According to Collins English Dictionary, identity crisis is a period or episode of psychological distress, often occurring in adolescence but sometimes in adulthood, when a person seeks a clearer sense of self and an acceptable role in society. The term identity crisis stems from the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (1902-1994), a German psychoanalyst who was raised Jewish but appeared very Scandinavian and felt that he was an outsider of both groups. From his own personal experience, Erikson argues that personality develops in a predetermined order through stages of psychosocial development especially from infancy to adulthood. According to him, for each stage, the person experiences a psychosocial crisis which may have a negative or positive income. The concept of trust and mistrust may characterize the infant’s emotional life. As a consequence, if the infant receives stability, he will be consistent and reliable; otherwise the infant’s life will be surrounded by suspicion and stability as Erik Erikson realizes.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience oneself as something that has continuity and sameness and to act accordingly [1].

Many post-colonial thinkers do not shy from analyzing the concept of identity crisis which stems from the issue of migration and displacement as well as the social and political causes leading this loss of identity. In addition, displacement can be motivated by religious identity as most exiled may suffer from religious oppression and dislocation resulting in political disillusionment. In his autobiographical work Out of Place, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said strives to record his personal experience of exile which coupled with the hopeless situation of his Palestinian people who have been victims of collective disruption by the Israeli state since 1948.

Perspectives on Identity, Migration and Displacement

Most post-colonial thinkers have also dealt with this issue of identity crisis. Among them the Pakistani-English writer Hanif Kureshi’s Buddha of Suburbia [2] explores the issue of identity crisis which is mostly experienced by immigrants who are often victims of racial and religious discrimination, a situation which makes those exiles to feel as second class citizens and make their lives more difficult. 

The problem of race seems the first issue that plagues most immigrants who are ignored or discriminated as a result of their color and religious affiliation. In this respect, Hanif Kureshi by examining the concept of mixed identity tells the story of Karim and his experience of exile in London  as  a  foreigner  who  is  victim  of  violence  and racism which he encounters from a variety of sources. The novel as a satirical coming of age, chronicles the life of an adolescent torn between two cultures, half Indian and half British. The clash of eastern and western civilization can be observed in Karim’s character.

Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored [3].

Karim is from an English mother and Indian father and being a British Indian accentuates his identity confusion as his father’s friend does not like as a result of his black skins. This situation is reminiscent of RHYS’s Wide Sargasso Sea. As a West Indian female writer who grew up in a Caribbean island of Dominica, RHYS was a daughter of a Welsh doctor and a creole mother. Her novel Wide Sargasso Sea is set in Jamaica and retells the story of a young white girl whose father a hatred former slaveholder died and left the family in poverty. The female protagonist Antoinette COSWAY who descended from a Creole family is both marginalized by the white minority and black majority on this Dominican island. 

This social isolation and moral alienation accentuated her despair and disempowerment as an outsider because she neither belongs to the white community nor to the black folk. In this respect, identity crisis is caused by the impact of slavery in Jamaican culture which disrupts and destroys local culture as it is explored by post-colonial theorists who represent the pioneers of literary theoretical line. 

Edward Said was a quintessential intellectual and a founding figure of post-colonial studies. As a distinguished professor, a renowned critic, and influential philosopher, Edward Said was a controversial and political activist known for his assessment of the relationship between representation and power, in the realm of culture. Said has long earned a place apart in the panoply of great 20^th century post-colonial thinkers. Most themes that post-colonial theory and literature deal with are race, gender, ethnicity, but identity is one of the most controversial issues dealt by those scholars. For Said, the central point of identity construction is the ability to resist and recreate oneself as a post-colonial anti-imperialist. This Palestinian-American writer is among the most influential writers to diagnose the conditions of identity crisis on the colonized. In his memoir Out of Place, Edward Said examines the multi-fold homes he had occupied in his life ranging from Jerusalem and Cairo to Lebanon and the United States as SAID reaffirms.

Identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone, it cannot constitute or even imagine itself within radical original break or flow which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, suffered-and later perhaps, even triumphed. The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well [4].

