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13 books match the query 'Cultural fusion'

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Creolizing the Nation

Kris F. Sealey

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Winner, 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award

Creolizing the Nation identifies the nation-form as a powerful resource for political struggles against colonialism, racism, and other manifestations of Western hegemony in the Global South even as it acknowledges the homogenizing effects of the politics of nationalism. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Kris F. Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, humane communities.

Analyzing the work of thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega, Sealey shows that a properly creolizing account of the nation provides an alternative imaginary out of which collective political life might be understood. Creolizing practices are always constitutive of anticolonial resistance, and their ongoing negotiations with power should be understood as everyday acts of sabotage. Sealey demonstrates that the conceptual frame of the nation is not fated to re-create colonial instantiations of nationalism but rather can support new possibilities for liberation and justice.

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Culinary Mestizaje

Racial Mixing and Foodways across the United States

Edited by Felipe Hinojosa and Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.

University of Texas Press, 2025

2026 Gold Medal for the Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – English, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)

How cross-racial and ethnic communities have created new culinary traditions and food cultures in the United States.

Culinary Mestizaje is about food, cooking, and community, but it’s also about how immigrant labor and racial mixing are transforming established US food cultures from Hawai’i to the coast of Maine, South Philadelphia to the Pacific Northwest. This collection of essays asks what it means that Chamorro cooking is now considered a regional specialty of the Bay Area, and that a fusion like brisket tacos registers as “native” to Houston, while pupusas are the pride of Atlanta.

Combining community scholarly insights, cooking tips, and recipes, the pieces assembled here are interested in how the blending of culinary traditions enables marginalized people to thrive in places fraught with racial tension, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the threat of gentrification. Chefs and entrepreneurs matter in these stories, but so do dishwashers, farm laborers, and immigrants doing the best they can with the ingredients they have. Their best, it turns out, is often delicious and creative, sparking culinary evolutions while maintaining ancestral connections. The result is that cooking under the weight of colonial rule and white supremacy has, in revealing ways, created American food.

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Cultural Transfers in Dispute

Representations in Asia, Europe and the Arab World since the Middle Ages

Edited by Jörg Feuchter, Friedhelm Hoffmann, and Bee Yun

Campus Verlag, 2011

Our conception of cultures and cultural change has altered dramatically in recent decades: no longer do we understand cultures as isolated units; rather, we see them as hybrid formations constantly engaged in a multidirectional process of exchange and influence with other cultures. Yet the very process by which we represent these cultural transfers is itself subject to cultural, political, and ideological conditions that affect our understanding, acknowledgment, and representation of them. Built around concrete examples of controversial representations of cultural transfer from Asia, the Arab world, and Europe, Cultural Transfers in Dispute presents a critical self-reflection on the scholarly practices that underpin our attempts to study and describe other cultures.

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Decolonization and the Decolonized

Albert Memmi

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

In this time of global instability and widespread violence, Albert Memmi—author of the highly influential and groundbreaking work The Colonizer and the Colonized—turns his attention to the present-day situation of formerly colonized peoples. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi expands his intellectual engagement with the subject and examines the manifold causes of the failure of decolonization efforts throughout the world.As outspoken and controversial as ever, Memmi initiates a much-needed discussion of the ex-colonized and refuses to idealize those who are too often painted as hapless victims. He shows how, in light of a radically changed world, it would be problematic—and even irresponsible—to continue to deploy concepts that were useful and valid during the period of anticolonial struggle.Decolonization and the Decolonized contributes to the most current debates on Islamophobia in France, the “new” anti-Semitism, and the unrelenting poverty gripping the African continent. Memmi, who is Jewish, was born and raised in Tunis, and focuses primarily on what he calls the Arab-Muslim condition, while also incorporating comparisons with South America, Asia, Black Africa, and the United States. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi has written that rare book—a manifesto informed by intellect and animated by passion—that will propel public analysis of the most urgent global issues to a new level.Albert Memmi is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Paris, Nanterre, and the author of Racism (Minnesota, 1997).Robert Bononno, a teacher and translator, lives in New York City.

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Exchanging the Past

A Rainforest World of Before and After

Bruce M. Knauft

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Bruce M. Knauft found then that the killings stemmed from violent scapegoating of suspected sorcerers. But by the time he returned in 1998, homicide rates had plummeted, and Gebusi had largely disavowed vengeance against sorcerers in favor of modern schools, discos, markets, and Christianity.

In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them—a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.

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Fernando Ortiz

Caribbean and Mediterranean Counterpoints

Edited by Stephan Palmié

HAU, 2023

Cross-regional scholarly dialogue inspired by the work of the pioneering Cuban scholar.

Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) coined the term “transculturation” in 1940. This was an early case of theory from the South: concepts developed from an explicitly peripheral epistemological vantage point and launched as a corrective to European and North American theoretical formulations. What Ortiz proposed was a contrapuntal vision of complexly entangled processes that we, today, would conceptualize as cultural emergence.

