Article. — Formations. — 2010. — Vol.1. — No.1. — pp. 31-38.
The contemporary cultural landscape is an amalgam of cross-cultural influences, blended, patch-worked, and layered upon one another. Unbound and fluid, culture is hybrid and interstitial, moving between spaces of meaning. The notion of cultural hybridity has existed far before it was popularized in postcolonial theory as culture arising out of interactions between “colonizers” and “the colonized”. However, in this time after imperialism, globalization has both expanded the reach of Western culture, as well as allowed a process by which the West constantly interacts with the East, appropriating cultures for its own means and continually shifting its own signifiers of dominant culture. This hybridity is woven into every corner of society, from trendy fusion cuisine to Caribbean rhythms in pop music to the hyphenated identities that signify ethnic Americans, illuminating the lived experience of ties to a dominant culture blending with the cultural codes of a Third World culture. Considerations of hybridity run the gamut from existential to material, political to economic, yet this discussion will not be able to tease out the extensive implications of each consideration. Rather, this discussion aims to explore the notion of hybridity theoretically, synthesizing the vast body of literature to critique essentialist notions of identity as fixed and constant. I will offer three ways in which hybridity might serve as a tool for deconstructing the rigid labels that maintain social inequities through exclusion in race, language, and nation. By exploring how the hybrid rejects claims of boundedness within race, language, and nation, I suggest that cultural studies like these are imperative in considering the politics of representation. For the purposes of this discussion, I will use a definition of hybridity referring to the integration of cultural bodies, signs, and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures.
