Postcolonial Identities in Dinaw Mengestu’s Literary Chronotope

Abstract

The critical discussion in this article is on postcolonial identities and it centres on Dinaw Mengestu's novels Children of the Revolution and All Our Names. It is contended that the term postcolonial identities is taken to mean the awareness of the subaltern as they try to negotiate who they are within the chronotopic hybridized African space in the postcolonial context. In the epigraph above, Gayatri Spivak describes the culturally oppressed, the subaltern, as having neither antiquity nor ability for speech due to the milieu of colonial production in which they operate. Important for the study, history and speech happen in time-space. Therefore, the identities of the subaltern, which Spivak associates to history and speech, come into being in the novel through fusion of time-space indicators. Cued by Spivak’s unique assertion, how Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution and All Our Names address themselves to postcolonial identities through fusion of time-space indicators is the central concern of this paper.