ABSTRACT
A gap has opened up between the study of the political sociology of the relations between immigrant communities and their societies of settlement in Europe and that of the study of cultural relations, focused particularly on the concept of cultural hybridity. This chapter discusses theoretical and methodological assumptions of these two types of study and examines the question of the relations between them before going on to suggest a more complex notion of ‘cultural hybridity’. The migrant community’s connections with the homeland will in the first place involve some kinship connections. For H. Bhabha, migrants exist in a double cultural space and produce a new culture which is necessarily ‘hybrid’. Migrants from the Caribbean also have another set of problems. Their ancestral African cultures and forms of social organization were largely destroyed in the process of enslavement and they were forced to adopt, albeit as inferiors, their masters’ language, religion and cultures.
