Concepts of Hybridity and Mimicry in Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas

This paper deals with the imbalance hybridization of cultures in the selected novels of Selvon and Naipaul that make the characters ‘mimic’ men and alienates them from their origins and create diasporic identities. Hybridity and mimicry have been influenced by multiple diasporic routes of Western colonial literary representations. Naipaul and Selvon believe in the hollowness of ‘mimic man’ who lost their originality, creativity and thinking ability by imitating the colonial authority. The mimicry of the colonial language by the postcolonial writers is a way of resistance to colonial authority. The adaptation in mimicking Western modes of European modernist writing and the ambivalence of the image of the black British wanderer capture the doubleness of hybrid identities in literature.

Keywords:

Hybridity , Mimicry , Marginalization , Diasporic , Mimic Man , originality , Colonized , Colonizer