity intervenes in the exercise of authority not merely to indicate the impossibility of its identity but to represent the unpredictability of its presence (Bhabha, 1994: 114; emphasis in the original).
As an example, Bhabha discusses the spread of Christianity by British missionaries in India. In the early nineteenth century, the Bible was translated into several Indian languages and handed out for free or sold at a very low price in thousands of copies. However, the adoption of Christianity by Indians was not just a case of the colonizers' religion being extended to the colonized, but it also brought about a transformation of how...