Beyond Metropolises: Hybridity in a Transnational Context

Beyond metropolises and within transnational contexts, investigating hybridity discourses is long overdue. This article argues that the epistemic violence embedded in such discourse has grave implications for the very impoverished nations and peoples with whom it claims solidarity and that, because this discourse is trendy in academia, its service to neoliberal capitalism is both easy to miss and important to expose. Interstices of postcolonial hybridity discourses, development discourses, and environmental justice discourses—dominant versions of which are segregated from contextual issues—as produced in Western academia and exported to third world countries for appropriation as developmental efforts—reveal epistemic violence, the manipulation of a knowledge-power tryst by developed countries in an attempt to materialize their neoimperialist desire under rubrics of developmental myths