Kartography- A Mesh of Turbulent History and Hybrid Identity

Abstract

Kartography, a novel by Kamila Shamsie (2001), which talks about the diasporic struggle of various characters with hybrid identities. The present study deals with the hybrid identities of characters earned in newly created ‘third spaces’. The concept is given by a postcolonialist critic Homi K. Bhabha (1994). This paper talks especially in terms of how hybrid characters like Karim have to maintain ‘ambivalence’. The process of self-actualization of the main characters of the novel under discussion has been marked by the struggle to diminish geographical borders and embrace cultural globalization. Karim’s struggle with the previous culture in Karachi and the present culture in London entitled him to a transnational identity that is to survive his ambivalent diasporic challenges. This is the space that Bhabha (1992) believes is a part of t h e resistance. This space lies between the articulation of mimicry and mockery while subverting the dominance of the West. Karim’s mother’s Bengali ethnicity, after the partition of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, instantly marks her an outsider, alienating her from the country which provided her identity so far. Karim’s struggle for a global identity and his love for the mapping, extends the boundaries and create a liminal or third space where cultures and identities co-exist and facilitate him in his self- recognition. In diasporic writings nostalgia of the origin never fades away; however, new cultural identities emerge in response to multiculturalism. The current research undertakes how people in third space earn hybrid identities in response to the de-culturation of either of the two or more parent cultures that can lead to a more defined new global identity.

Keywords: Hybridity, multiculturalism, third space, Global Identity, Diaspora