Hybridity

Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture. Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term. Hybrid (biology) Multiracial Hybridity is a cross between two separate races, plants or cultures. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture. Hybridity is not a new cultural or historical phenomenon. It has been a feature of all civilizations since time immemorial from the Sumerians through the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to the present. Both ancient and modern civilizations have, through trade and conquests, borrowed foreign ideas, philosophies, and sciences, thus producing hybrid cultures and societies. The term hybridity itself is not a modern coinage. It was common among the Greeks and Romans. In Latin, hybrida`, or ibrida, refers to "the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar" and, by extension, to the progeny of a Roman and a non-Roman. The word hybridity was in use in English since the early 17th century and gained popular currency in the 19th century. Charles Darwin used the term in 1837 in reference to his experiments in cross-fertilization in plants. The concept of hybridity has been fraught with negative connotations from its incipience. The Greeks and the Romans borrowed extensively from other civilizations, the Egyptians and the Persians in particular, and created ipso facto hybridized cultures but regarded unfavourably biological hybridity. Aristotle, Plato and Pericles were all opposed to racial mixing between Greeks and "barbarians" and viewed biological hybridity as a source of racial degeneration and social disorder.