Hybridity

Abstract Widely used in cultural, literary, and linguistic studies, hybridity began as a biological and racial term, used during the peak of nineteenth‐century colonialism to mark a clear distinction between colonizer and colonized. Hybridity can reveal and emphasize the sense of physical and social mixture and interaction among peoples, cultures, and nations and entails concepts such as diaspora, creolization, and cultural criticism. Scholars have theorized hybridity across a range of fields. Within postcolonial and cultural theory, work has been undertaken by Homi K. Bhabha and Robert J. C. Young; the work of the writer Édouard Glissant has also been influential, and the writings of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall have been significant for postcolonial studies, particularly in the British and Caribbean contexts. In linguistics, there is the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and in anthropology that of Néstor García Canclini and Ulf Hannerz. As peoples and cultures continue to interact, hybridity promises to retain explanatory power for phenomena such as nationalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism.