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Borders and Hybridity in Contemporary Literature and Social Theory
Nedim Karakayali
SAMUEL BECKETT’S CLOV IMAGINED AN IMPOSSIBLE WALL: “Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there is a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. . . . Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’ll lean on the table, and look at the wall.” (Beckett 1958, 1–2). Clov’s wall, like the walls and boundaries in many of Kafka’s short stories such as “The Chinese Wall” or “The Burrow,” however, is never really finished; it is always in the process of completion: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” (ibid. 1).
Beckett and Kafka are not the only examples. The theme of a border that never completely becomes a perfect line and always remains in the process of completion is a recurrent theme in modern literature. Perhaps more importantly, because the border is not complete, it is imagined to occupy a critical space—a borderland. The border, instead of separating lives, itself becomes a site of living. In fact, many contemporary authors with very different backgrounds consider themselves as inhabitants of this borderland. Ultimately,1 the importance of the theme of the incompleteness of walls and borders lies in the fact that this incompleteness opens up the possibility of all sorts of mixtures and encounters, and further evokes a host of other themes and concepts: hybridity, in-betweenness, liminality, ambivalence, and so on.
Those concepts, of course, are not merely literary constructs and metaphors; they are extensively used by a large number of contemporary social theorists, literary critics and philosophers. As such, they constitute a veritable constellation in the landscape of contemporary social theory and literary criticism. There are even journals dedicated to studies in this conceptual field like Limen, Journal for Theory and Practice of Liminal
.
Phenomena
This brings us to the main question I will try to answer in this chapter: how can we account for the growing attractiveness and popularity of those series of concepts that are supposed to denote a “borderline” condition? What enables them to coexist with, if not partially overshadow, the more “solid” concepts that we find in the classical sociological literature (Zeitlin 1973, 2001)?
At first sight, there seems to be an obvious answer to those questions in the literature. It has frequently been pointed out that this constellation gained its present importance partly due to historical reasons.2 Modernization, globalization, colonialism and decolonization, and mass migration are among the key processes that have been associated with the emergence of ambivalent identities, hybrid spaces, liminal experiences, and so on. Thus, in their discussion of hybridity and marginality, Robert Park (1928) and Everett Stonequist (1937) are inspired by mass migration to America; Zygmunt Bauman (1991) and Bruno Latour (1993), albeit from very different perspectives, view ambivalence and hybridity as inherent characteristics of modernity; Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994) arrives to his “third space” through a sustained reflection on postcolonial experience; and, although Victor Turner’s (1967) starting point is not the modern world, his concept of liminality is frequently put to use in the anthropology of modern societies (see, for example, Bettis 1996).
Such an answer, however, is not entirely satisfactory for several reasons. First of all, it is important to note that these concepts are seldom utilized to merely capture and name a historical fact. They are essentially concepts in the sense that their primary reference has always been to a reality which is not
theoretical
immediately given to empirical observation. Let me further point out that whenever one or another element from this constellation is put to use, there is unmistakably an allusion to a “revelation.” Through these concepts, social theorists often claim to have unearthed an invisible tension in social life, or to have laid bare an invisible potential, or to have marked out a chaotic process in the middle of order, or to have brought to center what appears to be at the margins and so on and so forth: ambivalence renders the intrinsic paradoxes of modernity visible (Bauman, 1991); marginality might ignite hidden potentials of social actors (Park 1928; Stonequist 1937); the “third space” is where desires are set to motion and new meanings are created (Bhabha 1990, 1994); hybridity opens up new paths in the evolution of “things” (Latour 1993).
So, although they definitely have a historical origin, we cannot simply assume that those concepts are proposed to simply “represent” an empirical historical phenomenon. As I will try to show in the first part of the chapter, they should rather be seen as an attempt to solve a series of theoretical as well as political and ethical problems and paradoxes that have become particularly pressing issues in modern societies.
This, however, does not mean that we should consider the theories utilizing these concepts (or literary works using these metaphors) as natural or self-evident responses to a historical situation. We have indeed a second reason for not accepting that this constellation of concepts has a merely empirical foundation. Let me begin by noting that the usage of such concepts involves much variation. They are sometimes used in a “spatial” sense, sometimes as temporal categories invoking a transitory “stage” between two periods or “moments” in history, yet in some other instances the reference is to the qualities of a particular agent as in the case of a migrant who bears elements of two cultures in one identity.
