Becoming the Other: Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and the Issue of Identity for the Native Character Pauline Puyat

Year 2008, Issue: 28, 5 - 14, 01.10.2008

Punyashree Panda

Abstract

In postcolonial literature racial and ethnic identities are not fixed but are subject to shaping and reshaping. Having been ascribed to and associated with cultural representations, nativity, rewriting of history, and reconstruction of identity, postcolonialism offers a space to discuss the issues of identity in the writings from the margins of the contemporary world. Postcolonial literary productions, more often than not, point to marginalized writers’ attempt to preserve their cultures and to ensure continuity. Writing for cultural survival, postcolonial authors focus on the celebration of their liminal status, and, in the process, deconstruct and reconstruct cultural codes and modes of representation. In such a scenario, history, politics, and even culture itself are altered, rediscovered, and reassessed in the voices of those who previously had no voice. Rejecting the unitary, monolithic, and monochromic versions of western textual and cultural discourse, postcolonial authors stress the polyphonic and heteroglossic concepts of a poststructuralist discourse.

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