Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridit

Laura Popa, Roeland Goorts (Eds.)

Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity. With a Foreword by Pnina Werbner

ISBN 978-3-98940-046-7, 288 pp., 36 illustrations, € 34,50 (E-Book/pdf, 2024)

(GCSC - Giessen Contributions to the Study of Culture, Vol. 18)

The history of the hybridity concept and the literature about hybridity show the continuous transformation of its meaning(s). It ranges from biological racist connotations in 19th-century colonialism to a powerful subversive tool for analysing asymmetric colonial encounters in 20th-century postcolonial studies. In the 20th century, hybridity and adjacent notions, such as transculturation, denoted this asymmetry. Bringing them into dialogue again in the 21st century, these and other related concepts may guide analyses of planetary cultural, economic, and political entanglements that avoid the false objectivism that the notion of ‘globalisation’ implies. As a result, the book critically reconsiders cultural hybridity as a concept for a world globally interconnected without losing the local articulations. So, this book argues that hybridity should be reframed with a view to the connections and entanglements it enables and complicates. As the world has become increasingly interconnected in the last few decades, this book investigates connectivity, relationships, and entanglements through new meanings and adjacent concepts, methods, and social expressions of hybridity. Methodologically, it examines hybridity within the framework of an increasingly interconnected global world, while analysing identities that intersect in cultural, socio-political, religious, and virtual spaces. The purpose of these multifaceted critical explorations is to reframe the potential and limits of hybridity in shedding light on the intersections between cultures on a global scale.

Preview / Table of Contents (pdf)

Review

"Hybridity has been redefined multiple times in different disciplines across the world. From its original meaning in botany to refer to the mixture of two plants, or crossbreeding, to its usage in cultural studies following Homi Bhabha’s seminal work, hybridity is constantly expanding in meaning as culture and societies evolve. This edited volume presents different definitions and applications of hybridity in the study of religion, literature, fashion, photography, and other fields of study that focus on cultural identities. With a foreword by the late Pnina Werbner, who argues that in today’s globalized world, intentional hybridity must be disruptive, Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity provides readers with interdisciplinary approaches to hybridity as a theory and a research method. Hybridity is viewed in this book as a result of asymmetrical power in a globalized world and forced upon by oppressive forces and must be engaged with intentionally in order to be redefined. As Werbner points out in her foreword, intentional hybridities, as the ones shown in this book, are meant to be thought-provoking, reflexive, and challenging to dominant hegemonies. And that is what the authors in this edited volume achieve. Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity engages in a thought-provoking debate on the meaning and place of cultural hybridity in the twenty-first century. The authors in this volume provide their definitions of the concept, rethinking it through theoretical, methodological, and social frameworks to redefine it and open space for the social, political, and cultural entanglements of each society. This book is a must-read for those who seek to find new meanings and applications for this ever-changing concept."

Natalia Rabahi, KULT_online 72 (2025)