Construction Of Hybrid Identity Research Articles

Being nomadic and overseas rappers: Construction of hybrid identity in Chinese hip-hop scene

This research aims to explore the function of intercultural communication of Chinese Rap music and the construction of hybrid identity, through discourse analysis methods: Narrative Semiotics, visual semiology, and sociolinguistics of globalization. The general context of the research is the development of global youth culture and Rap music as an intercultural formulation of local identities. Songs of two Chinese Rap groups are analyzed: Higher Brothers and Bohan Phoenix. In short, it attempts to scrutinize their use of Rap lyrics in order to promote the intercultural communication and construction of hybrid identity.

Transporting and reconstructing hybrid identity through language use in the work domain: focus on Filipinos in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Globalisation has resulted in people from different parts of the world migrating from one country to another in search of better job opportunities. Countries that provide attractive job opportunities are most likely to become the major destinations of migrant workers. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia is one of the preferred destinations of economic migrants from neighbouring countries such as the Philippines. Studies show that blue-collar and white-collar Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) in Malaysia have increased in number over time. This paper examines how Filipinos transport and reconstruct their hybrid identities through language choice in multilingual and multicultural Malaysia. To conduct the study, 30 Filipinos were interviewed about their choice of language in the work domain, and they were asked how such language choice reflected the identity that they wished to portray. The findings show that OFWs construct and reconstruct their identity by using the Philippine variety of English, and code-switching between English and other Philippines languages. Such construction of hybrid identity is seen through language choice, lexical choices, and pronunciation, and accent. The hybrid identity of OFW is a product of continuous transportation and reconstruction of their identity.

On Hybrid Identity and Relocation of Chinese Americans in Tripmaster Monkey--- His Fake Book

Tripmaster Monkey---His Fake Book is Maxine Hong Kingston’s first real novel with focus on the Chinese American cultural identity. It has won many awards and attracted great attention since its publication. With Homi K. Bhabha’s “Hybridity” strategy and “the Third Space” theory, this paper is to discuss how the construction of hybrid identity and middle space can make it possible for Chinese Americans to relocate their cultural identity, with the aim to emphasize the trend of multi-culturalism and the necessity of cultural inclusiveness.

Language and the Construction of Hybrid Identities in Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing

The linguistic maneuvers of the work collected in Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood demonstrate that Judith Ortiz Cofer tells her stories of the past as a means to a...

Conversions to Islam and Identity Reconfigurations among Poles in Great Britain

In recent decades, a significant number of Polish citizens have not only left the country but also moved away from the religious traditions in which they were brought up. The article sheds light on the phenomenon of religious conversions and identity reconfigurations within the Polish community in Great Britain. It delves into the intricate processes of religious self-transformations and their impact on other forms of identity among Poles who have embraced Islam in the context of migration. It also assesses the processes of converts’ distancing themselves from the elements of ethnicity and religion in which they were born and adopting new ones amid an atmosphere of increased anti-Muslim sentiments and stigmatisation. The paper draws from fieldwork data carried out amongst Polish Muslim converts living in different British cities between 2014 and 2016. It analyses their relations with the Polish community in the United Kingdom, the British Muslim population, as well as their larger sending and receiving societies. It argues that the processes of religious conversion and migration are frequently interrelated, as a significant proportion of the over 2,000 Polish Muslims in Britain embraced Islam either after their arrival in the country or elsewhere before coming to the UK. The paper also shows how the change of religious identity leads to the adoption of new traditions and habits and to a process of at least partial distancing from non-Muslim relatives and elements of non-Muslim Polish culture. The converts thus engage in construction of hybrid identities, linking elements of Polishness with super-diverse British Muslimness.

“I Come from a Pancasila Family”: A Discursive Study on Muslim-Christian Identity Transformation in Indonesian Post-Reformasi Era by Suhadi (review)