Inspired by Ortiz, this volume engineers an unprecedented conversation between Mediterraneanists and Caribbeanists. It harnesses Ortiz’s mid-twentieth-century theoretical formulations to early twenty-first-century issues pertinent to both regions, including migration, territorial sovereignty, and cultural diversity. The contributors explore this perspective (arguably formed during Ortiz’s youth in late nineteenth-century Menorca) in a dialogue between scholars of the contemporary Caribbean and Mediterranean to enable novel analytics for both regions and to more broadly to probe the promises and limits of Ortiz’s contribution for contemporary anthropological research and theorizing.

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Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination

Notes on Fleeing the Plantation

Michaeline A. Crichlow

Duke University Press, 2009

Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination is a major intervention into discussions of Caribbean practices gathered under the rubric of “creolization.” Examining sociocultural, political, and economic transformations in the Caribbean, Michaeline A. Crichlow argues that creolization—culture-creating processes usually associated with plantation societies and with subordinate populations remaking the cultural forms of dominant groups—must be liberated from and expanded beyond plantations, and even beyond the black Atlantic, to include productions of “culture” wherever vulnerable populations live in situations of modern power inequalities, from regimes of colonialism to those of neoliberalism. Crichlow theorizes a concept of creolization that speaks to how individuals from historically marginalized groups refashion self, time, and place in multiple ways, from creating art to traveling in search of homes. Grounding her theory in the material realities of Caribbean peoples in the plantation era and the present, Crichlow contends that creolization and Creole subjectivity are constantly in flux, morphing in response to the changing conditions of modernity and creatively expressing a politics of place.

Engaging with the thought of Michel Foucault, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Achille Mbembe, Henri Lefebvre, Margaret Archer, Saskia Sassen, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Crichlow argues for understanding creolization as a continual creative remaking of past and present moments to shape the future. She draws on sociology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies to illustrate how national histories are lived personally and how transnational experiences reshape individual lives and collective spaces. Critically extending Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, she describes how contemporary Caribbean subjects remake themselves in and beyond the Caribbean region, challenging, appropriating, and subverting older, localized forms of creolization. In this book, Crichlow offers a nuanced understanding of how Creole citizens of the Caribbean have negotiated modern economies of power.

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Hybrid Renaissance

Culture, Language, Architecture

Peter Burke

Central European University Press, 2016

Hybrid Renaissance introduces the idea that the Renaissance in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and in the world beyond Europe is an example of cultural hybridization.

The two key concepts used in this book are “hybridization” and “Renaissance”. Roughly speaking, hybridity refers to something new that emerges from the combination of diverse older elements. (The term “hybridization” is preferable to “hybridity” because it refers to a process rather than to a state, and also because it encourages the writer and the readers alike to think in terms of degree: where there is more or less, rather than presence versus absence.)

The book begins with a discussion of the concept of cultural hybridization and a cluster of other concepts related to it. Then comes a geography of cultural hybridization focusing on three locales: courts, major cities (whether ports or capitals) and frontiers. The following seven chapters describe the hybridity of the Renaissance in different fields: architecture, painting and sculpture, languages, literature, music, philosophy and law and finally religion. The essay concludes with a brief account of attempts to resist hybridization or to purify cultures or domains from what was already hybridized.

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Hybridity

The Cultural Logic Of Globalization

Marwan Kraidy

Temple University Press, 2005

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.

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The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture

Edited by Jeb J. Card

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

In recent years, archaeologists have used the terms hybrid and hybridity with increasing frequency to describe and interpret forms of material culture. Hybridity is a way of viewing culture and human action that addresses the issue of power differentials between peoples and cultures. This approach suggests that cultures are not discrete pure entities but rather are continuously transforming and recombining. The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture discusses this concept and its relationship to archaeological classification and the emergence of new ethnic group identities. This collection of essays provides readers with theoretical and concrete tools for investigating objects and architecture with discernible multiple influences.

The twenty-one essays are organized into four parts: ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; ethnicity and material culture in pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America; culture contact and transformation in technological style; and materiality and identity. The media examined include ceramics, stone and glass implements, textiles, bone, architecture, and mortuary and bioarchaeological artifacts from North, South, and Central America, Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, Europe, and Mesopotamia. Case studies include Bronze Age Britain, Iron Age and Roman Europe, Uruk-era Turkey, African diasporic communities in the Caribbean, pre-Spanish and Pueblo revolt era Southwest, Spanish colonial impacts in the American Southeast, Central America, and the Andes, ethnographic Amazonia, historic-era New England and the Plains, the Classic Maya, nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, and Upper Paleolithic Europe. The volume is carefully detailed with more than forty maps and figures and over twenty tables.

The work presented in The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture comes from researchers whose questions and investigations recognized the role of multiple influences on the people and material they study. Case studies include experiments in bone working in middle Missouri; images and social relationships in prehistoric and Roman Europe; technological and material hybridity in colonial Peruvian textiles; ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; and flaked glass tools from the leprosarium at Kalawao, Moloka‘i. The essays provide examples and approaches that may serve as a guide for other researchers dealing with similar issues.

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The Creolization of Theory

Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds.

Duke University Press, 2011

Introducing this collection of essays, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and “French theory” originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chancé, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Édouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities.

Contributors. Étienne Balibar, Dominique Chancé, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Édouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Françoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

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