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Tracing the discursive history of the term "hybridity" in the work of Nestor García Canclini manifests the roots of his thought in Latin American intellectual history. In particular, the regional tradition growing out of José Carlos Mariátegui's writings inflects García Canclini's work with a concern for historical location and questions of political economy. These emphases contrast with those of Anglo-American post-colonial theory for in this latter discourse, hybridity is understood textually, as a linguistic or psychoanalytic category, just as colonialism is often centered in the consciousness of the Western colonizing subject. The goal of examining these contrasting conceptions of hybridity is not merely to expose the culturalist fetish of much mainstream postcolonialism, but also to suggest a larger contrast between intellectual voices in the Global South and mainstream postcolonialist critics who are often taken to speak for the southern intellectual.
Key Words: Hybridity, Mestizaje, Dependency, Transculturation, Postcolonialism
Nestor García Canclini and Homi Bhabha have both become inextricably tied to one of the most often cited terms in the contemporary lexicon of cultural studies: hybridity. Once the Mexico City-based Argentine anthropologist García Canclini had his book Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (1989) translated into English and published in 1995 as Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, it was perhaps inevitable that many readers would associate him with Bhabha, who had already become established as an author of several key texts within the bibliography of postmodernism generally, and of postcolonialism in particular. Bhabha's work particularly emphasizes what he has often referred to as "hybridity" in order to subvert the rhetorical binarisms-particularly the one between "East" and "West"-which he believes enable the combinations of prejudice and domination that form the foundation of the colonial project.
While García Canclini has become increasingly well known in the United States as his work has been translated into English and promoted by scholars including Fredric Jameson and George Yudice, his fame for the most part has not moved beyond the boundaries of specialists in the field of Latin American cultural studies. Bhabha, on the other hand, has become required reading for any scholar aspiring to be current in contemporary critical theory. Walter Mignolo has recently reminded us that the geographic and institutional origins of...