Cultural Identity in Selected Arab-African Novels

Abstract

Identity is no longer considered a linear concept. An individual’s identity is in a continuous process of being constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed—whether partially or totally. This process is multilayered, holding history, politics, race, and gender within its folds. As the term “identity crisis” might seem overused or a kind of cliché, the question of identity is still—and seems to still go—under investigation. As one of the most important, if not the most important, and influential thinkers of cultural identity, Stuart Hall believes that identity as a concept is no longer an essentialist one, but “this concept of identity does not [any longer] signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change; the bit of the self which remains always-already ‘the same’, identical to itself across time” (3). Accordingly, identity is no longer the solid or stable part of the self that stays unchangeable; on the contrary, identity is an ever-evolving being as long as the individual interacts with different social, political and historical positions. The Question of Identity Hall’s notion about identity is that it is “always in the making” (Drew 173). Hall further elaborates that there are mainly two positions or approaches to define identity though he refuses to follow any of these two approaches which he explains as, first, “one idea of identity as a fixed position, and another [second] idea that identity is relative to the extreme” (Drew 173). Hall supports a third balanced position in which he believes that “people [who follow any of the two previously mentioned approaches] have moved away from identity as process and have sometimes gone right over to the point where identity is nothing at all” (Drew 173). Thus, Hall maintains a middle-ground position where he attempts to find a realistic balance between the two positions of perceiving identity as a concept; therefore, the concept of identity cannot be