ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, as colonialism reached its zenith, hybridity became a cipher for the anxieties of imperial encounter and reflected deep-seated fears about interracial mixing and the possibility of contagion. A number of translation scholars have engaged with H. K. Bhabha’s interrelated notions of the third space and the in-between, and their connection with hybridity, including K. Batchelor, Bennett and Wolf. Hybridity also contains the contradiction that to prove its relevance as a transgressive solution to essentialized identity categorizations it must rely on the presence of an essentialized and dualistic cultural divide in the first instance. In translation studies, Klinger focuses on hybridity as a textual feature present both in interlingual translations and cross-cultural writing, such as migrant, travel or postcolonial writing. Intentional hybridity contains a “double-voiced” quality that entails a performative gesture; it is a quality that is cultivated deliberately, rather than something that develops organically.
