Although the term hybrid has gained much traction in literary analyses of contemporary experimental poetry, there is a notable divide within scholarly discourse wherein its uses pertain to either form or content. The term has been used by literary critics and anthologists to categorize works of poetry that combine formal techniques and practices from opposing traditions of literary history, but within cultural, postcolonial, and Asian American studies, it has served as an important term that designates sites of resistance within cross-cultural contexts of uneven power dynamics. This discrepancy in uses of the term hybrid serves as the basis for my critical investigation of experimental poetry by Cathy Park Hong, Craig Santos Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Monica Ong. This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary reassessment of the concept of hybridity that applies it to both formal experimentation and cultural content by examining the innovative ways in which Asian American and Pacific Islander poets use hybrid forms to represent hybrid identities and the particular social, political, and colonial contexts within which they emerge. While the term in relation to ethnic American poetry has primarily pertained to multilingual features, my study widens the scope of hybridity to not only include verbal expression but also visual forms of representation (such as photographs, illustrations, and digital renderings of images). How do these poets grapple with both text and image as a means of communicating across and confronting different types of boundaries (such as linguistic, national, cultural, racial, and ideological)? How do they utilize the page as a textual-visual space to not only represent hybrid identity but also to critique their social and political milieu? I address these inquiries by exploring the ways in which Hong, Perez, Choi, and Ong enact formal hybridity to challenge multilingualism as cosmopolitan commodity, the colonial erasure of indigenous language and culture, hegemonic narratives of history, and representations of the racial Other. This dissertation argues that their poetry demonstrates an expansive hybridity in which multilingual and mixed-media practices serve as the very means by which they negotiate the fraught conditions of migration, colonization, geopolitics, and marginalization. / English

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This pedagogy of weaving the Nigerian Tiv a'nger into life writing, mobility and place blends in my experiences, cultures, geographical locations and stories. As I travel through and within countries as an international student, I draw from postcolonial and feminist scholars such as Anzaldua (1987), Bhabba (1994), Rushdie (2011) and Trinh (1994) in negotiating a hybrid space where my sense of belonging and home is continuously unsettled and negotiated. In this thesis, I use the a’nger as a metaphor for blending, merging and blurring text, identities, and questioning the conditions which produce stories, memories and events. In this auto/ethno/graphic pedagogy of weaving the Tiv a'nger into my encounters as a traveller, sojourner and mother, I am seeking to link my cultural background with my scholarship in the faculty of education and the faculty of law as a literary metissage that allows me to situate my narrative within broader sociopolitical discourses that query gender race and class issues (hooks, 2003; Fanon, 2008). I am guided by a desire to show that stories are research and that stories influence our movements as Africans in diaspora (Achebe, 1973; Wa Thiong’o, 1986). In drawing from the stories of my Tiv ancestors through African indigenous a’nger, I am guided by a quest to decolonize a space in academia to include other ways of knowing and being in the world. In retelling my stories, I open up conversations about the experiences of international students from Africa who relocate to other countries in the quest for continuous education. I use qualitative research methodologies such as auto/ethno/graphy (Douglas & Carless, 2013), bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005), metissage (Lionnet, 1991), multimodality (Morawski et al., 2016); and life writing (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) to linger, tarry and trouble the sites between history and culture, home and abroad, us and them.

Fran Ross's only novel, Oreo, explores the nature of multiethnic American identities through an empowered female character that embarks on a Theseus-like journey. Ross devotes significant portions of the novel to the introduction of Oreo's family and individual character, in order to carefully outline her interracial and multiethnic upbringing as an African-Jewish American girl. In order to understand Oreo's political and aesthetic sensibilities, this thesis explores the cinematic representations of interracial relationships during the time that Oreo was written, and argues that Fran Ross's main character is in direct conversation with the predominant 70s black movie and political culture of blaxploitation and Black nationalism. Blaxploitation cinema's rise during the early 70s was facilitated by a burgeoning literary genre depicting an urban black experience aligned with Black nationalist ideologies, to which Fran Ross responds with her interracial protagonist. While not all Black nationalist leaders and supporters felt that blaxploitation movies furthered the revolution, the politics of the movement were still present in the movies, especially in regard to interracial relationships. Black nationalist ideologies regarding interracial relationships positioned sexual relationships between black people and white people as counter-revolutionary, because they did not result in the propagation of the black race, and were reminiscent of the rapes that occurred during the slave period and beyond. In contrast with these cinematic depictions, Oreo is a desexualized, witty, and athletic mixed raced female, who challenges the stereotypes of black cinematic culture and the politics of Black nationalism. As Oreo was written at the end of the blaxploitation genre's height (1974), its politics appear to be in direct dialogue with the representation of blackness in the movie genre. Ross even goes as far as rewriting scenes and stereotypes from blaxploitation movies, positioning Oreo as a critique of the Blaxploitation genre, and the genre's Black nationalist political agenda surrounding interracial relationships.

