The various studies of this book have revealed the presence of multiple and shifting hybridities, at all levels of the work of recovery and reconstruction underway in all communities, if to varying degrees of transculturality. Accounts of first contacts on beaches with savages were shown to be largely a product of European Enlightenment thinking, the circulation of European ships and texts. Translation of the texts of oral tradition was an early locus of production of a hybrid new cultural entity, different nonetheless in degrees of transformation in the publications of the red virgin, the missionary-ethnographer, and the contemporary ethnographer. To these palimpsestic and translational hybridities, the (hi)stories of settlement added what we have designated as strategic hybridity. The tropes of exile and of home, emblematic of a quest for identity and instruments of a political strategy, and staking claims to a belonging to the Caledonian earth, circulate across the literatures of all communities. Three different literary reproductions of the story of the founding father, Kanaké, by Tjibaou, Gorodé, and Pourawa – respectively nationalistic, woman-centred, and mythicopoetic – illustrated the different reconstructions of history and the different kinds of hybridity within a single and evolving (Kanak) writing community. And again within Déwé Gorodé's own texts, alongside the revaluing and re-centring of a lost Kanak culture, there is inner splitting, the returning spectre of the ghosts of abusive sexual power, a ‘haunting’ return to tradition, to the Other within. Such a doubling is materialized in the proliferating image of the canoe, in its simultaneous representation of idealized and essentialized voyaging ancestors, and the hidden problems within Kanak tradition.

The intertextual hybridity that was the subject of the subsequent study of the shared motif of the avenging lizard revealed the range of purposes of cultural borrowings and exchanges between European and non-European traditions, but also the emergence of distinctively New Caledonian emblems, common to all communities. The subsequent overview of Caledonian texts of European and other origin argued for the centrality of themes of biological and cultural métissage in Caledonian literatures and for difference between colonial and postcolonial hybridities and the slow and difficult progression towards the latter.