Unmasking Hybridity in Popular Performance

This paper explores cultural hybridization in popular music and the eroticization of the exotic eastern aesthetic. Using musicology and anthropology as tools, the paper examines varying perspectives of the artists, audience and marginalized groups. Although cultural appropriation has been used recently as a blanket buzzword in mainstream dialogue, it does provide a platform to discuss complex issues on gender, race and sexuality that has been muddled by colonial mentalities

Himalayan Hybridity and the Evolution of Ladakhi Popular Music

Historically, Ladakh in the Western Himalayas was a significant nexus of Trans-Himalayan caravan trade, and thus exhibited a significant hybridity in its material, linguistic, religious, and musical culture. In this paper, I examine the rise of Ladakhi popular music in and through these crossroads, paying attention to themes of hybridity. I look at the development of Ladakhi ethnic, political, and musical identity, and the role of government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and individuals with regard to the rise of new musical genres. Accompanying the historical survey of the music is as discussion of the evolutions of textual content. Changes in mass media technology and economics have had a profound effect on this remote region, and have shaped how cultural identity is negotiated by both song writers and consumers of popular music

The Theological Misappropriation of Christianity as a Civilizing Force

The theological misappropriation of Christianity as a civilizing force occurs when individuals convert to Christianity due to deception that ignores the faith-based aspect of Christianity. The history of Western education in India illustrates the hidden curriculum that Christian missionaries employed to disrupt the Indian educational system. This unnerving pedagogy points to the need for a postcolonial theoretical framework that relates the inescapable hybridity of religion and culture where Orientalism has the potential to occur. To press the ongoing urgency of this discussion, I convey how the history of British India connects to my lived-reality as an American Hindu. Overall, I point to hybridity as a lived paradox of ambiguous conflict that embraces interfaith relations. I offer implications for Christian missionaries today to foster authentic interfaith connections without engaging in colonizing ideologies

The Postcolonial Reality of Using the Term " Liturgical " to Describe Hindu Dance

Homi Bhabha, a postcolonial scholar influenced by the work of Franz Fanon and Edward Said, indicates that identities stimulate a need to negotiate in spaces that result in the remaking of boundaries. There is a call to expose the limitations of the East and the West in an effort to acknowledge the space in-between that interconnects the past traditions and history, with the present and the future. This study applies Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to determine whether the term liturgical is appropriate to describe Kuchipudi Indian classical Hindu dance. Presented are the elements of Kuchipudi dance and liturgical dance, and then contemplative dance is discussed as an appropriate medium in the space of hybridity between Kuchipudi dance and liturgical dance

Recombining your way out of trouble: the genetic architecture of hybrid fitness under environmental stress

Hybridization between species is a fundamental evolutionary force that can both promote and delay adaptation. There is a deficit in our understanding of the genetic basis of hybrid fitness, especially in non-domesticated organisms. We also know little about how hybrid fitness changes as a function of environmental stress. Here, we made genetically variable F2 hybrid populations from two divergent Saccharomyces yeast species, exposed populations to ten toxins, and sequenced the most resilient hybrids on low coverage using ddRADseq. We expected to find strong negative epistasis and heterozygote advantage in the hybrid genomes. We investigated three aspects of hybridness: 1) hybridity, 2) interspecific heterozygosity, and 3) epistasis (positive or negative associations between non-homologous chromosomes). Linear mixed effect models revealed strong genotype-by-environment interactions with many chromosomes and chromosomal interactions showing species-biased content depending on the environment. Against our predictions, we found extensive selection against heterozygosity such that homozygous allelic combinations from the same species were strongly overrepresented in an otherwise hybrid genomic background. We also observed multiple cases of positive epistasis between chromosomes from opposite species, confirmed by epistasis- and selection-free simulations, which is surprising given the large divergence of the parental species (~15% genome-wide). Together, these results suggest that stress-resilient hybrid genomes can be assembled from the best features of both parents, without paying high costs of negative epistasis across large evolutionary distances. Our findings illustrate the importance of measuring genetic trait architecture in an environmental context when determining the evolutionary potential of hybrid populations

Intersectionality queer studies and hybridity: methodological frameworks for social research

This article seeks to draw links between intersectionality and queer studies as epistemological strands by examining their common methodological tasks and by tracing some similar difficulties of translating theory into research methods. Intersectionality is the systematic study of the ways in which differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and other sociopolitical and cultural identities interrelate. Queer theory, when applied as a distinct methodological approach to the study of gender and sexuality, has sought to denaturalise categories of analysis and make normativity visible. By examining existing research projects framed as 'queer' alongside ones that use intersectionality, I consider the importance of positionality in research accounts. I revisit Judith Halberstam's (1998) 'Female Masculinity' and Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) 'Borderlands' and discuss the tension between the act of naming and the critical strategical adoption of categorical thinking. Finally, I suggest hybridity as one possible complementary methodological approach to those of intersectionality and queer studies. Hybridity can facilitate an understanding of shifting textual and material borders and can operate as a creative and political mode of destabilising not only complex social locations, but also research frameworks

Gatherings of mobility and immobility: itinerant “criminal tribes” and their containment by the Salvation Army in colonial South India

In retelling the history of “criminal tribe” settlements managed by the Salvation Army in Madras Presidency (colonial India) from 1911, I argue that neither the mobility–immobility relationship nor the compositional heterogeneity of (im)mobility practices can be adequately captured by relational dialecticism espoused by leading mobilities scholars. Rather than emerging as an opposition through dialectics, the relationship between (relative) mobility and containment may be characterized by overlapping hybridity and difference. This differential hybridity becomes apparent in two ways if mobility and containment are viewed as immanent gatherings of humans and nonhumans. First, the same entities may participate in gatherings of mobility and of containment, while producing different effects in each gathering. Here, nonhumans enter a gathering, and constitute (im)mobility practices, as actors that make history irreducibly differently from other actors that they may be entangled with. Second, modern technologies and amodern “institutions” may be indiscriminately drawn together in all gatherings

The Postcolonial Pedagogical Challenge of Creativity

Edward Said pointed to the problem of Orientalism that develops when the West creates a fictitious imagined version of Eastern religion and culture. Said’s notion of Orientalism focuses on the general distorted representation of Eastern religion and culture by the West. Homi Bhabha extends Said’s notion of Orientalism to reveal the tension of the inevitable hybridity between the East and the West. Here, cultural practices develop in the space of hybridity with the intention to promote a feeling of coherence as opposed to with the objective to deform or distort religion and culture. Thus, the intention in a space of hybridity is often not to engage in Orientalism. Instead, the goal is to develop something new in a hybrid form. An opportunity arises in philosophy of education to adequately confront the problem of Orientalism that may develop in a space of hybridity. The author proposes a philosophical postcolonial framework that engages in a creative process that does not further Orientalism but rather develops something new with an ethic of hybrid responsibility for religion and culture. To illustrate this, the author uses Kuchipudi Indian Classical Hindu dance as an example