According to Easthope, the concept of hybridity could be generally understood from three aspects—“biology, ethnicity and culture” (Easthope 341). Its etymology, “hybrida” that derives from biology, means a “genetic component”—two species could produce the offspring inherited some characters from, but not being any one of, both species. Its ethnical meaning refers to “an individual ‘having access to two or more ethnic identities’,” which, in Easthope’s sense, has its own limitations, for it firstly misunderstands two identities hybridized as being “formerly pure in themselves,” and secondly there is “no agreed definition” of ethnicity. Therefore, the ethnical meaning of hybridity might not clarify the people, for example, “who had an English
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In order to let the Oriental reacquire its cultural discourse right, restoring its national culture’s reasonable position in the world, Said has queried the purity of the western culture or discourse which consider everything concerning Orient as inferior and marginal: “My principal aim is not to separate but to connect, and I am interested in this for the main philosophical and methodological reason that cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure” (14). “Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things,” he continues to clarify, “cultures actually assume more ‘foreign’ elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude” (15). With the contact between Western and Eastern culture, the supposed boundary within them has gradually been vague, and thus Western culture loses its purity on the basis of which it advertises its superiority and advancement. This hybrid cultural view is rightly similar to what Bhabha puts forward in “Signs Taken for Wonders: The Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May1817”—the concept of hybridity. In it, Bhabha, by applying some theories from many theorists, M. Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault in particular, has successfully demonstrated that hybridity exists in the colonial authoritative discourse and the possibility of resistance it brings
In order to let the Oriental reacquire its cultural discourse right, restoring its national culture’s reasonable position in the world, Said has queried the purity of the western culture or discourse which consider everything concerning Orient as inferior and marginal: “My principal aim is not to separate but to connect, and I am interested in this for the main philosophical and methodological reason that cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure” (14). “Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things,” he continues to clarify, “cultures actually assume more ‘foreign’ elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude” (15). With the contact between Western and Eastern culture, the supposed boundary within them has gradually been vague, and thus Western culture loses its purity on the basis of which it advertises its superiority and advancement. This hybrid cultural view is rightly similar to what Bhabha puts forward in “Signs Taken for Wonders: The Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May1817”—the concept of hybridity. In it, Bhabha, by applying some theories from many theorists, M. Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault in particular, has successfully demonstrated that hybridity exists in the colonial authoritative discourse and the possibility of resistance it brings