Postcoloniality, Multiculturalism and Exile: The Reification of the Human Being in Contemporary Literature

We live in a diverse, multicultural, post-colonial world in a time of general crisis, accelerated migration and chaos. My research places a few well-known contemporary novelists within the framework of post-colonial theory. By comparing the works of these contemporary writers in exile to some of the most important theorists of the post-colonial situation, my paper stakes out an important place for the value of literary interventions in the political arena. Contemporary multicultural writers capture the uncertain dialectic that works between a person's identity and the discourse and ideology that made him or her, between who someone is, and where that person came from. Their novels and short stories explore important theoretical and practical implications of exile across national, generic, and ethnic boundaries. Contemporary writers in exile contribute to a notion of the colonial subject as the site for the exploration of difference and alterity. The exile opens up the notion of a reified subject and a reified culture. The condition of exile as reified and hybrid subject opens up closely held notions of never exhausted continuity of play. Within the colonial context, play is both a force for the confrontation with power and that which will assure that identity can never be found. Most contemporary novels dealing with our multicultural world and migration have a double purpose: to document the impossibility of completeness, the inevitability that the exile must continue his or her wandering, and to make explicit the opportunity that this provides.