REGRESSIVE HYBRIDITY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY: ANALYZING CULTURAL NEGOTIATION IN SHAHRAZ’S ‘A PAIR OF JEANS

Abstract

This study examines the concept of hybridity and its implications in Shahraz’s short story A Pair of Jeans. The narrative explores the challenges faced by second-generation immigrants as they attempt to balance their cultural identity with the host culture and ancestral heritage. Although this paper argues that the hybridity depicted in the story forms a binary opposition that favors modern thought over traditionalism, hybridity is also considered a subversive strategy to challenge dominant norms. This study uses the concept of regressive hybridity to examine how identity construction in diasporic intellectuals and second-generation immigrants becomes exclusionary and westernized. Therefore, the goal of this study is to identify the thought patterns that stigmatize tradition and explore how hybridity becomes regressive when traditional markers are marginalized in second-generation immigrants and diasporic intellectuals. The primary issue is the essentialization of modernity and traditionalism as progressive or normal and backward respectively. In this regard, the theoretical framework of Homi K. Bhabha is applied to explain the basic understanding of hybridity in a post-colonial context. Further critique is drawn from Pnina Werbner, David Theo Goldberg, and Friedman to analyze the favoring of one thought over the other in the story.

Keywords:  Identity, Hybridity, Essentialization, Second generation.