ABSTRACT
For the past three decades hybridity has been a key concept in cultural studies, postcolonial theorizing, and youth studies. This loan term from biology informed social science and language discourses regarding the outcomes of cultural mixing. In the 18th century public opinion feared racial mixing or hybridity would lead to a weakening of White races, producing minimized distinctiveness and subsequent loss of superior status. Similarly, language hybridity threatened a country's national language through the introduction and adoption of foreign terms. At the end of the 20th century influential social theorists including Donna Haraway (1985) and Stuart Hall (1993) reinvented the concept. For Homi Bhabha (1994) hybridity implied a discursive “third space” of identity/subjectivity characterized by ambivalence in the postcolonial moment. Hybridization is how “newness enters the world” (p. 227). Currently, hybridity or hybridization describes cultural synthesis or mixing, in relation to transnational practices, identities, and diaspora, implying the conflation of culture and nation.
