Bhabha’s Concept of Hybridity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun: A Postcolonial Critique

Abstract

The primary focus of the study in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is to question the position of Homi Bhabha in his The Location of Culture wherein he states that hybridity demonstrates the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. The present research critiques Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity as it neglects the economic and political issues of the colonized nations. Furthermore, it does not seem to interrogate the western hegemony, cultural arrogance and class supremacy implicitly imposed through the globalizing agents which are indeed working to retain imperialism in the colonized nations even in the postcolonial situation. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is studied in the line of postcolonialism that is boosted up with the intellectual and academic supports of the postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, on one hand, and the very text is critically analyzed through the lens of neo-Marxist critics such as Rumina Sethi, Arif Dirlik, Amar Acheraiou, Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmad and others on the other, who interrogate the position of the postcolonial theorists and intellectuals for their negligence to the issues like class, resistance, economy, and other political and racial aspects which are vibrant remnants in the colonized nations. Thus the study shows how Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun dramatizes the situation wherein Olanna and Kainene from the elite family and Richard working as an agent in the guise of journalist to retain and pervade the racial domination suffer the crisis of cultural belonging, and Ugwu, Odenigbo, Madu representing the Nigerian mass resist the cultural domination and racial supremacy of the West.