These usages, however, almost never have a purely empirical content, i.e., they do not refer to well-defined empirical objects. Almost all the elements of this constellation have their disciplinary origins elsewhere than social and cultural sciences—in biology (hybridity), psychology (liminal), or in psychiatry (ambivalence). And, while in these disciplines there have been occasional attempts to operationalize these concepts for empirical research, in the social sciences, this empirical orientation seems to have disappeared from sight.
As a consequence, in the context of social theory, the whole constellation is imbued with a kind of metaphorical surplus. Thus, when one talks about a “borderland,” the reference is only minimally geographical. The borderland immediately invokes a liminal existence and experience that is unlocalizable in any concrete geography. Similarly, when one talks about cultural hybridization, there is no requirement of bodily contact between the “cultures” that enter into the process. Or, when Bhabha coins the term “third space,” we understand perfectly well that he is not talking about physical space.
One striking consequence of such a metaphorical usage is that in the absence of a rigorously defined reference, an enormous array of totally unrelated objects and experiences can be subsumed under this constellation of concepts. The suggestion is then close to hand that theorists utilizing these concepts have a different mission than to provide explanations for specific empirical phenomena. Rather, everything points in the direction of a “critical” or “normative” mission.
To put it more bluntly, both in social theory and in literature, the main concern of the authors utilizing these metaphors seems to have been to affirm and encourage certain experiences and identities that can be qualified as “hybrids.” Clearly, concepts such as hybridity, ambivalence, and so on have existed for a long time; they are not new concepts. However, these concepts did not always have a predominantly positive sense and they have not always been objects of affirmation. In this respect, the attempt of giving a predominantly positive sense to such notions can be understood as a “re-interpretation” in the Nietzschean sense of the term. This attempt of re-interpretation, I believe, is indeed the most unique aspect of those theoretical and literary texts I will analyze in this chapter. In the second part of the chapter, I will try to provide a brief typology of the different ways in which this re-interpretation is carried out and briefly comment on some of the problematic consequences of proposing a predominantly positive conception of hybridity and ambivalence.
The Border and Its Paradoxes
Very often in entering a country from another, one hardly notices a great change in physical surroundings. Even when oceans, mountains and rivers constitute formidable geographic barriers between peoples and regions of the world, they do so in a “silent” way. In contrast, it is almost impossible to think of borders in a sociological sense without signs which often take a very straightforward form: they say, “this is a border.” The same is true for the distinctions between people who are often distinguished by their passports which tell us which side of the border they come from.
As such, a border in the sociological sense does not simply reflect or record existing differences in the world, but it also produces them. To use Bateson’s (1972) celebrated phrase, by classifying or territorializing “differences,” borders produce a “difference that makes a difference.” All the borders in our lives, whether
they are drawn between nation-states or between men and women have this property.
More importantly, borders in the sociological sense almost always precede us; we always speak and live as “someone,” that is, long before we start talking we are always already differentiated by one or another border. Thus, if we ever want to talk against the borders in our world, we are faced with the paradox of doing this from a position that those borders provide for us. If we ever want to eliminate the border, we could only do this by eliminating our own position. And it is precisely this paradoxical nature of borders which makes it so3 difficult to deal with them theoretically as well as practically.
One of the most vivid expressions of this paradox in the relatively recent literature can be found in the works of “postcolonial” critical theorists who were trying to tackle what might be called the “problem of borders.” For example, as is well-known, Edward Said (1991, 328) was criticizing Orientalism for taking up “a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own.” Said’s critique had clear ethical overtones. The elusive border-line drawn between the Orient and the Occident, which approximately overlapped with the line between the colonialist center and the colonized periphery was necessarily inhumane: “Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly divided cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?” (cited in Clifford 1988, 261).
The critical questioning of borders, however, is not without its problems and paradoxes which Said himself seems to observe when he mentions “the sense of fixed identities battling across a permanent divide that my book quite specifically abjures, but which it paradoxically presupposes and depends upon” (Said 1995, 4). This permanent divide is not only in the minds of Orientalists, but it is also visible in the world, in the media, in travel agencies, at passport queues, and in the dynamics of international labor migration. In fact, “postcolonial” theory itself only makes sense in this “divided world.”
