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their social and historical contexts while resisting traditional narrative -based historical
methodologies. The origins of this so-called ‘new historicism’ are present in the work of
French theorist and cultural anthropologist Michel Foucault and cultural theorist
Raymond Williams (see cultural studies ), emerging more fully formed in the work of
literary historian Stephen Greenblatt (see Greenblatt 1980, 1982). An example of the
influence of this thinking on musicology is Gary Tomlinson’s study of magic and
Renaissance music (Tomlinson 1993b). Tomlinson aims:
Tomlinson’s aim to set up a truly reciprocal dialogue with the ‘interpreters, texts, and
contexts’ of Renaissance music clearly reflects the relativist views of post-structuralism
and the shift of methodological emphasis encouraged by the new musicology , an
approach that can be seen reflected in a number of other recent studies (see Born and
Hesmondhalgh 2000; Abbate 2001).
Further reading: Frigyesi 1998; Hamilton 1996; Veeser 1994
HISTORIOGRAPHY
HISTORY
HYBRIDITY
A concept that has been much developed by cultural criticism and post-colonial studies,
hybridity is concerned with degrees of cultural exchange between race , ethnicity ,
gender and class . Although often considered to have contemporary origins, the term was
first used in seventeenth-century botany and zoology, where it referred to the crossing of
two separate species of animal or plant; it was expanded to include humans during the
eighteenth century Imperialism and Western colonialism in the nineteenth century saw
both segregation and assimilation policies; the latter were seen as a way of ridding a race
of the characteristics that marked it as degenerate.
Theories of hybridity may also be developed to account for new cultural forms that
have arisen as a result of borrowings, intersections and exchanges across ethnic
boundaries, some of which are controversial or contradictory An example of this is the
appropriation of Aboriginal art by white Australians as a means of promoting Australian
culture in a manner that glosses over the poor state of Aboriginal civil rights and the
country’s history of persecution (see Brah and Coombes 2000). However, colonial
subjects seeking emancipation have themselves sought to appropriate the colonizer’s
language in order to develop an effective anti-colonial critique (see post-colonial/post-
colonialism ). This has led to the creative hybridization of languages. In Africa, English
is reappropriated as a common language, while in Britain, musicians and writers have
developed localized ethnic variations of English, as expressed in the poetry of Lynton
Kwesi Johnson (commonly cited as the first major dub poet) or the rap of Roots Manuva.
Hybridity, as the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha has pointed out, is contained in the act
of mimicry that occurs when a colonized subject copies the occupying culture, since
‘each replication…necessarily involves a slippage or gap wherein the colonial subject
produces a hybridized version of the “original”’ (ibid., 11). The result, in Bhabha’s terms,
is a third space that contains ‘something different, something new and unrecognisable, a
new area of negotiation of meaning and representation’ (Rutherford 1990, 211; see also
Bhabha 1994). However, a contrasting view was presented by the Russian theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin. In his work on literature, he noted a form of intentional hybridity.
Intentional hybrids, in Bakhtin’s formulation, consist of an ironic double-voicedness, a
collision between differing points of view on the world that ‘push to the limit the mutual
non-understanding represented by people who speak in different languages’ (Bakhtin
2000, 356).
A number of types of cross-cultural exchange have been noted since Bakhtin, leading