DISIDENTIFICATION AND HOMELESSNESS IN TABISH KHAIR’S NIGHT OF HAPPINESS

Year 2019, , 494 - 501, 30.06.2019

Mustafa Büyükgebiz

https://doi.org/10.33692/avrasyad.590723

Abstract

Tabish Khair, who is an Indian author settled in Denmark, employs a postcolonial
discourse in his works. He creates multicultural and also anti-colonial fiction by blending his
native culture with the adopted western one. Tabish Khair‟s novels, in particular, resist the
hegemonic voice of the Western culture and as an author, he tries to reflect the original voice of
postcolonial characters by focusing on their cultural clashes and discontents which emerge
when these characters live in the West as immigrants or interact with the colonial culture. One
of the most striking novels in which he portrays vivid characters with identity crisis is his latest
novel; Night of Happiness. The novel, named after an important date for Muslims known as
Shab-e-baraat night, was first published in 2018, and narrates the story of postcolonial
characters who suffers from identity loss in the postcolonial, ambivalent atmosphere of
contemporary India. In this sense, the aim of this article is to unfold the psychological and social
defects of formerly colonized individuals in our contemporary era by referring to some specific
quotations from the novel, and to apply Postcolonial Literary Theory to shed light on the novel‟s
anti-colonial discourse, and Khair‟s humorous style of social criticism. 

Keywords

identity, crisis, postcolonialism, ambivalence

References

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