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Placing Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) within a larger historical and transnational context, this essay interrogates Gilroy's uncritical deployment of mestizaje and hybridity to theorize Black subject formation and Black cultural productions. In doing so, it shows that the exclusion of Afro-Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean has crucial consequences for the work's conceptualization of the Black Atlantic and its broader racial politics. While Gilroy seeks to repudiate what he calls 'the dangerous obsessions with 'racial' purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics,' I argue that the obsession with hybridity that animates Gilroy's work is no less dangerous. Contrary to Gilroy's assumption, 'creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity' do not 'exceed racial discourse,' but are rather embedded in the history and logics of the Latin American eugenics movement. As it fails to contend with the material histories of racial mixture as a white supremacist technology, The Black Atlantic echoes some of these eugenicist logics, colluding with the anti-Black agenda that it seeks to contest. In the process, the book prefigures the racial disavowal of Gilroy's later work and leaves us with inadequate tools for understanding the workings of racial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the concepts of hybridity and transnationalism can be salvaged from a neo-liberal discourse of identity politics and rescued for a critical Cultural Studies project that takes into account historical materialism. Focusing on a 'place-based notion of identity' in the context of Hawai'i's diverse ethnic population, and with specific reference to the hybrid and transnational formation of a 'local Chinese consciousness', the paper argues that understanding the complex local Chinese identity formation in Hawai'i requires re-conceptualizing hybridity and diasporic consciousness along the lines of Aihwa Ong's notion of 'embedded citizenship', Adam McKeon's emphasis on diasporic network relations, and Ien Ang's definition of hybridity as denoting 'complicated entanglement' and 'togetherness-in-difference'. Applying these conceptual distinctions to a careful reading of the celebrated play, 'A Little Bit Like You', by local playwright Darrell Lum, the paper shows that beyond the humorous, albeit familiar, portrayal of interethnic marriage and hybrid identity in Hawai'i, the play actually offers us invaluable insight into the complex entanglement of ethnicity and socio-economic inequality as a result of diasporic labor and network relations in the islands. In the final analysis then, this paper makes a case for a critical transnationalism that seeks to reveal, rather than conceal, economic inequality and social injustice as part of a larger intellectual commitment to an ethics of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since liberation in 1994, the meaning of 'South African' has undergone change. Theoretical terms need to be developed in order to talk about culture and identity in the 'new' South Africa. There are rich traditions on which a South African cultural studies could draw, in the context of the Anglo-American domination of the field of cultural studies. However, the complexities of undertaking any kind of cultural studies in the context of the country's history, its inherited and ongoing structures, both material and conceptual, make clear the imperative to localize any theory. A South African cultural studies vocabulary has to forge something that is informed by the past even as it seeks to transcend it. Current attempts to develop a South African cultural vocabulary, such as the African Renaissance and the metaphor of the 'rainbow nation', are inadequate, especially in the context of the commodification of the hopes for 'newness' of the 'new' South Africa. A South African cultural studies vocabulary has to negotiate the difference which is the primary building block of the 'new' South Africa and the sameness which is being projected onto the identities under construction as South Africans renegotiate their relationships with Africa, and with each other in the context of 'nation building'. Creolization and hybridity have both been used to describe aspects of South African identities, in ways which bespeak the importance of countering colonial and apartheid insistences on policing the borders of cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated within subaltern cultural studies, and building on the work of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin, this essay tells the story of the 'new flâneur', a recent immigrant and refugee group of continental francophone African youth, who are attending an urban French-language high school in south-western Ontario, Canada. In it, I offer an alternative cultural framework of 'translation' and 'negotiation' as a way of seeing that which is supposedly competing and conflicting is indeed re-de-and-transformed and negotiated into New ways that make them radically performed. Their radicalness stems, precisely, from the notation that displaced identities, the focus of the paper, are not oppositionally articulated; on the contrary, they are negotiated, translated, and re-born in a more complex and hybrid space: a third one. This hybridity, I will show, is habitually performed in and through language - in its broad semiological sense. As part of an ethnographic research project, the essay will show the different ways in which the new flâneurs form and perform their identities. Here, the Old and the New are not ethnographically observed in competition; both are translated in the identity formation processes and in the process, they are negotiated so that both are found in the same sentence, in the same garments, at the same time to produce a third hybrid space. To walk is to vegetate To stroll is to live Balzac [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A parallel is posited between the ways hybridity and kinship are thought about in Western contexts, challenging the idea that kinship and biology tend to lead to