Exploring the Individual's Struggle for Agency and Identity: A Comparative Analysis of J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

Postcolonial literature depicts the struggle for agency and identity as the people strive to navigate through a newly constructed culture, cultural hybridity, and the newly constructed perception of identity. To understand these struggles, the paper draws upon the critiques of Postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha’s hybridity theory, Frantz Fanon's concept of the colonized psyche, and Edward Said's idea of the Other to discuss the theorist’s arguments about the issue of identity in the postcolonial world and how the struggle for identity is manifested in the works of postcolonial novelists , particularly the works of J.M. Coetzee in The Life and Times of Michael K, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. As postcolonial theories have presented the struggle for agency and identity as one of its critical focus, the three novelists have also exposed and represented the conditions of identity crisis that indigenous communities undergo in the postcolonial era.