At its most basic definition, hybridity means a crossing or mixing. “Hybridity” emerged in biology to describe genetic variability, but in the nineteenth century, the term was later applied to racial theory and linguistics to describe the mixing of race, language, and culture. The origins of the negative connotations of “hybridity” can be traced to the Greeks and Romans, who regarded both biological and cultural hybridity unfavorably (Heit, 2005). Prominent figures such as Plato, Pericles, Aeschylus, and Aristotle voice a negative view of the “barbarian” other as a source of potential social disorder. This fear of racial degeneration would later carry on into the era of European imperialism as the concept of hybridity would continue to generate fear of miscegenation and cultural contamination and encourage the assimilation of the Other (Burke, 2009). 

In the field of cultural studies and critical rhetorical and communication studies, the concept of hybridity is used to analyze discourses about race, culture, identity, postcolonialism, language, globalization, citizenship, intersectionality, imperialism, migration, and diaspora. According to communication and global media scholar Marwan Kraidy, hybridity “has become a master trope” in cultural studies, critical studies, and postcolonial theory and has been both “widely used and criticized” (Kraidy, 2002, p. 316). The shifting and unstable dynamics of hybridity renders it a double-edge sword—hybridity can function as a “practice of hegemony” to serve dominant interests and reinforce white privilege, or hybridity can “pose a profound threat to whiteness” by exposing and rupturing whiteness as a discourse and rendering whiteness visible (Shugart, 2007, p. 119). Although the progressive potential of hybridity is often celebrated, the persistence of nativistic, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant discourses reflect how hybrid individuals are often viewed as a threat to racist social structures and erased within a discourse of a “monoracial” and assimilative society. 

Especially in the age of globalization, the concept of hybridity can be further expanded to think about how all people are in a sense culturally hybrid due to the transglobal movements of media, language, ideas, peoples, and cultures. According to postcolonial scholar and cultural critic Edward Said, “The history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowing” (as cited in Burke, 2009, p. 40). Hybrid aesthetics are recognizable in entertainment, art, literature, music, and food as there is no such thing as a “pure culture” free of outside influences. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall asserts that cultural identity is a “positioning” rather than an essence, and it is not static, but a “production” or “process” which is always undergoing transformation (1994, p. 222). A rhetorical study of hybridity functions to illuminate how diasporic individuals navigate the borderlands and hybrid cultural spaces, and how they perform hybridity in difference while still engaging in shared meaning-making toward social and political goals. A critical cultural and rhetorical theory of hybridity and diasporic identity has transformational value as it offers something new that is “neither the one nor the Other, but something else besides” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 219). 

Rhetoric, media, and cultural studies scholar Raka Shome outlines the importance of a postcolonial critical perspective for rhetorical studies. She illuminates the colonizing and imperialist discursive practices that subjugate culturally hybrid individuals. In order to expose the eurocentrism of Western discourses, Shome advances three perspectives of postcolonialism: “discursive imperialism, hybrid and diasporic cultural identities, and postcolonial academic self-reflexivity” (Shome, 1999a, p. 592). Discursive imperialism refers to the representations of “third world” subjects or racially oppressed peoples as an inferior “other” as a result of Western discursive practices. These Western discourses in turn uphold Western hegemony and legitimize global power structures by “subjugating the ‘native’ by colonizing him or her discursively”; thus, Western discourse becomes a means of imperialism through linguistic power (p. 592-593). This construction of the Western self through the creation of an “other” is defined by postcolonial scholar and cultural critic Edward Said as “Orientalism.” Orientalism is a function of power that frames the racial “other” in numerous spheres such as education, media, and scholarship and places them under surveillance and domination as they become objects of the colonial gaze (Said, 1978). A postcolonial perspective thus argues for the recognition of the “hybrid location of cultural value[s]” as hybridity exists in the borderlands of “cultural indeterminacy” and resists “any totalizing forms of cultural understanding (whether imperialistic or nationalistic)” (Shome, 1999a, p. 594). 

