De-scribing hybridity in 'unspoiled Cyprus': Postcolonial tasks for the theory of education

Abstract

As post‐Independence but still ethnically divided Cyprus enters Europe and speaks the idiom of multiculturalism, the fear of Others and otherness become re‐inscribed in its cultural self‐projections and the politics of the history of education. This article argues that the post‐Independence fascination with roots and derision for otherness has been marked by a double colonial legacy: the colonial ‘Othering’ of Cypriots as a ‘hybrid genus’, and the resistance to colonial usurpations of educational control by tainting every cultural contact under or through colonial rule as de‐Hellenization. Focusing on the transculturation of local educational idioms during colonial times, the paper suggests that the nationalist discourse that enveloped Greek Cypriot anti‐colonialist educational politics was actually hybrid. It involved a partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the Empire and an ideological borrowing from the Hellenic diaspora. The re‐iteration of this hybridity is proposed as a task for postcolonial education.