Marginal Identities in Postcolonial Discourse: As Represented in Selected novels by Jean Rhys, Alex La Guma, Amy Tan and Diana Abu-Jaber

Postcolonial theory has provided a valuable critique of the discourses that underwrote the colonial and Western project. Postcolonial critics, such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, among others, focus mainly on the term discourse in their study of postcolonialism because discourse does not simply reflect social meanings and relations, but rather constitutes them. Discourse, in postcolonial theory, interacts with knowledge to constitute and reinforce. This dissertation focuses on the question of marginality in postcolonial discourse and whether marginal identity is able to speak and represent the marginalized within postcolonial discourse. In this sense, the marginal and the dominant are necessarily defined in relation to each other.