Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INTERNATIONAL MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM STUDIES CONFERENCE 2022, Osmaniye, Türkiye, 18 - 19 Ekim 2022, ss.65
It is a conventional fact that immigrants who escape from the suffocating atmosphere and chaos of the
colonized lands to more civilized and welfare countries are not easily able to erase the traces of their
devastated past. The traces of their culture that they grew up in not only pursue them but also conduce
them not to adopt thoroughly the countries they have currently lived in. In addition, another reason why
they could not adopt to the countries they moved to lies also behind the fact that they were discriminated
against and undervalued in every sense and were treated as second-class. In this sense, being exposed to two
entirely disparate cultures and belonging to a minority culture in a country, have brought about the
questioning of belonging within itself. In the light of post-colonial literature, it is likely to encounter some
protagonists who are trapped in an inner turmoil in which they could not identify themselves with a certain
place because of the reasons mentioned above; these protagonists no longer feel that they belong neither to
the place where they were born nor to the idealized place that imposes on them a considerable cultural
alteration. One of the prominent critics of postcolonial literature, Homi Bhabha, deals with cultural issues
in his The Location of Culture (1994). In tandem with the issues of culture and identity that Bhabha elaborates
on, this study will deal with Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996) in terms of notions such as sense of belonging, inbetweenness, and hybridity.
Keywords: culture, identity, in-betweenness, hybridity, sense of belonging