when the child was a child, it was the time for these...
TRANSCRIPT
When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?
—Peter Handke, “Song of Childhood”
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Chapter One:The Spatial Dynamics of Identity
A common thematic concern of postcolonial literatures has been identity and identity
formation. The postcolonial period that validates the existence of the colonial period
is affected up to such an extent by the dislocation of human population artificially
induced by colonialism that Ralph J Crane has defined the postcolonial condition as
“one of dislocation and cultural expatriation (a sense of belonging to one place and
simultaneous refusal to accept another)” (Crane 2000: 4). As a result, in the
postcolonial context, the construction of identity vis-à-vis home becomes problematic
because context invariably structures texts. Postcolonial literatures document and
represent “the power politics of cartography and territorial conquest, or of the
unfolding of multiple histories in a given location” (Spearey 2000: 158).
Consequently, it becomes viable to study postcolonial literatures from the perspective
of identities situated at various spatio-temporal junctures in the postcolonial contexts
in order to determine the implications and impact of such dislocation in the literary
representations.
Identity
Identity is a construction. It is not a stable and immutable entity; rather it is an
ongoing process that is always in a state of flux. Although it is a concept that has
evolved over a long period of time, its elusive and deceptively difficult nature
prevents the categorisation of identity as an essentialist or monolithic conception
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having well demarcated and universally acceptable parameters. Theoretically,
however, identity is conceived of from three different perspectives. From the first
perspective, identity denotes a conscious and knowing subject. Secondly, identity is
also a product or outcome of social relationships, and third, identity is both an
outcome and resource in interaction between the self and others.
Both at the level of the individual and the collective, the factors that contribute
significantly to the formation of identity may be broadly classified into two
components—the psychological and the social which together make up the cultural
context of identity. Composite and multi layered social formations such as the
physical, political, social, economic, religious and linguistic structures determine the
meaning and position of identity within the cultural matrix, but these structures vary
from time to time because every era produces different discourses that regulate and
define the cultural norms of that period. Therefore, identity is essentially a cultural
construction that, according to Kevin D. Vryan “locates a person within socially
structured sets of relations” (2007: 2217).
Western philosophers and sociologists have been long debating the nature of identity.
Analysing the different conceptions of identity as developed by modern philosophical
thought, Jorge Larrain argues that the “modern philosophical conception of identity
was based on the belief in the existence of a self or inner core which emerges at birth,
like a soul or essence, and which, in spite of being able to develop different
potentialities in time, remains basically the same throughout life, thus providing a
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sense of continuity and self-recognition” (Larrain 1994: 144). This idea of the a priori
self, argues Larrain, was postulated by the Cartesian dictum: cogito ergo sum (I think,
therefore I am).
John Locke developed Rene Descartes’ idea from a different angle by defining the
self as “that conscious thinking thing ... which is sensible or conscious of pleasure
and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself as far as that
consciousness extends” (Locke 1948: 251). Thus, Locke stipulated memory as a very
important determinant of identity by asserting that “as far as this consciousness can
be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of
that person” (Locke 1948: 257). Gottfried Leibniz, too, like Locke championed the
cause of memory, but at the same time, also insisted on the metaphysical dimension
of identity:
...the intelligent soul, knowing what it is and being able to say this ‘I’ which
says so much, does not merely remain and subsists metaphysically (which it
does more fully than the others), but also remains morally the same and
constitutes the same personality. For it is the memory or knowledge of this ‘I’
which makes it capable of reward and punishment (Leibniz 1973: 44).
In the eighteenth century, however, Immanuel Kant credited ‘reason’ as the creator of
self—an ahistorical, supra-temporal and abstract self to which Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel added the historical dimension and the reference to the ‘other’
(Larrain 1994: 145). Karl Marx critiqued Hegel’s idealist conception as too reductive
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and posited identity as a social construct because he argued that human beings can
individuate themselves only in the midst of society and they “become individuals
only through the process of history” (Marx 1973: 496). After Marx, the sociologist G
H Mead argued for the “self in its dependence upon the social group to which it
belongs” (Mead 1974: 1). Unlike his predecessors, Mead brought into focus the
impact of linguistic structures on identity that anticipated the theorization of the
twentieth century structuralists and the post structuralists (Mead 1974: 173).
