From the Editors: The Ambiguities of Hybridity

The notion of hybridity is treated with suspicion in many political and academic circles. Anticolonial movements (and postcolonial scholars identifying with them) despised hybridity as trivializing colonial oppression and the insurmountable cultural and political distance from the colonizer. Nationalists – both those fighting for independence and those already in control of nation-states – consider hybridity the main threat to the national body's wholesomeness. Historical empires relied on factual hybridization but refused to acknowledge its reality because their social order was built on the bases of hierarchically arranged races, confessions, legal estates, and other forms of groupness.

These political sensibilities and the biases of ideological discourses do not have to influence scholarly analysis, for this means streamlining the empirical reality. Regardless of one's theoretical rendering of hybridity, there were about two million "Eurasians" (Anglo-Indians) in India in the first half of the twentieth century,¹ two-thirds of the registered Russian nationalists in the Russian Empire resided on non-"Russian" territories,² and the population of the empire was categorized by physical anthropologists in terms of "mixed racial types."³ These basic facts alone disqualify any dismissive attitudes to hybridity as manipulations of reality.

The relevance of hybridity as an analytical concept lies far beyond the affirmation of physical or cultural intermixtures of population groups. The concept is needed to account for transitional social formations and thus to overcome limitations of the structuralist analysis of society in terms of "pure forms" (or stages), which cannot be developed into a dynamic model of social transformation. It is no wonder that Max Weber identified pure forms as "ideal types," that is, as "utopia[s]" that "cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality."⁴ Most obviously, hybridity is an indispensable analytical category in discussing the situations that have been identified metaphorically by Richard White as "the middle ground" – the state of "mutual and creative misunderstanding."⁵

The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.… People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and the practices of those others. They often misinterpret and distort both the values and the practices of those they deal with, but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new practices – the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.⁶

Any history of globalization or global history, history of cultural transfers and mutual influences implies the situation of the middle ground and thus, the phenomenon of hybridity, whether it is a study of the twentieth century or the eighteenth century (the time frame of White's original study). The histories of empires and anti-imperial resistance are inseparable from the history of hybridity not because of the actual intermixing of the population, but because people conceptualized a new reality simultaneously using the native and borrowed idioms and discourses. Any encounter with modernity is hybrid by default because it involves rejection and acceptance, the old and the new.

The omnipresence of hybridity does not make it any less ambivalent, thus partially substantiating the suspicions mentioned at the beginning of this essay. It can facilitate demobilization of the anticolonial protest – but it can also have an equally subversive effect on the metropole, imposing cultural norms and political views of the formerly colonized through "the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground" (White). Interest in hybridity can sideline the centrality of resistance to foreign domination, but it can also uncover historical subjectivities muted by hegemonic discourses of nationalist particularism. Obviously, the problem is not the analytical concept itself but its politically motivated applications.

This thematic issue of Ab Imperio develops the annual theme "Rethinking Hybridity and Purity in a Global Perspective," and highlights two main aspects of hybridity as a concept: its ability to explain historical dynamics and the situation of contact in the middle ground.

The "Methodology and Theory" section features the forum "Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire" guest-edited by Karuna Mantena and Rama Sundari Mantena. An outgrowth of Ab Imperio's seminar on the...