narrow, roots-oriented, essentialized definitions of identity. Rather than being the opposite of rhizomic, diasporic hybridity, kinship and biology partake of the tension between roots and routes that is characteristic of all hybridity. Anthropological evidence on the character of Western kinship thinking is examined to elucidate some features of its flexibility. Theories of hybridity are seen as being themselves a type of kinship thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the applicability of postcolonial theory to Irish culture and history. It develops the concept of multiple rhythms or temporalities of social struggle for which only that of nationalism is determined punctually by the struggle for the state. The domination of Irish historiography by state-oriented narratives occludes the histories and the formal or organizational aspects of other forms of social movement, such that the postcolonial project is directed simultaneously towards the mapping of such alternative movements and to the critique of statist historiographies, whether imperialist, nationalist or 'revisionist'. Where postcolonial theory has tended to emphasize the 'hybrid' nature of colonial cultures, this essay prefers to focus on the productive interface between the incommensurable social and cultural formations of colonial modernity and colonized non-modernity. At this interface emerge continually both new subaltern social formations and practices, which cannot be understood as 'traditional' and new forms of colonial state institution that are summoned into being by anti-colonial practices, for which the model of an advanced state coming to bear on a backward population is clearly inadequate. The essay draws from the history of agrarian movements in Ireland and banditry in the Philippines and from contemporary techniques of state surveillance and resistance to it in Northern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a steady consensus within academic cultural studies concerning the fact that reifications (or 'essentializations') of ethnicity, whether literally meant or practically used, like reifications involving gender or national identity, are not good from a political perspective. The common response invokes hybridity as a counter-concept strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic reification and by the same token is able to ground a sufficiently fluid politics of identity/difference that might warrant the cultural redemption of the subaltern. Nevertheless, the political force of hybridity, such as it may be, remains to a large extent contained within a politics of the colour line. Without abandoning it, that is, without altogether abandoning the terrain of a politics of the subject, it would seem necessary to move beyond the theorization of hybridity in cultural studies in order to find ways to articulate subaltern resistance against the terror of dominant identities more effectively within a larger commitment to economic justice. Hybridity categories, once they solidify into a strategic political project, circumscribe political life to subjective agency; but subjective agency does not exhaust the political. Ultimately, the postulation of subjective agency as the limit of the political remains trapped within a Cartesian game of calculation and counter-calculation which is by its very nature unable to break through and beyond the internalization of hegemony. Some appeal to a position of exteriority remains necessary in order to restitute the possibility of what,following Balibar, we might call 'unconditional insurrection'. Unconditional insurrection does not name a voluntaristic project of world revolution. It names, rather, the possibility of an other history, of an alternative historical memory: a memory made possible by the simple fact that things could be, and could have been, other than what they are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the image of interspecies reproduction, arguably the most disturbing of the range of contemporary images of reproductive technology, as both a metaphor of some historical standing and as a new, and troubling, medical/scientific capability. Moving from the 1994 report of the Human Embryo Research Panel of the NIH, also known as the Muller Panel, through a range of sites - natural history, popular science writing, social critique, fiction, feminist theory and science studies - the article explores the context in which our current scientific perspective on interspecies reproduction is constructed. The study demonstrates the value of contextualizing - both in terms of history and literature - even the most seemingly transparent scientific or medical intervention, in order to achieve the fullest understanding of its implications. A concluding consideration of the philosophical/theoretical construction of interspecies reproduction in the present (postmodern) moment explores its implications for our understanding of the feminist critique of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a number of texts which position the historical body of the indigene as a means of centering concerns about contemporary Australian identity. The most telling artifact of the colonizing process is the indigenous body as exhibit and commodity, a production still operative and at its logical extreme in the infamous Human Genome Project currently sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Health. The author examines the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses termed as multiculturalism and hybridity.

The article discusses anthropological notion of culture and the radical difference between Eurocenter and the third world. This conceptual foundation has increasingly been under challenge, as the Eurocenter is being forcibly relativized by national liberation movements from without and new social movements from within. The relativistic notion of cultures that are autonomous and bounded is now contested by a notion of historically grounded multiple subject positions. The third study of third time spaces aims to displace the canonical anthropological notion of culture as well as to nudge cultural studies away from its text, a Western-centered focus.