Representation of Identity Crisis in Relation to Mimicry and Sense of Belonging in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By The Sea

Year 2022, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 47 - 64, 02.11.2022

Muzaffer Zafer Ayar , Saliha Şahin

Abstract

A new period emerged from the second half of the 20th century, and it has led to many debates regarding language, identity, race, gender, and culture. Simultaneously, a floor has emerged as postcolonial literature where literary figures raised their voices against all kinds of oppression in the cultural sense, and not remained silent towards experiences they had gone through all during the colonial period. With their anti-colonial rhetoric, writers living the shellshock in geographies of Africa and Asia passed on the story of their struggles to readers through their writings as first-hand experiences. Within this context, this study aims to examine the lives and backstories of two main characters in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea (2001) from a postcolonial viewpoint. As one of the most prominent issues of the postwar period, identity crisis will be clarified in connection with mimicry and sense of belonging coined and discussed by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) and by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks (1967).

Keywords

Colonialism, identity crisis, immigration, mimicry, sense of belonging, postcolonialism

Project Number

Yok

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