Mixed Race Studies

Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition

Rodopi
2007
330 pages
Hardback: 978-90-420-2141-9 / 90-420-2141-1

Edited by:

Joel Kuortti, Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Culture
University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Jopi Nyman, Acting Professor of English
University of Joensuu, Finland

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.

Table of Contents

• Contributors
• Joel KUORTTI and Jopi NYMAN: Introduction: Hybridity Today
• Part One: Reconstructing Theories of Hybridity
• • David HUDDART: Hybridity and Cultural Rights: Inventing Global Citizenship
  • Sabine BROECK: White Fatigue, or, Supplementary Notes on Hybridity
  • Dimple GODIWALA: Postcolonial Desire: Mimicry, Hegemony, Hybridity
  • Jeroen DEWULF: As a Tupi-Indian, Playing the Lute: Hybridity as Anthropophagy
  • Paul SHARRAD: Strategic Hybridity: Some Pacific Takes on Postcolonial Theory
  • Andrew BLAKE: From Nostalgia to Postalgia: Hybridity and Its Discontents in the Work of Paul Gilroy and the Wachowski Brothers
• Part Two: Reading Hybridity
  • Zoe TRODD: Hybrid Constructions: Native Autobiography and the Open Curves of Cultural Hybridity
  • Sheng-Mei MA : The Necessity and Impossibility of Being Mixed-Race in Asian American Literature
  • Jopi NYMAN: The Hybridity of the Asian American Subject in Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World
  • Joel KUORTTI: Problematic Hybrid Identity in the Diasporic Writings of Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Andrew HAMMOND: The Hybrid State: Hanif Kureishi and Thatcher’s Britain
  • Valerie KANEKO LUCAS: Performing British Identity: Fix Up and Fragile Land
  • Samir DAYAL: Subaltern Envy? Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh
  • Mita BANERJEE: Postethnicity and Postcommunism in Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift and Salman Rushdie’s Fury
  • Index

Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities

Rodopi
2002
152 pages
Hardback: 978-90-420-1378-0 / 90-420-1378-8
Paperback: 978-90-420-1368-1 / 90-420-1368-0

Edited by:

Elizabeth Russell, Professor of Womens Studies and British Literature
University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona

The essays in this collection (on Canada, the USA, Australia and the UK) question and discuss the issues of cross-cultural identities and the crossing of boundaries, both geographical and conceptual. All of the authors have experienced cross-culturalism directly and are conscious that positions of ‘double vision’, which allow the / to participate positively in two or more cultures, are privileges that only a few can celebrate. Most women find themselves “caught between cultures”. They become involved in a day-to-day struggle, in an attempt to negotiate identities which can affirm the self and, at the same time, strengthen the ties which unites the self with others. Theoretical issues on cross-culturalism, therefore, can either liberate or constrict the /. The essays here illustrate how women’s writing negotiates this dualism through a colourful and complex weaving of words – thoughts and experiences both pleasurable and painful – into texts, quilts, rainbows. The metaphors abound. The connecting thread through their writing and, indeed, in these essays, is the concept of ‘belonging’, a theoretical/emotional composite of be-ing and longing. ‘Home’, too, assumes a variety of meanings; it is no longer a static geographical place, but many places. It is also a place elsewhere in the imagination, a mythic place of desire linked to origin.

Policies of multiculturalism can throw up more problems than they solve. In Canada, the difficulties surrounding the cross-cultural debate have given rise to a state of “messy imbroglio”. Notions of authenticity move dangerously close to essentialist identities. ‘Double vision’ is characteristic of peoples who have been uprooted and displaced, such as Australian Aboriginal writers of mixed race abducted during childhood. ‘Passing for’ black or white is full of complications, as in the case of Pauline Johnson, who passed as an authentic Indian. People with hyphenated citizenship (such as Japanese-Canadian) can be either free of national ties or trapped in subordination to the dominant culture; in these ‘visible minorities’, it is the status of being female (or coloured female) that is so often ultimately rendered invisible.

Examination of Canadian anthologies on cross-cultural writing by women reveals a crossing of boundaries of gender and genre, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, national boundaries, in an attempt to connect with a diasporic consciousness. Cross-cultural women writers in the USA may stress experience and unique collective history, while others prefer to focus on aesthetic links and literary connections which ultimately silence difference. Journeying from the personal space of the / into the collective space of the we is exemplified in a reading of texts by June Jordan and Minnie Bruce Pratt. For these writers identity is in process. It is a painful negotiation but one which can transform knowledge into action.

Contributors
Isabel Carrera Suárez
Dolors Collellmir
Mary Eagleton
Teresa Gómez Reus
Aritha van Herk
Elizabeth Russell
María Socorro Suárez Lafuente

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Introduction
• ARITHA VAN HERK: Cross-Dressed Writing in Canada
• ISABEL CARRERA SUÁREZ: Hyphens, Hybridities and Mixed-Race Identities: Gendered Readings in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Texts
• MARÍA SOCORRO SUÁREZ LAFUENTE: Creating Women’s Identity in Australian Civilization
• DOLORS COLLELLMIR: Australian Aboriginal Women Writers and the Process of Defining and Articulating Aboriginality
• ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Cross-Cultural Subjectivities: Indian Women Theorizing in the Diaspora
• TERESA GÓMEZ REUS: Weaving / Framing / Crossing Difference: Reflections on Gender and Ethnicity in American Literary and Art Practices
• MARY EAGLETON: Working Across Difference: Examples from Minnie Bruce Pratt and June Jordan
• List of Contributors