This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.
Over the last two decades, the unstable notion of hybridity has been the focus of a number of debates in cultural and literary studies, and has been discussed in connection with such notions as métissage, creolization, syncretism, diaspora, transculturation and in-betweeness. The aim of this volume is to form a critical assessment of the scope, significance and role of the notion in literature and the visual arts from the eighteenth century to the present day. The contributors propose to examine the development and various manifestations of the concept as a principle held in contempt by the partisans of racial purity, a process enthusiastically promoted by adepts of mixing and syncretism, but also a notion viewed with suspicion by those who decry its multifarious and triumphalist dimensions and its lack of political roots. The notion of hybridity is analysed in relation to the concepts of identity, nationhood, language and culture, drawing from the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Paul Gilroy and Edouard Glissant, among others. Contributors examine forms of hybridity in the work of such canonical writers as Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas De Quincey and Victor Hugo, as well as in contemporary American and British fiction, Neo-Victorian and postcolonial literature.
The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980’s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage. The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx’s riddle with a single word, “Man.” This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus’ latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.
Engagements with Hybridity in Literature: An Introduction is a textbook especially for undergraduate and graduate students of literature. It discusses the different dimensions of the notion of hybridity in theory and practice, introducing the use and relevance of the concept in literary studies. As a structured and up-to-date source for both instructors and learners, it provides a fascinating selection of materials and approaches. The book examines the concept of hybridity, offers a historical overview of the term and its critique, and draws upon the key ideas, trends, and voices in the field. It critically engages with the theoretical, intellectual, and literary discussions of the concept from the time of colonialism to the postmodern era and beyond. The book enables students to develop critical thinking through engaging them in case studies addressing a diverse selection of literary texts from various genres and cultures that open up new perspectives and opportunities for analysis. Each chapter offers a specific theoretical background and close readings of hybridity in literary texts. To improve the students’ analytical skills and knowledge of hybridity, each chapter includes relevant tasks, questions, and additional reference materials.
Drawing on recent insights from postcolonial theory and social psychology, Travis B. Williams seeks to diagnose the social strategy of good works in 1 Peter by examining how the persistent admonition to "do good" is intended to be an appropriate response to social conflict. Challenging the modern consensus, which interprets the epistle's good works language as an attempt to accommodate Greco-Roman society and thereby to lessen social hostility, the author demonstrates that the exhortation to "do good" envisages a pattern of conduct which stands opposed to popular values. The Petrine author appropriates terminology that was commonly associated with wealth and social privilege and reinscribes it with a new meaning in order to provide his marginalized readers with an alternative vision of reality, one in which the honor and approval so valued in society is finally available to them. The good works theme thus articulates a competing discourse which challenges dominant social structures and the hegemonic ideology which underlies them.
The concept of identity has steadily emerged in importance in the field of intercultural communication, especially over the last two decades. In a transnational world marked by complex connectivity as well as enduring differences and power inequities, it is imperative to understand and continuously theorize how we perceive the self in relation to the cultural other. Such understandings play a central role in how we negotiate relationships, build alliances, promote peace, and strive for social justice across cultural differences in various contexts. Identity Research in Intercultural Communication, edited by Nilanjana Bardhan and Mark P. Orbe, is unique in scope because it brings together a vast range of positions on identity scholarship under one umbrella. It tracks the state of identity research in the field and includes cutting-edge theoretical essays (some supported by empirical data), and queries what kinds of theoretical, methodological, praxiological and pedagogical boundaries researchers should be pushing in the future. This collection’s primary and qualitative focus is on more recent concepts related to identity that have emerged in scholarship such as power, privilege, intersectionality, critical selfhood, hybridity, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, queer theory, globalization and transnationalism, immigration, gendered and sexual politics, self-reflexivity, positionality, agency, ethics, dialogue and dialectics, and more. The essays are critical/interpretive, postmodern, postcolonial and performative in perspective, and they strike a balance between U.S. and transnational views on identity. This volume is an essential text for scholars, educators, students, and intercultural consultants and trainers.
Contesting Race and Citizenship is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself. Contesting Race and Citizenship opens discussions of the so-called migrant "crisis" by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. Hawthorne traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.
This book examines the modes by which the grand theories of International Relations can be restructured at the level of meta-theory. It emphasizes the inability of grand theories to make sense of international relations in postcolonial societies and argues to engage in such restructuring in the domain of ontology. This is done by making a historical sociological defence toward adopting mid-level theories in IR. It is a critique of the meta-theoretical foundations of Kenneth Waltz's grand theory of neorealism, by pivoting itself upon the framework of postcolonial ontology. Dwelling upon Mohammed Ayoob’s mid-level theory of subaltern realism, it argues for undertaking the task of restructuring International Relations at the level of meta-theory, largely in the sphere of ontology. It explains how the thrust of grand theories such as neorealism, on ontological singularity can be circumvented. Owing to this, International Relations can experience a meta-theoretical transformation that may manifest in the broader engagement of the discipline itself, with the very conception of ontological multiplicity.
