Comparative Hybridities: Latin American Intellectuals and Postcolonialists

Abstract:

Tracing the discursive history of the term hybridity in the work of Nestor Garcia Canclini manifests the roots of his thought in Latin American intellectual history. In particular, the regional tradition growing out of Jose Carlos Maritegui's writings inflects Garcia Canclini's work with a concern for historical location and questions of political economy. These emphases contrast with those of Anglo-American postcolonial 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.

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