ABSTRACT

Melting and fusing European immigrants, accenting the í of Puerto Rican-Americans, and transforming Indians in mid-air all portray different ways to create identity, a new self. Rushdie's The Satanic Verses asks, perhaps, the most relevant questions of all. Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture addresses these questions of identity in interesting ways. With an eye on postcolonial, multicultural, and migrant works, build on Bhabha's observation that borders, interstices, and in-between spaces "initiate new signs of identity". He explains how Green uses the liminal space of staircases to question fixed identities and create a hybrid identity in its place. Writing amidst a surge of scholarship discussing postcolonial states, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism, Bhabha's work examines the formation of identity, particularly in the face of colonialism's legacy. Rather than focusing on the productive encounter of groups within borders, use Bhabha's concept of hybridity to question "narratives of originary and initial subjectivities" or what he calls "primordial polarities".