5 Unremarkable Hybridities and Metrolingual Practices

Abstract

This paper starts with the assumption that hybrid language use is unmarked.That is, we take hybridity as the starting point rather than viewing it as a ramification of the interaction between pre-given discrete 'languages'.This argument is a response to several different concerns with the notion of hybridity, which has been critiqued along various lines, from its botanical and colonial origins (Young, 1995), or its almost fetishistic status within some areas of postcolonial and cultural studies (Hutnyk, 2005), to the ways in which it potentially maintains the prior purities it claims to overcome (Gilroy, 1993).The notion of hybridity, as Hutnyk (2005) argues 'is a usefully slippery category, purposefully contested and deployed to claim change' (p.80).All too often it assumes dichotomous relations even as it claims to supersede them, reassigning 'fixed identity into what becomes merely the jamboree of pluralism and multiplicity' (Hutnyk, 2005: 99).Hybridity has been mobilized to oppose what are seen as essentialist accounts of culture and identity.Rather than people being assumed to adhere to ascribed identities (Indian, Singaporean, man, woman, teacher, linguist) whose characteristics are pregiven and known,

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