A Mashup World: Hybrids, Crossovers and Post-Reality
In the 21st century, hybrids (such as hybrid war, hybrid regimes, hybrid cars, and hybrid identities, among others) have become all-pervasive, and the computer term “mashup” has turned into a symbol of hybridity. This book highlights the phenomenon of hybridity and hybridization from a variety of angles and perspectives – in social and cultural practices, education and fiction – and notes the connecting patterns between hybridization in different fields of human endeavour.
Perhaps the most important hallmark of our age is the crossover into the virtual. The spread of hybrids in “post-reality” has snowballed due to the Internet and the ease of the web-based dissemination of information and disinformation. New entities, such as fake news, have been put together using collage techniques with the result that make-believe events produce real-life effects. Without the special analysis provided in this book, this non/reality generated to manipulate people is unlikely to be differentiated from authentic stories.
Associate Professor Irina Perianova holds a PhD from Moscow Linguistic University. Her research bridges cultural and linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, intercultural communication and culinary linguistics. She has published more than 50 articles and book chapters dedicated to these fields in different languages. She is also the author of the book The Polyphony of Food: Food through the Prism of Maslow’s Pyramid (2015). She has taught intercultural Communication and Business English at the University of the National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria and has translated for various local and international organisations.
“There are no doubts that this monograph is searching for some answers to very important questions of modern times: what are hybrids in different spheres of our life and why they are becoming so important in the new context of post-reality; how ‘truth’, ‘reality’, ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, ‘post-truth’ intervene and have practically no borders; and if human perception is failing to register them. I think that holistic approach to hybridization, crossing the traditional boundaries of sciences and humanities, defended by the author is a very attractive point of the book.”
Dr Iouri Pankrats
Linguistics Department, Simon Fraser University, Canada
“The book is finished. But it is not the end... Every chapter is expandable… Yes, it is… expandable by captivated readers, like me, with their thoughts, arguments, doubts, fears, hopes… [It is an i]mpressive and meaningful text [which] won’t leave you indifferent… for better, not for worse.”
Manana Gabashvili, PhD
Professor and Deputy Dean, School of Social Sciences, Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, Tbilisi
“Irina Perianova’s book […] explores a variety of cross-border forms of self-location. Her monograph is thus synchronous with the enhanced border crossing that has become one of the dominant aspects of the contemporary age, and can certainly be approached as one of the pertinent responses to the production of liminality. Her critical undertaking abounds in terms that form part of an interdisciplinary vocabulary – mashup (borrowed from computer science), hybridity (from genetic studies), fusion (from chemistry, physics and culinary language), or the broadly-applicable term ‘mixes’. For greater convenience, however, and because her investigation focuses on the ontology of heterogeneous forms, she prefers the terms “hybridity” and “hybrid” to render the idea of cross-over both as regards the origins of the heterogeneous form and when it comes to its composition. To harness the exploding immensity of hybrid entities, Perianova adopts a holistic approach, which, as Dr Iouri Pankrats, one of the reviewers of the book, suggests, contributes an attractive technique of handling multiplicity (see his comment on the back cover).”
Petya Tsoneva, PhD
Department of English and American Studies, University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
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