AustLit

'What is cultural hybridity, and how do the poetics of hybridity inform notions of Australian-Australian, diasporic, or migrant poetries, and how these terms overlap with each other? Popular notions of hyridity include ideas of the post-modern collage and cultural accretion, like fusion food, or something like a festival of world music. Go shopping and you'll find contemporary clothing inspired by Southeast Asian hill tribes, geishas and Vietnamese ao dias. Current use of form in Anglo poetry reveals the popularity of the cento, the ghazal, pantun, haiku and haibun, forms which are, respectively, Latin-Roman, Malay-Arabic, Persian and Asian. Along with god and devil, there is a proliferation of other deities - Chinese, Hindu, Turkish, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Laotian, Malay or Filipino - in our literature now. Accretive hybridity (this proliferation of diverse forms) can resist efforts to impose ownership on this available array of aesthetic techne, and the current on-going tendency for culture to flow globally (facilitated by the Internet and electronic translation tools) feeds this appetite for hybrid exchange and experimentation.' (Author's introduction)