Debating Cultural Hybridity

Cultural hybridity has become one of the key buzz words of late twentieth-century critical theory, cited and celebrated as a space of resistance and protest, on the one hand, and tolerance, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, on the other. But what are the limits of cultural hybridity? Why is it such a difficult - at times almost impossible - challenge to negotiate differences across cultures? In what ways does racism strike at the foundations of multiculturalism to create pathological cultural hybrids and ambivalences? This pathbreaking new book by leading European sociologists and anthropologists deconstructs established approaches and discloses why anti-racism and multiculturalism can be hard roads to travel.

1. Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity - Pnina Werbner
PART 1: Hybridity, Globalisation and the Practice of Cultural Complexity
2. From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity - Hans-Rudolf Wicker
3. The Making and Unmaking of Strangers - Zygmunt Bauman
4. Identity and Difference in a Globalized World - Alberto Melucci
5. Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarreling - Jonathan Friedman
6. 'The Enigma of Arrival' - Peter van der Veer
7. Adorno at WOMAD - John Hutnyk
PART 2: Essentialism versus Hybridity: Negotiating Difference
8. Is It So Difficult to be Anti-Racist? - Michel Wieviorka
9. 'Difference', Cultural Racism and Anti-Racism - Tariq Modood
10. Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism - Alistair Bonnett
11. Ethnicity, Gender Relations and Multiculturalism - Nira Yuval-Davis
12. Dominant and Demotic Discourses of Culture - Gerd Baumann
13. Essentialising Essentialism, Essentialising Silence - Pnina Werbner
PART 3: Mapping Hybridity
14. Tracing Hybridity in Theory - Nikos Papastergiadis