Sihem Arfaoui Abidi: “The Between-world Dilemma: Pains and Pleasures of Hybridity in Arab and Arab American Memoirs”
The discussions of hybridity in works dwelling the Asian, African and Latin Americas – in the folds of texts like The Bluest Eye or The Woman Warrior – as a between-world dilemma almost amount to axiomatic or even common-sense exercises for the world-wide readers of English literatures. Unfortunately, it seems to require the 9/11 events to turn attention to another significant segment of English American literature, that is, Arab American writings and shed light on their contributions to the investigation of similar issues, since what brought this genre to the spotlight has often-times been related to this eventful decade. This is not to suggest that Arab American fiction is more original when it comes to such issues as hybridity, but rather that this segment of American literature needs to be taken into account in the articulation of the considered question. In the spirit of reviving the current keen interest in this multilayered literary corpus – albeit in comparison with an Arab memoir written in English, I propose to study the representations of hybridity in two memoirs by Arab and Arab American women writers. These include Dreams of Trespass (1994) by the Moroccan woman writer Fatima Mernissi and The Language of Baklava (2005) by Palestinian-Jordanian American novelist Diana Abu-Jaber. Both memoirs, I argue, abound with instances where the identitarian between-world status remains dilemmic as long as it oscillates between pain and pleasure. By drifting away from racial purity and cultural authenticity, Mernissi’s and Abu-Jaber’s life-writings tell painful stories of displacement, exile, instability, non-belonging, of people in a ceaseless search for roots. On the other hand, these works trust themselves to the possibilities of mixing and syncretism which loom large for hybrid identities, as it is mirrored through third-world solidarity and alliances as well the challenges to homogeneity and the binarist symmetries between East and West, colonizer and colonized.
Claudine Armand: “Forms and practices of hybridization in Fred Wilson’s visual art”
Fred Wilson is a New-York based conceptual African-American artist (born in New York in 1954) whose multidisciplinary work draws from various sources, such as art history, architecture, and anthropology. Through his nomadic practices, he appropriates and explores heterogeneous spaces, be they indoors or outdoors, which are always historically-charged. As an artist, he also likes to take up different roles (as curator, collector, guide, docent, or spectator). His approach partakes of a postmodernist and postcolonial reflection on the traditional boundaries of genres that he decompartmentalizes and a questioning of public places and institutions, like museums whose rhetoric and language he appropriates so as to unveil their gaps, inadequacies, and intricacies. This paper aims at exploring the hybridization process – generic, formal, functional – that underlies Fred Wilson’s art practice. It will therefore be based on an analysis of the artist’s appropriation strategies and various forms of hybridity that are inextricably linked to issues related to identity and representation. It will also show how Wilson builds a protean art and an aesthetics of crossbreeding through installations, his favourite medium. His installations are open and fluid spaces, sites of interaction and overlapping of multiple gestures.
Markus Arnold: “Cosmopolitan visions and odysseys of memory: identity twists in the writing of Mauritian author Amal Sewtohul”
For a couple of years a young generation of writers has been enriching the literary field of Mauritius Island with esthetically innovative representations of anti-essential identities. Diverging from better known ‘creolizing’ currents in the Antillean and in Reunion, those committed literary voices (A. Devi, N. Appanah, S. Patel, etc.) are opposing to the hegemony of a fixed multiculturalism such as it can be found in Mauritian official discourse and traditionalist viewpoints. Aiming at an interethnic dialogue, those authors transgress intercommunal barriers and subvert the ideas of identity purity and homogeneity through different ways of representing creolization. The present paper will analyze how the novels of Amal Sewtohul – Histoire d’Ashok (2001) and Les voyages et aventures de Sanjay (2009) equally portray such an esthetics of the hybrid. But we’ll then see to what degree their innovative poetics diverge from the current literary voices en vogue in Mauritius. Thus, Sewtohul’s hybrid visions can be considered as propositions of a transcultural dialogue. But do they not illustrate at the same time the limits of political commitment? Do they not run the risk of an elitist cosmopolitanism far away from the Mauritian realities?
Myriam Bellehigue: “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: a mixed-blood narrative”
“One of the characteristics of being a mixed-blood is searching. You look back and say, ‘Where am I from?’ You must question. You must make certain choices. You’re able to. And it’s a blessing and it’s a curse.” The contemporary Native-American novelist and poet, Louise Erdrich, defines herself as mixed-blood, and the quest for identity related to these mixed origins lies at the core of most of her narratives. Love Medicine, first published in 1984, was reissued in a revised and expanded version in 1993. It is the first novel Erdrich has devoted to the Chippewa community she originates from. Several other novels have completed this fictional family saga set in North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation. Love Medicine is a short story cycle that focuses on several members of the community over a period of 50 years. Erdrich draws from a dense historical, political and social background to explore the pervasive thematics of cultural, linguistic and religious métissage. But hybridity is also a key motif in the very aesthetics she has chosen for her first book, approaching the issues of intermixing from the edge: “I am on the edge, have always been on the edge, flourish on the edge, and I don’t think I belong anywhere else”. She resorts to various intertextual strategies borrowing from the Indian oral tradition of storytelling and from other Native-American writers, but also from American predecessors like William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. She is also influenced by European fairy-tales or Greek mythology. As a short story cycle, the narrative is marked by its own textual pollination: kaleidoscopic construction, polyphony, echoes, repetitions and variations. The discontinuity inherent to this hybrid genre is counterbalanced by various forms of porosity and circulation. Through multiple reconfigurations, Erdrich manages to blur limits and to paradoxically perpetuate memory and heritage: “In the light of enormous loss, Native American writers must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe.”
Salhia Ben-Messahel: “Hybridity as the site of difference in Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread and Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking”
Recent Australian fiction shows a marked interest for cultural issues and the need for Australia to reconcile different cultures and stories: Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories in a postcolonial and global environment. Nicholas Jose and Gail Jones’s novels tackle intercultural and transcultural relations and design an in-between space that becomes a site of difference. The issue of identity and otherness, from the perspective of a multicultural nation in the Asia-pacific, surfaces through an intertextual construct that transgresses the scope of time and space. Time and space merge to design a hybrid text resting upon interpolation and dialogism, extending the boundaries of genre and discourse. A feature of postcolonial discourse, hybridity translates as an assumption that the centre is a decentred reality, replaces a temporal lineality with a spatial plurality and constructs postcoloniality by playing with textuality. The intertextual nature of Jose and Jones’s works, which can also be interpreted as part of a postmodern approach, is a means to negotiate (between multicultural) identity and displacement, to refute Eurocentric views about the world, to examine cross-cultural issues and address the text as an artefact that operates as the real in a dislocated global environment.
