Norval Edwards
Senior Lecturer
Department of Literatures in English
UWI, Mona

The Fetishism of Hybridity: A Reading of Conceptual Norms in Caribbean Criticism

This paper examines the theoretical inflation of hybridity in contemporary Caribbean cultural criticism, particularly in its instrumental formulation of a regional ethos and aesthetics characterized by incessant cultural syncretism, epistemological pluralism, diasporic mobility, and the subversion of fixed categories of race, nation, and language. In the wake of the influential theories of Antonio B?enìtez-Rojo and Edwouard Glissant, hybridity’s operative concepts and tropes now routinely constitute a normative discourse in academic studies of the region’s literature and culture. Theories of hybridity have resulted in immensely productive formulations and readings of Caribbean poetics, but their conceptual ascendancy can blind us to their problematic, conflictual, and differentiated configurations and genealogies. This paper argues that we need to take these problematic aspects into account by reading discourses of hybridity in terms of the politics of intellectual history as well as the poetics of cultural forms.