For postcolonial scholar and critical theorist Homi Bhabha (1994), the effect of colonial power is actually the “production of hybridization” rather than the consolidation of colonial authority or the repression of tradition (p. 119). The “production of discriminatory identities” is meant to secure the idea of pure colonial authority, but hybridity and the uncertainty and ambiguity it produces destabilize “the visibility of the colonial presence and makes the recognition of its authority problematic” as hybrid representation enters the dominant discourse (p. 120). Bhabha argues that the language of critique can “overcome the given grounds of opposition and open up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations” (p. 26). Critical rhetorical theory allows for new imaginative possibilities that can rupture Western hegemony and reveal the liberatory and constraining discourses of hybridity. 

The complexity of hybridity resists unidirectional tropical moves that attempt to simplify the “exotic” and “unclassified” diasporic identity by structuring the Other in relation to the Self (Spivak, 1988a, p. 5-6).  Postcolonial scholar and critical theorist Gayatri Spivak critiques European ethnocentrism and its role in the constitution of the Other through assimilation with the Western subject (p. 89). In the Journal of Applied Communication Research, Orbe and Allen (2008) discovered that most articles presupposed a universal White subject or relied on dualistic categories when talking about racial identity; this presumes race as a stable rather than a dynamic category with permeable boundaries. However, hybrid individuals exist outside of dualistic binaries of white/black, traditional/modern, oppressor/oppressed and are not easily categorizable or generalizable (Anzaldua, 1987). 

Through a critical rhetorical lens, hybridity’s unities of discourse need to be analyzed in order to demonstrate that the labels used to describe hybrid individuals are constructed through metaphoric language and reductionist categorization. By pointing out these discourses of hybridity, critical rhetoric can then point to a reconception of discourses of hybridity that imagines and embraces hybridity in all its uniqueness, ambiguity, and complexity. Historical theorist Hayden White defines discourse as “a product of consciousness’s efforts to come to terms with problematical domains of experience” (1978, p. 5). The identity of diasporic individuals is a “problematical domain of experience” that society seeks to understand through metaphoric tropes, often by attempting to render the unfamiliar into the familiar. This is problematic because these tropes often result in operations of assimilation and accommodation. The trope of synecdoche “constitutes objects as parts of wholes or gather entities together as elements of a totality sharing the same essential natures” (p. 8-9). This tendency towards synecdoche results in diasporic individuals being reduced to their parts rather than the whole. An identity classification based on only one aspect of diasporic identity such as citizenship, race, generational difference, appearance, mannerisms, or language fluency is a product of society’s “need to organize reality” without an “ironic reflection on the inadequacy of the characterization” in explaining the complex identity of diasporic peoples. For example, the term hapa primarily used in Hawaii refers to a person of mixed racial heritage (often white and Asian), while the Japanese term hafu emphasizes a mixed person with Japanese citizenship/nationality, often with a high level of fluency in Japanese. In choosing the labels with which to describe diasporic individuals, it is important to remember that words “will always obscure as much as they reveal about the objects they are meant to signify,” and that “a value-neutral system of representation” is impossible (White, 1978, p. 232). 

Communication and global media scholar Marwan Kraidy argues that the study of media representations of hybridity is important, and that the attention of communication scholars “needs to be redirected from debating the political and theoretical usefulness of hybridity, to analyzing how hegemonic structures operate in a variety of contexts to construct different hybridities” (p. 334). Studying discourses of hybridity through a postcolonial analysis of media representation is imperative to understand the ideological forces at work and the slippage that results in the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of hybridity.


Hybrid individuals in the media are often reduced to their parts, misunderstood and misidentified, or under constant scrutiny and questioning of their background. For example, former president Barack Obama is biracial as his mother is white, but he is known as the first black president and his hybridity is often ignored in the media. He was also constantly scrutinized by the media about his place of birth. In America, black identity is linked to the racist history of census-taking and the assigning of specific labels to mixed-race African-Americans or “mulattoes” based on the amount of “black” blood they had and the “one-drop rule.” Furthermore, golf star Tiger Woods’ decision to embrace his hybrid identity by labeling himself “Cablinasion,” or Caucasian, black, (American) Indian, and Asian, was respected by some African-Americans, but criticized by others who viewed it as a betrayal or rejection of his blackness (Nishime, 2012, p. 92). Woods argued that to only call himself African-American would be to erase his mother’s side of his racial identity, but many choose to racially categorize Woods solely based on his physical appearance and his apparent blackness. The 1997 “Tiger Woods” bill called for a “multiracial” category on the census. This bill was opposed by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, who argued that this category would undermine the political power of other legally recognized racial categories. This debate over a “multiracial” category illuminated the divide between notions of “colorblind” rhetoric and civil-rights based strategic essentialism. 