Elisabeth Bouzonviller: “Cracks and ‘bricolage’ in Louise Erdrich’s The Antilope Wife or the Art of Hybridity” Louise Erdrich is from mixed origins and most of her novels are set in North Dakota in, or close to, an imaginary Ojibwa reservation. Repeatedly, her fiction celebrates an America of multiplicity through her characters, plots and literary technique but it also calls for constant remembering so as not to forget Native culture and certain troubled aspects of national history. The Antilope Wife takes place mainly in Minneapolis but the narrative establishes links with the land of origins somewhere in the West, where some initial crack brought paradoxically three White, Ojibwa and mixed-blood families together. Our paper will study the way Erdrich manages, through her writing, and this novel in particular, to refuse rigid frameworks, a return to identity and sectarianism and finally conveys a hybrid reading of America. Unlike Silko or Momaday, who are perceived as more politically committed artists and who favor a return to traditions in their fiction, Erdrich offers a hybrid writing which mixes geographical, human and literary origins, a writing which, like Lévi-Strauss’s « bricoleur », makes good use of all available elements to produce a new whole resonating with modern America.
Marilyne Brun: “Racial and Literary Hybridity in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing”
The nine novels of contemporary Australian writer Brian Castro are particularly interesting in relation to hybridity. Most of Castro’s heroes are mixed-race, and their racial identity is often deeply ambiguous. What is unique about Castro’s fiction is that he suggests, in his critical work, that he also mobilises hybridity as a literary trope. In this sense, it is crucial to understand how Castro employs hybridity both thematically and poetically in his novels, and what relation can be established between the representation of multiraciality and hybrid poetics. This paper deals specifically with Castro’s seventh novel, Shanghai Dancing (2003), which follows the quest of Antonio Castro. While the novel playfully represents racial hybridity as ambiguous, its narrative can also be described as fundamentally hybrid thanks to its mixture of genres and intertextual complexity. Elaborating on Salman Rushdie’s celebration of “mongrelisation” and Fred Wah’s “half-bred poetics”, I argue that Shanghai Dancing tightly associates racial and literary hybridity, and thereby highlights not simply the presence of racist forms in language, but also the desire for homogeneity that exists in canonical literature.
Simona Corso: “Robinson’s Adventures in a Hybrid World”
In his 2003 Nobel Lecture, entitled “He and His Man”, J.M. Coetzee evokes the figure of an old and sullen Robinson Crusoe, who grasps the pen but does not find the right words. “His man”, on the other hand, dines with him but spends his days in the streets of England, hunting for stories, and filling page after page with his “reports” – scenes of everyday life, tragic, endearing or funny. Reading and re-reading these reports, Robinson understands that they are figures of his own life, events that occurred to him many years ago on his island. Since he is lost for words, his man’s eloquence irritates him, just as he was once annoyed by the many imitators, who, like cannibals, fed off his “island history”, “that is to say, his life”. But Robinson consoles himself: “there are but a handful of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence”. While he is being celebrated as one of the world’s greatest living writers, Coetzee, unsurprisingly, turns to Crusoe. The story of Robinson – one of the most powerful myths in English culture – haunts the imagination of postcolonial writers. It is a direct source of inspiration for Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Derek Walcott’s Pantomime (1978), but it also proves a powerful influence for many narratives or episodes centered on the master-servant relationship – from V. S. Naipaul’s short story “One out of Many” (1971) to Moses’ relationship with his “right hand man” in Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975). Coetzee and Walcott, Selvon and Naipaul unravel English culture from its presumed margins; by re-writing, sometimes painfully some other times humorously, the story of Robinson and Friday, these authors speculate about the violence that underlies every form of cultural hegemony, the status of historical truth, the privilege of having a voice, but also the rich potentials of irony and satire available in any reversal or hybridization of well established literary myths. Drawing examples from J. M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, and V. S. Naipaul I wish to explore the semantic complexity of Robinson’s story and its relevance to postcolonial fiction, not only as the narrative core of a modern mythography of colonialism and its tragic consequences, but also as a great laboratory for hybridization and satire.
Sophie Dannenmüller: “ ‘Café Mestizo: a grind so fine you give in to the pleasure’: The use of the medium to criticize society in David Avalos’ hybrid sculptures”
The concept of hybridity is intrinsic to the Chicano (Mexican-American) culture and identity. In 1989, the California Chicano artist David Avalos (1947-) created the Café Mestizo installation in order to uphold the notion of mixture and denounce the negative connotation of the term ‘half-breed’. The ‘menu’ of Café Mestizo featured various Combination Platters in the form of hybrid constructions collectively entitled Hubcap Milagros. ‘Milagros’ (miracles) are small traditional devotional ex-votos characteristic of Mexican Catholicism, while ‘Hubcap’ suggests the customized Chicano lowriders. These sculptures were all made of objects loaded with meaning: barbed wire, revolver, tomahawk, hubcap, chili peppers, cactus, Sacred heart, vagina dentata…. For instance, Junípero Serra’s Next Miracle: Turning Blood into Thunderbird Wine juxtaposes symbolic objects to challenge the myth of an idealistic colonization and to contest the Franciscan missionary’s canonization in 1989; The Straight-Razor Taco represents the confrontation of indigenous and European civilizations through a rereading of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which insidiously proscribed miscegenation. This paper will examine the connection between medium and political content in Avalos’ composite sculptures, which blend and confront Anglo and Mexican cultures, high and low art, the profane and the sacred, myths and historical facts, to expose the current Chicano condition.
Anne Dromart: “Hybridity, Legitimacy and Identity in the Writings of Daniel Defoe”
By calling the English a hybrid people – « a mongrel half-bred race » — in The True-Born Englishman (1700) as an answer to Tutchin’s Foreigners published a few months before, Daniel Defoe dismisses the idea that nationalism can be based on ethnic purity and proffers a new construction of Englishness through a reevaluation of the notions of legitimacy and individual identity. What he does here for moral and political purposes is also to be found in his other fictional or non-fictional writings in which he counters the traditional association of mixed blood with Satanic or subversive forces, in order to show that an individual’s true identity does not lie in his direct genealogical line. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 the related themes of legitimacy in politics and bastardy in literature partake of the same reflexion on both inner worth and social value in a way that legitimates social mobility.
