114 Gary Reger
Irish, Jews, and blacks—were deployed to support the general claim that the urban
experience forged new mixed identities such as Irish-American (Hutnyk 2005: 92–5;
Glazer and Moynihan 1970). Glazer and Moynihan tended to impute essentializing
characteristics to different ethnic groups in ways that few studies would now do, but
their recognition that ethnic identities are mutable remains an important contribution.
Finally, a number of scholars have looked to colonialism’s impact on subjugated
populations as fertile ground for the growth of hybrid ethnic identities (Anthias 2001:
629–31). Interests of the ruling power, pressures on the colonized, and competition
for resource control (back to Barth) may conspire to promote the creation of new,
hybridized identities.
However, hybridity is not a neutral concept. It originates as a metaphor borrowed from
animal breeding and agronomy. Agronomists seeking to improve aspects of a cultivar’s
performance—resistance to disease, yield in less-than-ideal conditions, and so on—may
try to blend the genomes of different strains of the same species with different charac-
teristics; the result may be a new strain of the same cultivar but better adapted to specific
conditions. Such a new strain is a hybrid. This process was the basis, for example, of the
so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s, which began with hybridization experiments
in northern Mexico on various strains of wheat, initially in the hope of improving yield
under arid conditions. Success in hybridization occurs not only when the new strain
displays the characteristics desired, but also when it “breeds true,” that is to say that
offspring of the hybridized cultivar preserve and exhibit those characteristics. (See Hut-
nyk [2005]. In his otherwise very useful guide to hybridity as a social sciences concept,
Hutnyk [2005: 82] deploys grafting in plants as the model for creating hybrids. Grafts,
however, are not hybrids, but one species of cultivar connected to another so as to receive
nutrients from it.)
The cognitive framework within which this conceptualization of hybridity exists carries
several important presuppositions. First, the ability to create a hybrid out of pre-existing,
separate strains implies that these strains exhibit a sort of “purity”—that is, that they
are themselves true breeding and identifiable as separate strains (Hutnyk 2005: 81–3).
Second, the hybrid is a new thing, distinct from its forebears. Third, ancestry is a central
component of the process; everything depends on the features of the parent generation.
Finally, the characteristics of both parent and hybrid offspring inhere in their genetic
makeups. It is the inherited characteristics that are fundamental to the identity of the
hybrid and the measure of success of the breeding program.
It should be obvious that the hybridization metaphor lends itself with ease to racist or
racialist applications. For example, a central theme of certain racist fiction produced in
the post-Civil-War United States rested on the supposed characteristics of racial hybrids.
Thomas Dixon’s notorious novelThe Sins of the Father, originally published in 1912,
features a mixed-blood (“hybrid”) woman named Cleo, who exhibits the worst charac-
teristics of her black and white parents. Anxiety about “racial purity” fueled by horror
(and fascination) at sexual “mixing” helped to drive this dread of the hybrid, whose loy-
alty was seen as belonging to neither of the races from which she derived (Hodes 1997;
Paulin 2012).
This notion of the hybrid intersects on several important dimensions with the defining
characteristics of ethnicity. First, boundaries and boundary markers are crucial. In
early wheat-breeding experiments seeking resistance to wheat rust, Edgar McFadden