Mixed Race Studies

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2011
232 pages
ebook ISBN: 9780230305243
Print ISBNs: 9780230298286 HB 9780230318519
DOI: 10.1057/9780230305243

Amar Acheraïou

This book offers an accessible, in-depth analysis of hybridity as a practice, discourse, and ideological construction. Its scope ranges widely, encompassing conceptualizations of hybridity from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. The views of such key figures as Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Virgil, Gobineau, Renan, and Tocqueville, as well as Bakhtin, Fanon, and Bhabha are all freshly reassessed. The ground-breaking perspectives provided reorient contemporary debates on hybridity and the ‘Third Space’. They significantly widen our awareness of the history of métissage and expand the methodological, conceptual, empirical, and ideological orientations of contemporary hybridity theorists.

Acheraïou deftly examines the questions of race, class, identity, binarism, postmodernist ideology, neoliberalism, and globalization. In particular, he recommends decolonizing postcolonialism, indicating ways to transcend the cultural and spatial turn predetermining current discussions of métissage, culture, and identity politics. Throughout, he analyzes hybridity in the light of globalization, suggesting how postcolonialism could become a genuinely counter-hegemonic mode of resistance to global neoliberal doxa.

Contents

• Introduction
• PART I Hybridity: A Historical Overview from Antiquity to Modern Times
  • 1 Métissage, Ideology, and Politics in Ancient Discourses
    • 1.1 Cultural, political, and scientific métissage in antiquity
    • 1.2 Reflexive and strategic hybridism
    • 1.3 Ancient literary, political, and philosophical perceptions of hybridity
  • 2 Myths of Purity and Mixed Marriages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
  • 3 Interracial Relationships and the Economy of Power in Modern Empires
    • 3.1 Syncretism in modern colonial politics and ideology
    • 3.2 Métissage: a double-edged colonial weapon
    • 3.3 Sexual politics, from tolerance to abjuration: the case of the British East India Company
    • 3.4 Hybridity as the space of the impossible: the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean
• PART II Hybridity in Contemporary Theory: A Critical Assessment
  • 4 The Ethos of Hybridity Discourse
  • 5 Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space
  • 6 Class, Race, and Postcolonial Hybridity Discourse
  • 7 Postcolonial Discourse, Postmodernist Ethos: Neocolonial Complicities
  • 8 Hybridity Discourse and Binarism
  • 9 The Global and the Postcolonial: Uneasy Alliance
    • 9.1 An overview of globalization: hegemony and resistance
    • 9.2 Empirical and theoretical insights into postcolonial and global relationships
  • 10 Hybridity Discourse and Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism
  • 11 Decolonizing Postcolonial Discourse
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index