The Changing Landscape of Hybridity: A Reading of Ethnic Identity and Urban Form in Vancouver

Recently a tendency has arisen in cultural criticism to reactivate the notion of hybridity as a way to open a new path for the rethinking of resistance and dominance. However, by conceptualizing hybridity as a timeless form of oppositionality, this new critical direction has tended to succumb to the temptation of homogenizing multiple realities. Through a comparison of the urban forms of Vancouver in the early and late portions of the twentieth century, this essay suggests that, while the hybrid pattern of Vancouver during the first quarter of this century was more likely a boundary-based arena, one major character of the hybridity of late-twentiethcentury Vancouver is that “the other” has emerged within the constitutive core. Analysis of the differences between these two historical periods shows how various degrees and forms of hybridity appear to shift continuously with changing relations of power. The essay calls for greater attention to the temporal dimension of hybridity in attempts to understand the complexity of opposition and domination in any specific place.