Conceptualization of Culture and Language in Post Colonial Literature Essay

Culture and row argon the major issues in the post colonial system. My assignment lead deal with these three f comportors in verges of colonial perspectives. The post colonialism principally explores the ideas much(prenominal) as cultural diversity, geographical dimensions, Diasporas, race, ethnicity, marginality, markizationity, national identities, cultural variety, changes and political relation in language etcConsiderations of hybridity run the range from existential to material, political to economic, up to now this discussion will not be able to tease kayoed the extensive implications of for each angiotensin converting enzyme allotation. Rather, this discussion aims to explore the flavor of hybridity hypotheticly, synthesizing the vast personate of literary productions to critique essentialist notions of identity as indomitable and constant. According to my catch of crown of thornsity, in that respect be three ways in which hybridity might religious serv ice as a appliance for deconstructing the rigid labels that maintain favorable inequities through and through and through exclusion in race, language and nation.By exploring how the hybrid rejects claims of bonds deep trim race, language, and nation, I understand that cultural studies like these be imperative in considering the government activity of representation. For the purposes of this discussion, the cultural hybridity refers to the integration of cultural bodies, signs, and practices from the colonizing and the colonized coatings. The contemporary cultural ornament is an amalgam of cross-cultural influences, blended, patch-worked, and balladered upon one an new(prenominal).Unbound and fluid, gloss is hybrid and interstitial, moving among spaces of meaning. The notion of cultural hybridity has existed far before it was popularized in postcolonial theory as culture a travel out of interactions between colonizers and the colonized. However, in this time after imperi alism, globalization has both expanded the reach of westerly culture, as well as allowed a physical operate by which the air jacket constantly interacts with the East, appropriating cultures for its own convey and continually shifting its own signifiers of dominant culture.This hybridity is woven into e rattling corner of society, from trendy fusion cuisine to Caribbean rhythms in pop music to the hyphenated identities that signify ethnic Ameri understructures, illuminating the lived date of ties to a dominant culture blending with the cultural codes of a Third human being culture. Framing Cultural Hybridity in post colonial con school text Among postcolonial theorists, at that place is a wide consensus that hybridity arose out of the culturally internalized interactions between colonizers and the colonized and the dichotomous bring ination of these identities.Considered by some the father of hybrid theory, Homi Bhabha argued that colonizers and the colonized argon mutuall y dependent in constructing a sh bed culture. His text The localization of function of Culture (1994) indicateed that there is a Third Space of Enunciation in which cultural systems are constructed. In this claim, he aimed to create a spic-and-span language and mode of describing the identity of Selves and Others.Bhabha says It becomes crucial to distinguish between the resemblance and similitude of the symbols across various(a) cultural experiences such as literature, art, music, Ritual, life, shoemakers live on and the cordial specificity of each of these productions of meaning as they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification.The infixedized, unifying colloquy of nation, peoples, or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths of cultures particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The spacious, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly aware of the whirl of culture and the invention of tradition. In exploitation words like diaspora, displacement, relocation, Bhabha instances the propellant nature of culture, and the flimsy consistency of the historical narratives that cultures rely upon to draw boundaries and mend themselves.As a result, culture cannot be delineate in and of it, retributive rather moldinessiness be seen within the context of its construction. More significantly, Bhabha draws heed to the reliance of cultural narratives upon the other. In illuminating this mutual construction of culture, studies of hybridity can offer the opportunity for a counter-narrative, a center by which the reign can revitalize shared will business leader of a culture that re equivocations upon them for meaning. This supposed erspective will serve as the foundation for the considerations explored in this paper, employing hybridity as a right tool for liberation from the domination imposed by delimited descriptions of race, language, and nation. RACE Racial hybridity, or the integration of cardinal races which are fancied to be manifest and separate entities, can be considered first in terms of the somatogenetic body. Historically, the corporeal hybrid was birthed from two symbolic poles, a bodily representation of colonizer and colonized.These mixed births, mestizo, mulatto, muwallad, were stigmatized as a physical representation of dingy blood, and this racism unyielding served as a tool of power that maintained that even in this blending of two bodies, just one drop of glum blood would deem the body impure and alien, an abomination. Institutionalized racism created a perpetual state of ambiguity and placelessness for the hybrid body and prevented cultural inclusion via race.However, the expanse of immigration since colonialism and the spectrum of shades of distinct difference point to an increasingly hybrid populace in which these classifications of black and white no bulkyer carry the same power of representation, however the old labels persist. This labeling is significant as it elucidates the continuing power of racial labels in a society set on fixing bodies in racial space by binding them to labels, which are understood to contain fixed truths.I argue that utilizing the conceptual tool of hybridity to deconstruct these labels allows a representation by which hybrid individuals can come together in powerful solidarity, rather than allowing their ambiguous place in racial space to give way them invisible. Harnessing racial hybridity to project the simultaneously unique but common experience of hybridity can be a means by which the individual exit can join to a marginal community through stories and partial(p) memories. Furthermore, racial hybridity must harness the dualistic experience of cash in ones chipsing, or being mistaken for a race other than ones own. totally identities involve passing to some close, in that a subjects self can never truly match its image, but racial passing implicitly