Corinne Duboin: “Black Atlantic Literature: Aesthetics, Hybridity and Globality”
In the present context, postcoloniality seems to disappear gradually for the benefit of globalized transculturality. Writers themselves have become “global souls,” nomadic, cosmopolitan figures “in the modern, postnational globe” (A. Pico, Global Soul). Thus, one may wonder about the evolution and the place of migrant and diasporic literatures in the future. The new mobilities of the black Diaspora not only produce more diversity within the Diaspora itself, but also new hybridities and intercultural connections that combine tension with fusion. Those processes should be examined from a new perspective that revises the postcolonial approach by focusing not only on “vertical” binary relations, but on “lateral” relations as well (F. Lionnet & S. Shih, Minor Transnationalism). I propose to show through a transversal reading how African American and Caribbean writers scattered throughout the Black Atlantic inscribe their works within a textual “third space” that reflects an ontological liminality. These writers build their own canons through a process of textual hybridization, a negotiation of new codes that combine sameness with difference in an interactive way, initiating both a pluralistic decentering of writing and a new world order.
Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay: “Denaturing, contamination and hybridity in Thomas de Quincey’s autobiographical works (1821-1853)”
Towards the end of his life, Thomas De Quincey was evoking a form of predatory self-torture: “It is like being a vampire who sucks his own blood, for the man who is cursed with a good memory is ‘a fiery heautontimoroumenos (or self-tormentor)’ ”. The role of hybridization in his life and works clearly appears though this recourse to ancient Greek and, above all, through the novel image of the vampire, the alien from the East, decades before S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Indeed, the title of Conan Doyle’s short story, “The Sussex Vampire” (1924) sounds like a paradox in a nationalist perspective, emphasizing the seemingly outlandish nature of vampirism in the very heart of England. How did De Quincey come to this, through what slow and painful metamorphosis did he become other and turn into a hybrid creature formed of heterogeneous French, Turkish, Malaysian, or Chinese elements? These were the very threats he had erected the prescriptive and normative stronghold of Englishness against, at the start of his literary career. As a matter of fact, in his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, shortly after the Napoleonic wars and within the context of colonial expansion in the East, he had vigorously and repeatedly claimed (t)his English « purity », from a literary, moral, intellectual and physical point of view. This paper will therefore focus on the origins, modalities and consequences of this hybridization through a corpus including the Confessions (1821), “The Apparition of the Brocken” in Suspiria de Profundis (1845), The English Mail-Coach (1849) and Autobiographic Sketches (1853). Cannon Schmitt’s Alien Nation. Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationalities (1997) will also be used as a secondary source.
Blossom Ngum Fondo: “Metaphors of ‘Twoness’: Constructing a Double Heritage in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng”
Caribbean writings like most postcolonial writing are involved amongst other things with the ways in which the colonial experience affected the lives of the colonized. The Caribbeans especially find themselves in a unique situation where they are physically and psychologically placed at the nexus of two dissimilar worlds. Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff in her novel Abeng is interested in presenting the double heritage of the Caribbean focusing on characters who are descendants of both the slaves and slave masters. In doing this, she engages a series of metaphors which highlight this double and conflicting heritage of the Caribbean. This paper intends to bring out this rich repertoire of metaphors of ‘twoness’ in Abeng showing the ways in which her narrative technique, characterization, landscape, sexuality, naming, descriptive strategies inter alia all go to show how the Caribbean is a citizen of two inescapable worlds and must therefore confidently carry the load of these two worlds and reconcile the various conflicts and differences.
Jean-Michel Ganteau: “Mongrelization and Assimilation: The Hybridity of Englishness”
This paper will address Peter Ackroyd’s critical and polemical definition of Englishness, as exemplified in his oeuvre, and more especially in the texts that he has published over the last three decades. Such a definition is based on a vision of English culture as assimilation and hybridization, according to the principles of mongrelization and linguistic hybridization encapsulated in the figure of the “monypolylinguist”. Such an exploration chooses impurity as one of its most powerful features and echoes what T.S. Eliot has defined as the “metoikos” so as to subvert the canon of Englishness (or English Music, in Ackroyd’s terms) and promote a latent counter-canon, which is either denied of repressed. It constitutes the symptom of the cultural trauma of the Reformation which makes the figures of the cultural and religious other surface in the present under the guise of Catholic, Mediterranean culture and promote the workings of hauntology. By so doing, Ackroyd proposes a new ethical positioning for a vision of national culture.
Laure Gardelle: “The contribution of pronominal gender to the representation of a hybrid linguistic identity”
In the United States, the War of Independence triggered a search for a truly American linguistic identity. Noah Webster, in particular, advocated a language that would reflect the “soul of the American people”. Hence his edition of the first American dictionary, which contained many spelling and grammatical reforms. He viewed American linguistic identity as a movement away from an existing language standard which he construed as a hybrid British / American blend. In the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many writers furthered the search for American linguistic identity by representing in their works what was regarded as the authentic speech of the people. This time, American linguistic identity was presented as irreconcilably hybrid: beside the standard language, one found substandard English, with a different use of the language, especially in what came to be called the Old Southwest. While pronunciation and lexical differences have been widely documented, the present study looks into one grammatical aspect of hybridity that has been little studied: the use of grammatical gender, more specifically the increased use of she in substandard English. It seeks to determine how gender use contributes to an author’s hybrid discourse, with special reference to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Teresa Gibert: “Thomas King and the Paradoxes of Hybridity”
Thomas King’s self-defined position between two countries and his belonging to more than one ethnicity has provided him with a vantage point from which to deal with the paradoxes of hybridity and the difficulties in occupying what he calls “racial shadow zones.” In several interviews, as well as in his creative writings, he has explicitly or implicitly revealed his personal attitude toward the United States, his birth country, and Canada, the country that he has called home for many years now. King has also commented on his mixed ancestry and his desire to reconnect with his Native heritage: “Greek was the assumed, the given identity. Indian was the mystery, the unknown self” (1999). Furthermore, he has often addressed the sensitive issues of authenticity and legitimacy on the part of mixed-bloods whose degree of “Indianness” is questioned in spite of their firm determination to be seen as Natives. Considering roots a matter of choice to some extent, he has explained why he distanced himself from the Cherokee from Oklahoma, to whom he is genealogically linked, and felt more affinity with the Blackfoot, who constitute the major source of material that frames the realistic component of his novels and short stories.
Lise Guilhamon: “English ‘made as India’: the language of Salman Rushdie’s fiction between linguistic heterogeneity and poetic hybridity”
Critics and postcolonial scholars have often dubbed Salman Rushdie’s exuberant and proliferating style “Masala English” and acclaimed its hybridity, the way it mixes English with innumerable Hindi or Anglo-Indian expressions, with nonce words, malapropisms and multilingual portmanteau words, all of which distort and displace English in order to Indianize it. But one wonders if these devices of linguistic crossbreeding, which are at work in Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh for instance, should really be described as the result of a process of hybridation as defined by Homi Bhabha, that is to say, an interlinguistic process of poetic creativity. Wouldn’t most of these instances of language blending be more aptly described as the result of the heterogeneity of the language of these novels, the coexistence, within the text, of several idioms, languages and idiolects? To distinguish heterogeneity from hybridity, I will analyze the language of Rushdie’s fiction as English “made as India” (Midnight’s Children), i.e. a literary tongue which is grounded in multilingualism in order to perform a metamorphosis of language through a process of poetic creativity.
