Rasaili, Laxmi Prasad2024-02-042024-02-042008https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14540/21675Ambivalence deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. Colonial mentality reveals the repressed desires of the sovereign subject of the colonizer rather than the fixed nature of the natives. The protagonists, John in the Youth and Lakunke in The Lion and The Jewel evoke their complex mix of attraction and repulsion between colonizers and colonized because they are never simply and completely opposed to the colonizer. Their hybrid consciousness locates in in-between space; therefore, they mimic the colonizers. In fact, the word barbarian becomes a constructed concept imposing to the native people. Soyinka and Coetzee’s plays explore the characters tension between two cultures in the light of how they are located in the in-between location which means neither the one nor the other but something else beside. Soyinka and Coetzee advocate the postcolonial culture that is of hybridized nature and this space is the space of negation and interaction between cultures. Most of the problems that John and Lakunke encounter are the result of the postcolonial condition of the ambivalence. In terms of cultural identity there is nothing absolutely new in the world.en-USPostcolonial cultureColonized psycheThesis