Third Space, Hybridity, and Colonial Mimicry in Fugard's Blood Knot

Abstract

Literature, as a branch of Humanities, has a significant role in demonstrating the problems and the realities of a society. Therefore, the literary texts written in South Africa, had a major role in the victory of people against the policy of Apartheid, according to which the whites were segregated from non-whites. Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard is one of the writers, who showed his hatred and dissatisfaction to the world, with his plays. He is known for his deeply rooted and controversial anti-apartheid plays. His Blood Knot (1961) has been chosen in this study, in which the negative implications of colonialism and racism can be explored. Bhabha is one of the influential critics whose works give priority to the agency of colonized people. The relation between the colonizer and the colonized will be scrutinized subsequently according to what Bhabha mentioned in his influential book The Location of Culture.

Hybridity and the Shape of the New African Woman

“…Andre compels Fatima to recreate an identity that ultimately overwhelms him and destroys his very power. Therefore, Fatima evolves to be a hybrid who, according to Ghasemi, Sasani, and Nemati (2018), destroys the stance of colonial authority. This (re)created identity is invoked alongside the Negritude movement, an ideological position that holds Black culture to be independent and valid on its own terms and an affirmation of the African cultural heritage to forge a third option (Young, in Castle, 1996).…”

“…Instead, they become ambivalent or two-powered, which means the complicity and resistance that exist in a fluctuating relation within the colonial subject is seen to be both exploitative and nurturing or even only nurturing. Such ambivalence, according to Ghasemi, Sasani, and Nemati (2018), is nurturing on the part of the colonial subject because with the emergence of hybridity, the authority of the colonizer is destroyed. They argue that though hybridity may be a sign of the colonial power's productivity, it is also a sign of shifting of forces and fixities and a strategic reversal of the process of domination, which is disadvantageous to the colonizer.…”