Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change

Migration Literature and Hybridity reinvigorates the study of post-colonial hybridity by offering a way out of the theoretical deadlock of pitting hybridity against purity, or flux against fixity. The book theorises hybridity primarily in terms of time and develops Bakhtin's notions of organic and intentional hybridity in ways that enable us to work with several speeds of becoming, hybridisation and cultural change. Through Deleuze's theory of becoming and Lotman's cultural semiotics, the book proposes intentional and organic hybridity as two extremes on a continuum ranging from transcultural change as fast and highly visible to transcultural change as largely obscured and very slow - the latter being the condition of any supposedly pure culture. The theory of the first part of the book is expounded in three detailed studies of Mukherjee's Jasmine, Mahjoub's The Carrier and Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival that engage the entire spectrum of hybridity from the enunciation of delirious transcultural change to hybridity as a slow 'changing sameness'. The readings illustrate how a more comprehensive engagement with transcultural Literature is enabled once we leave behind the mere celebration of contemporary migration and its hybrid heroes.