Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

Abstract

For many years the study of race relations was dominated by paradigms—of assimilationism and multiculturalism—which highlighted difference and division (as a problem, or a virtue). In more recent years the idea of racial and cultural mixing—creolization or hybridization—has become an important concept in ethnic and racial studies. The starting point of this article is the observation that the idea of racial and cultural mixture—hybridity or mesticagem—was a key ideological feature of Portuguese colonialism in its last decades. If hybridity is not therefore a new discourse in Portugal, what is the place for it today and what kind of hybridity is being referred to? What might the Portuguese case tell us about discourses of hybridity more generally? The article explores these questions through a combined visual and linguistic analysis of the lifestyle magazine Afro as a site where contemporary discourses about race intertwine. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1002247