Talking against borders and even demonstrating their “constructed” and “illusory” nature then might not be a sufficient strategy to undermine their unwanted effects. How can we deal with borders then; what other strategies are possible? If criticizing and attacking walls and borders from without is an insufficient strategy, can one perhaps attack them from within? This is where, I believe, a number of contemporary critical theorists and authors turn to notions such as hybridity and ambivalence as an alternative strategy: if you cannot eliminate borders, sit on them, enlarge them, and play them against themselves.
The Paradox of the Border Revisited: The Border and the Borderland
In order to make sense of this alternative strategic move, let us try to pose the “problem of the border” in a different light—a “geometrical” light. From a geometrical point of view, a border really functions only when it is intangible without width and volume, —when it is a perfect, abstract line. It functions only when it can divide without a residue; when it leaves behind no ambiguous, overlapping zones. Until this moment, the division is not complete. Paradoxically, then, the border functions best when it ceases to exist. Or, conversely, borders function precisely because they never completely are; they exist, because—as Beckett’s Clov
recognized—they are impossible. The border always leaves behind a residual zone, a “lean coast,” a space for the other: “A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. . . . The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” (Anzaldua 1987, 3).
As such, the border always has a width—the borderland—which sustains its reality but which also allows a site for the other. Or, better, the Other: that which is not codified or categorized by the border, that which is neither on this side or the other side, but on the Other side. Thomas King (1993) captures this idea nicely in his story titled “Borders” which tells about a Blackfoot woman who repeatedly refuses to identify herself as either “Canadian” or “American” on the Canada-U.S. border. “Blackfoot” alone would most probably make sense in other contexts, but on the border it turns into a serious problem. As “Blackfoot,” she neither belongs to the American side nor to the Canadian side. Or, rather, she belongs to both sides and as such profoundly challenges the legitimacy of the border.
The “width of the border” and its “otherness” has been pointed out by numerous writers in various contexts. The borderland Anzaldua describes above is depicted in more concrete terms in Arreola and Curtis’ (1993) study on the Mexican-U.S. border cities. This geographical study challenges “the popular American perception of the Mexican border towns . . . as tawdry yet convenient and accommodating tourist outlets . . . [and] as small places, not really large enough to be considered cities.” (ibid. 3). On the contrary, the research shows that
the border corridor of nearly 2,000 miles has emerged over the last three decades as one of the most urbanized regions in Mexico. Its largest cities are among the fastest growing in the Western Hemisphere. . . . As a consequence of extraordinary growth, these communities have become dynamic urban places where a new structure and urban landscape have evolved. They exhibit aspects of Latin American as well as North American cities, but contain elements that are unique to the border as a place. . . . They share an experience dissimilar to other regions of Mexico; it sets them apart and gives them a distinctive landscape anatomy and personality.” (ibid. 3–5, emphasis mine)
Similar accounts of the Canada-U.S. border—as a place—are abundant. Marshall McLuhan, for example, in his essay “Canada: The Borderline Case” directs the reader’s attention to “the world of the interval, the borderline, the interface of worlds and situations” (McLuhan 1977, 233; see also Arthur 1988). And in this slim world of the interval, “[w]hat may be banal and commonplace situations, merely by their confrontation and interface, are changed into something very important” (ibid. 245). As already this passage from McLuhan suggests, it is a short step from the conceptualization of the border as an entity with a “width,” to its re-interpretation as a different, exciting and ultimately a positive “location.” In the next two sections, I will try to give examples of this positive reevaluation.
