| The term hybridity describes people occupying geographic or cultural borderlands---bilingual, diasporic, immigrant, urban migrant, refugee, exiled, and indigenous people. Hybridity is more than cultural mixture or syncretism, because it emphasizes that identity is actively manipulated and created. It draws attention to the contestation of power that occurs within, or emerges from, cultural blending.; Teachers work to enhance students' understanding of how to productively engage with a world that grows increasingly complicated. While the aims and outcomes of multicultural education should be applauded, recent world events indicate that multicultural education's scope is no longer enough. Cultural diversity is too often limited to expressions of difference in food, custom, and celebration. It is time that we move well beyond fixed ideas of nation, race, and ethnicity. Minimizing impressions about the difficulty of living together and ignoring issues of power and privilege, current multicultural education does little to eliminate antagonistic social patterns of dominance and subordination. Additionally, the political attempt to set in stone exclusive group identities leaves out any individual who has claim to more than one ethnic, racial, or cultural identity. Hybrid narratives present an important alternative to existing narratives of multicultural education. By undermining static representations of difference, they lead to empathetic imagination and function as a powerful tool in the project of building global understanding.; This dissertation presents fictional narratives of the hybrid experience in formal and informal education in Indonesia, Hawai'i, and New York. I hope to encourage the use of narratives of mixture to make understandings of identity more complex. I hope to contribute to the project of global education by articulating a hybrid perspective that can be used in teaching Humanities courses (History, Literature, Social Studies, and more). The intended audience of this dissertation is the Humanities educator working with a multicultural curriculum and a diverse population. I hope to encourage a move to a radically pluralist and participatory politics of interpretation through pedagogy. I hope that teachers will be moved to help students harness their narrative potential in order to grow into writers themselves or at least become more nuanced readers of complex circumstances. |
