--- ONLINE --- WS: Cultural Hybridity Revisited --- ONLINE ---

The concept of cultural hybridity has developed into a widely disputed interdisciplinary master trope in cultural research. It has become an important tool for diagnosing contemporary global conditions, their cultural mixtures, pluralized identities, in-between spaces and non-homogeneous constellations. But hybridity also has a subversive potential for a progressive postcolonial politics of difference, stressing the power of “third spaces” in cultural contacts. Epistemologically, it addresses the transgressive, anti-essentialist and anti-dichotomic and the impure condition of cultures. Instead of taking this easily appropriated and in itself hybrid term for granted, this workshop could pursue a critical perspective – by emphasizing the neoliberal dimension in the notion of hybridity as a phenomenon expressing Western cultural dominance and appropriation, but also as a real dimension of the global marketplace in the context of transnational capitalism and its cultural hegemony. Cultural hybridity revisited in this way – could this help to work towards a changed concept of transnationalism as well as to a redefinition of culture itself? Going beyond such big questions, this workshop could also aim at making the open and ambivalent term/concept of cultural hybridity more precise and, not least, try to find concrete connections to our own projects.  

Texts for Discussion:

- Kien Nghi Ha: “Crossing the Border? Hybridity as Late-Capitalistic Logic of Cultural Translation and National Modernisation,” in: translate.eipcp.net 11 (2006). https://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/1206/ha/en.html.

- Hans Peter Hahn. “Circulating Objects and the Power of Hybridization as a Localizing Strategy,” in: Conceptualizing Cultural Hybridization: A Transdisciplinary Approach. Ed. Philipp Wolfgang Stockhammer. Berlin/Heidelberg 2012. 27–42.

\\ Dr. Doris Bachmann-Medick (GCSC)