Hybridity

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Critical race theory emerged from the participation of scholars of color within the academy and their pioneering approach to understanding their privilege and oppression relative to white privilege and the dominant culture. Most impressively, the [Page 444]foundations have been traced to W. E. B. DuBois' work on double consciousness at the turn of the past century. Double consciousness was the articulation of how African Americans because of their historic oppression through racism held the understanding of not only the dominant culture but also their own cultural insight, which afforded them an alternative level of analysis and insight. DuBois' analysis and writings informed the work of the Frankfurt School, which would go on to establish critical theories as a tour de force in ethical scholarship. The uptake of critical theories was embraced by scholars seeking to create ethical epistemologies within the academy. While critical race theory was pioneered to interrogate racism, it is effectively used by scholars to critique a broad spectrum of xenophobic cultural oppressions, including sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and more. Critical theorists illustrate how the intersection of race, class, and gender has material effects in people's lives.

Hybrid terms can highlight the subject position of people who are identified with blended categorizations. A concentrated focus on hybridity as the research question has been conceptualized as borderland work. As our cultures become increasingly globalized and shift from multiculturalism toward polyculturalism, hybridity takes on greater importance. Understanding how people who exist within and between different identities negotiate various aspects of their lives is the context for borderland work. In the earliest work on hybridity, it was assumed that a unitary consciousness was the sought-after goal. As more scholars reflected on the lived consciousness of hybridity, the inherent problems with this assumption were illuminated. In this postmodern turn, hybridity is not a dualistic simplistic construction of binaries but rather is conceptualized as shifting and fluid depending on various contexts. Postmodern definitions challenge any unitary definition and instead encourage us to think about heterogeneity and multiplicity within hybrid ethnicities.

A problematic area for hybridity is that it can be used to entrench racist attitudes further when the new hybrid category is used by the dominant culture as an explanatory concept. Explanatory concepts reify difference as something that explains how a group of people can be assumed to be. Unitary definitions of hybrid identities feed into this tendency to create the “other” that postcolonial theories have brought to the foreground. Postcolonial analyses have deepened the understanding of how hybridity functions within dominant culture as well as within colonized groups. Decolonization is about disrupting the dominant discourse, and hybridity may in some ways play into that discourse. Researchers need to use hybridity terms with reflection and care as to how and when they employ the blended concepts.

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