Fictons of (In)Betweenness

Abstract: The study investigates how both fictional and theoretical texts engage in 'worrying the lines' between conceptions of home and exile. It analyzes the ways in which home and exile are problematized in novels by Louise Erdrich, J M Coetzee, and David Malouf, to bring them in contact and collision with similar reconceptualizations in the writings of Homi K. Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said. The texts discussed are seen as participating in the rethinking of such issues as center/margin and self/other that we have come to associate with theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism. These texts position themselves as texts of (in)betweenness in that they are engaged in thinking the between f (binary) oppositions. In their attempt to think against and across categories, articulations of (in)betweenness cannot be fixed in either a postmodern or postcolonial space. Rather, (in)betweenness is a mode of thinking that is dependent on what is called a postcolonial awareness.