Hybridity, the uncanny and the stranger : the contemporary transcultural novel

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: During the past century, for a variety of reasons, more people have been crossingnational and cultural borders than ever before. This, along with constantly developingcommunication technology, has seen to it that clear-cut distinctions, divisions andborders are no longer as easily definable as they once were. This process, nowcommonly referred to as 'globalisation,' has led to a rising trend of 'multiculturalism'and 'cultural hybridity,' terms often connected with celebratory views of ourpostmodern, postcolonial world as a colourful melting pot of cultures. However, whatthese celebratory views conveniently avoid recognising, is that the increasingoccurrence of hybridity places a growing number of people in a painful space inbetweenidentities where they are 'neither just this/nor just that (Dayal 47), 'neitherthe One… nor the Other… but something else besides (Bhabha Commitment 41).Perhaps in an effort to combat this ignorance, a new breed of authors – who haveexperienced the rigours of migration first-hand – are giving voice to this pain-infusedspace on the periphery of cultures and identities through a developing genre oftranscultural literature. This literature typically deals with issues of identity closelyrelated to globalisation and multiculturalism. In my thesis I will be looking at threesuch novels: Jamal Mahjoub's The Drift Latitudes, Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss,and Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore.These authors move away from an idealistic, celebratory view of hybridity as theeffortless blending of cultures to a somewhat disenchanted approach to hybridity as acomplex negotiation of split subjectivity in an ever-fracturing world. All three novelslend themselves to a psychoanalytic reading, with subjects who imagine themselves tobe unitary, but end up having to face their repressed fractured subjectivity in amoment of crisis. The psychoanalytic model of the split between the conscious andthe unconscious, then, resonates well with the postcolonial model of the intrinsicallyfractured hybrid identity. However, while psychoanalysis focuses on internalprocesses, postcolonialism focuses on external processes.Therefore, I will be making use of a blend of psychoanalytic and postcolonialconcepts to analyse and access discursive meanings in the texts. More specifically, I will use Homi Bhabha's concept of 'hybridity', Freud's concept of the 'uncanny', andZygmunt Bauman's concept of 'the stranger' as distinctive, yet interconnectedconceptual lenses through which to view all three of these transcultural novels.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University