Introduction

This special issue, “Hybrids and Other Fusions,” is a collaborative project that brought together both authors and editors who are experts in their fields and writers and practitioners who experiment with theories and genres, offering innovative approaches to nonlinear narratives. Guest editor Ana María Rodríguez-Vivaldi, a scholar of Latin American literature and culture and past president of PAMLA, chose the topic and selected the authors and readers, whose counsel and editorial advice became invaluable. We would like to thank our colleagues for their vision, patience, and continued support. We are especially grateful to Laura Mullen for her contribution “Hybrid Talk” and to the writers who agreed to the interviews that add thoughtful insights and inspirations for researchers and students alike.

The five articles presented here investigate new forms of hybrid genres, such as the hybridity of cultures, hybrid poetics, epistolary cybernetic postmodern genres mediated through e-mail structures, Internet writers and Internet literature, and production and dissemination of nonlinear narratives in literature, theater, film, and society. By choosing articles that investigate Latin American, American, Puerto Rican, Chinese, and German writers, the selection does not merely represent pertinent cases within a national literature; it decidedly underscores hybridity as a global movement.

This special issue opens with the guest editor’s article, “Of Hybrids and Other Fusions: Latin America’s Cultural Voyage,” in which Ana María Rodríguez- Vivaldi defines the concept of hybridity as a “diverse, fissured,

Fig. 1.

Molly J. Wicks, Things That Make You Go “Hmmm.” Oil on steel, 2011. A blend of sculpture and painting, reminiscent of a woman’s profile, the hybrid exploration in the piece generates a visual and vibrant relationship aimed to evoke sound.

Used with permission.

plural construct.” Appropriately, she provides a comprehensive history of the development of hybridity in literature and the arts in Latin America, documenting the many areas of culture the movement has shaped. Most importantly, however, she touches on the themes and topics explored in the articles and interviews, setting the stage for a dialogic discourse that brings us together in an exchange of innovative ideas.

Rodríguez-Vivaldi traces the notions of diversity and plurality intrinsically linked to the development of complex social and political organizations as well as material, scientific, and artistic progress in Latin America, from the fifteenth century to the present. By exploring the process of acculturation and cross-fertilization through cultural interaction, she also highlights the expansion of boundaries, the cross-over of media, in short, the gradual syncretism of indigenous cultures with the foreign. The static structures of colonialism are juxtaposed with alternative models of national self-determination that subvert imperialist systems of power through hybridization and interfusion. A wide variety of examples from literature, architecture, music, and the arts underscore her thesis and represent the scale of hybridity and fusion that is examined in the articles in this issue.

In her article “Chinese Historical Fan Fiction: The Internet Writers and Internet Literature,” Jie Lu provides a broad as well as an in-depth account of the impact of Internet literature in contemporary China that not only challenges print culture represented by the cultural elite but also changes venues of dissemination and interactions for a broader range of popular participants. Data from major Chinese Internet network centers documents the wide reach of literary websites giving billions of netizens access to cybersites as readers and writers. By discussing these postmodernist literary traits through a close reading of time-travel fictions—a mock historical genre—its dialogic interaction, intertextuality, and linguistic collage, Jie Lu redefines the genre as a form of historical fan fiction. As Di Stefano demonstrates of López Nieves’s fictions later in the issue, Jie Liu argues that the time-travel genre situates history in a literary cyberspace that provides opportunities for “historical reimagining/ re-emplotting as well as for self-empowerments on the part of its writers.” She concludes that contemporary Chinese online literary writings are dynamic and creative, since they provide a space, especially for the young writer with limited historical knowledge, to...