Narratives of hybridity: Third space in the Ibis Trilogy

Abstract

Many nineteenth-century European authors have written novels in which the colonization process played a background role. Much rarer are contemporary literary reflections by colonized people. In an attempt at reconstruction of their points of view, present-day author Amitav Ghosh tries to give the colonized people voice in his historical novels. In his Ibis trilogy, he makes “the subaltern speak” in a diversity of voices. In this rendering of the narrative of emerging colonialism from the viewpoint of subalterns, Ghosh pays special attention to situations of hybridity that are created by the colonial master-narrative. “Hybridity” is a concept that was developed by Homi Bhabha. In this article, I want to investigate how hybridity functions in the Ibis trilogy of Ghosh, especially in his novel Sea of Poppies, and whether hybridity, according to Ghosh, creates a liberating alternative discourse to deal with the traumas of colonialism.