Hybrid Distantiation

Abstract

In a 2003 American Literary History article, Cyrus Patell announced that while “[h]istorically, the concept of hybridity was a conceptual leap forward for minority discourse” allowing “us to see that what appeared to be an either/or situation is in reality a situation of both/and,” our “next great task” is to “move beyond hybridity toward a more complex understanding of the nuances of heterogeneous identities and multiple, overlapping identities.”¹ This chapter looks at Chi-cano novelist Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996) to consider the ways in which attending to this next great task cannot come simply from shifting our theoretical frameworks or dropping the term hybridity from our work. Hybridity is already an embedded concept in ideologies of liberal multicultural US citizenship. In its most simplified form—the joining of one “type” to another (usually through reproduction) to form a new composite type—it is a foun-dational logic of US liberal multiculturalism, which celebrates the hyphenated citizen and the nonthreatening diversity of a hybridized subject population (Asian American, African American, gay American, etc.). A serious limitation of hybridity as a critical tool under liberal multiculturalism is not only that it essentializes the two “joined” identities but also that it too often constructs difference and conflict as a celebratory pluralism, thereby obscuring systemic inequalities.