Othering and Identity in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup: A Saidian Reading

Nadine Gordimer has been the voice of the other, the suppressed, in the era of Apartheid and post-Apartheid in South Africa. Her subtle, perceptive, and exotic treatment of controversial and at the same time vital issues hasreceived a lot of critique. Not much attention, however, has been paid to how Gordimer’s critical assessment ofapartheid policies arising from her attempt to concretely embody African languages, discourses, and cultures in her fiction. A towering figure in post-colonial studies, Edward Said, since the publication his extraordinary tome,Orientalism, played a key role in representing the repressed voice of the others in stark dichotomy of the west and the east.This study aims to analyze othering and identity in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup based on Saidian reading.Related theories of Spivak and Bhabha are used in this study in order to have the most comprehensive result.According to Said, Orientalism, as a discourse, by using the power of the works of orientalists, institutions and also the government gains itself the guarantee of being a true representation. And using the statements of this discourse, western cultural institutions create others and using this difference, through a binary opposition, they establish their own identity. Said also believes that Orientalism is mainly a way of defining and locating Europe s others and therefore othering is strategy through which west constructs other parts of the world and calls them others. In other words, theresearcher attempted to assess The Pickup in terms of some key concepts propounded by Edward Said, namely, Resistance, Othering and role of place and identity in the novel

Keywords:

Othering , Identity , Nadine Gordimer , The Pickup