ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the issues and debates thrown into relief by the Mipsterz controversy. It considers the changing elaborations of ethnicity and identity that – as a consequence of the flows of globalisation – have increasingly characterised modern youth cultures. The chapter begins by highlighting the way local youth cultures cannot be considered in isolation, but have to be understood as part of a ‘global tapestry’ woven from a wealth of connected ‘threads’. It explores the way the processes of cultural hybridisation have been especially evident in the realms of youth culture and music; and it considers the way such developments may be constituent in the emergence of a new plurality of negotiated and dynamic identities. For Jan Nederveen Pieterse, hybridy exists on a continuum stretching from an ‘assimilationist hybridity’ to a ‘destabilising hybridity’. For postcolonial theorists, the importance of cultural hybridity lies in its potential to question and subvert dominant notions of the world.