Christian Gutleben: “Hybridity as oxymoron: An interpretation of the dual nature of neo-Victorian fiction”
In this paper I would like to consider neo-Victorian fiction as an example of postmodernism which systematically hybridises the traditions, genres or works of the past with the contemporary aesthetic and ideological perspective. Starting with Charles Jencks’ definition of postmodernism “as double coding – the combination of modern techniques with something else” (1986, 10), I intend to define neo-Victorianism as a form of double-coding which grafts the modern onto the Victorian and thus produces a new, quintessentially hybrid, novelistic species. In its endeavour to associate the new and the Victorian, to combine the opposed traditions of Victorianism and modernism, and to simultaneously highlight incredulity and faith, the familiar and the foreign, the same and the other, neo-Victorian fiction’s hybridity turns out to be oxymoronic. An oxymoron is not only the combination of two opposed concepts, it is also a new synthesis and neo-Victorian fiction does indeed present unexpected modal and tonal conflations. But to bracket together contrary ideas can also create ideological ambiguity: how can neo-Victorian fiction be conservative and subversive at the same time? What does it mean to undertake an operation of both mythologisation and demythologisation? To interpret the ideological ambiguities which stem from neo-Victorian fiction’s oxymoronic hybridity will constitute the goal of this paper.
John Hutnyk: “Creativity across borders”
With so much already said about Hybridity, there is little more to add. Except that hybridity is perhaps best when it is constant addition. This talk addresses the fate of the term when it meets the politics of an international music festival dedicated to creativity across borders. A festival that explicitly and implicitly, and sometimes ambivalently, declares a challenge to easy identity, that is concerned to mix up the melodious global jukebox with the discordant rhythms of the global sweatbox. Commercialization and operationalization of ‘culture’ is critiqued, yet “Clandestino!” remains one of the most interesting festivals on the circuit. Participation as an organiser and as a guest offer different ways to access the complexities of public performativity – and a theorization that is sometimes a little behind the practice and engagement of those more recently “added” to the creative roster. What more can be said about hybridity will be risked again.
Madhu Krishnan: “Narrative Hybridity and the Dynamism of the Postcolonial in Chris Abani’s GraceLand”
This paper will consider the use of hybridity in narrative structure by considering the case of Chris Abani’s GraceLand. Throughout its narrative, GraceLand fuses together elements from Igbo mythico-religious tradition with elements from American popular culture and the contemporary mythology of the American dream. Rather than providing a case to support either framework, GraceLand instead uses its narrative structure as a means of highlighting the hybridity of postcolonial personhood, while questioning the legitimacy of purist conceptions of cultural tradition and national progress. As part of the so-called ‘third generation’ of Nigerian literature, Abani’s novel serves as an intervention in fossilized conceptions of self and society through its unapologetic use of conceptual blending, double-scoped narratives and hybrid mythologies and master plots, ultimately working as a statement on the dynamism of postcolonial existences and the necessity of hybridity for any judicious and balanced imagining of the African continent and its nations.
Joel Kuortti: “Hybridity as a ‘Disease’ in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence”
In Salman Rushdie’s work, one of the most striking and recurring features is the adamant refusal of singularities, stable identifications, or monological representations. Instead, aesthetic, ethical, and political issues obtain their value in and through imaginative plurality, hybrid formations, and heterogeneous dialogue. Whether it is the Midnight’s Childrens’ Conference, the House of the Black Stone, or the Ocean of the Stream of Stories, multiplicity is valued over sameness, narrative over history. In The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Rushdie plays with history and combines Europe and Mughal India in an imaginative way through the journey of the protagonist Niccolò Vespucci. In my paper, I look into the ways in which Vespucci’s appearance in Akbar’s Mughal court destabilizes accepted identifications, and possibly hybridizes the perceived histories of both Europe and India. For this, I start from the idea that Vespucci’s multilingualism and -culturalism – “He could dream in seven languages” (p. 10) – pose either a threat or an opportunity to identity. What suggests that this is not an unproblematic issue is his relationship with these identificational languages: “He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases” (ibid.). What kind of a ‘disease’, then, is hybridity presented?
Florence Labaune-Demeule: “Hybridity revisited: Anita Nair’s Mistress”
When Christopher Stewart, a young English journalist and musician, decides to travel to India in order to meet Koman, the great kathakali artist, hybridity is a central concept in his own quest for origins: he wants to know if the old man could be his father and if he himself could have been the fruit of the hybrid union between the kathakali dancer and his English mother. Thus the theme of “genetic” hybridity gradually suffuses the love-story which unites Chris and Radha, Koman’s niece, who is also Shyam’s unhappy wife. The novel ends on the announced birth of Radha’s adulterine child, the hybrid embodiment of his parents’ opposing cultures — the East and the West; India and England, Radha and Chris. This, therefore, means that cultural hybridity is just as central: all the characters in the novel are torn between their need for authenticity and their desires to share their cultural specificities with others, often strangers, as happens with Koman, who both tries to practice the purest form of kathakali and who lets himself be lured into becoming a very famous but potentially debased kathakali dancer in the West. The novel foregrounds the themes of identity and otherness, showing characters who often try to find for themselves a hybrid position, a form of in-betweenness which can only lead to some lack of stability, entailing the subversion of any initial aesthetic feeling. However, Anita Nair manages to create what can truly be called an aesthetics of hybridity: the novel relies on the nine rasas to be found in kathakali, which is typical of Indian culture, while it is also based on several traditional characteristics of the Western genre, the novel. In Mistress Anita Nair creates a verbal kathakali to which she slowly initiates the reader, leading him into this dance of the senses, orchestrated by both chenda and cello.
