THIRD SPACE OF ENUNCIATION: A STUDY OF MULTI-LOCATIONALITY IN MOHSIN HAMID’S EXIT WEST

Abstract

Diaspora in Postcolonial context, refers to the notion of ‘dispersion from’ which entails the connotations of a center or a locus from which the dispersion occurs. It occupies an ambivalent sense of home, which in turn, invokes an image of multiple journeys. It takes into account the homing desire, which is not the same thing as a desire for ‘homeland’. Hybridity, in conflation with diaspora studies, refers to dismantling cultures from their totalizing specificities of cultural situations. This cultural decolonization leads towards the emergence of an identity in a contradictory and an ambivalent space called the ‘Third Space of Enunciation’. It offers a space for articulation in order to voice multiple and diverse narratives. The concept of mimicry has been focused upon, as it tends to provide a space for double articulation in order to mock the unified representations of colonial subjects in a diasporic context. The present study also deals with an issue of identity crisis as it attempts to reveal that how colonial subjects are positioned not only in relation to the Colonizer but also in relation to one another. Hence, the colonial identity is always in a state of flux and anxietydue to multi-locationality, as the home is a slippery space in the diasporic imagination.The study not only problematizes the issue of identity as a fixed entity but also attempts to give voice to the paradox of homing desire. Moreover, the study deals with Hamid’s engagement with the arbitrariness of borders, as borders are discursive narratives, which further leads towards the deterritorializationas dislocation and displacement of meanings and identities. Hamid, in the Exit West, significantly maintains the ambivalence of diaspora space where binaries of exclusion/inclusion, belonging/otherness, us/we are contested in a global context.