Summary
With the destabilization of political and cultural boundaries between peoples and nations, the 
concept of identity, with its implications in the dialectics of self and other, becomes a philosophical 
challenge in a globalised cosmopolitan world. %e challenge resides in the fact that in such a 
postmodern situation where identity is viewed as shapeless, shifting and moving beyond the 
fixity of Manichean thought, a process of questioning is enacted to interrogate identity in its 
past, present and future implications. 
%is paper will attempt to look at the ways in which some postcolonial novels set out to deconstruct 
the concept of identity by constructing ambivalent texts, blurring the borders between self and 
other, laying the foundations for hybridity where otherness reigns as a process of signification 
which rests on interpretation. 
Key words: identity, hybridity, deconstruction, otherness, ambivalence, interpretation
 Povzetek
Ošibitev političnih in kulturnih meja med narodi in nacijami vzpostavlja koncept identitete, 
vključujoč dialektično razmerje med jazom in drugim, kot filozofski izziv v globaliziranem 
kozmopolitskem svetu. V postmoderni situaciji, kjer je identiteta razumljena kot brezoblična in 
pomikajoča se onkraj ustaljene manihejske misli, se izziv poraja v procesu izpraševanja identitete 
v okviru njenih preteklih, sedanjih in prihodnjih implikacij.
Članek skuša orisati načine, s katerimi se nekateri postkolonialni romani lotevajo dekonstrukcije 
koncepta identitete, ko z ustvarjanjem ambivalentnih besedil brišejo meje med jazom in drugim 
in tako postavljajo temelje za hibridnost, kjer vlada drugost kot proces označevanja, ki se opira 
na interpretacijo. 
Ključne besede: identiteta, hibridnost, dekonstrukcija, drugost, ambivalenca, interpretacija
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.7.2.91-99

In his Reflections on Identity, Stanley Aronowitz reiterates the fact that “the older theories of 
identity have tended to posit ‘society’ and the ‘individual’ as fixed” (in Rajchman 1995, 115). 
%e observation that identity was traditionally thought of as something stable and fixed can be 
corroborated by Stuart Hall who assumes that in the past the discourse of identity rested on the 
idea of fixity and stability wherein authenticity was sought for as a guarantee to secure continuity 
and resist the mutability of a rapidly changing world.
%e logic of the discourse of identity assumes a stable subject, i.e., we’ve assumed that there 
is something which we can call our identity which, in a rapidly shifting world, has the great 
advantage of staying still. Identities are a kind of guarantee that the world isn’t falling apart 
quite as rapidly as it sometimes seems to be. It’s a kind of fixed point of thought and being, 
a ground of action, a still point in the turning world. %at’s the kind of ultimate guarantee 
that identity seems to provide us with. (Hall 1989, 10)   
%is traditional discourse conceives of identity as being related to a fixed point, a particular set 
of values, serving as a sort of hallmark for the individual in society. Stuart Hall goes further to 
suggest that identity is a discourse wherein the logic of stability and continuity steers towards the 
belief that an individual can remain the same person over time, whatever his life experiences may 
be. In this discourse, identity is associated with a point of reference, a kind of origin that secures 
or guarantees authenticity, fixity and stability.
%e logic of identity is the logic of something like a “true self.” And the language of identity 
has often been related to the search for a kind of authenticity to one’s experience, something 
that tells me where I come from. %e logic and language of identity is the logic of depth 
– in here, deep inside me, is my Self which I can reflect upon. It is an element of continuity. 
I think most of us do recognize that our identities have changed over time, but we have the 
hope or nostalgia that they change at the rate of a glacier. So, while we’re not the fledglings 
that we were when we were one year old, we are the same sort of person. (Hall 1989, 10)
1
 
%e old logic of identity creates, as Stanley Aronowitz puts it, “a self-enclosed universe of identity 
discourse” (in Rajchman 119). %e old self-enclosed discourse of identity rests on the exclusion of 
the other, the other individual or the other identity group, whose difference is felt as constituting a 
potential threat or danger. %e danger of such an identity discourse is that it offers a fertile terrain for 
all sorts of essentialist thinking such as communitarianism, extremism and radical nationalism. 
 There is little need to focus on the ways in which the great collective identities related to nation, class, race or gender contribute to fix 
the concept of identity to the notion of stability: 
 “The whole adventure of the modern world was, for a long time, blocked out in terms of these great collective identities. As one knew 
one’s class, one knew one’s place in the social universe. As one knew one’s race, one knew one’s racial position within the great 
races of the world in their hierarchical relationship to one another. As one knew one’s gender, one was able to locate oneself in the 
huge social divisions between men and women. As one knew one’s national identity, one certainly knew about the pecking order of 
the universe. These collective identities stabilized and staged our sense of ourselves. That logic of identity that seemed so confident 
(…) was in part held in place by these great collective social identities...” (Hall 1989, 10–1 1)

