IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION IN 20th CENTURY POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVE

In an age where ethics and aesthetics seem to be in constant conflict, Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie express their points of view from the vantage point of a first-person narrator, reflecting upon the turbulences that afflict their postcolonial nations, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Gordimer and Rushdie let their own personal experiences of and sentiments with respect to historical happenings transpire in the unfolding of their narratives. In the ongoing debate between subjective veracity versus historical objectivity, Gordimer and Rushdie s fiction act as a counter- narrative in the dismemberment of canonical myths and universalisms, thereby putting into service the function of the writer that both believe to be the social conscience of the reality which literature seems to represent/ fictionalize. The Third-World writer s concerns are fixed upon that of the nation, the diaspora and the threat posed to the ideal of multiculturalism, as well as by the rise of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, phenomena both perilously present in current geopolitics.