Cultural hybridity and migration: From extraordinary states of in-betweenness to everyday phenomenon

Cultural hybridity is a key concept in the study of migration literature, and, although it is a concept that has had a rocky career of hyperbolic celebrations, severe criticisms, and refinements, it continues to be a central and driving perspective in conceptions of migratory identity. Basically, cultural hybridity refers to the blending of cultures that result from contacts between different people and texts of all kinds, a phenomenon that has always taken place, but has accelerated in the modern age with the increased volume and speed of the global movement of people and fast cultural flows in all kinds of media. In Jan Pieterse's general formulation, "hybridity concerns the mixture of phenomena that are held to be different" and may refer to all kinds of things, such as "cultures, nations, ethnicities, status groups, classes, and genres" where hybridization "by its very existence blurs the distinctions among them" (Globalization 81). In relation to migration literature, cultural hybridity may be identified as one of its distinguishing aesthetic features, just as it is frequently one of its conscious themes-the latter being especially the case in the 1990s.