The critique of identity as a construct gained momentum from David Hume who
visualised personal identity as a perception: “...when I enter most intimately into what
I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other...I never can
catch myself, at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but
the perception” (Hume 1978: 252). He also maintains that identity is fictionally
constructed by “...the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove
the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise
the variation” (Hume 1978: 254).
Friedrich Nietzsche furthered this line of reasoning by ascribing the many states that
constitute the fiction of the subject to one substratum.
"The subject" is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one
substratum: but it is we who first created the "similarity" of these states…
(Nietzsche 1968: 269)
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This "subject", Nietzsche further clarified “is not something given, it is something
added and invented and projected behind what there is” (Nietzsche 1968: 267).
However, it was Sigmund Freud’s topos of the conscious/unconscious that eventually
dislocated and decentralized the unified, structured and integrated concept of the
“self” as a conscious subject, coherent and consistent in its tendencies and activities.
Thereafter, Jacques Lacan’s representated the subject as a divided unity and Julia
Kristeva conceptualized the identity as a ‘subject in process’ (Prud’homme 2006:
web).
The structuralist conception of identity as a construction shaped by external social
structures is highlighted by Claude Lévi-Strauss’ contention that the “...supposed
totalizing conception of the self ...seems to me to be an illusion sustained by the
demands of social life—and consequently a reflection of the external on the
internal—rather than the object of an apodictic experience” (Lévi-Strauss 1974: 256).
This view of identity as a malleable entity intensified doubts about the proposed
consistency and unity of the self.
Poststructuralists like Michel Foucault’s argument that the individual “...is not a pre-
given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his
identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over
bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces...” (Foucault 1980: 73-74) and Jean-
François Lyotard’s postmodernist situation of the self as “always located at ‘nodal
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points’ of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be” (Lyotard
1984: 15) further highlighted the crisis of identity, or the sense of the self as
experienced by the postmodern individual.
This idea is also supported by Stuart Hall who conceptualises the postmodern subject
“as having no fixed, essential or permanent identity. Identity becomes a ‘moveable
feast’: formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are
represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us. It is historically,
not biologically, defined. The subject assumes different identities at different times,
identities which are not unified around a coherent ‘self. ’ Within us are contradictory
identities, pulling in different directions, so that our identifications are continuously
being shifted about… The fully unified, completed, secure and coherent identity is a
fantasy” (Hall 1992: 277). As a result, the issue of identity has gained so much
attention in the contemporary cultural and critical lexicon because “identity only
becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent
and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty” (Mercer 1990:
43).
Identities are conceived of as “social constructs—culturally and interactionally
defined meanings and expectations—and as aspects of self-process and structures that
who or what a person or a set of persons is believed to be” (Vryan 2007: 2217). The
enactments and negotiations of identity is manifest in factors such as personal name,
gender, age, family, race, ethnicity, religion, occupation, nationality and ‘voluntary
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subcultural memberships’. It is a fluid concept, an on-going process of construction
that affects “self-conceptions and processes of the person believed to embody the
identity” (Vryan 2007: 2217) because it is “actively and creatively presented,
interpreted, and modified across social contexts and over time” (Vryan 2007: 2217).
This flux in the ‘construction’ of home vis-à-vis a satisfying sense of self has
generated questions surfacing in writings by Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward
W. Said and Bill Ashcroft.
The concept of identity is constructed on the underlying principle of difference—the
difference between the “self” and the “other”. Dani Cavallaro argues that whereas
philosophers like Descartes and Stuart Hall have identified “self” as the primary
essence of identity, others such as Hegel and Lacan have argued that the human
consciousness is not capable of perceiving itself without being recognised by others
and the existence of the “self” is a function of its relationship with the “other” (2001:
122). Within the Eurocentric culture, “dominant ideologies have time and again
defined themselves in relation to a subordinated Other” (2001: 122). All those who
deviated from the norms of patriarchal, heterosexual, white social structure, that is,
minority groups such as women, gays and lesbians, and people of colour were
codified as the ‘other’. Cavallaro cites Emmanuel Levinas’ argument in Totality and
Infinity to assert that “Western philosophy has insistently repressed the Other by
striving to give it a definite place” (Cavallaro 2001: 122). In fact, the Other transcends
all structures and any attempt to categorize it amounts to domesticating—and by
extension, colonizing—its intrinsic alterity” (Cavallaro 2001: 122) which almost
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invariably resulted in discrimination, disempowerment, oppression and abuse.
