ABSTRACT
I If colonial regimes and ideologies sought to create rigid boundaries between races and cultures, ‘hybridity’ has become the rallying cry for many post-colonial theorists and writers, especially in the wake of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967). Colonial and postcolonial subjectivities are now widely understood as hybrid conditions; conversely, it has become a kind of common-sense that hybridity is a necessary marker of the post-colonial condition. These equations have also been sharply contested, so that hybridity has become a key issue in ongoing debates about post-colonial studies, their poststructuralist genesis and Western location, their reconfiguration of
colonial history and the contemporary globe, and their understanding of power as well as subversion. In this essay, I shall trace some of these debates, and then discuss how hybridity is now used in some current discussions of race and colonialism in Shakespeare. In the second section, I will consider Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and a 1996 Indian production of Othello in the Kathakali style of dance-drama, in order to suggest that any meaningful discussion of colonial or post-colonial hybridities demands close attention to the specificities of location as well as a conceptual re-orientation which requires taking on board nonEuropean histories and modes of representation.
