In biology, a hybrid is the offspring resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms of different varieties, species or genera through sexual reproduction.
Both ancient and modern civilizations have, through trade and conquests, borrowed foreign ideas, philosophies, and sciences, thus producing hybrid cultures and societies.
[6][7] In Latin, hybrida`, or ibrida, refers to "the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar"[8] and, by extension, to the progeny of a Roman and a non-Roman.
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.
[10] 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.
[12] Pseudo-scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans, Asians, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders were racially inferior to Europeans.
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.
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 this way, hybridity can unsettle the narcissist demands of colonial power, but reforms its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the colonist.
Therefore, with this interpretation, hybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the subject into the anxiety-causing object of "paranoid classification—a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority".
First, the metonymy of presence supports the authoritarian voyeurism, but then as discrimination turns into the assertion of the hybrid, the sign of authority becomes a mask, a mockery.
Yet hybridity no longer is solely associated with migrant populations and with border towns, it also applies contextually to the flow of cultures and their interactions.
[3] Others like Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, and Benita Parry blame Homi Bhabha for recycling obscure psychoanalytic and postmodern theories of culture and identity.
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.
According to him, by clearing this concept of its negative biological associations, Bhabha evades the discussion of the problematic issue of race and racism, which should, paradoxically, be a central concern in hybridity theory.
He calls this alternative mode of rethinking postcoloniality "a radical ethics of hybridity," which is "global in scope and planetary in aspiration".
Furthermore, he stresses that this "resistive planetary hybridity" is not "confined to the migrant, diasporic condition," and has "as many centres of consciousness as geographical points of origin".
[16] He argues that globalization as hybridization opposes views which see the process as homogenizing, modernizing, and westernizing, and that it broadens the empirical history of the concept.
For example, young Muslims in Indonesia are followers of Islam but have "synthesized" trends from global culture in ways that respect religious tradition.
In anti-Western countries, youth who try to create cultural hybridity through clothing conflict with the traditional views of modesty in their religion.
Abbé Grégoire recommended wiping out these "crude idioms" and forcing French on the Basques, Bretons and Occitans to "spread enlightened ideas (...), well-being and political tranquillity".
For example, "Israeli" (a term for Modern Hebrew) has been argued to be a Semito-European hybrid language that "demonstrates that the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows.
[31] 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.
[31][32][33] 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.