Purpose- The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between space, non-whiteness, embodied experiences and related perceptions, establishing reality connections for the participants in this matter. One notion that collides with the unrestricted individuality of these subjects, who are perceived as being outsiders to the Swedish norm, is the concept of Othering. The general aim is to gain a deeper understanding about the complexities of these women's experiences as of them being perceived as Others. Originality/value- This research adds to previous research by focussing on the understanding of the self as crucial in processes of Othering and by highlighting how hegemonic discourses construct an imagined national identity. Further, the abstract concept and sensation of segregation, feeling Othered and experiencing boundaries while moving around in a city are complex phenomena that will be examined in relation to urban spaces. Design/methodology/approach- The research study scope was chosen to be qualitative research approach in order to explore and identify variables that cannot be measured easily, in this case experiences and emotions, since predetermined information and literature and relying on other studies did not seem sufficient for this topic. In an attempt to capture the interpersonal and embodied experiences taken up by daughters of immigrants who live in the urban landscape of Malmö, four in-depth individual interviews were conducted. Findings- The presented narratives reveal the richness of the mechanisms of exclusion through Othering as a continuous process regarding both their embodied experiences as well as interpersonal interactions. Being Othered as a daughter of immigrants, irrespective of belonging to a certain ethnic background, is not a unitary or one-dimensional experience but is rather a collectivity of cohesive experiences. These experiences furthermore are neither exclusively determined by embodied or interpersonal encounters, nor are they to be avoided through modifying their behaviour, which ultimately means that these young women are always subjects of stigmata, categorizations or assumptions about them.

This research seeks to address the issue of media consumption and the formation of diaspora identity within second and third generation British-born residents of Pakistani origin. In recent years there has been much debate centred on this group within the context of domestic and wider international geopolitics of winning hearts and minds, the ‘war on terror’ and the rise of the internet and social media as unrestricted spaces of self-expression. This has had a profound impact on the sense of belonging that transcends national boundaries and becomes a more transnational experience creating new communities of interest. The role of the media and other forms of communication may be a key or important determinant in how these groups, represented by the Pukhtoon and Punjabi in this study, not only see themselves but view representation of their identify and sense of self to a wider public arena. The perceived relationship between Islam and the ‘war on terror’ as formed by the media has had a profound impact on perceptions and mindsets of many of the diaspora. New technology has created a new smartphone generation able to reassess and reaffirm their emerging hybridity set within a new discourse of equal rights and respect for cultural and religious values within a transnational context.

Scholars today deem Robinson Crusoe the first British novel. Defoe's construction of Crusoe as the atypical British traveler asserts his collective subjectivity within the framework of intimate personal experiences, accentuating his individualism. Yet, as scholars of Orientalism and Transatlantic theory can attest, calling Robinson Crusoe the first novel provides problematic methodologies that arise from affiliating the novel form to a structure associated the British colonialism and fashioning a "superior" British subject. In this essay, I work to emphasize the hybridity present within the novel, utilize historical context to provide a voice to marginalized Indigenous Americans to show how the format relies upon a relationship between collectivism and individualism, assert Indigenous voices matter in the novel, and analyze the relationship of a new collectivism that arises from narratives that cross into American spaces.

The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel's scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood's text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of vulnerable species. Oryx and Crake reveals humanity's organic connections with non-human others through interspecies gene-splicing and the ensuing hybridity. In this perspective, Atwood's text provides a dialogue on humankind's alienation from the natural world and synchronic connections to the animal other, and poses timely questions for twenty-first century consumerism, globalism, and humanist approaches to nature. The loss of balance provoked by the apocalyptic situation in Oryx and Crake challenges commonplace attitudes toward beneficial progress. This imbalance signals the need for a new narrative: A consilient reimagining of humanity's role on earth as an integrated organism rather than an intellectual singularity.

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