Refugee hybrid fiction: Rhetorical, generic and intermedial hybridity as strategies of political resistance

Abstract

To introduce the concept of hybrid fiction, this article critically investigates contemporary developments in migration media production. It explores a class of migration media content and elaborates on its composite-hybridized nature. The study originates from a mapping of 98 examples of digitally distributed media content (2014–21) aimed at charting their hybrid character by combining insights from genre theory, narratology and intermedial studies. The results highlight three overlapping levels of hybridization throughout the sample: medial, generic and rhetorical. Therefore, they reflect the emergence of a strand of content that, in pushing three different boundaries of conventional manifestations of fiction, challenges the uniformity of visual regimes of migrant ‘exclusion’. Hence, the article advances a politics of hybridity in media and migration by delineating the nexus between the agonistic, counter-hegemonic character of migration media content and its tendency to combine, layer and blend different rhetorical, generic and intermedial forms.