Mixed Race Studies

Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil.  Certainly the existence of racial “hybrids” infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out.  But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to narrativize time.  I find a suggestive emblem of such disjunctive or hybrid temporality in “the miscegenation of time,” a phrase from which the state of racialist thinking can never be fully removed.  The hybridization of genre implied in the miscegenation of time entails not simply the splicing together of different forms but the encounter of genre with its law and therein its indeterminancy.  Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory…

Nyong’o Tavia, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 12.

Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture.  This article explains the history of hybridity and its major theoretical discussion amongst the discourses of race, post-colonialism, Identity (social science), anti-racism & multiculturalism, and globalization. This article illustrates the development of hybridity rhetoric from biological to cultural discussions.

Hybridity as racial mixing

Hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used to classify the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture.  As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century. Scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans and Asians were racially inferior to Europeans.  The fear of miscegenation that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race.  Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation.  Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit…

Wikipedia