Cultural Hybridity 1st Edition

This is a very important book in understanding post-colonial science.

IN good condition!

Peter Burke has written a series of handbooks about academic and historiographical trends on over the years, including his 'Sociology and History' and 'What Is Cultural History?'. Each of these books is a grab-bag, but Burke generally managed to combine knowledge from his historical specialization (Renaissance and Early Modern Europe) with an introduction to the trend, while making some incisive comments along the way. This book is significantly weaker than his other books, however.Where Burke's earlier books reflected a mature, thoughtful engagement with the issues at hand, Burke here seems unwilling or unable to go beyond reporting the findings of earlier scholars and critics. Where his books on cultural history and sociology at times raised meaningful questions about how and by whom cultural and sociological processes were occurring-- and what the scholarly terminology really implies-- Burke here generally seems content with vague formulations about cultural interactions that just seem to happen. Where his other handbooks were helpful guides for both classic works and current scholarship, Burke's bibliography here seems thin, and he seems less assured when discussing important figures. He leans fairly heavily on Gilberto Freyre, for example, without really engaging other major scholars of hybridity like Bhabha and Spivak. His use of Early Modern history is less revealing than in his earlier books. More critically, Burke wants to see linguistics and linguistic terminology as offering a helpful way out of the thicket of terminology for hybridity and cultural interaction. There may be something to this, but Burke seems to have a rather hazy knowledge of linguistics. Drawing on a 50-year old article, for example, he makes an unclear, probably incorrect distinction between bilingualism and diglossia on p. 111.Perhaps I have overreacted by finding so many faults in what is a slight work (it can be easily read in an afternoon). And the book does improve a bit towards the end. All the same, with so much scholarly attention to hybridity and post-colonialism in recent years, there are better introductions to the subject out there. Start somewhere else.

This map is doubly metaphorical. In the first place it isn't really as map; in the second, what it (metaphorically) maps is the metaphors that have been used to deal with recent issues of cultural interaction, of which hybridity is just one. I have known Burke's work for some years and admired his scholarship, but missed this one when it first came out. Casting around for something to guide a graduate student wanting to work on aspects of the Armenian community in Argentina I was delighted to discover Burke's Cultural Hybridity, which provides a succinct and well judged introduction to a very extensive range of literature, drawing attention to the virtues and limitations of an exhaustive catalogue of ways of writing about the subject.

La questione rilevante, quella dell'ibridismo culturale, viene affrontata in modo alquanto divulgativo, ma fornisce anche spunti da approfondire interessanti per chi voglia capire la dinamica della scambio culturale che oggi porta tanti problemi alla cultura e alla società civile. Il testo è redatto in un linguaggio semplice, i casi scelti come esempi coprono tempi e spazi molto vari. Una lettura piacevole che può arricchire anche sotto il profilo della dinamica tra fiction e realtà

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