Monica Latham: “Bringing Newness to the World: Lloyd Jones’ ‘Pacific version of Great Expectations’ ”
Mister Pip constitutes Lloyd Jones’ dialogue with Charles Dickens, the title of his novel being a clear echo of Great Expectations. Dickens’ hypotext becomes the backdrop of Jones’ novel. The author transposes his predecessor’s Victorian novel to a completely different cultural context, that is to say 20th-century Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Mr Watts, the only white character who chooses to stay on the island during the civil war, proclaims himself a teacher and starts reading chapters from Dickens’ novel in the classroom, thus giving the children “another piece of the world”, for them to forget the atrocities perpetuated around them. The villagers also take the floor in the classroom and share their own stories: the Victorian literary story is thus paralleled by native, personal, mythological oral tales until they finally fuse in Mr Watts’ life story told in front of the rebels. If imposing foreign stories in a given culture can amount to a process of colonisation, putting a native imprint on the canonical text means responding to the colonising text, “writing back” at it to celebrate “hybridity, impurity, intermingling”, “new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas” (Rushdie) and to bring “newness” to the old world.
Claude Le Fustec: “Magic realism: the poetics of hybridity in African American Literature”
At the juncture of two visions of the world usually held to be antithetic (at least by western standards), magic realism stands out as a narrative mode particularly well suited to express hybridity. Alternately advocated in the 1940s by one of its major theoreticians, Alejo Carpentier, in the name of cultural hybridity, and denied nowadays by quite a few writers, whom critics would deem “magic realists”, for its underlying western rationalism, the concept has fuelled controversy and raised a number of questions : close to such genres as the fantastic, the marvellous and even science fiction, magic realism questions generic purity and fixity ; as a conceptual tool, it highlights the gap between critical theory and literary practice ; a postcolonial, subversive writing technique turned global, it testifies to the culturally hegemonic tendencies of our global world. Beyond the problems raised by this mode, however, this paper proposes to address the creative potential of magic realism as a critical concept and writing practice. Basing our analysis on African American literature, our aim will be to analyze the way magic realism manages to achieve, in Wendy B. Faris’ words, a remystification of contemporary western fiction, by opening up western literary imagination to a much more comprehensive view of reality than that conditioned by its secular rationality, creating a non conflictual, truly hybrid imaginative space.
Deborah Madsen: “Hybridity, hyphenation and mixed-race identities”
In 1993, Time magazine published what it called “The New Face of America,” a computer simulation of a mixed-race person who would be the result of decades of immigration and intermarriage. This issue of the magazine also ran stories with titles like “The Global Village Finally Arrives” and “Intermarried … With Children.” This issue of hybridity has also been taken up by Kip Fulbeck in his “Hapa Project,” which brought together photos and self-descriptions by people of complex mixed-race backgrounds. Despite such attention from popular media and scholarly publications alike, the ethnic profile of the US continues to be conceptualized according to a model that I want to call “mono-hyphenation.” The process of hybridization or “Americanization” is expressed rhetorically as an integral part of the migration experience every time an individual is referred to as “Asian-American” or “Irish-American” or even “African-American.” Yet individuals, like the Hapas photographed by Fulbeck, are increasingly identifying themselves as, for instance, “Asian-Irish-African-Americans” in a process not of mono- but of “multi-hyphenation.” The question I want to pose in this presentation is: why does the institution of literary study continue to promote an increasingly unsustainable, mono-hyphenated, understanding of ethnicity in the wake of large-scale immigration? And, how can the conservative preference for mono-hyphenated ethnicities over complex mixed-race or “hapa” people be resisted? Are pan-ethnic cultural coalitions possible? How would such a coalitional model translate into the terms of a transnational, post-ethnic, hemispheric American Studies?
Sarga Moussa: “Imaginary Hybridities: the cross-fertilisation of cultures, languages and religions in Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales”
Without ever having travelled across the Mediterranean Sea, Victor Hugo dreamed all at once of “the Orient” (meaning both what one calls nowadays the Middle-East, and a mostly imaginary version of the Orient, derived from The Arabian Nights) and of a new relation between the Orient and the West. Moving borders around, and displacing centres, including centres of consciousness and positions of enunciation, the poet, as soon as 1829, forced his readers to reflect on their own identities, by suggesting the dynamic, or rather multiple nature of their identity. In poems such as “La captive” or “Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe”, Hugo stages a mutual, albeit problematic seduction between two seemingly antagonistic cultural spaces, the Orient and the Western world. The question of languages is also central in Les Orientales, where foreign words and orientalised rhythms abound, thus constituting a defiant Romantic challenge to classical aesthetics. Moreover, the relationship between Islam and Christianity, a haunting subject for many 19th century writers after Chateaubriand, is progressively reassessed as the reader progresses in Hugo’s collection of poems: “Voile” (XI) stages a dark version of Islam, still very much indebted to the concept of “oriental despotism” generated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, whereas a poem like “Sultan Achmet” (XXIX), significantly included in the Spanish cycle of Les Orientales — Spain, from the very preface of the book, constitutes an in-between space — makes it possible to conceive of a religious reconciliation, mediated by the love of a Muslim for a Christian woman, although of course the former first has to become a convert. What Hugo seems to be doing is not to deny or annihilate differences, but rather to play with them so as to demonstrate that the “Orient” is within us. That is why the notion of hybridity, as theorised in postcolonial studies, can help us to perceive the astonishing modernity of a collection of poems that has far too long been wrongly considered as the illustration of a lazy and fashionable exoticism.
Jopi Nyman: “A Carvery of Hybridity: Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen”
It is the aim of this paper to examine the role of hybridity in the recent novel In the Kitchen (2009) by the British Asian writer Monica Ali. I will argue that the novel is a further example of the attempt to hybridize Britishness and British identities in the context(s) of globalization that characterizes Ali’s literary narratives. Whereas Brick Lane (2003) opens up hybrid spaces in East London and Alentejo Blue (2006) explores British identities in a Southern European context, In the Kitchen imagines a transforming Britain affected by contemporary global flows and actors including multinational companies, human trafficking, and illegal immigrant workforce. In carving out a new hybrid sense of Britishness, the novel’s two settings, the multicultural kitchen of the London Imperial Hotel and the post-industrial Lancashire hometown of its chef-protagonist Gabriel Lightfoot, appear to play a central role. While the novel contrasts the vibrancy of the multiethnic metropolis, a contact zone with the restaurant kitchen as its microcosm, with the regionalism and traditionalism associated with the North, neither site is fully privileged or celebrated. Subsequently the novel hybridizes Britishness as it both challenges all attempts to fix it along internal binary divisions and places it in a transnational and global context.