Edward Said, in Orientalism, argues that
Without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand
the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to
manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily,
ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment
period. (1991: 3)
According to Said, the Europeans strategically used discourses such as literature,
sociology, anthropology, historiography, etc., to construct the East/Orient in relation
to the West/Occident as the menacing and mysterious ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ Other
in order to validate the Eurocentric socio-political and economic structures of
domination to the extent that “…European culture gained in strength and identity by
setting itself against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self”
(1991: 3).
An alternate view of identity as based not only on difference, but also on similarities
and sameness, especially in terms of location is augmented by Benedict Anderson’s
thesis of nations as “imagined communities” promulgated by him in Imagined
Communities – Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism published in
1983. Anderson’s contention that a nation, where many people cohabit, is imagined
rest on the following premises he advanced in support of his argument:
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First, even if the members of the even the smallest nations do not personally
know, or meet, or even hear of most of their fellow members, they identify
with a common space because “in the minds of each lives the image of their
communion”.
Second, even the largest of the nations, encompassing perhaps a billion living
human beings, have “finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other
nations”.
Third, a “deep, horizontal comradeship” and fraternity makes it possible for
many millions of people, not so much as to kill, as willing to die for such
limited imaginings over the past two centuries. ((Anderson, 1991: 6-7)
By analogy, Anderson’s concept of the nation as impacting the identity of a collective
entity of human beings, at the micro level, reflects how home becomes a shared site
of identity that an individual shares with the members of his/her family.
Locating the ‘self’
The transformative quality of locations and geographies of the contemporary world
no longer bind the individuals to any particular space. As a result of the globalised
economics, the movement of individuals across socio-political boundaries have
become fluid and most of the time, dislocations and relocations of individuals,
primarily fuelled by prospects of material advancement, are based on a reasonable
element of choice than ever before. Amartya Sen has highlighted the importance of
choice vis-à-vis identity formation and its representation. He speaks of the different
often overlapping matrices of identity from which choices may be made leading to
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options available in projecting simultaneous membership of various categories. One
important category postulated by Sen is that of geographic origin. He says:
In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups—we
belong to all of them. A person’s citizenship, residence, geographic origin,
gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sports interests,
taste in music, social commitments etc., make us members of a variety of
groups. (2006: 5)
This freedom to choose some of the matrices of identity came about as a result of
drastic changes induced in the political, economic and cultural structures of the
society in the aftermath the two world wars that officially terminated colonialism.
Subsequently, globalisation accelerated the pace of geographical and cultural
mobility, making the process of the formation of identity more challenging.
Whether by choice or by compulsion, geographic dislocation necessitates major re-
adjustments and transformations in the spatial poetics of an individual’s identity. The
experience of the disruption from a specific location constitutes the texture of human
life in a postcolonial, migratory reality because “…the privileged role of the home
does not consist in being the end of human activity but in being its condition, and in
this sense, its commencement” (Levinas 1969: 152). Therefore the study of the
place/space as important determinants of identity and the effect of these factors on the
construction of the self and the other now are attracting considerable academic and
critical attention. Since the power relations inevitably get translated into knowledge
systems and disseminated through structures of representation, home gains as much
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importance as a determiner of identity as gender, class or race. Home consequently
becomes a discourse in process that contests the dichotomies of self and other.
Place and space
The concept of place may be examined from the following three perspectives: place
as a site of situated interaction, place as a locus of attachment, and, the social place or
status of an individual. Among these, the first perspective conceptualises place as a
material location: a fixed bounded site which can be identified with a particular set of
situated expectations and behaviours because people’s conception of identities they
possess already or aspire to can drive the construction or location of the places they
inhabit. As a result, “pieces of material culture then become important identity or
personal history markers” (Wasson, 2007: 3410). In the second case, place refers to
the identification or attachment an individual develops to a particular location, usually
geographical which influences the on-going process of the development of a self-
identity. Place, here is “composed of more than just the physical elements of the
location” because an “individual may express nostalgia or homesickness for the prior
location, and link its influence to elements of self or social character in the present”
(Wasson, 2007: 3410). In its third sense, place refers to “the niche in the social
stratification system in which the individual belongs,” or in other words, “the social
place of an individual” (Wasson, 2007: 3410). In this case, the location of the self is
more focussed on the socio-cultural rather than the physical setting.
