The crisis of identity in postcolonial literature

During the second half of the twentieth century a new era arose when many countries gained independence, transitioning from colony to country. According to literary critics and theorists, the term "postcolonial" is defined as all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. Colonialism has had an immeasurable influence on history of the world, societies and individuals. It has penetrated the larger issues of culture, race, gender, and identity. Most themes that postcolonial theory and literature deal with are race, gender, ethnicity, identity and culture. One of the controversial issues of post colonialism is the question of identity and culture. In the modern world with the increase of immigrant numbers, hybrid nations, and constitutions of countries with different cultural diversities, the question of identity came to the surface. Theorists have paid a great attention to identity issues. Franz Fanon's argued about the consequences of colonialism and the change formed by the experience of immigration. For Edward Said, the central point of identity construction is the ability to resist and to recreate oneself as a postcolonial, anti-imperialist subject. At the same time, postcolonial novelists especially writers in former British colonies attracted the attention of readers and literary prizes. These novelists exposed and expressed the conditions of identity crises that emerged in postcolonial period. Their novels rarely avoided or escaped from the presence of Diasporas and exile and matters connected to identity. Chapter 1 of this thesis introduces the study and a brief account of the meaning and historical background of the term "postcolonial"; it also sheds light on some important issues of postcolonialism and its most commonly discussed terms, such as diaspora, hybridity, and displacement. In addition, it explains the nature of the novel and of the period and its emergence, figures and characteristics. The theoretical approach of the dissertation is discussed in Chapter 2, which explains briefly postcolonial theory, and then investigates outstanding theorists, Stuart Hall, Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Bill Ashcroft, Eduard Glissant, and others. These theorists have given greater attention to explaining identity crisis in the postcolonial era because of its importance in the complexity surfaced after colonialism. Chapter 2 also argues the value of identity as a thematic subject in the postcolonial period and literature. The chapter's main discussion focuses on the theorists' arguments about identity in the postcolonial world and their views about the construction of identity in former colonized countries. In particular, they note immigrants from postcolonial countries who suffered the diasporas and the dilemma of constructing a coherent identity. Chapter 3 is devoted to analyzing the novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), by the Trinidadian author Sam Selvon, and its connections to postcolonial theory, especially Fanon and Said, whose have discussed identity, homelessness, and the diasporas of the Caribbean immigrants in the postcolonial period. Chapter 3 also examines The Lonely Londoners as a textual space concerned with picturing the specific experiences of a marginalized and diasporic group of individuals encountering the colonial "centre" of London. Chapter 4 analyzes the crisis of identity in Nobel Prize-winner Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967). The chapter derives its argument from postcolonial theorists Fanon and Said arguments about mimicry and the crisis of identity felt by Naipaul's protagonist. The discussion shows the impact of colonialism on individual ambivalence and the loss of identity and how this leads to an imitation of the colonizer's identity. Chapter 5 also shows the findings of the study, arrived at from the above postcolonial novels and analyzed according to arguments of postcolonial theories in issues of the identity crisis. The conclusion shows how pro-colonized people faced their crisis of identity as a dilemma, ascribed to the impact of colonial tradition; the history of colonialism weighed heavily even on immigrants who became citizens of colonizer countries. Finally, the strategy of colonial power has had an effective influence on colonized people losing their sense of identification and becoming mimics of their host countries and while remaining with a sense of homelessness.