All too frequently in the contemporary world we find groups obsessed with asserting the 
“identity” or “sameness” of their members in order to affirm the contrast with what they 
perceive to threaten them as “different” or “other.” %e perceived differences may belong to 
any number of familiar typologies, including race, religion, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual 
preference, or other status taken to be “fundamental” in some supposedly alarming sense. 
(Grier 2007, 1) 
 In line with postmodern thought, postcolonial theory fully subscribes to the new identity discourse 
by acknowledging the destabilisation and the fragmentation affecting the concept of identity. 
%e destabilisation of the concept of identity stems from the growing awareness that identity is a 
question involving the relationship of the self and the other. Without the other, there would be 
no self, no identity. %e contemporary concern with otherness highlights the proposition that 
alterity (difference or the existence of the other) determines the process of identification. It is 
the existence of the other that gives the self meaning. Besides, the self is not a finished product; 
it is not a stable construct; it is, rather, a process in constant flux; something that is incessantly 
shifting. %e ceaseless change that affects the self in its relation with the other endows identity 
with mutable fluidity. “Identity emerges as a kind of unsettled space or an unresolved question 
in that space, between a number of intersecting discourses” (Hall 1989, 10).  
Many thinkers agree today on the shifting nature of identity in a globalised world characterised by 
what Edward Said calls in Culture and Imperialism “the mixture of cultures and identities” (Said 
1994, 407). For Edward Said, instability is a major characteristic of identity. Identity is always in 
progress, fluctuating between differences, shifting beyond Manichean thought, undergoing an 
endless process of change. “No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or 
Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience 
for only a moment are quickly left behind” (ibid., 407). 
As it develops the self embraces different identities and becomes therefore an on-going process 
of differentiation. Identity is not stable because the self is constantly shifting from one identity 
to another, and this is mainly because of the inherent diversity within identity. Identity cannot 
be restricted to only one particular thing; instead of being en-closed within the boundaries of 
particularism, identity opens out to embrace pluralism. 
Pluralistic identity is a notion that calls for Homi Bhabha’s treatment of the concept of hybridity; 
such a concept is inescapably intertwined with the notion of ambivalence and indeterminacy. 
%e indeterminacy and ambivalence of identity, the fluctuation between sameness and difference, 
spring from the inadequacy of any attempt to adopt only one particular identity. %e inherent 
diversity of the self, places identity in an in-between interval, a third space, for Homi Bhabha 
who, in adopting a politics of the in-between, opens the scope for investigation into the fertile 
interstitial space of identity. 
Seen under the light of this new discourse, identity in postcolonial theory becomes a process of 
questioning. Postcolonial theory perceives identity as a process in constant flux wherein the self, 

