Epigraph source:Tomlinson, 1999, p. 141.
1. InHybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race(1995), Robert Young writes that
“hybrid’’ is a nineteenth-century word that “in Latin. . .meant the offspring of a tame sow and wild boar’’(p. 6). TheWebsterdefined hybrid in 1828 as “a mongrel or mule; an animal or plant, produced from the mixture of two species’’ (cited in Young, ibid.). While “hybrid’’ was used as early as 1813 by one writer who discussed human fertility, the use of “hybrid’’ to refer to human intermixing was first recorded in theOxford English Dictionaryin 1861 (Young, 1995).
2. “Hybridity’’ is in my opinion a better English translation of the French m´etissagethan the usage in English of the Spanish wordmestizaje. On this point I am in agreement with French Guyanese literary critic Roger Toumson, who inMythologie du m´etissage(1998) writes: “C’est `a la faveur de ce d´ebat qu’a surgi au sein de l’intelligensia europ´eenne, en France et en Angleterre, plus particuli`erement, la probl´ematique de l’ ‘hybridisation’—c’est le terme dont a us´e Salman Rushdie—c’est-`a-dire du ‘m´etissage’’’ [It is in the wake of this de-bate (about the end of history) that has emerged, among European intellectuals, most particularly in France and in England, the problematic of hybridity—it is the term used by Salman Rushdie—that is to saym´etissage] (p. 62). Indeed, as a
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widely known celebrant of cultural fusion in the West, the Indian-born novelist Rushdie uses the term “hybridity,’’ not “hybridization.’’ Besides, inLa pens´ee m´etisse, French historian Serge Gruzinski (1999) defines “m´etissage’’ as “le bras-sage des ˆetres et des imaginaires’’ [mixing of beings and imaginaries] (p. 36);
(brassageis also the French equivalent of “brewing’’). Gruzinski differentiates between “hybridation’’ and “m´etissage,’’ defining the former as a “closed imag-inary’’ of cultural diversity, and the latter as an “open horizon.’’ In Gruzinski’s view, the first marks the cohabitation of diverse cultural forms, and the second captures a transformative process of fusion (see pp. 190–193). Others concur with the view that “the category ofm´etissage. . .cannot be merely translated with the Spanishmestizaje’’ (Rabasa, 2000, p. 315). It is unfortunate, then, that Deke Dusimberre translated Gruzinski’sLa pens´ee m´etisseasThe Mestizo Mind (2002), effectively equating “m´etissage’’ and “mestizaje.’’ As used in this book and in the literature about mestizaje, m´etissage, creolization, or syncretism,
“m´etissage,’’ then, is the French equivalent of “hybridity.’’ Chapter Three will unpack the multiple meanings and applications of these terms.
3. A partial list: anthropology (Thomas, 1996), critical race studies (Werbner and Modood, 1997), cultural studies (Gilroy, 1993), art criticism (Clarke, 1997;
Coombes, 1992), popular music and ethnomusicology (Boggs, 1991; Hutnyk, 1997; Nexica, 1997; Salamone, 1998), sociology (Nederveen Pieterse, 1994, 2001), film studies (Marchetti, 1998), literary criticism (Jussawalla, 1995; Moreiras, 1999; Young, 1995), migration studies (Papastergiadis, 2000), postcolonial the-ory (Ahmad, 1995; Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1994), and performance studies (Joseph and Fink, 1999). Hybridity is also used in studies of tourism (Hollinshead, 1998), folklore (Kapchan and Turner-Strong, 1999), sports (Archetti, 1999), and archi-tecture (Morton, 2000). Finally, discussions of hybridity can be found in books about global corporate competition (Zachary, 2000), popular travel writing (Iyer, 2000), economics (Cowen, 2002a), and mainstream media accounts of global popular culture (“Culture Wars,’’1998; Hermes, 1994; Farhi and Rosenfeld, 1998;
Waxman, 1998).
4. Users of the concept of hybridity in media studies are still scarce, and most of those working specifically in international communication have merely mentioned or addressed hybridity in a rather limited fashion, an issue I dis-cuss later in this chapter. Nonetheless, since the mid-1990s, hybridity is an emerging issue in media and communication and has appeared regularly at professional conventions of the International Association for Media and Com-munication Research (IAMCR), the International ComCom-munication Association (ICA), the National Communication Association (NCA), and the Society for Cin-ema Studies (SCS), renamed the Society for CinCin-ema and Media Studies (SCMS).
This is in addition to meetings that focus on hybridity, e.g., the “Theorizing the Hybrid’’ conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in March 1996 and the “Traveling Concepts: Texts, Subjectivity, Hybridity’’ conference orga-nized in January 2000 at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA).
N´estor Garc´ıa-Canclini, whoseHybrid Cultures(1989/1995) is a founding text of hybridity research, was a keynote speaker at the 1997 IAMCR conference in Oaxaca, Mexico, while the 2001 ICA conference in Washington, D.C., included several papers on hybridity, and the 2003 ICA conference in San Diego featured one theme-session panel devoted to discussing cultural hybridity that attracted
nearly seventy attendants. However, these efforts do not offer a systematic con-ceptualization of hybridity in international communication and media studies scholarship.
