Introduction

Transnational Identities 301
and thereby change orders and identities (“Migrant Transnationalism” 158). Even
theories on diasporic communities or imagined homelands do not entirely cover
this phenomenon of continued simultaneous involvement in both country of
immigration and sending country. Both rootedness in a nation-state and uncertain
ideas of home in diasporas thus do not adequately capture the realities of people
who live in transnational social spaces for whom questions of identity, home and
belonging certainly bring up very different answers.
4. Transnational Identities
4.1. Hybridity
A long neglected influential concept must finally be acknowledged: hybridity. Especially
in postcolonial literary theory one can hardly escape the term, above all
when it comes to migrants’ identities, which are generally described as hybrid. My
only using it sparingly in this thesis therefore needs some explanation. In cultural
studies, the concept of hybridity is used to describe the effects on identities in the
case of contact between different cultures (Griem 269). It is an attempt to go beyond
the conception of cultural identities as absolutes, which is illustrated by the
notion of the “third space” which shows how cultures interpenetrate one another
and become inextricably intertwined (Griem 269; my translation). This approach is
highly influenced by the writings of Homi Bhabha. However, Bhabha’s definition
of hybridity is quite problematic. As Ania Loomba puts it, it is not only the “most
influential” but also the “most controversial in postcolonial studies” (148). Nevertheless,
it is inevitable to address it in connection with transnationalism, since
hybridity also speaks of the migrant condition in terms of space.
The problem with Bhabha’s use of hybridity becomes instantly apparent as
soon as one tries to point out how Bhabha defines hybridity since he hardly ever
says what it is but mostly just what it does. For him “all forms of culture are continually
in a process of hybridity” (“Third Space” 211), and, while different from
one another (“Third Space” 209), they are constantly “subject to intrinsic forms of
translation” (“Third Space” 210). 22 As he explains in “The Third Space”, when
such intrinsically hybrid cultures meet, a hybridizing process starts:
[T]he importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments
from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third
22 Bhabha defines ‘translation’ as “a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense –
imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the
very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum and
so on: the ‘original’ is never finished or complete in itself. The ‘originary’ is always open to
translation so that it can never be said to have a totalised prior moment of being or meaning –
an essence” (“Third Space” 210; emphasis in original).