Hybridity

From Metapedia

Cultural hybridity has been identified as one of the main features of our current (post)Postmodern globalized era. The appearance of new cultural forms based on combining elements from two or more cultural sources and genres. Some theorists maintain that all new distinctive cultural forms have always been hybrids, though now we have a larger global and real-time media and communications environment to accelerate the process of hybridization.

"Hybridity" is used as a concept in many kinds of cultural arguments, and appears in post-colonial theory and various approaches to identity and globalization.

Since postmodernism, it has become more difficult to maintain ideologies of "pure origins" for racial, ethnic, national, or other identity groups, since most histories of identities have been found to be hybrid, mixed, multiple, and not unitary at whatever starting point one chooses for a narrative of origins.

Similarly, all cultural works have been recognized as being hybrid in many ways, from cultural sources and contexts to materials, mediums, and technologies used in creation and production. The pressure of ideologies of unity--arguments for "pure" connections to producing cultures or individual artists--continue in many political and cultural sectors. However, in an era of explicit multi-sourcing, sampling, riffing, ironic referencing of prior or contemporary work, post-production, appropriation, and awareness of intertextuality in all of its forms, most artists, writers, musicians, film-makers, photographers, and those engaged in the production side of cultural works know that hybridity is condition of making anything, especially making the new thing.

(Martin Irvine)