المستخلص: |
This article addresses the problematic of Self/Other hybrid encounter and the dilemma of belonging that the main protagonist, John, endures during his diasporic experience in J. M. Coetzee’s Youth. Although he is invested with the capacity for self-analysis and change, John ends up frustrated, alienated and split between two cultural identities. This may invoke the uneasy state of hybridity, a concept commonly related to cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism, which are often associated with celebratory views of the postcolonial world as a colorful melting pot of cultures. However, most of these views conveniently circumvent the fact that hybridity may also produce alienated and marginalized subjects who are neither in nor out, but entrapped in liminal spaces between cultural identities. The hybrid encounters in Coetzee’s fiction may suggest a move from an idealistic approach to hybridity as a space of cultural blending to a relatively disenchanted view of hybridity as a complex negotiation of fractured subjectivity.
|