This essay explores and investigates post-colonial identity in Ireland in Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood (2003) and The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006). Relying primarily on Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial criticism, which draws on some ideas from psychoanalysis, this essay argues that the autobiographies resonate well with the ideas of culture as a strategy of survival and of the post-colonial child as an analyst of Western modernity. Thus, three chosen concepts; ‘the Uncanny’, ‘Third Space’ and ‘Hybridity’ work together to reveal a recurring theme of split and duplicity in reference to the colonial past throughout. Furthermore they also reveal that the actual writing of the autobiographies in itself must be regarded as a way of responding to and negotiating that very same split and duplicity in reference to Ireland’s past.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hh-40358 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Johansson, Fredrik |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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