Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context: An Autoethnographic Journey of the Self Across Cultures

In this autoethnographic article, I am interested in theorizing about how hybridity illuminates my lived experience of identity performed across cultures, and more specifically in diasporic context, at the intersections of various facets of my selfhood: Black, female, postcolonial, African, bi-tribal, diasporic, immigrant, nonnative English Speaker, “French native speaker,” and so on. I use personal narrative as a locus of subjectivity to recount critical moments of my lived experience as a hybrid subject navigating at the borderlands of two cultural worldviews: Congolese and American. My cross-cultural journey reveals a series of challenging and triumphant episodes from my childhood back home to my life in the United States, a journey during which I have experienced both privilege and oppression. My process of identity construction results in the creation of a third space that celebrates difference through new ways of being, encompassing cultural values from both the United States and the Congo. This process is articulated through different ways of being/not being “American” and/or “African” and just being “different.”