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Postcolonial Identity

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POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITY CRISES IN V.S. NAIPUL'S THE MIMIC MEN

BY
IDENYI, GRACE
ABSTRACT
The mimetic function of Literature often reveals the society from which it evolved. The experience of an individual in the society from which a literary piece originates usually represents the experiences of other people in that society. In the fragmented and chaotic post-colonial world, the characters feel estranged from the world around them and experience a crisis of identity which leaves them hollow and unable to reinvent themselves. The present paper adopts the Postcolonial approach. As its focus is on the problematics of being a postcolonial subject. In other words, it deals with the repercussions of the colonial encounter on the lives of the colonized in the text under review. The paper aims at identifying estrangement and crises of identity in the postcolonial society of the Caribbean Islands as …show more content…

Post-colonial theory according to John Lye(1998) deals with
[T]he reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonized countries or literature written in colonizing countries which deals with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses particularly on the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people and on literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness. Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness. There are however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, for

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