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Although sometimes the two terms place and space are used interchangeably, there is
a noteworthy distinction between the two. Emphasising the relations of space and
place, Yi-Fu Tuan says:
In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place. “Space”
is more abstract than “place.” What begins as undifferentiated space becomes
place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. Architects talk
about the spatial qualities of place; they can equally well speak of the
locational (place) qualities of space. The ideas “space” and “place” require
each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware
of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if
we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each
pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into
place. (1977: 6)
In agreement of Yi-Fu Tuan’s opinion that space is associated with movement and
place with relative stasis, Michel de Certeau distinguishes between place (lieu) and
space (espace) by looking upon place as an order “in accord with which elements are
distributed in relationships of coexistence…each situated in its own ‘proper’ and
distinct location, a location it defines” whereas space, for de Certeau
…exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and
time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It
is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movement deployed within it. Space
occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it,
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temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual
programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space
is ….trans-formed into a term dependent upon many different conventions,
situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the
transformation caused by the successive contexts. […] In short, space is a
practised place. Thus, the street geometrically defined by urban planning is
transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the
space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place
constituted by a system of signs. (1984: 117)
Hence, the emphasis on space as the “intersections of mobile elements” that is
“actuated by the ensemble of movement deployed within it”, space for de Certeau
becomes “a practised place” impacted primarily by the motion of its inhabitants.
Referring to Edward T Hall, Jr.’s The Hidden Dimension (1966), Leslie Wasson
argues that like place, the concept of space too may be treated as a “sociological
category of experience” (Wasson, 2007: 3410). Whereas place is “a specific location
in the physical or cultural world,” space is “the physical distance among the elements
of which that place is constituted.” In other words, place is ‘a social organization of
space’ to which individuals attach a particular meaning, and in which certain
activities are more likely to occur. Sociologically, space may be variously defined:
“... as individual space, as the private spaces ... for personal lives, the situated space
defined for social interactions, the public spaces of wider social activity, and space as
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a scarce distributed resource in the organization of human social life” (Wasson, 2007:
4626-27).
As a concept, space is no longer merely a Kantian a priori for human existence and
action, rather space, as Lefebvre contends, is “ordered by human custom and
definition” and provide meaning and continuity to human life (Wasson, 2007: 4626).
Michel Foucault states that the “present epoch will be perhaps above all the epoch of
space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the
epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a
moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life
developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects
with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating
present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined
inhabitants of space” (2008: 14). He further emphasizes the importance of the socially
produced space of sites that people actually live in thus:
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the
erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that torments
and consumes us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we
do not live in a kind of void that could be coloured with diverse shades of
lights, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are
irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.
(2008: 16)
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Therefore, like place, the control and occupation of space too, has the potential to
generate and regulate ideological and socio-political power. Foucault highlights this
aspect of space by asserting that space is fundamental to the exercise of power
because a “whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same
time be history of powers (both these terms in the plural)—from the great strategies
of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” (1980: 149).
The concept of space has received considerable treatment in the texts of various
literary genres, but as Eric J. Bulson reiterates, the novel has contributed considerably
to “the formation of a spatial imagination for centuries and has continually brought
the lore of faraway places, wherever they may be, to a wide variety of audiences
around the globe” (Bulson 2006: 1) because the use of space in the novel “is
qualitatively different from the use of space in other literary and non-literary forms”
(Davis 1987: 53).
Another possible reason why a novel offers a better scope for the literary
representation of space is its organic relationship with time. This “intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” has been summed up by Mikhail
Bakhtin in his concept of the “chronotope” which literally means “time-space”.
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused
into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens,
takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged
and responsive to the movements of time, plot , and history. This intersection
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of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. (1981:
84)
Thus, associating chronotopes with social and historical processes, Bakhtin elaborates
that the novel and its various subgenres provide different ways of representing time
and space and different chronotopes actually generate different kinds of plots (Kastan
2006: 57).
