Title: Contours of Contemporary Research: Perspectives Across Disciplines
Chief Editors: Dr. S. Durga, Dr. S. Sathyapriya, and Dr. V. A. Jane
ISBN: 978-81-17787-25-0
Chapter: 8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59646/880/8
Authors: Dr. J. U. Gayathri, and Dr. C. K. Uma Devi
Abstract
Cultural hybridity became one of the defining terms of postcolonial literary studies in the 1990s, offering a way to read colonial and postcolonial cultures as mixed, unstable and productive rather than pure or fixed. Three decades later, the term carries a double reputation: it remains indispensable for describing the textures of diasporic and postcolonial writing, yet it has been charged with ignoring material inequality, flattering the cosmopolitan elite and serving the marketing needs of global publishing. This paper reassesses hybridity by tracing its theoretical foundations in Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Stuart Hall; examining the major Marxist, historical and market-based critiques of the concept; and testing both positions against Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. It then considers four contemporary perspectives that have reshaped the field: world-literature as a system of combined and uneven development, decoloniality, Afropolitanism and postcolonial ecocriticism. The paper argues that hybridity continues to do critical work only when it is read back into the histories, economies and environments that produce cultural mixture. Detached from those conditions, it describes difference; anchored in them, it explains how difference is made and who pays for it.
Keywords: postcolonial theory, cultural hybridity, Third Space, world-literature, decoloniality, Afropolitanism, postcolonial ecocriticism