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”

2

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

3

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

4

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

5

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)

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

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:

10

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

11

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

12

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.

13

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,

14

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

15

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)

16

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

17

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

18

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

19

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

20

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)

21

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:

22

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

23

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.

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There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes

where we were born, where objects became dear to us before

we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world

seemed only an extension of our personality.

—George Eliot The Mill on the Floss.