British-Tanzanian expert Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. His works focus on the theme of refugees and describe the living conditions of colonial people, showing his compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents. This is of great social significance for the study of the living conditions of refugees in the post-colonial era and the reflection on immigration issues. As his first novel in a first-person view, By the Sea is one of the works reflecting Gurnah's concern for the identity crisis of refugees, which cannot be ignored. In the novel, Gurnah depicts Zanzibar as a place of hybridity, and the refugees in the novel also reflect ambivalence and hybridity. Their reconciliation with their hybrid identity at the end of the story demonstrates the author’s positive attitude towards eliminating the binary opposition and achieving cultural integration in the post-colonial period. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space and Hybridity theory, this article analyzes the contribution of hybridity in power spaces and cultural spaces to the production of two hybrids—the two refugees in the novel, and also explores their identity reconstruction through storytelling.

Jiarui Xu. Identity Construction in the Post-colonial Period: Hybridity and Third Space in Abdulrazak Gurnah. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2023) Vol. 6, Issue 19: 154-158. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2023.061925.

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