The Trajectory of the Hybrid Self/Melez Kisiliklerin Gezingesi (Essay‪)‬

"Nations require narratives through which individuals imagine themselves as national subjects and align themselves in the national narrative" (Brinker-Gabler 17) At the turn of the new millennium Zadie Smith's White Teeth was celebrated by critics as the new literary voice of London because of its political importance of what John McLeod terms as "millennial optimism" (2004, 160). However, in an interview, Zadie Smith claimed that "[t]o reduce writers to the role of representatives who are expected to delegate, or speak on behalf of a particular community, is to curb their artistic freedom" (Procter 102). According to Procter, Smith's contention "foreground an important tension" between "representation as a process of fictional depiction" and "representation as an act of political delegation" that has become increasingly apparent since the late 1980s (102). I believe that the multicultural writers' inbetween state is highly reflexive in their works. Despite the fact that they may also project other cultural backgrounds rather than their own biculturalism like Smith's The Autograph Man, writers voice transcultural identities; "the trajectory of the [hybrid] self" (Giddens 70) and hence fiction is disclosed as an act of political delegation, at least as an understatement. As Bhabha contents the dual heritage, the "'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood singular or communal- that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself" (1-2). However, alongside the idea of redefining society, multicultural fictions in general focus on hybrid identity, self-reflexivity and in recent times religion, as well. Accordingly, the term hybridity has become a blanket term for all kinds of differences and marginalities in current cultural and literary criticism. Therefore, difference, pluralism, hybridity and heterogeneity are contested themes underpinned by a notion of "multiplicity" (Brah 214). Kuortti and Nyman, on the other hand, note that as a critical term hybridity is often discussed in connection with a set of other terms denoting "intercultural transfer" and the "forms of identity" such a change generates (4).