The intermingling of people and media from different cultures is a communication-based phenomenon known as hybridity. Drawing on original research from Lebanon to Mexico and analyzing the use of the term in cultural and postcolonial studies (as well as the popular and business media), Marwan Kraidy offers readers a history of the idea and a set of prescriptions for its future use.Kraidy analyzes the use of the concept of cultural mixture from the first century A.D. to its present application in the academy and the commercial press. The book's case studies build an argument for understanding the importance of the dynamics of communication, uneven power relationships, and political economy as well as culture, in situations of hybridity. Kraidy suggests a new framework he developed to study cultural mixture—called critical transculturalism—which uses hybridity as its core concept, but in addition, provides a practical method for examining how media and communication work in international contexts.

Beyond entrenched notions of digital studies research

Western histories and ideas dominate studies of digital technologies despite the fact most of today’s digital users live outside the West. Clovis Bergère, Marwan M. Kraidy, and Marina R. Krikorian curate essays that explore new ways of understanding global digital life by centering the experiences, practices, and infrastructures of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

The contributors proceed from the idea that the plural term “digitalities” reflects how material conditions, social hierarchies, and local histories shape digital life. Their approach sees so-called Southern digitalities as a gateway to rethinking digital theory from a starting point that draws on grounded knowledge, multilingual concepts, and place‑based research. Four organizing themes—data, belonging, work, and epistemologies—reveal how scholars can navigate and reinterpret digital systems with concepts and methods that challenge established ways of studying and understanding international digital life.

A merger of the theoretical and imaginative, Southern Digitalities provides a blueprint for uncovering more inclusive understandings of contemporary digital worlds.