Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
10th International KTUDELL Conference on Language, Literature, and Translation, Trabzon, Türkiye, 29 - 30 Mayıs 2025, ss.145, (Özet Bildiri)
The aim of this study is to examine Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “By the Sea” through the combination of cultural mimicry and hybridity to explain how these two dynamics shape a multi-layered identity crisis. Focusing on Homi Bhabha’s mimicry and ‘third space’ theories, this study explores how the main character of the novel, Saleh Omar, navigates between two different cultural worlds within a false identity to survive his exile. However, his mimicry fails creating an authentic belonging; rather, it increases the alienation and internal fragmentation. His experiences reveal that hybridity may tend to be a zone of existential dislocation, rather than a creative place of cultural negotiation. This study argues that Gurnah portrays the postcolonial subject as suspended between cultures and unable to neither reconstruct the past nor integrate into the target society. Through the analysis of silence, displacement and manipulation of identity, this study highlights the destructive structure of hybridity and mimicry, arguing that postcolonial identity formation is characterized more by fragmentation and alienation than by unity.