Reviewed by: “I Come from a Pancasila Family”: A Discursive Study on Muslim-Christian Identity Transformation in Indonesian Post-Reformasi Era by Suhadi Florian Pohl Suhadi, “I Come from a Pancasila Family”: A Discursive Study on Muslim-Christian Identity Transformation in Indonesian Post-Reformasi Era. Interreligious Studies 6. Zurich and Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014. Pp. 242. €34,90, paper. The awakening of religious ideology has been a salient feature of Indonesian society since the fall of the New Order political regime in 1998. Central to Suhadi’s study are questions about how disruptive the assertion of strong religious identities is in Indonesia’s religiously divided society and what factors mitigate the elevation of religious identity above other identities and enable co-existence. Based on his dissertation research—itself part of a larger comparative project in the narrative study of religion at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands—the author offers a discursive analysis of twenty-four focus-group discussions (FGD’s) with [End Page 504] Muslim and Christian participants from the Central Javanese city of Surakarta. Examining the communicative practices in the FGD’s—how participants speak about themselves as well as about and with the religious other—Suhadi highlights the flexible and contingent nature of participants’ identification practices that allow him to make a convincing argument in favor of a shift from social-identity to multiple-identity theories in the study of religion. With its emphasis on fluidity and hybridity, the study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that criticizes an overemphasis on broad categories of social identity, such as religion, while neglecting other aspects of identity that cut across those broader social identities. Its particular contribution lies in the author’s attention to the role that social institutions, such as shared social knowledge and practices, play in intrareligious struggles as well as for tolerance across religious-identity lines. Javanese language and customs as well as culturally significant concepts, such as Pancasila, furnish just two examples of the types of shared knowledge and practice participants in the FGD’s draw on when prioritizing common civic rather than separate religious identities. Forming the heart of the study, the chapters on the FGD’s offer a compelling first-hand look at the discursive strategies at work in the construction of hybrid identities. The detailed attention to the FGD’s comes at the price of leaving the author only a short final chapter to consider the work’s theoretical contributions to the study of identity transformation. Questions left open by the brevity of the theoretical reflections include the study’s relationship to a wider array of related approaches, such as cosmopolitan theory with its themes of the familiar and the strange in valuing others. A productive question to be pursued further would be how the study’s central insight into the importance of an institutional dimension constituted by shared cultural practices relates to scholarship on cosmopolitanism, which frequently stresses more personal elements of social-identity formation. These open questions, however, do not take away from the project’s success in questioning notions of unique founding conditions for the accommodation of religious diversity. Against normative conceptions of multiculturalism that describe privatization and marginalization of strong religious identities as a prerequisite for intercultural and interreligious understanding, Suhadi’s study underscores the need to pay attention to the distinctive cultural resources linked to tolerance that are available and in specific local contexts, which can enable civic coexistence. [End Page 505] Florian Pohl Oxford College, Emory University, Oxford, GA Copyright © 2015 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

“Island girl from the island”

This study investigates the construction of hybrid identity and cultural values as demonstrated by local Hawai‘i residents in the multiethnic urban community of Honolulu. Due to its unique historical background, Honolulu has become host to a variety of Pacific and East Asian ethnic and cultural communities, many of which are places wherein tattooing has been a traditional practice among the natives. Ideals of culturalized identity were espoused by tattoo wearers through discourse with the researchers. The results demonstrate that many wearers feel an interconnection or transnationalism with one or more of Hawai‘i’s constituent cultures, and often imbue tattoos with personal or cultural meaning, with the goal of displaying the semiotic ideology of their local specific identity in a Hawai‘i context.

Magical or Monstrous? Hybridity in Social Housing Governance

While a growing number of national social housing strategies rely on the work of hybrid entities blending social and commercial tasks, the state/market dualism continues to dominate the conceptual landscape of housing research. This exploratory paper develops a conceptual approach to support research into the role of not-for-profit social entrepreneurs in the housing market. It looks for insights within their ‘hybrid’ status, spanning state and market, and subject to multiple sets of institutional conditions. Four frames of hybrid identity are developed, and then substantiated via a discussion of two different sectors of not-for-profit social entrepreneurs in Australia and the Netherlands. As the growth trajectory of each sector is traced and the construction of hybrid identity is explored from both public and private perspectives, institutional pressures are revealed that set the current context for development. This brings forth implications for existing conceptual tools, as well as directions for new research.

Challenging Democracy: Ethnicity in Postcolonial Fiji and Trinidad

Fiji and Trinidad are similar in terms of their colonial and postcolonial historical experiences, yet their political outcomes are different. The argument put forth is that constitutional reforms that were adopted by Fiji were unsuccessful because of systemic conditions specific to the country. Sustained by structural features such as land rights and chiefly jurisdiction, and more intangible factors such as cultural identity and nationalism, ethnic identity is the lens through which most public discourse occurs. By contrast, Trinidad does not have these corresponding institutional structures, and the existence of public spaces for the contestation of ethnic identities together with the construction of hybrid identities at the local and national levels have contributed towards political stability.

Transcultural literacy: between the global and the local

In this paper the authors draw on a larger project related to diasporic identification in order to explore the concept of transcultural literacy. They argue that transcultural literacy grows out of border‐crossing dynamics that extend beyond the binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as these are lived within and between nations. In this way it is responsive to, and reflects, the various shifts between the local and the global; between place and space. Transcultural literacy is inseparable from social and cultural practices of meaning‐ and identity‐making on the fault‐line between various and often competing cultures. This model of transcultural literacy uses theorisations of space to connect textual practices to the construction of hybrid identities. In so doing, it offers an alternative to models of literacy premised on liberal or neo‐conservative understandings of cultural difference. In this paper, we explore transcultural literacy in relation to current literacy debates.

IDENTITY, NATION AND RELIGION: EDUCATED YOUNG BANGLADESHI MUSLIMS IN LONDON'S `EAST END'

In this article I seek to analyse the diverse understandings among British Bengalis of their social identities as shaped by national and Muslim belongings. The complexity of these understandings is described as the young Bengalis explore the interrelationships between these identities, attempt to rank them and, in some cases, look beyond national boundaries to a worldwide Islamic community. Their constructions of identity are influenced by their social situation within Britain where racism plays a significant role but also by political and religious developments within Bangladesh and other nation-states within the Indian sub-continent. Like other descendants of migrant workers in Western Europe, they are caught up in a public debate about national belonging where their supra-national links provide them with special insights into the construction of hybrid identities and new ethnicities and the maintenance of individual identities in a globalising world.