in its perpetual negotiation with the other, enacts a self-interrogating mechanism, a self-centred 
process of interrogation, establishing a deconstructive apprehension of identity. According to 
Jacques Derrida, the self, “in departing from itself, lets itself be put into question by the other” 
(1978, 96). In its encounter with the other, the self indulges in a process of becoming other 
than itself (ibid., 119, 133). In its “adventuring outside oneself towards the unforeseeably-other” 
(ibid., 95), the self has to face “the impossibility of return to the same”. %e acknowledgment of 
this inescapable impossibility of return to the same after encountering the other plays an active 
role in approaching postcolonial identities. 
 Hanif Kureishi’s novel #e Bhudda of Suburbia (1990) is a telling example of how identity is 
deconstructed in postcolonial fiction. %e narrator-character of the novel is self-consciously 
aware of the hybrid nature of his identity, an identity to be situated in an in-between interstitial 
space. Karim Amir, the London Suburbian of Indian origin, speaks of himself as inhabiting an 
indeterminate in-between space, a third space of both belonging and unbelonging. %e opening 
paragraph sets the autobiographical tone of the narrative wherein identity emerges as a central 
concern for the author who, from the outset, reveals his deconstructive approach to the important 
postcolonial issue of identity. 
My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often 
considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from 
two old histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the 
South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and 
blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored. (3)
%e sense of restlessness that the narrator expresses in the opening paragraph may be viewed 
as revealing the crisis of identity from which the postcolonial self suffers. Karim’s restlessness 
could be related to the sense of displacement and dislocation he faces as an individual living 
in a postcolonial world where he must come to terms with a hybrid identity, an identity that 
ties him up to more than one culture. But the restlessness Karim feels might be connected 
with the dynamic workings of the postcolonial hybrid identity. %is restlessness is the inner 
movement which reveals identity as a process in constant flux. %e in-between nature of identity, 
the “belonging and not” of which Karim speaks is the deconstructive process, the in-and-out 
movement of the self, the quest for meaning that allows the self to embark on a perpetual journey 
towards the unattainable understanding of his own identity. Karim’s restlessness is the process 
of self-questioning; it is identity in constant flux. %roughout the novel, identity is constantly 
interrogated, moving away from the fixity of Manichean thought as incarnated by Karim’s uncle 
who stands for the failure of the old identity discourse which rigidly sticks to the ideal of stability. 
Karim’s uncle blames his brother for losing his Indian authenticity by becoming too westernised. 
Karim’s father, who represents the first generation of immigrants in Britain, undergoes an 
identity-change, leading him away from the traditional values left back home, there in India, 
in order to embrace the English culture adopted here in England. His choice to divorce his first 
wife, Karim’s mother, and his love for Eva, could be interpreted as revealing his desire to change 

and seek a new identity. Karim inherits his restlessness from his father, perhaps; but he seems 
to share with his Indian-born genitor that balance which consists in accepting the identity of 
origin while accommodating other identities. Like his father’s, Karim’s restlessness stems from his 
wavering between cultures and identities. 
Karim’s restlessness, associated with the postcolonial dynamic quest for a meaning to identity, 
is to be found in Anita Desai’s novel Fire On the Mountain; it is incarnated by the little wild 
girl Raka who stands for revolt against the past, as personified by her great-grand-mother, the 
heroine of the novel. Raka, who allegorically represents the new generation of Indians struggling 
to overcome the sense of loss in a rapidly changing world, could be thought of as reminiscent of 
Owonko’s inner energy which ends in tragedy at the close of Chinua Achebe’s #ings Fall Apart. 
%e same inner energy is to be found in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North where 
the hero’s sexual dynamism betrays his restless strive to come to terms with his being trapped 
between cultures and identities.  
Like Karim and Raka, Okwonko faces a crisis of identity, a crisis that fictional characters at times 
tend to resolve in violence. Karim’s depression and “self hatred” make him desire “to mutilate 
himself with broken bottles” in Kureishi’s Bhudda of Suburbia (249–50).
All the same, my depression and self hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken 
bottles, and numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the 
feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn’t go mad, 
even if that letting-go was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal. I began to 
wonder why I was so strong – what it was that held me together. I thought that it was that 
I’d inherited from Dad a strong survival instinct. (249–50)
2
Okwonko commits suicide at the end of Achebe’s novel, and Raka, at the close of Anita Desai’s 
narrative, mysteriously sets a fire in the forest, destroying the local landscape which is part of the 
heroine’s roots and identity. Fire as a destructive element is closely associated with the identity 
crisis from which the heroine suffers in #e Wide Saragasso Sea. %is narrative reeks with violence 
as Antoinette struggles against insanity and alienation, allowing the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys 
to delve into a profound investigation into postcolonial identity. %e final descent of the “mad 
woman in the attic” with a candle in her hand, ready to set the whole house on fire, dramatises 
the violent inner struggle to apprehend identity. 
In Tayeb Salih’s novel, Season of Migration to the North, Mustapha Saeed, a typical postcolonial 
hero, drowns himself in the Nile in a final desperate attempt to resolve his identity crisis. Salih’s 
postcolonial narrative is permeated with violence which characterises the hero’s sexual relationships 
with his female victims. Such a silent sort of violence culminates in his final submission “to the 
destructive forces of the river” (168). His drowning marks the end of his innermost identity 
conflict between the oriental components of his Arab identity and the acquired occidental parts 
of his personality; the western part of his identity is personified by the European women he seeks 
to conquer, driven by the desire to embrace the Other’s identity. 
 testifies.  

