Before answering the question of how the post-colonial theory explains identity formation, it is required that give some information about the post-colonial theory. Simply, this is a term after World War II, when England and the other colonizers began to lose their colonies.
Post-colonial theory holds that decolonized nations, affected by the colonial process, developed a post-colonial identity based on cultural interactions between different identities. Even if colonized nations gained their legal and political independence after World War II, they had already lost their national identity, particularly their language, history over time. They judge and demand not only their land but also their history, language, culture, and social agency; however, this is no longer possible. Now, they are independent, but they do not know where they are belong to. Whatever they do or try in the name of being the same people before colonizing, they were neither colonized nor colonizer. This situation called hybridity, cross-fertilization of cultures, challenges the idea whether a person has any uncontaminated identity or not. According to Jamaica Kincad, who showed how Antiguans became Anglicized in their thinking, in her works A Small Place, it is inevitable that the colonized or colonizers adopt each other’s attitudes or behaviours.
There are some authors, who gave notable works about post-colonial theories, such as a notable psychiatrist Frantz Fanon who analyzed the relation between imperialism and identity, and Homi Bhabha, one of the leading post-colonial theorists of that age and came up a hybridity theory reconsidering the issues of identity, social agency, and national affiliation. From Bhabha’s point of view, hybridity has three meanings, in terms of biology, ethnicity and culture, and black consciousness or the Indian soul is the same in descriptions.
Melike Çelik
Comments