The Border as a Different Place: The Positive Reevaluation of Hybridity
In most of the works I discussed above, the border is depicted not only as a “place” but also as a different place. This difference is partly due to the paradoxical fact that the border is the place where borders cease to exist. On the border, one escapes the lands created by the borderlines. Scott Malcolmson (1994) expresses this idea in his travel memoirs from Istanbul:
Uskudar is on Istanbul’s “Asian side,” as it’s called; Besiktas is on the “European side.” . . . Traditionally we call each a “continent,” though they are no more separate, geographically, than Canada and the United States. . . . We leave for Europe in our little boat-taxi. . . . The boat-taxis putter slowly, tossed by the wakes of huge freighters plying between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. . . . At this point, though, [nobody] is talking, because it is nighttime on the Bosphorus and intensely pleasant to rock up and down on the creaking dolmus [boat-taxi] in silence. . . . [Y]ou close your eyes. This is your favorite place in all of Istanbul, a floating point in between two imaginary continents, delicate, deliciously landless. (Malcolmson 1994, 1–2)
In Malcolmson’s depiction, the border becomes a floating signifier, opening a silent space for other voices.4 As such, his depiction is no doubt utterly exotic. Before beginning to question critically such exceptionally peaceful and romanticized depictions of borders, however, I would like to turn to more sophisticated examples of “positive” conceptualizations of borders in social theory.
Borderland as the “Third Space”
One general proposition that can be drawn from the texts discussed above is that the borderland cannot be reduced to the difference of two “main” lands which it separates. As geographers Arreola and Curtis (1993) put it: “In area as well as by definition, the border is a separate resolution. It is usually depicted as a subset of the larger borderlands, yet holding tight to the borderline. . . . This bicultural zone, traversed and elegantly described in recent accounts, has been called ‘the common ground’ and a ‘third country’” (ibid. 7).
The concept of “third country” or “third space” has been taken up by various contemporary social theorists in connection with the rejection of the idea of pure cultural identities. This concept appears especially in
works focusing on migrant and diaspora cultures (Bhabha 1987, 1990; Hall 1990; West 1991). Here, there is a clear shift in emphasis from the idea of a given, primordial (cultural) identity, to one of continuously constructed and reconstructed, hybrid cultural identities. What is mainly being challenged here is the5 depiction of migrants and diasporas as secondary or deviant figures in comparison to the natives.
Instead, Homi Bhabha, for example, places difference and hybridity at the very origin of all cultural activities: “[A]ll forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But . . . the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity . . . is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge” (Bhabha 1990, 211). In other words, the migrant cannot be defined in terms of the “two original moments” of home and abroad; on the contrary, the homeland and new-land cultures could only be understood in reference to the “third space,” that is, in reference to the migrant as a borderline case. As such, the third space appears as the basic model for conceptualizing culture: “The migrant culture of the ‘in-between,’ the minority position, dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability . . .” (Bhabha 1994, 224).
In his work on the black diaspora, Gilroy (1993, 1) offers a very similar perspective. According to him, “the contemporary black English, like the Anglo-Africans of earlier generations . . . stand between (at least) two cultural assemblages, both of which have mutated through the course of the modern world that formed them and assumed new configurations.” As such, the “Black Atlantic” defines a gigantic borderland which can not be reduced to its constituent parts. Rather, Gilroy wants to treat this “third space” as the constitutive6 element of the modern world itself: “In opposition to both . . . nationalist or ethnically absolutist approaches, I want to develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (15).
If the borderland, as Bhabha puts it, is the “third space” which actively “enables other positions to emerge,” then it can not simply be conceptualized as a transient experience, as a transitory zone, or as an extension of “main-lands.” The silence of the border, the experience of this silence and immobility, which McLuhan characterizes as a situation in which there is “[n]o need to move or follow, but only to tune the perceptions on the spot” (McLuhan 1977, 233) is only one side of the coin. For this “tuning of the perception” also entails a change in perception. It is the beginning of another type of mobility: “A border is not a connection but an interval of resonance” (ibid. 226) and “[t]he interface is where the action is” (ibid. 233). As such, the borderline is “[t]he middle . . . where things pick up speed” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 25).
A Typology of “Border-Writing”
So far I have tried to give examples of how in contemporary social theory and literature the “borderland” is reconceptualized as a site of unique experiences, giving way to a positive reevaluation of hybridity and affiliated concepts. However, it would be a gross generalization to consider all such reconceptualizations under one heading. In this part of the chapter, I will try to sketch out a very rough typology of different versions of these reinterpretations, focusing mostly on literary rather than theoretical works. Some scholars have suggested the term “border-writing”—in contradistinction to “writing against borders”—to describe these positive re-evaluations of the border through literary texts. Following this terminology, the typology I present here, therefore, can be seen as a very sketchy delineation of some of the strategies developed by “border-writers.”7
As the first type of border-writing we can talk about a counterculture-identity writing. For example, in her work on “borderlands,” Anzaldua (1987) strives for a new—“hybrid”—language in order to fulfill “Chicanos’ need to identify [themselves] as a distinct people.” She wants “[a] language which they [Chicanos] can connect their identity to” (ibid. 55). For Anzaldua, language (and consequently writing) is directly linked to identity—even when this language is a hybrid language, even when the writing is bilingual: “So, if you want
to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.” (ibid. 59). Gilroy’s (1993, 6) work on “Black Atlantic” seems to involve a similar approach: “it is the struggle to have blacks perceived as agents . . . that is for me the primary reason for writing this book.”