Violence also reigns in Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, a recent novel where the civil war in Lebanon 
provides the canvas on which the author’s brush attempts to render the crisis of personal and 
collective identities in a postcolonial country. Bassam and George, the heroes of the novel, 
embody the struggle to cope with their multiple identities in a world endangered by political, 
cultural and religious hatred between communities. 
As the hero of Kureishi’s novel suggests, it is probably “the odd mixture” of cultures and 
sensibilities – the multiplicity of selves – that make these postcolonial characters “restless”. But 
the restlessness, if thought of as a characteristic feature of the multiple postcolonial self, enacts a 
dynamic process of self-interrogation, a process that expresses itself in violence, at times, but it 
imposes itself as revealing the effort made in order to adjust to a rapidly-changing world. 
%e restlessness, which is not unrelated to violence in the above-mentioned novels, should be 
interpreted as signs connected to the crisis of identity faced by the characters in postcolonial fiction; 
but violence could be perceived as a manifestation of madness, and madness, namely the insanity 
associated with a number of characters, is revolt, a process of questioning which raises disturbing 
questions. Madness, which is a form of violence, enacts a process of self-interrogation, putting into 
question the fixity of meaning that the self may seek to reach in its struggle to apprehend identity. 
Madness may manifest itself in the form of schizophrenia which could function as a deconstructive 
mode of interrogation, an incessant process of questioning identity. Gilles Deleuze perceives 
schizophrenia as “a line of flight”, a sort of escape from “the enclosed and stratified systems 
of authoritarian thought” (Edgar and Sedgwick 2002, 40). Schizophrenia in the Deleuzian 
sense is a sort of revolutionary attitude in its rejection of authoritarianism, and it could also be 
approached, not as mental illness, but rather as a creative process and a productive movement. 
As a productive and creative process, schizophrenia, which becomes a critical mode, opens onto 
an incommensurable space of numerous possibilities, variations and potentials of signification.
3
  
It is in this light that the postcolonial approach to the concept of identity may be considered 
under Deleuze’s perception of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia, as a creative and dynamic process, 
should be compared to the interrogative movement inherent in identity as a process of self-
questioning. If identity can be thought of as a “third space”, an interstitial universe of border-
crossings and numerous possibilities, one may be tempted to suggest that identity as a process 
of self-questioning is a schizophrenic movement perpetually raising an unlimited number of 
interrogations. %e restlessness mentioned above, as characterising a number of postcolonial 
characters, could be viewed thus as a sign of schizophrenia in its interpretation as a dynamic 
process related to the deconstructive investigation into identity. 
 (Bouaniche 2007, 156). (ibid., 157).  (ibid., 157). 

In the end of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, the heroine undergoes a strange experience that 
could be considered as a fit of insanity. After the discovery of the body of her father who has 
been reported missing in the forest, the narrator-character ends her journey (which structures her 
narrative) by performing a bodily merging with the natural environment. She, who suffers from 
a deep sense of loss and estrangement, feels that she is undergoing a physical metamorphosis, 
turning her into something as yet unknown, something hybrid, conflating the human, the 
animal and the environmental. “I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees 
and animals move and grow, I am a place” (175). Her body is depicted as undergoing a process 
of transformation, making her dissolve gradually into the natural elements, turning her into a 
living creature that identifies with the prehistoric inhabitants of Canada. “I stay on the bank, 
resting, licking the scratches; no fur yet on my skin” (180). %is metamorphosis marks the final 
stage of her trip back to the place of her childhood, looking for her lost father who represents her 
individual and collective identities: her personal identity and her Canadian identity. %is mystic 
experience, this madness, occurs at the end as the climax of the protagonist’s quest, culminating 
in the discovery of her own Self. %e individual self is deeply rooted in the collective identity; 
the heroine returns to her Canadian origins which stretch back to the country’s primitive history. 
%e heroine identifies with her father who drowns while contemplating prehistoric inscriptions 
on a rock by the lake. In her madness, which is a complete effacement of otherness, the heroine 
seems to be merging with the place of her personal and collective origin, invoking the sacred 
space of primitive gods and old local beliefs. “I invoked it, the fur god with tail and horns, already 
forming. %e mothers of gods…” (175).
Her mystic journey back into the personal and collective past is also a journey into the future. 
Her metamorphosis marks the birth of a new identity, but this new identity is pluralistic; it is a 
hybrid identity. Her newly-born identity is to be situated in an ambivalent interstitial space, an 
in-between world where otherness is effaced. Her madness is a world of freedom; it allows her to 
cross the borders by turning into a hybrid Self, half-male, half-female; half-human, half-animal. 
Such hybrid self transcends the boundaries between humans, animals and environment. %e 
fluid imagery the author implements to render the heroine’s bodily metamorphosis contributes 
actively to the creation of an atmosphere of transparency. Fluid imagery and transparency reflect 
the fluidity of the protagonist’s identity. 
If the father is a symbol of identity, the heroine’s genitor is to be considered in this novel as a 
great symbol of fluidity; he transcends death and returns as a ghostly presence capable of taking 
any shape imaginable.  
I say Father. 
He turns towards me and it’s not my father. It is what my father saw, the thing you meet 
when you’ve stayed here too long alone. (…)
I am part of the landscape; I could be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock. 
I see now that although it isn’t my father it is what my father has become. I knew he wasn’t 
dead. 

