Notions of Identity: Hybridity vs. Cultural Consolidation in Some Black Post-Colonial and Women's Fiction

Abstract

This thesis involves a theoretical study of the dynamics of cultural interaction as represented in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat, Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Ema Brodber's Myal. Specifically, it considers the role that a dialogue between critical theory (post-colonial and feminist) and literary practice can play in the evaluation of two distinct conceptions of cultural difference: identity politics, understood as positing an essential binaristic difference between an ethnic or gendered Self and Other, and hybridity theory, which conceives of Self and Other as mutually constitutive and inescapably interconnected. While this thesis demonstrates some of the ways in which hybridity theory can revise and expand contemporary critical readings of the novels under study, it also demonstrates how literature can problematize the universalizing claims of both hybridity theory and identity politics, thus stressing the importance of sociohistorical and literary/narrative contexts to the evaluation of strategies of resistance to colonial and/or patriarchal regimes. After an introductory chapter dealing with questions of theory, three subsequent chapters discuss themes of hybridity and cultural separatism in the novels by Ngugi, Hurston, and Brodber, respectively. Each of these latter chapters involves a detailed analysis of the colonial and/or patriarchal discourses represented in the particular novel or novels under study. These analyses include discussions of some of the ways in which dominant discourses attempt to co-opt cultural difference and impede equitable intercultural hybridizing exchange by polarizing Self and Other in a binaristic economy. Each chapter also considers the presence of internal contradictions in dominant discourses and the implications of such contradictions for a revolutionary politics. On the basis of these discussions, this thesis considers the relative efficacy of hybridity and identity politics as strategies of resistance, demonstrating that different contexts call for different approaches to revolutionary theory and practice.