American hybrid, stay away from me-ee

Hybridity is in the air! Just in time for the Chevy Volt, Christine Hume has published “Hybrity: A Card Game,” an interactive piece of literary criticism, on poets.org. The “game” is pretty simple: one clicks on the deck of cards, and a paragraph appears concerning an aspect of the debate around hybridity. And by referring the reader to other texts and to discussion boards, Hume tries to incorporate a level of interactivity. Here is how she describes the urgency of the issue:

a literary hybrid is a troubling concept in that it often exemplifies the very categories it gestures toward dismantling or assimilating; it reifies genres, traditions, and disciplines, requiring strict expectations and assumptions about literariness. Hybridity fortifies dualistic thinking of all kinds: aesthetic (academic vs. outlaw, conceptualism vs. flarf, official vs. innovative, quietude vs. post avant-garde), disciplinary (writer vs. artist, documentary vs. creativity, technology vs. inspiration), cultural (ethnic vs. white, double-consciousness vs. dominant, polyglot vs. monolinguistic). It invites a binary, oppositional vision of literary history (the game of war). These easy categories, however, won't be contained and often find ways of increasing infectiousness through cross-infection.