The concept of hybridity has been so central to postcolonial studies, but at the same time so variably interpreted and deployed, and so wildly productive and reproductive, that writers and critics have generated a seemingly infinite range of ‘hybrids’ (theories of the hybrid, or hybrid theories). This horticultural analogy is, of course, highly over-determined by the etymology and history of the term. As Robert Young reminds us in Colonial Desire, the word ‘hybrid’ in English comes from the Latin hybrida, ‘the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar’, and thus comes to mean more generally a transgression of ‘natural’ or ‘original’ species and the consequent production of a new variety, with multiple origins, formed from the interaction between what were previously distinct and separate ‘types’. Its adaptation by postcolonial theory, and in particular in the work of Homi K. Bhabha, has had a dual function: on the one hand, it has allowed us to expose and critically analyse the close links between the biological determinism in which hybridity is grounded and the racialism of colonial ideology; and on the other, it points to ways in which the foregrounding and active reappropriation of hybrid cultural identities, and the disruption of homogeneity in all its forms, opens the way for counter-discursive and counter-hegemonic political theory and practice.

One common critique of hybridity as a potentially enabling form of political activism is that it is confined to ‘discourse theory’, that its emphasis on textualism means that it simply bypasses any engagement with actual, material political struggles.