Quest for Identity in Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

Diasporic dislocation due to transcending boundaries and its consequences is a much-focused issue in postcolonial literature. All those writers who are living in a foreign culture have faced this issue. Therefore, the clash between the indigenous and the foreign cultures splits their personalities and they search for their identity. The present research is intended to explore the implicit optimism in diasporic dislocation and its consequences in Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat (2012). This is a qualitative research using an eclectic approach, which is the combination of Edward Sarian and Homi K Bhabha frameworks. The results show that identity crisis is a pertinent concept in diasporic literature and the protagonist in the novel under discussion goes certain transformations. In this process, the heroin of the novel faces a dislocation and a cultural crisis in terms of her cultural identity. She could not assimilate a foreign culture completely due to her indigenous cultural roots to apply Said’s terminology.