This memoir is an exploration of three dimensional life Said lived through in Jerusalem, Lebanon where he spent his college years in Victoria school before moving to the USA. Said wrote his memoir the time when he was diagnosed with leukemia. The same cancer plagued his parents’ life as well as the war which ravaged his Palestinian people who were deprived of their homelands. This inner crisis is deeply integrated into his scholarship and becomes the cornerstone of his memoir as he argues.

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents; I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. The currents (…) like the themes of one’s life flow along during the waking hours, and at their best they require no reconciling, no harmonizing [5].

Said, a cultural critic and political activist was one of the most influential revolutionaries to advocate the rights of the Palestinian people who have been displaced and disempowered by Zionist political power aided by the establishment of the state of Israel as an independent nation. Here lies his quest for self-determination. Said’s personal and geographical disorientation from his native land, the dispossession of his people by Zionism and his terminal illness which was probing towards physical death pave the way to his identity confusion and hopelessness. 

By virtue of one of the usually ignored consequences of Israel’s establishment, non-Jews, in his case, Palestinians have been displaced to somewhere where, in the spirit of Freud’s excavations, they can ask what became the traces of their history that had been so deeply implicated in the actuality of Palestine before Israel [6].

Religious identity and Anti-Immigration Sentiment

Hamid Dabashi is one of the most renowned scholars of post-colonial thought. His reflections are based on religious identity and the condition of colonialism and its trajectory after the collapse of the empires. An American-Iranian intellectual, he is also a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University. Dabashi is interested in analyzing the implications of Iranian Islamic ideology. His book Theology of Discontent narrates the 1979 Iranian revolution in the Muslim world which represents a backdrop of deeper understanding of contemporary Iranian history. As a post-colonial thinker, Dabashi does not shy from analyzing the theological aspects of Iranian revolution which was an uprising against authoritarian royal rule with a condition of modernist and Islamists who gave birth to a new Islamic republic that seemed to reject pro-western democracy.

This insightful analysis of this book shows Dabashi’s creative thinking skills in exploring historical trends of his Iranian nation which was deeply weakened by political dissension and accentuated by conflicting political and national identifies between the Middle East and the West. The book analyses the revolutionary ideas of most important ideologies of Islamic revolution. He finally comes to the conclusion that the ideology of revolution was that of discontent of the injured self-Islamic Iran against the hostile other. This discontent was expressed in ethical, moral, normative and spiritual terms. Political dissension was analyzed when Dabashi refers to the shah regime as Islamic ideology, saw and portrayed the Pahlavi regime as the epitome of corrupt despotism [7].

In his book, Shi’sm: A Religion of Protest [8], Dabashi exposes the soul of Shi’sm as a religion of protest and analyzes Shi’sm doctrinal foundations which indoctrinate three sites of contestations such Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon where Shi’sm emerged to claim global political attention as it arises to be a religious sect. The book also demonstrates the explosive conflicts in the Middle East. 

Brown Skin, White Masks [9] is another commanding work by Hamid Dabashi who strives to complete the work started by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks which explores the traumatic consequences of the sense of inferiority felt by the colonized. In his pioneering book, DABASHI shows how the intellectuals who migrate to the West are often misrepresented by imperial powers. DABASHI is likened to Said who manages to show his work The Intellectual Exile, the ill-effects of intellectual migration. 

The publication of Orientalism [10] marks the relationship between the West and non-West. His critique of European discourse in the Middle East demonstrates that western perception of the East is replete with racist stereotypes which categorize the non-European as barbaric and backward and uncivilized while Zionists are viewed as capable and civilized. Rooted in post-structuralist approach, inspired by the work of the French philosopher Michel FOUCAULT, Orientalism refers to a particular discourse of knowledge about the orient produced by the colonial powers of Europe. This work is one of the groundbreaking texts of contemporary post-colonial studies. SAID’s writings were also directed towards the plight of the Palestinian Arabs who have been victims of the injustices since the 20^th century.

