The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems with Crossing the Border

‘Silencing’ the border as a strategy to conceal the ‘other’ side: the case of the Curonian Spit

“…Border spaces often challenge the clear-cut distinctions between 'here' and 'there', 'us' and 'them' and introduce new types of experiences and identities. 7 However, in this article, hybridity is understood as an aspect of the border. It allows us to see its socially constructed nature and a multiplicity of its meanings and manifestations, which depend on concrete circumstances and points of view.…”

Juba’s “Black Face” / Lady Delacour’s “Mask”: Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

“…31 In gender, race, and postcolonial theory, hybridity frequently serves as a means for unsettling the border, for breaking out of the prisonhouse of oppositionalist logic into some kind of radically emancipated, free floating condition where the subject is free to move between the great dualities inherited from the enlightenmentmind and body, culture and nature, rationality and emotion, self and other, and so on-as well as the great dualities emerging from the history of colonialismcolonizer and colonized, settler and native, active and passive. 32 But as Annie E. Coombes and Avtar Brah suggest, the concept of hybridity must be subjected to scrutiny; critics must "take account of the multiple uses and meanings of the term depending upon the configuration of social, cultural, and political practices within which it is embedded at any given time." 33 In eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain, the transgressive possibilities inherent in the concept of hybridity were represented largely as a source of anxiety.…”