Hybridity as cultural synthesis can be disarticulated from its racialized origins

Evidence

Thus, I do not take seriously Robert Young’s argument (that the use of the term “hybridity” simply restores the old racialized discourse of difference which one was attempting to supersede). This is semantic quibbling. Surely, terms can be disarticulated and rearticulated from their originary meanings: what is this pre-post-structuralist conception of language in which meaning is fixed eternally to its racialized referent? Clearly, my concern throughout has been with cultural hybridity, which I relate to the novel combination of heterogeneous cultural elements in a new synthesis—e.g., “creolization” and “transculturation”—and which cannot be fixed by, or dependent on, the so-called racial character of the people whose culture I am discussing. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 400

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines cultural hybridity as creolization/transculturation — novel synthesis of heterogeneous elements — and defends it against the charge of restoring racialized discourse.
• XREF: The disarticulation/rearticulation of terms from their racialized referents is the precise mechanism the reader will need when discussing ‘Islamophobia’ itself being reworked as a term of critique. — connects to: All cultures arise from mixture, so hybridity theory restates an essentialist error. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 915; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”