Hybridity

Abstract Hybridity captures various ways in which identities are characterized by complexity or mixed-ness rather than simplicity or purity. It is a term that functions as a description of how things simply are, but it frequently appears to take on the characteristics of a prescription. It is not only that identities on various scales are hybrid, but also that they ought to be hybrid, or should become more hybrid. This prescriptive sense prompts reflection on the processes that drive mixed identities, shifting attention away from a static hybridity toward a dynamic and unending hybridization. The idea’s use in many different disciplinary formations typically implies that, while all identities are minimally hybrid, specific historical shifts have exaggerated and accelerated hybridity. Those shifts are associated with European colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, neocolonial echoes, globalization, and the rise of the cyborg. Such associations raise the question of resistance to the prescriptive recommendation of hybridity to the extent that hybrid cultures are so frequently an outcome of violent domination. Formerly colonized cultures strive to re-establish more fundamental identities, casting the hybridizing colonial period as a brief if damaging and disruptive interlude. Resistance is also found in former imperial centers, with multiculturalism perceived as a hybridizing threat to the core integrity of a melancholic post-imperialism. And commentators continue to warn that automation and related AI will make unexpectedly diverse jobs obsolete in the very near future, a hybrid cyborg future that occasionally begins to feel more machine than human. Ultimately, it may seem that hybridity is opposed to various forms of indigeneity, purity, or in the most general case, humanity in general. However, such oppositions would be misleading, principally because hybridity as a cultural fact and as a concept implies nothing of necessity. Each context demands specific attention to the ways it is hybrid, the processes of hybridization, and the stabilities that follow.