Daniel-Henri Pageaux: “A critical alternative to postcolonial hybridity: neo-baroque aesthetics (Latin-American and Caribbean literatures)”
Within the perspectives suggested by the call for papers of the conference, I have deemed it relevant to set up a different notional frame for the notion of hybridity, quite often associated with postcolonial criticism. Using texts by novelists such as Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy, as well as original Hispanic critical concepts such as transculturación, real maravilloso, mestizaje cultural, the baroque and the neo-baroque, it is possible to sketch new angles of approach and other readings of Francophone Caribbean Literature. Those concepts can also be found in the work of Edouard Glissant and they enable us to elaborate new critical procedures in order to analyse and explain the new novelistic aesthetics of these Francophone authors, and, more specifically, “creoleness”. If the aim is to suggest new aesthetic categories or even to apply certain concepts or generic features to literary productions (as post-colonial criticism does), then the concept of the “neo-baroque” can offer not only an interesting, fertile approach, but a critical alternative that has its advantages as well as its limits.
Yolaine Parisot : “Hybridity as an obstacle to postcolonial comparatist studies? The example of the Caribbean archipelago and the Indian Ocean”
The Caribbean archipelago and the Indian Ocean, as creole, creolized, creolophone spaces, impregnated with the memories of slavery and of engagism as well as with a diasporic imagination, genuine laboratories of plurilinguism, areas of exchanges between postcolonial nations and administratively submitted territories, invite us to compare their literatures with each other. The illusive effect of the international media scene often conceals the historical, cultural and aesthetical differences in order to dismiss ‘créolie’ and creolity as well as indianity and ‘coolitude’ back to back and to highlight the concept of hybridity as a global pattern. But, symptomatically, Homi K. Bhabha’s Location of culture is supported by a significant Caribbean hypotext: the works of Stuart Hall, the essays of Wilson Harris and Frantz Fanon or the novels of V. S. Naipaul. Even if the definition of the ‘vernacular cosmopolitism’ proceeds from the interest of the theorist, a native of India, in the Indo-caribbean experience, among all the names of the postcolonial hybridity, Alejo Carpentier’s and Jacques Stephen Alexis’ Marvellous Realism, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s and Édouard Glissant’s Creolization, the ‘littérature-monde’ of a manifesto that only two writers from the Indian Ocean have signed, are the ones the critic must make use of and the ones the critic imposes, with some epistemological violence, on the literary corpus from the Indian Ocean. Consequently, to examine the concept of postcolonial hybridity through the literatures from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean is to recall their mutual contribution to its emergence as well as their divergence towards its development.
Sneharika Roy: “Hybridizing Homer: A Case of Epic Genes and Genre in Derek Walcott’s Omeros”
Hybridity, with its resonances of cross-fertilization, has gained much currency as a conceptual tool in the postcolonial context. A case in point is the work of Derek Walcott, who stands at the confluence of the already hybrid Caribbean culture, and the occidental poetic tradition. However, has this emphasis on cultural inter-mixing drawn away from the generic and intertextual originality of Walcott’s œuvre, in particular his neo-epic, Omeros? In fact, the foregrounding of genetic mixing, inherent in the term “hybrid”, becomes particularly appropriate in the epic context of Omeros. Here, traditional epic genealogies of noble warriors give way to a variegated poetic genealogy, evident in the multicultural manifestations of the figure of Homer including: the eponymous Greek Omeros, a local fisherman named Seven Seas, and Walcott’s own poetic persona, a self-proclaimed hybrid Homer. A strong visual element is also interfused through allusions to the American artist Winslow Homer and the voice in the “vase of a girl’s throat” invoking “Omeros”. A hybrid operative principle is at work here, one which dynamically engages with the epic form and bardic figures, with generic and genetic make-up. Thus, by playing with notions of influence, authors and (af)filiation, Walcott transplants the epic tradition in a context that is both Caribbean and global.
Ebrahim Salimikouchi: “The polyphonic writing of the hybrid ‘I’ in the autobiographical work of Assia Djebar”
The writing of Assia Djebar who belongs to the first generation of the founders of an Algerian and francophone literature, is situated in a cultural context of hybridity. Her writing swings between French as her language of education, instruction, intellectual formation, and her Arabic-Islamic culture as her “culture of sensibility” (Djebar, 1992, 26). From the perspective of post-colonialist studies on hybridity as a distinguished characteristic of literary modernity, our research proposes to explore the work of Assia Djebar for a perusal of her writing of the hybrid “I”. We will focus in particular on L’amour, la fantasia (1985) and Vaste est la prison (1995) for a thematic and stylistic analysis of the textual and contextual structure of the identical construction of Djebar’s hybrid “I”. We propose to demonstrate the remarkable polyphonic, humanizing, democratic and dialogic dimension of her autobiographical work that may provide such literature the opportunity for greater respect, a better coexistence and dialogue in a world of cultural shocks.
Michaël Taugis: “There and Back: Cross-Cultural Journeys and Interweavings in Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook”
In the Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Vladimir Girshkin, the main character, is a Russian-American Jew born in Leningrad in 1968. His experience is defined by two main journeys: his immigration to the USA in 1980 and his round trip in 1993 from New York to the fictional city of Prava in the former Soviet bloc, and then back to America, to the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where he settles down, marrying Morgan, an American student he met in Prava. My paper will show that these journeys generate and reveal various forms of hybridity induced by Vladimir’s encounters, ambitions, and desires. These journeys represent what the Haitian poet René Depestre calls a “métier à métisser”, a cross-cultural weaving loom whose to-and-fro motion intertwines individuals and forms of life that are sometimes so different that they are seemingly incompatible. Vladimir’s memory is the shuttle of this weaving loom, moving from his Soviet childhood to his American adolescence, and more generally from the past to the present, because in the light of each reminiscence the present is implicitly connected with the past. This hybrid memory suggests that hybridity is not only a fact (for this Russian immigrant) but also a catalyst. In addition and above all, it is a weapon, a survival strategy, and an instrument of subversion.
Nicole Terrien: “The Neo-Victorian novel: Hybrid or Intertextual Mosaic?”
To study the Neo-Victorian novel, a genre (or sub-genre) that relies on the intercrossing of two periods, on the intertwining of various forms of writing, the notion of hybrid seems particularly welcome. We may consider Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) as the two founding novels of a genre the critics first valued for its open recourse to intertextuality, before it became known as neo-Victorian. Forty years later, the focus on the intertextual references has not impaired the value of the process and this should invite us to look at it from a different angle. The persistence of what cannot be reduced to a fad incites us to pay attention to what has been achieved rather than to the materials used in the process, to wonder at the very liveliness of such a process. The notion of the hybrid would allow us not to be petrified by a retrospective outlook, probably staged by the authors themselves to muffle the shock of a potentially subversive confrontation. We will focus on the role of the all powerful text of reference, accepting at first the homage paid to the canon that an explicit reference may incur. We will see that although this homage involves the reader in the interpretation of the constantly reinterpreted open work (Umberto Eco), it also allows the acknowledgement of texts now fallen into oblivion. The Neo-Victorian novel offers to its reader a constantly reinvented past rather then a remembrance of things past: it points at fiction as the true element of reference in our understanding of the past. Inviting us to question codes of representation, this exile in time allows us to forge in the smithy of our souls our uncreated conscience, to copy Joyce’s words (“to forge in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race”). Considering such vital stakes, the notion of hybrid/hybridity seems fruitful. On a syntagmatic axis, it allows the confrontation of experiences already transposed in language. On a paradigmatic axis, it uncovers a depth that reveals that past strata of experience may constitute a favourable terrain for the budding of an individual form of consciousness. It enables us to suggest, as an hypothesis for further study, that the neo-Victorian novel is not just an hybrid form of the novel, but also – and above all? – an hybrid form of the writing of History.