A second type of border-writing involves a more “personal,” or “exile-like” version of the first one. This type could be called a counterculture-writing without a people. Bessie Head’s (1972, 1974) work fits into this category. In the absence of a “real” people with whom the “in-between” author can associate her/himself, this type of writing proceeds with an imaginary people or a utopic society. As Nixon (1994, 109) puts it: “Faced with the congested projections of her as ‘deviant,’ Head could not submit to artificial divides between the pure and the impure, the authentic and the inauthentic. Nor, given her isolation, could she hope to surmount them speedily. Yet as a writer she possessed a third option: unable to find a society liberated from bigotry, she could project such a society of her own.”
A third type of border-writing can be characterized as cosmopolitan writing. In Brennan’s (1989, 2) words, such writers present themselves as “spokespersons for a kind of perennial immigration, valorised by a rhetoric of wandering, and rife with allusions to the all seeing eye of the nomadic sensibility.” This type actually includes many subtypes, a thorough examination of which is beyond the scope of this paper. The following passage from Pico Iyer (1993, 16–17) should suffice as an ideal-typical account of this position: “I have never bought a house of any kind. I have never voted. I have never supported a nation . . . or represented ‘my country’ in anything. Even the name I go by is weirdly international, because my ‘real name’ (a polysyllabic, unpronounceable Indian one) makes sense only in the home where I have never lived.”
Finally, we can talk about what Deleuze and Guattari (1986) call minor literature as our fourth type of border-writing. There are a number of traits which separate this type from the others. Unlike the previous ones, this type does not aim to create something like a “counter-identity.” In this type of writing the aim is not so much evading or resisting a border but traversing it. Kafka’s work can be seen as a paradigmatic example of this type. In his stories, again and again, Kafka lets his readers experience both the impossibility of constructing a border and the inescapability of borders. The construction of The Chinese Wall is inescapable, but it can never be completed. The Burrow is the only safe place for the animal living inside, yet this safety is also a danger since if an enemy enters, the animal would not be able to escape. Thus, the safety of the burrow is constantly questioned, its walls are perpetually made and remade. The home cannot be escaped (as in cosmopolitanism), but nor could it be ever completed (as in nativism).
As Deleuze and Guattari point out, Kafka does not approach borders ironically (by asserting their “constructed” or “illusory” nature), nor does he simply try to condemn them (by showing their unfairness). Rather, he approaches them humorously: give me a border and I will show you what I will do with it. In his three well-known novels, The Penal Colony Metamorphosis, , and The Trial, he juxtaposes one border over another, inverts or perverts relations between borders, or links them unexpectedly to each other. His stories and novels can therefore be read as “experiments with borders.”
We might then interpret Kafka as an author who responds to the paradox of the border by a paradoxical strategy—by expanding it as much as possible through literary means. But perhaps another interpretation is also possible: through his novels, we get a glimpse of a world which has turned into a giant border-land, populated by all sorts of hybrid characters and ambivalent identities. As such, would it be an exaggeration to suggest that his works can be seen as the depictions of a series of worlds to which the positive re-interpretation of borderlands and hybridity might potentially lead us? In a sense, Kafka’s humorous play with borders brings the positive re-interpretation of hybridity to its logical conclusion. Ironically enough, at this limit, the terrors and nightmares of borderline conditions—which, no doubt, are recognized but not fully emphasized by other “border-writers”—come to surface with full force.