From the lake a fish jumps
An idea of a fish jumps
A fish jumps, carved wooden fish with dots painted on the sides, no, antlered fish thing 
drawn in red on cliffstone, protecting spirit. It hangs in the air suspended, flesh turned to 
the water. How many shapes can he take. (180–1) 
%e complete effacement of borders in the experience of madness – the space and time 
compression that Mark Currie uses to define schizophrenia (Currie 1998, 103)
4
 – allows the 
protagonist to identify with her dead father. She becomes like him, an ethereal, fluid being, 
wavering between absence and presence, between here and there; between the visible and the 
intangible, between life and death, between sameness and difference. In her fit of insanity, the 
heroine in Surfacing undergoes a process of “space and time compression” through which she 
reveals her schizophrenic merging into something other than herself. She becomes a multiple-
self being whose schizophrenia or hybridity – if we adopt hybridity as a form of schizophrenia 
– rehabilitates her as an “interpreter”, to put it in Mark Currie’s words, an interpreter who 
aims to destabilise meaning (ibid., 103). %e world for Margaret Atwood’s heroine becomes “a 
theatre of signs and discourses which cannot exclude each other and which constitute a babble of 
voices” (ibid., 103). %e new pluralistic identity that the narrator has embraced in the end of the 
novel grants her the ability to speak through a multiplicity of voices. Speaking the unspeakable, 
her voice indirectly expresses concerns on behalf of all the oppressed women, all the primitive 
native Canadians, and, among other things, all the citizens suffering from the oppressive urban 
capitalist system. 
 Surfacing dramatises Atwood’s way of constructing a third identity which raises an infinite 
number of interrogations about the boundaries between what is traditionally deemed as male and 
female, human and animal, self and other. Like #e Bhudda of Suburbia, Fire on the Mountain, 
#e Wide Saragasso Sea, Season of Migration to the North, or De Niro’s Game, Surfacing illustrates 
the way postcolonial fiction offers to deconstruct the concept of identity whose ambivalence 
remains open to any re-imaginable interpretation. Postcolonial fiction is an ambivalent text that 
offers a fertile terrain for the never-ending investigation into the third space of identity. Founded 
on the concept of difference, identity opens onto otherness which reveals itself as a process of 
signification that feeds on ambivalence and interpretation, calling for perpetual destabilisation 
of meaning. 
With the destabilisation of cultural frontiers between nations, identity emerges as a philosophical 
challenge. Without offering possibilities of reaching definite answers, identity, as a process of 
interrogation, will continue to raise questions about the self in its incessant efforts to apprehend 
the unattainable other. Postcolonial fiction invites us to believe that in our attempts to answer 
 Mark Currie discusses the Lacanian definition of schizophrenia as “a kind of linguistic disorder”, resulting in “a different way of 
construing reality and experience” (Currie 1998, 102). Seen as a split or “disunity in the personality,” schizophrenia is dealt with as a 
“breakdown in the temporal chain of signification” (ibid., 102–3). Mark Currie accounts for this schizophrenic disunity as being con-
nected with the “inability to sustain the linearity of things” (ibid., 103). This inability to sustain the linearity of things results in ‘space 
and time compression’.  

questions about our relations with others, and no matter what new directions may the concept 
of identity take in the future, what matters most is perhaps the balance that should be sought for 
in order to avoid all forms of fixity of meaning that characterise essentialist thinking.