The ambiguity of hybridity is often beneficial to profit-driven capitalist interests. Latina singer, dancer, and actress Jennifer Lopez is marketed as a “crossover” star that has popular appeal with a wide range of audiences and can play characters of a variety of different ethnic/racial backgrounds (Shugart, 2007). According to Shugart, media representations of Lopez center around her authentic “otherness,” which is “secured via a particularly gendered and sexualized discourse of excess” through racialized exotification (p. 115). The ambiguity of hybridity can also be weaponized to uphold whiteness. Japanese-Haitian tennis player Naomi Osaka has been whitewashed in media representations, and her blackness often goes unmentioned when she is labeled by the media, who chose to focus on her Japaneseness instead. 

The ambiguity and ever-changing nature of hybridity defies easy categorization based on biological or cultural criteria. The lack of a vocabulary to describe hybridity further exacerbates racism in media representations. Hybridity complicates the racial notion of the body as signifier and disrupts the process of racial formation that influences how people interpret and understand the world and others around them. In Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative, Samira Kawash argues, “The modern conception of racial identity maintains an uneasy relation to the visual; the visible marks of the racialized body are only signs of a deeper, interior difference…The body is the sign of a difference that exceeds the body” (1997, p. 130). Ambiguous hybrid bodies disrupt this relation as “the visible becomes an insufficient guarantee of knowledge” (p. 130). Similarly, cultural studies and rhetoric scholar Raka Shome describes her experience of the body as a signifier of her Otherness: “My body becomes a site of struggle, a constantly marked racial signifier” (Shome, 1999b, p. 120). Especially for hybrid individuals who are physically “passing” as monoracial, they experience a dissonance between how they identify and their perceived racial identity—their hybridity is physically rendered invisible and they can feel like an “imposter” or “fraud.” Because the rhetorical negotiation of hybridity often occurs on the mediated bodies of hybrid individuals in popular culture, it is important to study these discourses and how they challenge and/or uphold whiteness and hegemony. 

Diasporic hybridity emerges from cultural and ethnic migrations. The postcolonial subject or culturally hybrid individual lives between two or more cultures or between two or more nations, often not feeling a sense of belonging to either one as the hybrid consciousness shuttles back and forth, unable to situate itself in either culture (Anzaldua, 1987). The hybrid individual exists in the diasporic position of what cultural theorist and author Gloria Anzaldua has coined the “borderlands.” Bhabha (1994) describes African-American artist Renee Green’s metaphor of a stairwell to describe the in-betweenness of diasporic identity; the stairwell becoming “the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white” (p. 20). The movement that the stairwell allows shows how identity is unfixed and unsettled and allows for shuttling to and from both polarities. This in-between space can function as a space of resistance and strategic hybridity. Performance studies and intercultural scholar Shane Moreman introduces the metaphors of the bridge and twin. The hybrid individual functions as a bridge in between two cultures, and the metaphor of the twin illustrates the rhetorical possibilities of a hybrid individual acknowledging the twoness or doubleness of their identity. Similarly, Stuart Hall (1994) visualizes black Caribbean identities as two axes or vectors, one vector representing “similarity and continuity” and one vector of “difference and rupture” (p. 226). The relationship between these two axes represents how Caribbean people share “the experience of a profound discontinuity” because of historical events such as slavery, colonization, and migration (p. 227).

