Appropriately for a word broadly defined as “having a mixed character,” “hybridity” has elicited contradictory interpretation since its inception in the Greek word hybris. While the word could mean miscegenation, shame, wantonness, outrage, and even violence, the term carried the alternate but equally valid connotation of surpassing limitations. This session foregrounds the concept’s status as a positive generative force and a mode of transcendence as we trace the hybrid’s varied deployment throughout history, from physical creatures to newly created plant and animal species to its deployments by Bhabha, Haraway, and Latour in their discourses on postcolonialism, gender, and science. With the term “hybrid” now an omnipresent descriptor of recent innovations in classroom and energy technologies, understanding the concept’s historical and current alignment with abrogating limitation enables the imagination of new alternatives as we move beyond the Anthropocene.

After the presider’s brief introductions, speakers will give 13-minute papers to allow at least 15 minutes of discussion after presentations. Claire Sommers opens the session by using The Winter’s Tale as a mechanism by which to articulate the hybrid’s evolution from antiquity to our own context. She positions the generic and temporal rupture of The Winter’s Tale as the representation of the hybrid’s shift from a destructive and hallucinatory emblem aligned with illness, miscegenation, and paternal anxiety to a material reality constructed by costume that enables the movement between geographic locations and social strata. By characterizing these costumes as scientific and technological innovations that vitiate boundaries of space and class while mollifying the paternal anxiety and misogyny that animates the earlier imaginary composites, Sommers establishes Shakespeare’s play as a Renaissance antecedent to the hybrid’s deployment by Bhabha and Haraway, namely as a means of blurring the boundaries of identity and subverting hegemonies of race, class, and gender. Next, Aileen Miyuki Farrar moves us from the Jacobean to the Victorian era by examining the hybridity of Wilkie Collins’ Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time. Her presentation similarly examines the intersection of the scientific and the literary in order to establish Collins’ sensation novel as a lens by which to understand the shift toward an emergent modern self-consciousness. By looking at the novel’s depictions of children and sound studies, Farrar’s paper characterizes Wilkie’s work as a locus for the creation of a dialectic between literature and science. She thus demonstrates the novel’s anticipation of the interdisciplinary hybridity articulated by Latour and shows that Collins’ work deploys admixture as a means to advance knowledge. Then, Kyle Garton-Gundling continues this focus on knowledge, moving into the 21^st century by discussing R.F. Huang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence. He frames the novel’s description of a subaltern library where knowledge is created and transmitted without political implication as a site of resistance against the colonial power exhibited by the British empire. By aligning this library with Bhabha’s strategies of subversion, Garton-Gundling shows that the novel portrays a profound imagining of how resistance movements might make hopeful use hybridity to maintain a sense of intrinsic value despite revolutionary opposition. Our final presenter Suzie Telep shifts us from literary analysis to the real-world case study of a Cameroonian Parisian woman and consultant expert in African luxury fashion. Her paper’s synthesis of Bhabha’s postcolonialist discourse with linguistic theory enables her to read the Black female body and Afropolitan fashion as visual and discursive signs that challenge Eurocentric colonial beauty standards. While Telep links the hybridity of Afropolitan fashion with Bhabha’s ambivalence to show that it reproduces racist and sexist power structures that constrain Black female agency, she also positions it as a mechanism to produce anti-racist images of Black African women that challenge hegemonic ideologies.

Our presenters have a range of interests, professional ranks, and racial identities. We are faculty at private and public universities, with two of our presenters Assistant Professors, one Associate Professor, and one full-time Lecturer. We represent Latinx, Asian-American, Caucasian, and African American identities. Our differing fields of expertise are evinced by the papers that comprise this session. Although three presenters are part of English departments, one looks at early modern literature and drama; one at 19^th century literature emphasizing feminist epistemologies and the medical humanities; and one the intersections between multicultural American literature and Asian religions. The fourth focuses on linguistic and sociocultural anthropology concentrating on real world application with an eye toward representations of race at the intersection of the French and Francophone. We also examine range of texts, including drama, novel, speculative fiction, and case study.