DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L31269
Authors: LO Chi Man
Abstract: Through the examination of Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River, this paper suggests that there is an inevitable ambivalence between the homogeneity essential to the approach of ‘rooting’ people by propagandizing nationalism and the African town’s heterogeneity inextricable from its original hybridization and entanglements with the West; thus showing that it is the factors of multiculturalization and hybridization that problematize the fixation and location of an authentic identity in this postcolonial context. It further argues that the authentic identity of the hybridized African town in Naipaul’s novel is merely located in the ancestral past due to the town’s increasing multiplicities as a result of contacting with the rest of the world.
Keywords: identity; Naipaul; nationalism; homogeneity; heterogeneity; hybridization
Updating...