Cultural Dialogue Through literature: The Implications of Homi Bhabha’s Theory of Hybridity in the Literature Class

Abstract

The present paper aspires to vindicate Homi Bhabha’s theorization

of cultural hybridity and its implications in reading Western literary

texts, which are not immune from imperialism and hegemony. The act of

reading is a process of cultural hybridity in which the student’s negotiation

of meaning transcends the Manichean polarities us/them, Self/Other,

colonizer/Colonized. The text itself is a hybrid, nomadic, and ryizomatic

world where meaning is generated out of the transaction between the

student’s culture and that of the author. The intercultural encounter results

in a liminal space, which is also dubbed Third Space or interstice, which

prevails over dichotomies. The student’s cultural identity and the text’s

meaning are both located in the in-between. Of outmost significance, the

paper evinces the threat of cultural assimilation when reading the theories

of cultural hybridity.