In Place of Conclusion
There is no doubt that much of modern literature and social theory involves a critique of rigid social divisions and borders. The problems of a divided world, crisscrossed with borders and walls, are perhaps all too
obvious. As I tried to show in this chapter, the positive re-evaluation of borderlands, hybridity, ambivalence, liminality, and other affiliated concepts can be seen as yet another attempt to respond to such problems. So far, my aim here was essentially descriptive. Nevertheless, in concluding this chapter, I would like to raise two critical questions concerning the implications of such a reevaluation.8
The first is a rather hypothetical question which concerns the potential consequences of such a reinterpretation. What would it be like to live in a world where hybridity and in-betweenness reign supreme—a world that has turned into a giant border-land—which, as I argued above, might indeed be one possible outcome of the positive re-evaluation of border-lands and hybridity? Might the positive re-evaluation of hybridity, unless carefully and critically reconsidered, eventually lead to a reification of hybridity, which, in effect, might entail no less serious problems than a world divided by rigid borders?
Secondly, perhaps a less hypothetical and more pressing question here is whether we can comfortably and unconditionally draw a link between hybridity, creativity and freedom, as is often done in the works discussed above. We need to remember that such an unconditional link has not been drawn in other disciplines such as biology and psychology where these concepts are also used. In fact, many of the authors discussed above also point to the “terrors” and harrowing experiences that might occur in border-lands. And if hybridity is not without its risks and dangers, then a more sober and neutral question would be under what conditions it can be a source of new values and freedom. So, perhaps it is proper to end this chapter with the remark that the real question here might not be how to give an exclusively positive sense to hybridity, but what to make out of it.
Notes
1. Just to cite a few examples: “This is my home/ this thin edge of/ barbwire” (Anzaldua 1987, 3). “We have always lived/ on this coast, leaner/ than the tendon of/ Quathootze’s right arm” (Gutteridge 1975, no page number). See also Ward (1981).
2. For a survey of the literature on this topic, and the historical development of the concepts, see: Karakayali (2006, 2009) and Young (1995). 3. The philosophical articulation of this paradox seems to be the main motivation behind much of Derrida’s work. See, for example, Derrida (1979). See also Spivak (1976) and Culler (1983).
4. In a quite similar context Donna Bennett (1987) writes about “Canadian silence.”
5. This point is clearly described by Stuart Hall in the following passage: “There are at least two different ways of thinking about ‘cultural identity.’ The first position defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’ . . . . There is, however, a second, related but different view of cultural identity. This second position recognizes that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’ . . . . We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about ‘one experience, one identity,’ acknowledging its other side—the ruptures and discontinuities. . . . Cultural identity, in this second sense, . . . is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture” (Hall 1990, 223–25).
6. The metaphor that Gilroy uses here is the slave ship—somewhat reminiscent of the boat-taxi on the Bosphorus: “The ship provides a chance to explore the articulations between the discontinuous histories of England’s ports, its interfaces with the wider world” (Gilroy 1993, 17).
7. Here I am using the term “border-writing” in the broadest sense of the word as defined by Emily Hicks (1988, 47): “Border writing is a mode of operation, not a definition. It is an attitude on the part of the writer towards more than one culture. Border writers give the reader the opportunity to practice multi-dimensional perception and nonsynchronous memory.”
8. For other critiques of the concept of hybridity in recent literature, see, for example: Mitchell (1997) and Werbner and Modood (1997).
References
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Literary Culture
Mitchell, K. 1997. “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15:533–53. Nixon, Rob. 1994. Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South Africa Culture and the World Beyond. London: Routledge. Park, Robert E. 1928. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man.” American Journal of Sociology 33 (6): 881–93. Said, Edward W. 1991. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.
———. 1995. “East Isn’t East.” Times Literary Supplement, February.
Spivak, G. C. 1976. “Translator’s Preface.” pp. ix–xxxix in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. London: John Hopkins University Press. Stonequist, Everett V. 1937. The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Turner, Victor. 1967. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” Chapter 4 of The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu
. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Press.
Ritual
Ward, Donald. 1981. Borderlands. London: Anvil Press Poetry.
Werbner, P. and Modood., T. (eds.). 1997. Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books.
West, Cornel. 1991. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” pp. 19–38 in Russell Ferguson (ed), Out There: Marginalization and . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Contemporary Cultures
Young, R. J. C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.
Zeitlin, Irving M. 1973. Rethinking Sociology: A Critique of Contemporary Theory. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. ———. 2001. Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
