Created Identities: Hybrid Cultures and the Internet

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Homi K. Bhabha has written that authorised power in a hybrid culture ‘does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through conditions of contingency and contradictoriness’ (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 2). This view of culture is one aligned with concepts of flux and transition. Hybrid cultural identity is created as time progresses, in part based on contingency. The boundaries of hybrid cultures are negotiated and able to absorb diverse cultural influences: borders are active sites of intersection and overlap, which support the creation of in-between identities. Hybrid cultures are antagonistic to standing authority and cultural hegemony - hybridisation engenders diversity and heterogeneity, once framed as bastardisation. Heterogeneity and multiplicity are here underlined as important aspects of hybrid cultures. Heterogeneity, multiplicity and rupture are three aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome that have been identified by Stefan Wray as similarly characteristic of the internet. This makes the internet an entirely suitable place to manufacture a hybrid cultural identity, with a cultural profile akin to that reported in mainstream news media. This paper maps out the above points with reference to the online/internet project the District of Leistavia welcomes you created by the author.