Living in the Third Space - an Analysis of Rushdie’s Short-Story “the Courter” Based on Homi K. Bhabha’s Theories

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Living in the third space An analysis of Rushdie’s short-story “The Courter” based on Homi K. Bhabha’s theories By Szonja Deák In my essay I would like to examine Salman Rushdie’s short-story “The Courter” based on Homi K. Bhabha’s three definitions: cultural hybridity, third space and mimicry. First of all I would like to summarize the meaning of these terms with the help of my lecture notes. Homi K. Bhabha denies the colonialist authority in repressing the colonised culture, but he claims that the oppressed culture participates in the formation of the new identity. Through the interaction of the coloniser and colonised culture a mixture is made, that is nor identical with the former, neither with the latter, but through this cultural hybridity creating a third space. Bhabha even claims that not any culture constructs itself from its own essence, but it is created through interactions with other cultures. Mimicry originally means the defence mechanism of animals who imitate the environment in order to survive. Bhabha introduced this term in Post-colonial theory to name the same mechanism observed among colonised people, who ensure their protection by imitating or miming the coloniser’s culture, habits and attitudes, but of course their mind is not fully colonised. They are just acting in order to survive as the species mentioned above. In Rushdie’s story many examples can be found for the phenomenon Bhabha named ‘third space’. This third space or ‘liminal space’ “in which cultural differences articulate and, as Bhabha argues, actually produce imagined “constructions” of cultural and national identity” (Graves). Such examples are the father who had an Encyclopaedia Britannica and Reader’s Digests in his office (183), but still he has language problems in every-day situations, like he

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