Origins, Journey, and Home: The Issue of Identity in the Work of Three Diasporic “African-Indian” Women Writers

2014

This chapter considers the issue of identity in postcolonial literature. It challenges the representations of center/metropolis and margin/periphery as a one-to-one link. The three writers considered here are located within a context of intra-colonial displacements from India. Ananda Devi, Natacha Appanah, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offer a blurred vision of identity, and share some important common points: the three of them define the identity as fluid and multiple. The identities they speak about are the results of a personal negotiation with numerous and diversified external stimuli. Finally, they show a similar relationship with the themes of the origins, journey, and “home”.