'The hunk of China in her': Reading cultural hybridity in the rhetoric of missionary daughters (Pearl S. Buck, Lettie Hamlett Rogers, Ida Pruitt)

Cultural and hybridity studies have largely focused on the phenomenon of cultural hybridity in the Caribbean and Hispanic realms. My study highlights the legacy of three missionary daughters who wrote about bicultural identity construction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Pearl S. Buck in My Several Worlds, Lettie Hamlett Rogers in South Of Heaven, and Ida Pruitt in My China Childhood. I offer historically grounded rhetorical analyses of these three texts to explore how a cultural hybrid negotiates identity, utilizes hybridity, and claims it as an empowering rather than destructive force.; This project recovers the texts of Buck, Rogers, and Pruitt using Homi K. Bhabha's theory of the enunciation of cultural difference as a point of conflict negotiation and potential site for the emergence of what he terms the Third Space. Close textual analysis using Bhabha's theory provides a lens for viewing how race, class, gender, and religion are deployed in cultural constructions of identity. I argue that the authors develop a rhetoric of resistance that involves a continual crossing of self and Other. Their texts provide a model for exploring how areas of conflict can be reconciled into opportunities for connection once the individual suspends culturally-charged notions of selfhood and power, and identifies with the Other.; This study suggests that hybridity can serve as a model for imagining relations in a postcolonial world, and become an effective pedagogical tool for initiating dialogue about difference. By fostering relational thinking as a form of critical thought, hybridity can return a sense of compassion and connection to the dynamics of the classroom and to daily life in a diverse and diasporic world.