• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.231-266
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• 2010

This paper explores hybridity and hybridized relations that see mixings and crossings as the first moment of multicultural society. References to hybridity often assume that the definition and orientation of the term are located within biology; that is, hybridity constitutes a mixing of two formally discrete objects. In this regard, there seems to be a dialectical preoccupation with purity that goes hand in hand with discussions of hybridity. This dialectical reference to hybridity privileges whole, complete entities as the original instance before mixing, and in this way purity becomes reified. My analysis of hybridity foregrounds mixings that occur at the level of the social, not exclusively at the level of the biological. Hybridity contexts the myth of monoculturalism in the United States and foregrounds multiculturalism as the initial context around which difference has begun to be conceived. In destabilizing the myth of racial origins, this paper attempts to establish a retroactive construction of purity, which is historically, ideologically, and ethnically examined in Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Through this work composed of disparate narratives discourses, Anzaldua employs physical differences to ward off the colonial desire that has defined others as objects which are to be controlled. In this regard, this paper pursues the way that physical differences could be repositioned in terms of 'hybridity' that has been related to the cultural, historical, economical significations of borderlands. The space of borderlands is also a place marked psychologically; it will turn differences mobilized in the borderland into an acute consciousness that makes us recognize 'otherness' within ourselves. In sum, this paper attempts to elaborate the productive and creative interactions among disparate languages, classes, genders, and ideas, which will draw attention to their own interlocking nature.