The Cambridge History of American Literature

The task of the literary history is to move beyond the model of hybridity, to ask what happens when two or more emergent categories are located in a single identity or text. Ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and class can be used as the starting point for the examination of hybrid identity. Historically, the concept of hybridity was a conceptual leap forward for emergent writers, critics, and theorists, opening up what Homi K. Bhabha have called 'the Third Space of enunciation'. Like much early post-structuralist literary criticism, emergent American literatures set themselves the task of identifying and deconstructing modes of binary thinking in which the two halves of an opposition are not created equal. Whereas Frank Chin's work remains rooted in the vagaries of binary thinking, Maxine Hong Kingston's work dramatizes the limitations of the available models of hybrid identity and seeks to move beyond hybridity to a more complex model of heterogeneous identity.