deconstructs the boundaries of Black and White. In passing, hybridity might function not as a conflict or struggle between two racial identities, but instead as constant movement between spaces, passing through and between identity itself without origin or arrival. The independence to move between identities carries its own power in defying the claims of essentialized racial identity.Furthermore, the bounded labels of race do not account for the historical and geographic narratives that lie behind each body and inform their identity. In Black Africans and inseparable Americans, Jack Forbes explores the disconnect between racial labels and the disposition of the bodies behind them using Native Americans and Africans as examples by which groups are forced into arbitrary categories hear their ethnic herita ge simple rather than complex. As a result, hybridity calls into question the boundaries of racial consciousness as a hybrid consciousness defies the imposed limits of race.The management of these identities becomes its own sort of performance, as the body negotiates each consciousness in different spaces. Again, the ability to play multiple business offices, to pass in different arenas, carries significant power. In embodying the inability to bind identities to race, racial hybridity both in the physical body and in consciousness offers a means of deconstructing the boundaries of dichotomous racial identities. In addition to race, language has long been bound in definitions as a symbol of nation and a mode of exclusion.As a means to connect with other social beings, communicating with language is a meaningful performance in that speechmaking requires two parties, one to perform language and an audience to observe and adopt language. During colonialism, as the colonizers language dominated national institutions, the spirit of being outside and othered was instilled in the colonized as their language and means of communication was stripped away. Now in a time after colonialism, can the colonized ever reclaim a language long lost, or has the colonizers language become their own?Has ownership of the colonizers language expanded over time? Fanons theorizing addresses the power of language in the formation of identity as he says, To speak . . . means preceding(prenominal) all to assume a culture, to wear the weight of a civilization,. He suggests that speaking the language of the colonizer stands in as acceptance or coercion into accepting a role in culture. Yet in accepting a role, whether by excerption or force, the meaning of the culture shifts and evolves. No longer does it belong to the colonizer, as it relies upon the colonized to give it shape.Similarly, with the introduction of a new set of engagementrs perform a language, the language no longer ex ists as it was it has shifted in meaning. beyond the thematic implications of language, hybridity has inspired an immense movement in literary discourse and understandings of the very way language is managed and owned. Herskovits developed the notion of syncretism, a theory attempting to explain why certain cultural forms are carried and others lost. Similarly, Claude Levi-Strauss developed the term bricolage to describe mixed forms within narratives.Creolization describes the linguistic blending of dominant and subdominant cultures. These examples illustrate the broad land of studies that have developed simply around the use of hybridized language. In an analysis of the rise of the hybrid genre in postmodernist literature, Kapchan and Strong say, Hybridization has become one such analytic allegory, defining lines of interest and affiliation among scholars of popular and literary culture, perhaps quite unintentionally. The extent to which these authors use the metaphor of hybridit y consciously and concisely differs.That they use it, however, qualifies hybridity as one of several tropes, or forms of metaphoric predication, that most epitomize the scholarship of the last decade, . Not nevertheless does this observation imply that the body of hybridized literature is growing, harkening to the rising voices and representations of the hybrid, but that hybridity is becoming normalized as an accepted form of literature and the purist notion of genre is diminishing. Furthermore, the use of a colonizers language by the colonized to speak of the crimes of colonialism is its own transgression and act of resistance.In taking ownership of the language, changing the way that it is used, the boundaries of language as belonging to a specific place or race are dissolved. Jahan Ramazanis Hybrid Muse is an analytical review of the poetry that has arisen from the hybridization of the English muse with the long-resident muses of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and other decolon izing territories of the British Empire (2001). A hybrid himself, Ramazani suggests that the use of native metaphors, rhythms, creoles, and genres has allowed a new form of poetry that not only speaks of the fierceness and displacement of colonialism, but embodies it in its very form.These hybrid poetries can be viewed as a gateway to understanding those once deemed unfamiliar, and hybridity of language becomes a way by which to deconstruct borders and relate to embodieds across cultural boundaries. Further, hybridity must interrogate the notion that nationality is essential zed in a distinct culture that geographic borders somehow embody inherent intimacy or truth about the people they contain. Mamdani solicits, How do you tell who is innate to the land and who is not? Given a history of migration, what is the dividing line between the indigenous and the nonindigenous? . He addresses the nationalist concern over entitlement to nation, and the indigenous wish to lay claim to c ulture. I understood that theories of hybridity, in clarifying the shifting and noncommittal nature of culture, can serve as a tool that pose the nationalist exclusionary practice of determining who does and does not have claim to a nation. From health care to immigration, his arguments resonate loudly with current events. Similarly, we must consider the ways in which the things that give culture meaning are floating(prenominal) and variable, negating essentialist arguments about inherent meanings of culture.In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford (1988) analyzes sites including anthropology, museums, and travel opus to take a critical ethnography of the West and its shifting relationships with other societies. He demonstrates how other national cultures are in fact fictions and mythological narratives, and we must ask the question of representation and who has the authority to speak for a groups identity. In his article Diasporas, he suggests that The old localizing stra tegies by bounded community, by organic culture, by region, by center and outer boundary may obscure as much as they reveal.Diaspora