In a reflection on the manifestations of multiculturalism in postcolonial literature, Sylvie André presents the phenomenon of cultural mixing as a victory over both the colonial will to assimilate and an inevitably unequal separate development. However, as she asks, to what degree must its constitutive elements be fused for a mixed society to consider itself multicultural? Does this require a shared ideological foundation, or is the acceptance of difference or so-called ‘diversity’ sufficient? (2002: 5). English-speaking Canada might consider itself a multicultural country but Quebec, despite thirty years of political coexistence, might well not. Laurence Cros expresses these differences in terms of the possibilities of ‘limited’ or ‘multiple’ hybridity for Canada.

It seems that multiculturalism, like hybridity, comes in weak and strong varieties, with only the latter (like postcolonial hybridity) substantively changing or overriding original identity formations. Multiculturalism, the subject of considerable debate and varied in its forms, is, like hybridity, the product of the interactions (commerce, wars, occupations, matrimonial alliances) and the colonizations that have marked the movements of peoples since the beginning of history. In our era, the phenomenon has accelerated and acquired a distinctive character through the legacy of nineteenth-century European imperialisms and the later processes of globalization with its flows of capital, goods, and peoples. It is the speed and density of these interconnections, the changes that take place through means such as mimicry, modification, recombination, and creation that allow the mixing of things initially considered to be different to become hybridity.