Abstract

The papers in this special section at once undertake and undermine the discourse of hybridity, at once to recognize the strength of its rhetorical force and critique the limits of its explanatory power. Rather than viewing hybridity as a kind of floating signifier in all its ambivalence as many postcolonial studies have been noted to have undertaken, the papers explore its conditions of possibility in the context of the materiality of the historical situation and specifically in the concreteness of the authors’ inscription in history and the worldly particularity of literature, literary form, and criticism. As a category, for a number of years now, hybridity has seemed indispensable for the renewed examination of the formation of the canon, the development of forms, modes of writing, or adaptation of texts in the exploration of its “subversive” possibilities. Apart from its literary inflection, hybridity studies have dealt with the transcultural amalgamation of diverse dimensions focusing variously from the racial to the religious, often interrogating cultural dynamics. But both as a literary trope and discursive category, among the issues that might bear emphasizing is that hybridity as a post-colonial condition has been so often decontextualized as if the experience were homogenous in its assumed universality, rather than heterogeneous in its particularity.


Keywords

1965 Coup, adaptation, anti-hybridity, Carlos Bulosan, hybridity, hybridities, Im Hwa, komiks, Lu Xun, New Order, syncretism

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Kritika Kultura
Department of English
School of Humanities
Ateneo de Manila University

The Philippine Commission on Higher Education (CHED) declares Kritika Kultura as a CHED-recognized journal under the Journal Challenge Category of its Journal Incentive Program.

International Board of Editors

Jan Baetens
Professor
Faculty of Arts
Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (Belgium)

Joel David
Professor of Cultural Studies
Inha University (South Korea)

Michael Denning
Professor of American Studies and English
Department of English
Yale University (US)

Faruk
Faculty of Cultural Sciences
Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)

Regenia Gagnier
Professor of English
University of Exeter (UK)

Leela Gandhi
John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English
Brown University (US)

Inderpal Grewal
Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
Professor of South Asian Studies, Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies
Yale University (US)

Peter Horn
Professor Emeritus and Honorary Lifetime Fellow
University of Cape Town (South Africa)
Honorary Professor and Research Associate in German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

Anette Horn
Professor of German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

David Lloyd
Distinguished Professor of English
University of California, Riverside (US)

Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
Professor Emeritus
University of the Philippines

Rajeev S. Patke
Director of the Division of Humanities
Professor of Humanities
Yale NUS College (Singapore)

Vicente L. Rafael
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History
University of Washington (US)

Vaidehi Ramanathan
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Davis (US)

Temario Rivera
Professorial Lecturer
Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines

E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippines Studies Center (US)

Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College (US)
Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University (US)

Antony Tatlow
Honorary Professor of Drama
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)