In a descriptive sense, the sprawling idea of hybridity can be taken to refer to the perpetual mixing and morphing, borrowing and mimicking, synthesizing and syncretizing, boundary-breaching and identity-stretching that goes on whenever particular social forces, cultural forms, and contentious discourses engage and then re-settle in compromised and creative fashion. Put that way, hybridity is a kind of constant of human interaction and group formation, a meta-datum of what happens through countless crossover processes occurring at many different levels and across the ages. And as the way the world is, so to speak, it is hard to see how we could be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ hybridity.

However, Israeli gerontologist, anthropologist and sociologist Haim Hazan seeks to jolt us into greater concern, by adding two further layers of attention. Hybridity, under conditions of capitalist globalization, is not just human business as usual, but interactions, identities and proclivities that become relentlessly mediatized and commodified, as an effect of which our human sensibilities are blurred and numbed. Nodding thus in the direction of the Frankfurt School, and drawing on Marwan Kraidy’s Hybridity (2005), the subtitle of which casts it as the cultural logic of globalization, Hazan plays up the burgeoning number of fads, services, and imaginings that fuel both the unfettered market drive and a slightly bizarre collective desire for anything apparently blended, fused and glocal. Like Kraidy too, but more emphatically, Hazan views today’s cultural analysts and critics as themselves constituting, culpably, a central part of the malaise. In a series of broad associations binding together the state of consumerist, touristic popular culture and what he takes to be a recently achieved, but thoroughgoing, consensus in how we theorize postmodern networking, multicultural, cosmopolitan society, Hazan indicts social and cultural studies for establishing hybridity as the contemporary ‘master trope’ of understanding and normativity. Hybridity, he believes, has become the obligatory, yet complacent, structure of feeling, to the point where we cannot easily tell whether the social trends apprehended within its omnivorous terms are the source or the output of the organizing mind-set. Either way, we should know better.

Pitched like that, Against Hybridity echoes polemics from the 1990s charging that cultural studies had become entranced by the consumer populism it was supposed to be skewering. There are also some reiterations of warnings issued by philosophical realists regarding the promiscuous relativism and unseriousness of postmodernist thinking. Hybridity, after all, is very close to the metaphorical ‘de-differentiation’ that in those earlier rounds played the role of unravelling the sharp modernist demarcations of distinct spheres of society, thought and affect, thereby turning a series of vertically nested institutions, tastes and analytical procedures into flattened, amorphous planes of apperception.

The primary thrust of Hazan’s enterprise lies not in his return to those well-worn sceptical tracks, nor in his re-telling of the ‘genealogical’ storyline in terms of which, in the early and middle phases of Western modernity, any dealings with hybridity (migrants, gypsies, slaves, mestizos, subalterns) were pursued by Western elites through the toxic contrapositions characteristic of their racist essentialism—fear and desire, hatred and envy, paternalism and punishment. Of course, social hybridization persisted just as a matter of fact, but the moral markers around it were unmistakable and forbidding. The extent to which this has all changed in late modernity is a matter of controversy—as illustrated by the ongoing advances and impasses in postcolonial studies—though the current global migrant crisis bolsters a definite sense of continuity.