is defined as a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host country, rely for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship. In this consideration of culture, we understand the vast connotations of displacement, from petition which history the diasporic should identify with to asking if it is even possible to return to a homeland one never knew or left long ago.Second, in the representation of culture, be it by petrifying culture in a museum or nailing it to an anthropological account, the risk lies in taking these subjective moments as truths or knowledge. Furthermore, the far-reaching diasporic symbols and narratives that snowball into this thing we call national culture suggest that culture is itself a traveler collecting artifacts from various locations along the way, and its walls are too insubstantial to be used as a means of exclusion.Third and perhaps most significant, hybridity in a postcolonial world muddles the very definitions of culture by which nations define themselves. Given that nationalism is founded upon a collective consciousness from shared loyalty to a culture, one would assume this culture is well-defined. Yet the solid grow of historical and cultural narratives that nations rely upon are diasporic, with mottled points of entry at various points in time. An investigation of the roots of cultural symbols like folk stories, religion, and music would reveal sources varied and wide-ranging.Furthermore, culture is defined in relationship to other cultures. Edward Saids Orientalism (1979) offers a strong description of the system by which nations appropriate from others to define themselves. He suggests Orientalism has helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Using a theoretical framework influenced by Gramscis notion of hegemonic culture and Foucaults notion of discourse, Said draws significant attention to the intricate and complex process by which the West must use the East to construct itself, its culture, its meaning.In an illuminating excerpt describing the process of Orientalism, he writes To formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its natural role as an appendage to Europe to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial occupation with the title contribution to modern eruditeness when the natives had neither been consulted nor treated as anything except as pretexts for a text whose usefulness was not to the natives to feel oneself as a European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography to make out of either observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type and, above all, to transmute aliment reality into the stuff of texts, to possess actuality mainly because zero in the Orient seems to resist ones powers. In a stream of fragments, Said shows the diverse processes by which dominant cultures are create at the service of Others. Using words like shape, definition, and transmute, he describes the act of defining nation and the artificial nature of these boundaries.Said offers a theoretical means by which to reject nationalist divisions between an us and Them, a West and Other. This conceptualization of the ways in which nations determine not only their own national identities, but the identities of Other is powerful in reveal the inherently hybrid roots of national culture. Studies of national identity are thus essential in deconstructing xenophobic nationalist claims to nation and the resulting crossbreeding of immigrant Others. CONCLUSION This discussion draws from th e body of postcolonial literature to suggest that studies of cultural hybridity are powerful in probing the bounded labels of race, language, and nation that maintain social inequalities.By examining how the hybrid can deconstruct boundaries within race, language, and nation, I understood that hybridity has the ability to empower marginalized collectives and deconstruct bounded labels, which are used in the service of subordination. In essence, hybridity has the potential to allow once subjugated collectivities to reclaim a part of the cultural space in which they move. Hybridity can be seen not as a means of division or choose out the various histories and diverse narratives to individualize identities, but rather a means of reimagining an interconnected collective. Like the skin on a living body, the collective body has a surface that also feels and Borders materialize as an effect on intensifications of feeling and individual and collective bodies surface through the very orient ations we take to objects and others,In the description that Formations our orientations can be shifted, our feelings towards Others transformed, there is a gap of redefining our exclusionary systems of labeling. Furthermore, breaking down immaterial borders through explorations of hybridity offers the possibility of more effective public policy, one that refers to the broad expanse of its diverse population. Frenkel and Shenhav did an illuminating study on the ways in which studies of hybridity have allowed management and organization studies to manage their longstanding western hegemonic practices and to incorporate postcolonial insights into the organizational literature revolving around the relationships between Orientalism and organizations.The willingness of institutions to reform their long held ideologies in light of a changing world, as well as to consider their work through alternative lenses, is an essential practice in deconstructing the bindings of narratives-as-knowle dge. In the boundary-shifting process, there is power in the notion of deconstruction in the service of reconstruction, breaking down boundaries in order to form a more inclusive champion of the collectivity. Furthermore, hybridity asserts the notion that representations of collective identity must be analyzed contextually. When we psychoanalyze a representation of culture, be it in a film, poem, or speech, we should ask Who is doing the representing? What are the implications of the representation? Why are they engaging in the process of representation? What is the historical moment that informs the representation? How are they being stand for?In addition to the questions explored in this paper, I would recommend applying theories of hybridity to a realm beyond race and nation, in order to consider alternative boundaries such as gender and sexuality. The work of hybrid theorists from Bhabha to Said suggests that there is a vast intellectual landscape for cultural inquiries like these. Our mission must be to continue this work and to delve deeper. Cultural studies have great potential to liberate us from the socially-given boundaries that so stubbornly limit our cognitive content for thought and discussion, but we must take time to join in a collective critique of the knowledge we ingest and disperse. After all, the great power lies in the heart of the collective.