Identity in Post-Colonial Texts

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how the idea of displacement is prevalent in these novels. The writer points out how the people in these post-colonial works are moving from places where the idea of displacement remained a part of their colonized history into places where they are now physically removed from their place of birth. When the post-colonial body is exposed to a culture that is very different from theirs, it becomes necessary for identity to alter.

From the Paper:

"Throughout the late twentieth century and into twenty-first, the search for self-identification grew in importance as a response to an increase focus on individualism. The search for identity is a problematic discourse in a world where dislocation imposes different cultures on individuals who leave their country of origin to exist in another. In the study of post-colonialism the search for identity is pertinent, because migration is a common experience for the postcolonial body. As migration occurs, "It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place" (Empire p.8). In postcolonial texts, the reconstructing of identities are not fluid and required in order to attain progression in the space migrated into. This motif is prevalent in Mira Nair's Mississippi Massala, Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Edwidge Danticat's Breath Eyes Memory."

More papers on Identity in Post-Colonial Texts:

• Analytical Essay # 26211 : "Identity and Culture in "Trainspotting"
• Essay # 53708 : "Enslavement and Emancipation in Post-Colonial Cuba and Brazil"
• Analytical Essay # 31873 : "Postcolonial Literature"

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