Elise Trogrlic: “Instability as praxis: the hybrid as a cross of failure and fertility in John Edgar Wideman’s treatment of Giacometti”
In his novel Two Cities, the African-American novelist John Edgar Wideman brings together an incongruous cultural meeting between Martin Mallory, an old amateur photographer living in Pittsburgh’s black ghetto, and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. In letters addressed to Giacometti that Mallory never sends, Wideman articulates a conception of hybridity characteristic of the esthetic preoccupation of his novelistic project. By combining a literary reflection with one on the visual arts, Wideman makes text and image meet at their breaking point. Wideman’s fascination with Giacometti comes from the instability of his artwork, as well as the sculptor’s admission of how representation is doomed to fail. Two Cities showcases Wideman’s desire to cross artistic practices and to initiate a dialogue between the arts: by disqualifying all univocal esthetic ideologies, the text becomes a fertile ground producing images, sounds, and multiple voices, all of this sometimes to the point of shapelessness. This instability becomes a praxis of destabilization that includes syntax, narrative voice, and temporal structure. Through this, Wideman utilizes hybridity to relaunch fiction writing and to explore the limits of representation.
Héliane Ventura: “Unadulterated Violence: The Hermeneutics of Hybridity in Native and Non-Native Fiction”
This presentation will address the resurgence of violence in three widely diverging and apparently disparate contexts. In Canadian literature from the twentieth century, it will investigate the motif of the Algonquin cannibalistic Wendigo, or ice-hearted monster with eyes of blood from Eden Robinson’s “Dogs in Winter” (Traplines, 1996), as well as the figure of the familicidal killer from Alice Munro’s latest collection of stories, “Free Radicals” (Too Much Happiness,2009). In Scottish literature from the nineteenth century, it will bring into focus the fratricidal murderer from James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The purpose of the presentation is to look into strategies of representation equally founded upon journeys from vulnerability to destruction in order to underline the solidarity between human protagonists and animals and the complicit reversibility between destroying and being destroyed in three sets of stories. Through the analysis of the resurgence of the visual into the textual, it will suggest contact-zones in the literary construction of postindian, postmodern, and gothic, hybrid identities.
Jean-Marc Victor: “Forms and Figures of Hybridity in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary”
The fear of miscegenation is a haunting presence in the whole of William Faulkner’s fiction as well as in a large portion of the literary production originating from the South of the United States. Whether it is experienced by characters as a questioning of their identity or a sign of some intolerable decline in the reactionary and eugenic context of the South, this fear crops up in the diegesis as one of many avatars of impurity in Faulkner’s vast novelistic cycle. Although it is more central in other novels (notably in Light in August), its cryptic and euphemized nature in Sanctuary (1931) will be worth analyzing here as it affects the novel’s dramatic and aesthetic concerns. Popeye, the cold-blooded impotent murderer and rapist, regardless of his skin color but merely on account of the black suit he is constantly shown wearing, is insistently and significantly described as “that black man” both by Temple Drake whom he raped with a corncob and Horace Benbow who vainly tries to save an innocent man wrongly accused in Popeye’s place. Temple’s own (incomplete) account of her rape during her (anti-)confession to Horace will be closely examined, thus revealing various modes of hybridity developing in Faulkner’s text as a reaction to silence and censorship. By making up retrospective ways of dodging the corncob rape and the subsequent monstrous hybridization between the human and the vegetable, Temple conceives of herself as other, thus turning herserlf into an unexpected hybrid: she sees herself as both man and child, the product of a grotesque cross between Lady Macbeth (as Faulkner rewrites Shakespeare’s famous “unsexing” scene) and Alice in Wonderland (as Temple is made to embody a fake ingénue endlessly metamorphosed and thrown into a world of violence where time and codes go berserk). In this intertextual experiment based on formal hybridity, the codes of ‘hard-boiled fiction’ are also deeply altered, as if destabilized by the unlikely encounter between the young white virgin and the little “black man”.
Kerry-Jane Wallart: “Imperial authority and Renaissance perspective in Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence”
“The text, a vehicle of imperial authority, symbolized and in some cases indeed performed the act of taking possession”, Elleke Boehmer writes in the opening pages of an important study about Migrant Metaphors that concerns itself with colonial and postcolonial writing. She goes on to analyse the way in which rhetoric has literally created the British Empire, with a last chapter dedicated to how contemporary authors have of reinterpreting such a world-shaping conception of language. Colonial literature has long been thought of as a response, voiced from the opposite vantage point, to this bulk of literature. Salman Rushdie has, on the other hand, made a name for himself as one who merges the two – or more – perspectives in order to confuse any opinion, to discard any certainty: the perfect hybrid novelist. The first part of the paper will indeed be concerned with showing with what obsession he has been deemed “hybrid”, and what this meant exactly. More generally, this paper will discuss this scholarly text, Migrant Metaphors, published in 2005 in the light of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. In his latest work, Rushdie once more seems to have penned a statement of intent in favour of transculturalism, humanism, the absence of any fixed perspective, the perils of convictions and worldviews. Vespucci and Akbar, the symbols of two different, yet similar Renaissances, could be seen to compose a hybrid character, a story-teller used to making East and West meet. Still, my contention will be that Rushdie reintroduces a distinct and distinctive perspective, something which, after all, was the great esthetic issue of the Renaissance. I shall argue that the encounter of cultures and the ensuing narratives are placed, in Rushdie’s novel, under the sign of a hidden unity, that of the author. Be he reliable or otherwise, he will impose his own voice over the entire novel; the paper shall attempt to pinpoint the various linguistic signs thereof. Hybridity, then, is no longer a combination of perspectives, but a monstrous association of the same nature as that which had prevailed during colonial times. It is one which tells of the other with one’s own words, and through one’s own screen. Such a vein will, inter alia, be scrutinized through the prevailing intertext of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where an ongoing discourse between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan produces descriptions of cities looking, on the page, like those very places. In Step across the Line, Rushdie has praised Calvino’s “multiplicity”, but is is in the end his iconographic powers he eventually covets and steals, making his text resemble the world as the Italian writer had.
