This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.

Over the last two decades, the unstable notion of hybridity has been the focus of a number of debates in cultural and literary studies, and has been discussed in connection with such notions as métissage, creolization, syncretism, diaspora, transculturation and in-betweeness. The aim of this volume is to form a critical assessment of the scope, significance and role of the notion in literature and the visual arts from the eighteenth century to the present day. The contributors propose to examine the development and various manifestations of the concept as a principle held in contempt by the partisans of racial purity, a process enthusiastically promoted by adepts of mixing and syncretism, but also a notion viewed with suspicion by those who decry its multifarious and triumphalist dimensions and its lack of political roots. The notion of hybridity is analysed in relation to the concepts of identity, nationhood, language and culture, drawing from the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Paul Gilroy and Edouard Glissant, among others. Contributors examine forms of hybridity in the work of such canonical writers as Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas De Quincey and Victor Hugo, as well as in contemporary American and British fiction, Neo-Victorian and postcolonial literature.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Cultural Hybridity -- Linguistic Hybridity -- Narrative Hybridity -- Formal Hybridity -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Interviews -- Index.

What does postcoloniality have to do with sacramentality? How do diasporic lives and imaginaries shape the course of postcolonial sacramental theology? Neither postcolonial theorists nor sacramental theologians have hitherto sought to engage in a sustained dialogue with one another. In this trailblazing volume, Kristine Suna-Koro brings postcolonialism, diaspora discourse, and Christian sacramental theology into a mutually critical and constructive transdisciplinary conversation. Dialoguing with thinkers as diverse as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak as well as Francis D'Sa, S.J., Martin Luther, Mayra Rivera, and John Chryssavgis, the author offers a postcolonial retrieval of sacramentality through a robust theological engagement with the postcolonial notions of hybridity, contrapuntality, planetarity, and Third Space. While exploring the methodological potential of diasporic imaginary in theology, this innovative book advances the notion of sacramental pluriverse and of Christ as its paradigmatic crescendo within the sacramental economy of creation and redemptive transformation. In the context of ecological degradation, In Counterpoint argues that it is vital for the postcolonial sacramental renewal to be rooted in ethics as a uniquely postcolonial fundamental theology.

The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980’s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage. The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx’s riddle with a single word, “Man.” This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus’ latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.

The concept of identity has steadily emerged in importance in the field of intercultural communication, especially over the last two decades. In a transnational world marked by complex connectivity as well as enduring differences and power inequities, it is imperative to understand and continuously theorize how we perceive the self in relation to the cultural other. Such understandings play a central role in how we negotiate relationships, build alliances, promote peace, and strive for social justice across cultural differences in various contexts. Identity Research in Intercultural Communication, edited by Nilanjana Bardhan and Mark P. Orbe, is unique in scope because it brings together a vast range of positions on identity scholarship under one umbrella. It tracks the state of identity research in the field and includes cutting-edge theoretical essays (some supported by empirical data), and queries what kinds of theoretical, methodological, praxiological and pedagogical boundaries researchers should be pushing in the future. This collection’s primary and qualitative focus is on more recent concepts related to identity that have emerged in scholarship such as power, privilege, intersectionality, critical selfhood, hybridity, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, queer theory, globalization and transnationalism, immigration, gendered and sexual politics, self-reflexivity, positionality, agency, ethics, dialogue and dialectics, and more. The essays are critical/interpretive, postmodern, postcolonial and performative in perspective, and they strike a balance between U.S. and transnational views on identity. This volume is an essential text for scholars, educators, students, and intercultural consultants and trainers.