Page 113 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

of population movement and settlement established during colonialism and its
aftermath, combined with the more recent acceleration of globalization, particularly
of electronic communications, have enabled the increased cultural juxtapositioning,
90 meeting and mixing that is constitutive of hybridity.
The concept of hybridity remains problematic in so far as it assumes or implies
the meeting or mixing of completely separate and homogeneous cultural spheres.
To think of British Asian or Mexican American hybrid forms as the mixing of two
separate traditions is problematic because neither the British, Asian, Mexican nor
American culture is bounded and homogeneous. Each category is always already a
hybrid form which is also divided along the lines of religion, class, gender, age,
nationality and so forth. Thus hybridization involves the mixing together of that
which is already a hybrid. Nevertheless, the concept of hybridity has enabled us to
recognize the production of new identities and cultural forms, for example ‘British
Asians’ and British Banghra. Thus, the concept of hybridity is acceptable as a device
to capture cultural change by way of a strategic cut or temporary stabilization of
cultural categories.
In Britain, for example, the emergence of British-born young ‘Asians’ gave rise
to a generation that was much more deeply involved in transactions across ethnic
boundaries than were the original migrants. Young British Asians went to school
with white and Afro-Caribbean Britons, shared leisure sites, watched television and
were frequently bilingual. Thus as British Asian young people have become skilled
operators of code switching so they developed their own home-grown hybrid
cultural forms such as ragga–banghra–reggae–rap crossovers. Many of the cultural
issues involved in this process have been aired in contemporary films such as East
Meets West, Bahji On the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham.
The differences within and between diaspora communities and the surrounding
cultures in the context of globalization prevent easy identification of particular
subjects with a given, fixed, identity. Thus subject positions are drawn from a
variety of discourses and sites and shifting identifications enact a hybrid identity
that draws on multiplying global resources. Thus, identities are never either pure or
fixed but formed through the articulation of age, class, gender, race and nation.
Links Black Atlantic, culture, diaspora, globalization, glocalization, identity

Hyperreality Hyperreality is a concept deployed within some versions of postmodern
thought signifying ‘more real than real’. It refers to the manner by which
simulations or artificial productions of ‘real life’ execute their own worlds to
constitute reality. As such, hyperreality is a ‘reality effect’ by which the real is
produced according to a model and appears to be more real than the real.
Consequently, the distinction between the real and a representation collapses or
implodes.
For example, the world according to the postmodern philosopher Baudrillard is
one in which a series of modern distinctions have broken down (sucked into a
‘black hole’ as he calls it) collapsing the real and the unreal, the public and the
private, art and reality. For Baudrillard, postmodern culture is marked by an all-