David Waterman: “The Contact Zone in Wartime: Hybridity’s Promise and Terror in Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil”
Nadeem Aslam’s 2008 novel The Wasted Vigil is set in contemporary war-torn Afghanistan, the English doctor’s house (formerly surgical clinic and perfume factory) having become the hub of a transcultural space in which many personal memories and collective histories catalyze. While Afghans, Russians, a British doctor and Americans come together in this contact zone, it is by no means a safe-house, but often a zone of conflict as certain characters resist the notion of an ambivalent identity, hence the “promise and terror” of hybridity that Jopi Nyman (discussing Homi Bhabha) refers to, and represented figuratively in the novel by the statue of the Buddha and a landmine, both buried in the yard. Certainly the authorities prefer a fixed identity – especially during wartime – and in this case the Taliban and the CIA are both on hand to police ideological allegiances and “place” people as friend or foe, further highlighting the difficulty of claiming an identity which does not respect dominant paradigms. This updated heartbreak house functions as a microcosm of contemporary Afghanistan, a time / space compression of the various geopolitical forces at work which threaten from without, as well as the individual stories and traumatic memories of those whom circumstances bring together which threaten from within; the house, like Afghanistan itself, becomes the ground for imported battles. In spite of many attempts, the promise of a hybrid identity and mutual understanding is often elusive as opportunities are missed, subsumed under the terror of suspicion and ghosts from the past.
Eileen Williams-Wanquet: “Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita (1993): the Politics of Hybridity”
Lindsey Collen, a political activist, was born in South Africa in 1948. She lives in Mauritius and all her novels are rooted in Mauritian reality. Set in the context of the “turn to ethics of the 1990s” in literature, The Rape of Sita (1993) paradoxically and typically associates both historicity and metafictionality. The form of the novel is hybrid in more ways than one, and it is this hybrid form itself that confers a political and ethical dimension on the novel, which re-thinks the symbolic systems and power structures that make up our psyches. The various transtextual references blend both Indian and Western cultures and traditions: hypertextuality with the Indian epic Ramayana and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, serves to re-visit the more diffuse hypotext that these “interpellative” texts transmit, i.e. the popular mythology that women are in some way responsible for having been raped. The setting in historical time and space combines both traditional realistic conventions and the postmodern perception of History as discourse: the realistic recontextualisation of the hypotexts in the context of class struggles in the Mauritian society of the 1980s—the patriarchal ideology of which is signalled by intertextual references to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—serves to deconstruct the patriarchal myth, revealing its secret violence, rape becoming a metaphor for both public and private tyranny. The “anti-novel” narrative strategy associates both novel form and oral tradition, which, combined with use of Hindu philosophy and of the recurring figure of the androgyne, offers a counter-discourse to the patriarchal grand narrative, calling for a fundamental change of the imaginary domain.
Laetitia Zecchini: “A historical hybridity and strangeness in contemporary Indian poetry”
This presentation aims at exploring the question of hybridity through the historical and metaphorical notion of exile, as it was theorized by Edward Saïd. This historical experience of dislocation, which implies a “double vision”, a plurality of ways of seeing, languages and traditions prevents from considering oneself as the owner or proprietor of memory, of language and identity. Exile also implies a radical break or “unhealable rift” through which other worlds and otherness may be experienced. Edward Saïd defines the “exilic condition” as a shifting ground, an unresolved dialectical tension between different belongings and inheritances, which have to be held together, in an unreconciled complexity. Exile thus also has a critical and transgressive significance that subverts all majoritarian discourses, quest for origins and homogeneous lineages. It is precisely the heterogeneity and strangeness brought about by history, which is poetically and politically at stake today in India. Exploring the question of hybridity in the Indian context is all the more interesting that the porosity of linguistic frontiers, of centers and peripheries, but also of traditions, translations and texts is one of the defining principles of Indian culture. It is through language that this hybridity is performed and that Indian poets writing in English (Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and others), a displaced language, negotiate their own voice and space. They refuse to be circumscribed or defined in one language, one past, one identity and claim a marginality which also stands, paradoxically, for hospitality. Through this poetics of hybridity and multilingualism, the fecund interplay with translation that blurs the frontiers between languages, authors, epochs, so-called original texts and their subsequent retellings, it is the idea of “propriety” and “property” that is unsettled. For a poetry hovering over boundary lines, the questions of a proper language, a proper history or of what would be “authentically” and “properly” Indian are irrelevant
Tania Zulli: “Identities in Transition: Hybridism in R. L. Stevenson’s Colonial Fiction”
On the Jubilee year (1887), Queen Victoria decided she would have an Indian attendant at court, “to bring the Empire into the dining room” (Richard Mullen and James Munson, Victoria. Portrait of a Queen, p. 111). The presence of oriental faces and exotic perfumes at Windsor Castle hid the wish to introduce the idea of an open, tolerant country, whose views would include people from the colonies as an ordinary element of everyday life. However, the cultural fabric that lay beneath the image of a seemingly cosmopolitan nation was complex, controversial and still not well defined: a crucial point lied in the very perception of natives as new entities to be faced. English nineteenth-century men of culture did not consider the presence of the ‘other’ as an admissible thing; confrontation caused a profound sense of bewilderment that did not allow for renewed strength, but only fostered more ambiguity emphasizing the idea of hybridity as a form of moral corruption that shook the empire in its epistemic foundations. The continuous oscillation between the need to find completeness through the figure of ‘the other’ and the fear of an actual meeting with diversity was the leading – and often underestimated – characteristic of the age. My paper intends to analyze the idea of hybridity in Late Victorian colonial fiction as a theoretical assumption based on and influenced by contrasting ideological forces; by so doing, I will explore the value of interracial encounters in late nineteenth-century colonial fiction in order to show the natives as “historical palimpsest[s]” (Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, p. 79). By moving on the parallel fields of culture and literature, I will argue that the imperial ‘other’ was, despite ideological and intellectual manifestations of intolerance and repulsion, an integral part of domestic culture, and represented a fruitful opposition to the well established, urbanized, social self. To this end, R. L. Stevenson’s short story “The Beach of Falesà” (in South Sea Tales, 1893) will be analyzed as a narrative moving between the two axiological opposites of assumed colonial authority and feared native degeneration. In the story, the protagonist’s final status reflects a new white individual identity apparently built on ideological immobility but actually relying on cultural and intellectual dynamism, confirming both the “impossibility of essentialism” (Robert Young, 1995) and the necessity of cross-cultural sophistication.