Another theorist also justifies the relationship between space and time by relating
these two concepts through the medium of memory. In Postmodernism, or The
Cultural logic of late Capitalism (1991), Frederic Jameson argues that while time,
temporality, and issues of memory dominated human experience during high
modernism, categories of space came to dominate many aspects of daily life in the
postmodern age:
What we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily
demoralizing and depressing original new global space which is the “moment
of truth” of postmodernism. What has been called the postmodernist
“sublime” is only the moment in which this content has become most explicit,
has moved the closest to the surface of consciousness as a coherent new type
of space in its own right…(Jameson 1991: 49)
Sites of transience
Due to the increase in the frequency of dislocated population across various temporal
and spatial zones, foregrounding the place/space has become essential for an
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individual because trapped in the spaces in between, in cross-cultural locations
linking the global with the local, the politics of identity is significantly impacted. As a
result, individuals suffer from the general crisis of the inability to represent any form
of stable space as an anchor for situating their identity. Such individuals often seek
refuge in the in-between spatio-temporal zones that may be termed as ‘sites of
transience’. Marc Auge coined the term “non-places” to denote transit zones such as
waiting-rooms, hotels, shopping malls, railway stations, airports etc. as “palimpsest
on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten” (Auge
1995: 79). Such temporal zones of situated interactions that evolve due to the
increased mobility and travel of people across such sites intensify the instability of
the locational security of the process of formation of identity vis-a-vis home.
The postcolonial context
The history of the human civilization is the record of the movement of human beings
across the various spatio-temporal trajectories. However, in its gradual evolution
across thousands of years, possibly no other event in human history brought about as
much drastic demographic dislocations and relocations of human populations on a
larger scale than did European imperialism that only lasted a few centuries. Territorial
dispossession emerged as one of the defining characteristics of imperialism because
enhanced mobility of the colonisers across the globe led to the mass exodus of the
victimized communities in order to facilitate the colonial apparatus. The forced
transportation of the African ‘slaves’ across the Atlantic to build the ‘Second’ world
in the Americas and the semi-voluntary movement of a South Asians as indentured
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labourers to the Caribbean sugar plantations are some such “successful” colonial
enterprises of dislocation. In another kind of displacement induced by colonialism,
newly discovered lands were viewed as terra nullius and its native inhabitants were
colonised by being ‘unhomed’ in their own natal lands as in the case of the Native
Americans, the Australian Aborigines and the Zulus and Bantus of southern Africa.
Land, along with history and language are what the colonists sought to take into
possession and alter the most. Such oppression is synchronous with what Fanon
termed as a conscious colonial strategy essential for the success of colonialism:
Colonization is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and
emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted
logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and
destroys it. (Fanon 1963: 210)
“The discourse of alteriety”, says Dani Cavallaro, “manifests itself in all its
complexity in the contexts of debates on colonialism and postcolonialism” (Cavallaro
2001: 122). He further asserts that the politics of imperialism thrived on the vigorous
annexation and exploitation of other territories.
“Nationalism underpins imperial and colonial domination by promoting
notions of territorial and ideological supremacy. Nationalism as a discourse
pivots on the notion that certain groups of people are bound together by
shared racial, historical and linguistic connections …associated with a
particular territory. The term territory does not refer merely to a geographical
area but also, more importantly, to a political and cultural organization: a
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nation state. Such a space is both physical and conceptual, a region whose
boundaries must be guarded against alien intrusions, and an ideology to be
exalted and divulged. (Cavallaro 2001: 122)
The enclosure of a territory inhabited by people with similar ‘racial, historical and
linguistic connections’ within political and cultural boundaries creates the nation.
These boundaries act as demarcations to determine the belonging or non-belonging of
people who reside both within and outside the nation state.
Race has emerged as one of the most important socio-cultural determinants of an
individual’s nationality:
The issue of race is closely linked with that of nationalism: the classification
of people on the basis of racially distinctive features (most notoriously, the
colour of their skin) has been instrumental to the construction of national and
territorial boundaries. The advancement of a nation state’s ideology through
imperial and colonial power is virtually inseparable from the issues of race,
racial relations and racial prejudice. In order to assert the status of a nation as
superior, something else—an Other—must first be branded as inferior. The
colonizer’s inflated sense of self can only be sustained in contrast with a non-
self. Racial difference has been ruthlessly harnessed to the construction of
social identities and related power structures: the more remote, primitive and
exotic a colonized population could be made to appear, the more legitimate its
exploitation and repression would seem to be. (Cavallaro 2001: 122)
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Racism, thus, became a very powerful tool harnessed by the Europeans who
legitimised the colonial hegemony by establishing their own fair and light
complexion as the norm vis-à-vis the darker hues of the indigenous population of the
terrains they conquered.
