Sense of Cultural Crisis and Alienation in Naipaul’s Guerrillas

Abstract

This thesis explores the problems of the colonized people: their sense of alienation from the landscape, their identity and cultural crisis. All the black characters feel dislocated because they are kept in margin and even not given human rights. They are taken as play things at the hands of the whites. This dissertation particularly deals with diasporic dislocation which causes cultural crisis and alienation in V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas. This study includes the basic elements of dislocation, social identity, hybridity, mimicry, cultural study, marginality of the black. Jimmy, the representative figure of whole black race, faces racial dislocation in his own land and in England, too. White people consider blacks to be inferior and non-human, and this ultimately marginalizes blacks pushing them to periphery. Their originality has been lost because of the domination of the so called supreme or dominant culture imposed by the whites during the period of colonization. Since they were physically, mentally and psychologically marginalized in their own land, culture and rights, they felt loss of cultural crisis and alienated in their own space. Jimmy and other black natives see the necessity of black racial identity. Because of extreme domination, they vow to start revolution against whites.