Deconstructing Identity in Postcolonial Fiction

Abstract

With the destabilization of political and cultural boundaries between peoples and nations, the concept of identity, with its implications in the dialectics of self and other, becomes a philosophical challenge in a globalised cosmopolitan world. The challenge resides in the fact that in such a postmodern situation where identity is viewed as shapeless, shifting and moving beyond the fixity of Manichean thought, a process of questioning is enacted to interrogate identity in its past, present and future implications. This paper will attempt to look at the ways in which some postcolonial novels set out to deconstruct the concept of identity by constructing ambivalent texts, blurring the borders between self and other, laying the foundations for hybridity where otherness reigns as a process of signification which rests on interpretation.