Identity Crisis and Homi Bhabha’s Third Space as Reflected in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What | ||
| مجلة کلية الاداب.جامعة المنصورة | ||
| Volume 77, Issue 77, August 2025 | ||
| Document Type: العلوم الانسانیة الأدبیة واللغات | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/artman.2025.413117.3225 | ||
| Author | ||
| محممدعلي احمد علوان الجبوري* | ||
| مدرس في الجامعة العراقية / كُلية التربية للبنات | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Abstract This research seeks to highlight the dire implications and consequences of colonization upon man’s identity in a consequent atmosphere of hybridity. It focuses specifically upon the identity crisis experienced by Pakistani Muslim immigrants in America in postcolonial period. Therefore, the research throws light upon the devastating consequences of colonization on both culture and identity of post-colonized countries. It critically tackles issues like globalization and immigration, highlighting the way they destabilize culture and distort cultural identity. It studies varied scenes of Muslim immigrants’ suffering from marginalization, cultural destabilization and being lost between two clashing cultures. This also implies clarifying the ongoing cultural hybridity that equally reflected in the creation of hybrid identities. In this concern, the paper identifies a relevant critical approach that builds heavily upon Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and his proposed concepts of the “third space”, “mimicry” and “ambivalence”. The approach also employs Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of culture mobility and the role played by culture artifacts to identify the concept of culture as dynamic rather than static. The paper examines The Who and the What (2014), as a selected play of postcolonial playwright Ayad Akhtar that to ponders over its reflection of the identity crisis of Muslim Pakistani in America. In this concern, the paper poses a fundamental question concerning the way Akhtar portrays the “third space”, as a potential area of subjectivity, focusing upon the characters’ success or failure to foster a self change and create an identity according to Bhabha’s spatial theory of identity building | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Hybridity; identity; third space; mimicry | ||
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