ABSTRACT
Hybrid histories There are significant numbers of white people who explicitly reject the possibility of cultural hybridity, even while they unconsciously engage with it on a day-today basis, experiencing and living through many hybrid moments. Some are attracted to a rhetoric which espouses nationalism, essentialism and the physical, moral and intellectual superiority of their ‘race’. There is a substantial literature which describes and analyses, historically and in contemporary times, aspects of white people’s theories of ‘race’ and racism (Stepan 1982; Gilman 1985; Harding 1993; Gould 1981; Frankenberg 1993): I want to indicate here some of the ways in which a sense of ‘racial pride’ is being reinforced by the construction of similar theories by certain black scholars for black people. This in turn raises issues regarding the explicit or implicit rejection of notions of hybridity by black people as well.