Although hybrid individuals often move across national borders and resist essentialist notions of race, they can also employ Spivak’s strategic essentialism as a political tool to organize for political goals (Spivak, 1988b). Postcolonial societies must imaginatively re-tell their past as colonization “distorts, disfigures, and destroys” history (Hall, 1994, p. 224). Hall specifically uses the term “re-telling the past” rather than “rediscovery” to make the point that identity is not grounded in archaeology, but hybrid aesthetics that embrace “an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation” in order to restore “the broken rubric of our past” (p. 224-225). In Hall’s focus on “Caribbeanness” and the hybrid aesthetic, he observes that what is “essentially” or “uniquely” Caribbean is “precisely the mixes of color, pigmentation...the blends of tastes that is Caribbean cuisine; the aesthetics of the cross-overs” (p. 235-236). Hall defines hybrid aesthetics as a kind of “cultural play” that redraws boundaries and is a place of “doubleness” (p. 228). For example, Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) purposefully shifts between poetry, narrative, and autoethnography, and between English, Spanish, and Chicano Spanish as she integrates different methods of storytelling in order to demonstrate the hybrid consciousness and the hybrid aesthetic. 

A new critical rhetorical theory of hybridity can disrupt reductionist metaphorical unities of discourse that reduce the Other to the self-same by theorizing new tropes and theories of how we can make contact with difference and understand diasporic identities. Tropes were theorized to “deviate from…accepted usage and normal usage. Tropes turn away from the normal…deviation, which tropes offer, makes liberation possible” (Sutton and Mifsud, 2015, p. xxii).  The goal is “contact without conquest, affiliation without assimilation” and a “respectful stance of wonder” that is appreciative, but not objectifying or appropriative of diasporic identities (p. 85, 87). 

Due to recent diasporic migrations and changing demographics across the world, hybridity has “become a master trope” in cultural studies, critical studies, and postcolonial theory (Kraidy, 2002, p. 316); however, “sustained treatments that theorize cultural hybridity as a communicative space or practice...and thus place hybridity at the heart of communication theory as a field, remain rare” (p. 316). Hybridity ruptures presumed “stable” categories of race and notions of colorblindness by illuminating the concept of race itself as a trope, and a critical interrogation of hybridity results in the troubling of critical race theory and intersectionality. Communication and rhetoric scholars acknowledge that addressing race in a way that both accounts for the complexities of difference and resists essentializing, while also recognizing that race is both socially constructed and a material reality with lived consequences is a central problem in their research: ‘‘This paradox of race, while certainly not new, continues to plague our scholarship” (Flores and Moon, 2002, p. 186). Although hybridity and its consequent labels are often thrust upon individuals, hybridity can also be used strategically to turn away from discourses of cultural “authenticity” and metaphoric tropes in a way that allows for a hybrid “performative ‘doing’ of identity” that reclaims hybridity from the harmful effects of linguistic terrorism, the performance of whiteness, constricting labels, and feelings of illegitimacy and guilt (Moreman, 2009, p. 351).  It is also imperative to continue to study hybridity and its relationships to power, inequality, and Western hegemony due to the persistence of xenophobic, nativistic, and anti-immigrant discourses. A critical rhetorical turn in analyzing the discursive performance of hybridity calls for new ways of knowing, being, doing, and meaning-making. 

Works Cited

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Kawash, S.  (1997). Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

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Moreman, S. (2009). “Memoir as Performance: Strategies of Hybrid Ethnic Identity,” Text and Performance Quarterly, 29(4), 346-366

Nishime, L.  (2012). “The Case for Cablinasian: Multiracial Naming From Plessy to Tiger Woods.” Communication Theory, 22(1), 92-111

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Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books 

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Shome, R. (1999b). “Whiteness and the Politics of Location: Postcolonial Reflections.” Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, edited by Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, 107–28. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Shugart, H. (2007). “Crossing Over: Hybridity and Hegemony in the Popular Media.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4(2), 115-141

Spivak, G. (1988a). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66-111. New York: Columbia University Press

Spivak, G. (1988b). “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 3–32. New York: Oxford University Press

Sutton, J. S., & Mifsud, M. L. (2015). A Revolution in Tropes: Alloiostrophic Rhetoric. Lanham: Lexington Books

White, H. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press