The Survey of Identity Crisis in Lawrence Hill’s Work

Literary works convey special themes. This paper has tried to reveal thatLawrence Hill’s Someone Knows My Name deals with the main concepts ofIdentity Crisis and Othering through the lens of postcolonial literary criticismand by relying on the theories of the two important postcolonial thinkers,Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. Based on content and theoretical analysis, itfocuses on the protagonist of the novel and highlights the notions of‘Othering’, ‘Otherness’, ‘hybridity’, ‘unhomeliness’, ‘mimicry’, and‘identity’. It pinpoints that the Orient becomes an imaginative geographythrough the false representations of the West as the colonizer and thus, bymeans of a number of mechanisms such as humiliating, oppressing,suppressing, classifying, objectifying and Othering, the colonized isdehumanized, marginalized and changed to ‘the Other’ in the hands of thecolonizer in the process of colonization. The paper concludes that theprotagonist can never completely achieve this goal despite getting back toAfrica as a matter of unhomeliness and her constant oscillation between heroriginal culture and the adopted one. She needs to be restored to her real ‘self’in order to fully feel at-homeness and self-stability.

Keywords:

Identity Crisis , Lawrence Hill , Someone Knows My Name , Post colonialism , Othering