Segregation on the basis of skin colour became such a dominant instrument that the
colonisers employed to subjugate the colonised that Fanon wrote two treatises: Black
Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth analysing the exploitative nature of
racism. Fanon states:
There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men.
There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men at all costs, the
richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. (Fanon 1967: 10)
The construction of identity on the white/black antithesis has been termed by Fanon
as a “massive psychoexistential complex” (Fanon 1967: 12) that has been injected so
deep by the colonisers within the mental structures of their victims that to Fanon,
“what is often called the black man’s soul is the white man’s artefact” (Fanon 1967:
14). Though his study is essentially focussed on the Caribbean, yet it becomes
applicable to the larger postcolonial context.
Other than the exploitation of human resource, the abuse of landscape by the imperial
machinery too left long lasting and deep impression upon the postcolonial psyche to
the extent that Edward Said contends:
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If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-
imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical in it. (1990: 77)
Therefore, after the degeneration of the colonial Empires in the mid-twentieth
century, along with deconstruction of “the color-line” to use W. E. B. Du Bois’
phrase, the reclamation of place and space became one of the major concerns of the
postcolonial subject. In the case of those people who were forcefully dislocated and
their descendents, physical and emotional distance resulting from the initial
displacement hindered their re-unification with the place of their origin because “a
valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from
migration” (Ashcroft 1989: 9). As a result, the formation of a satisfying sense of self
that was dislocated by colonialism initiated in the postcolonial individual a crisis of
identity and a desire for belonging definitively to a place and a space.
Makarand Paranjape argues that despite the shared experience of colonialism, there
are different types of dislocation and different types of belonging and the “elements
of this binary are not mutually exclusive.” According to him, both displacement and
belonging are synchronous and interpenetrating processes but neither is a given
condition, imposed from outside in an absolute manner. Therefore, he states, each
individual or collective displays its own unique pattern of choices while reacting to
displacement and belonging (2000: 231-233).
In addition, for such individuals located in the post-colonial and post-globalisation
scenario, the process of the construction of identity is also impinged upon by what
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Stuart Hall identifies as the positioning and construction of identities within the
discourses of history and culture:
Identity is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of
subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture. (Hall 1987: 44)
These ‘unstable points’ are definitely constructed by the interfaces of history and
culture which, every individual experiences and reacts to in a distinctive manner.
Identity, thus, becomes both a psychological and a consciously political construct and
dislocation and belonging emerge as important matrices of identity formation.
Therefore, the stories and narratives generated by these subjectivities, and by
extension, by the creative writers and artists, are dissimilar and they open up
prospects for comparative and contrasting analysis.
The structure of the dissertation
The first two chapters of this dissertation form an introduction and explicate the
theoretical foundations of this analysis drawing on the critical perspectives of
postcolonialism and cultural criticism. The present chapter has summarised the
received critical opinion about the notions of ‘space’ and ‘identity’ with specific
reference to the postcolonial situation. The following chapter contains the gist of the
existing literature survey about the concept of ‘home’.
Five different authors have been selected for the analysis in order to overcome the
recurrence of certain thematic concerns within the oeuvre of a single author.
Moreover, the contrast and comparison of texts written by individuals hailing from
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different contexts provides scope for interesting possibilities. None of the authors
studied here have exhausted their creative possibilities yet and together, in their
literatures, they more or less envelop a significant segment of the postcolonial world
except Latin America where a majority of authors are available in English through
translation and Africa where literatures in English are available both as original works
in English and through translations of texts written in other languages.
Chapters III to VII contain the detailed analysis of one novel of each author that I
consider the most appropriate for understanding the construction of the idea of home
and its representation in a narrative discourse. Chronologically, Chapter III contains
the analysis of V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), Chapter IV Sally Morgan’s
My Place (1987), Chapter V Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), Chapter VI Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Chapter VII Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry
Tide (2004) respectively.
The analyses of the novels selected for this study have been informed by the theories
and concepts outlined in the introductory chapters. However, essays of other authors
and critics considered pertinent to the discussion of the individual texts have been
referred to at relevant points in the analyses, the focus of the study being primarily on
the analysis of the text rather than on critiquing theoretical positions.
The concluding chapter sums up the major findings derived from the reading of the
five novels.