5. In Egypt,Alif: Journal of Comparative Poeticspublished a special issue, “The Hybrid Literary Text: Arab Creative Authors Writing in Foreign Languages’’
(Alif20, 2000). In France, the journalDiog`ene, published by the Presses Univer-sitaires de France with the assistance of UNESCO, had a 1999 special issue titled
“M´etissage culturel entre religions ´ecrites et traditions orales’’ (Cultural Hybrid-ity between Written Religions and Oral Traditions) (“M´etissage culturel,’’ 1999).
Finally, in the United States, theJournal of American Folkloredevoted an entire issue to the subject “Theorizing the Hybrid’’ (Kapchan and Strong, 1999), which carried the proceedings of the conference by the same title, mentioned in the previous note.
6. While a systematic elucidation of postcolonial theory and criticism is be-yond the scope of this book, the reader can consult an abundant literature on both the affirmation and contestation of postcolonial theory, including discus-sions of the value of the term “postcolonialism’’ itself: See Ahmad, 1992, 1995;
Appiah, 1991; Bahri, 1995; Dirlik, 1994; Hall, 1996; McClintock, 1992; Mishra and Hodge, 1991; Miyoshi, 1993; Shohat, 1992. Spivak (1999) succinctly expresses the central question when she writes that discussions of postcolonial theory
“often dissimulate the implicit collaboration of the postcolonial in the service of neocolonialism’’ (p. 361). In communication studies, see the exchange between Shome (1998) and Kavoori (1998) inCritical Studies in Mass Communication, 15(2), and the special issue ofCommunication Theory“Postcolonial Approaches to Com-munication’’ (Drzewiecka and Halualani, 2002; Grossberg, 2002; Kraidy, 2002a;
Parameswaran, 2002; Shome and Hegde, 2002; Spivak, 2002). In terms of post-colonial theorists who specifically address hybridity, Homi Bhabha has been both influential and controversial. In his exhaustive survey of postcolonial the-ory, Tanzanian-British literary critic Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997) devotes a full chapter to Bhabha—Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, the other members of what British literary critic Robert Young (1995) called the “Holy Trinity’’of postcolonial theory, get the same honor—arguing that one of Bhabha’s most original contributions is to have emphasized “the mutualities and negoti-ations across the colonial divide’’ (p. 116), in contrast to Edward Said’s focus on the colonizer (the “early’’ Said; see Chapter Three) and Frantz Fanon’s emphasis on the colonized. However, Bhabha’s Lacanian grounding and his focus on the semiotic and textual domains have made him the favorite target of materialist critics such as Aijaz Ahmad (1992, 1995). After acknowledging weaknesses in Bhabha’s writing, Moore-Gilbert offers a solid counter-critique of Ahmad.
7. Mart´ın-Barbero’s conception of mestizaje is used to describe various ob-jects and phenomena. InCommunication, Culture, and Hegemony: From the Me-dia to MeMe-diations(Mart´ın-Barbero, 1993a), the author’s magnum opus, there are other definitions than the one I just quoted. For example: “the cultural realities of these countries, the new combinations and syntheses—themestizajes—that reveal not just the racial mixture that we come from but the interweaving of modernity and the residues of various cultural periods, the mixture of social structures and sentiments’’ (p. 2), later elaborated: “Mestizajeis not simply a racial fact, but the explanation of our existence, the web of times and places,
memories and imagination which, until now, have been adequately expressed only at a literary level’’ (p. 188). In other instances there seems to be a slight confusion as to the meaning of “mestizaje,’’ possibly accentuated in the trans-lation from Spanish to English. In one instance Mart´ın-Barbero (1993b) refers to “urbanmestizajes,. . .the skills, knowledge, and grammars that, constituted in memory, mediate the cultural readings of the different groups, and to the imaginaries from which men and women, young and old, Indians and blacks, peasants and city dwellers project their identities’’ (p. 25). Elsewhere, Mart´ın-Barbero (2002) writes that identities are constructed in relational and narrative processes, which include “the multimediatic idiom within which today’s trans-lations are played out. . .and also that even more complex and ambiguous idiom of appropriations, and miscegenations [mestizajes]’’ (p. 627). For Mart´ın-Barbero, then, “mestizaje’’ is at once name and adjective, singular and plural, process and product.
8. In my view, the designation “global media studies’’ (Kraidy, 2002c) re-flects a variety of interdisciplinary theories that have widened the scope of research on global media and activated a consideration of the linkages between production, texts, and consumption (for example, Miller, Govil, McMurria, and Maxwell, 2001; Murphy and Kraidy, 2003a), a task that the traditional interna-tional communication canon has to a large degree neglected. Different traditions have tended to focus on one out of three stages of the communication process.
Cultural imperialism, grounded in critical political economy, focused on pro-duction and distribution. In contrast, media criticism, derived from literary and rhetorical criticism, examined the layers of meaning embedded in media texts.
Finally, reception studies, rooted in cultural anthropology and sociology, semi-otics and reader-response theories, emphasized the creative abilities of active media audiences. In my view, the rubric “global media studies’’ also encom-passes diasporic media research, another area neglected in the study of inter-national communication. Integrating these different aspects can improve our understanding of the links between media culture and broader societal pro-cesses in a comparative context. However, “global media studies’’ should not uncritically give prominence to textual and discursive aspects of global media.
At any rate, a full discussion of the benefits and pitfalls of the “global media studies’’ tag awaits another day.