Investigating Identity, Hybridity, And Resistance: A Critical Study Of Postcolonial Narratives

Abstract

The paper examines issues of identity and culture in postcolonial literature and emphasizes how these authors undertake a severe critique and resistance to the colonial legacy. Drawing from Said's Orientalism and Bhabha's (1994) ideas on mimicry and hybridity, this paper attempts to outline one direction through which postcolonial literature reflects the complexities of identity formation within societies that have undergone colonial domination. The current research determines how the three authors—Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children, and Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things are initiated to resist colonial narratives and[1] reclaim cultural identity. Achebe deconstructs the descriptions provided by the colonizers for African culture, while Rushdie and Roy dive into fluid identities and hybridity in postcolonial societies. The paper argues that postcolonial literature does not simply critique colonialism's cultural and psychological effects; instead, it reshapes identity and sets up the aspects of resistance. Indeed, in any case, it is finally analytically noticed that postcolonial literature reshapes global understandings concerning identity, culture, and power in a postcolonial world, opening new ways for interpreting the continuous impacts of colonial legacies within contemporary society.