Hybridity and History: A Critical Reflection on Homi K. Bhabha’s Post-Historical Thoughts

The essay by Satoshi Mizutani engages with the influential concept of hybridity by Homi K. Bhabha by introducing it to a specific historical context: the situation of “Eurasians” in the British Raj, or people of mixed descent, who after 1911 would be called “Anglo-Indians.” The concept of hybridity, as Bhabha formulates it, helps the postcolonial critic to upset the discourse of imperialism and compromise its claim for superiority, wholeness, and exclusiveness by disclosing its reliance on “vernacular” and mixed social groups and identities. At the same time, Bhabha is not interested in the hybrid group per se, as a specific social and historical phenomenon in its own right. Moreover, he dismisses the very mode of historical thinking, as an interface of colonial discursive domination. Mizutani argues that restoring agency and autonomous subjectivity to Eurasians not only will make the concept of hybridity more sophisticated but also will reinstall history as an open-ended process, devoid of teleology – and as an equally indeterminate mode of thinking about social change in time.