Different diasporas and the hype of hybridity

This is the historical movement of hybridity as camouflage, as a contesting antagonistic agency functioning in the time lag of sign/symbol, which is a space in-between the rules of engagement. – Bhabha, 1994, 193 Today‟s self-proclaimed mobile and multiple identities may be a marker not of contemporary social fluidity and dispossession but of a new stability, self-assurance and quietism. – Young, 1995, 4 In much of contemporary cultural criticism there is a celebration of diaspora and hybridity as spaces of subversion. The terms are attractive because of the inherent instability associated with each concept. In contrast with the unappealing teleologies of modernist paradigms or the paralyzing binaries of either/or frameworks, hybridity and diaspora seem to offer a satisfyingly unstable and ambivalent alternative. For many poststructuralist critics, conceptualizations of the mobile, marginal, contradictory, and ambiguous are especially soothing in a period where a growing number of Marxist and feminist scholars have demanded locations of actual resistance in addition to positions of textual critique. The “third space”2 of hybridity and the margins of the diaspori