Besides, in The Question of Palestine, the cultural critic Edward Said acknowledges the issue of “identicide” an attempt to erase historical Palestine. Said explores the dispossession of Palestinian people which was often encouraged by Zionist movement whose primary goal is to erase people’s memory, culture and tradition. This Zionist political and economic control became into prominence and mainly supported by imperialism and US Zionist movements which thought that Palestinians deserve to be excluded from a land, excluded from their rights and media coverage:

There is ample evidence to show that taken altogether as members of a community whose common experience is dispossession, exile and the absence of any territorial homeland, the Palestinian people have not acquiesced in its present lot. Rather the Palestinian have repeatedly insisted on their rights of return, their desire for the exercise of self-determination, and their stubborn opposition to Zionism as it has effected them [11].

Edward Said was one of the most influential writers in contemporary post-colonial literature. In this seminal work, Said examines his own exile and the fate of Palestinians. Therefore, exiles feel an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives. The achievement of exiles is permanently undermined by loss of something left behind, forever because it reflects a condition of terminal loss. For this reason, George Steiner argues that a whole genre of twentieth century western literature, is “extraterritorial”, a literature by and about exiles Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, is an analysis on the state of exile which creates the sense of outsider as Edward SAID remarks.

Exile is a jealous state…an exaggerated state of group solidarity and a passionate hostility to outsiders [12].

This collection of essays was written on a more personal hope because it elucidates the political activists’ personal exile as well as an acknowledgement of modern exiles, and their place in society. It also states the experience of millions of people who were displaced during the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. This situation is reminiscent of the issue of displacement in Caribbean culture; most of them move from their homelands to the United States. For Said, exile is similar to be out of place. Because, most displaced people experience the same frustrations, violence, racism, as they are often exposed to hate and discrimination in their adoptive lands.

Said was a contemporary modern teacher and a critic of highest order. In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, he uses a rhetoric sense of pathos to describe his feeling of being away from his home. Frantz Fanon was also one of the most prominent post-colonial thinkers to incorporate the issue of identity, race, gender and racism in his scholarship and contemporary non-fictional line. 

Black skins, white Masks [13] is a deep insight into the exploration of the effects of race and colonization, a part of his lectures and experiences in Lyon, and a personal experience as a black intellectual in a white world. This reality which makes him contend that racism generates harmful and psychological oppression of black people. 

In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon a psychiatrist examines how colonization affects the psychological makeup of the colonized. The sense of identity remains at the core of philosophical thinking where Fanon has the contention that it is the colonist who has created his own identity ant the identity of the colonized who is often viewed as the embodiment of inferiority and evil while the colonizer symbolizes advancement, success, and purity. This dual construction subjugated the colonized psychologically imposing an inferiority complex on the colonized, a situation which causes neuroses, and depression.

The existence of an armed struggle is indicative of what the people are determined to put their faith only in violent method. The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language, they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force [14].

Edward Said’s Out of Place, is an exploration of personal experience shedding light on the sense of geographical, cultural dislocation and displacement which characterizes the intellectual’s personal life and the fate of his Palestinian people. As an exploration of illness narrative, the autobiographical work Out of Place is the result of the ambivalent space of in between and non-belonging ranging from his departure from Jerusalem to Cairo and later the United States of America. His sense of identity confusion was mainly caused by dislocation and illness of leukemia. This memoir stands at the forefront of post-colonial thinking because it is a testimony to young generations of writers and intellectuals who conceive literature as a mirror as SAID continues to trust his public readership by unveiling his sense of personal dispossession.

1. Erikson, Erik H. Identity, Youth and Crisis, New York: Norton Company, 1968.

2. Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia, Faber and Faber, 1990.

3. Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia, Op.cit, pp. 3.

4. Said, Edward. Out of Place, Op.cit, pp. 54.

5. Said, Edward. Out of Place, Op.cit, pp. 295.

6. Said, Edward. Freud and the Non-European, Verso Books, 2003.

7. Dabashi, Hamid. Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, New York: New York University Press, 1993, pp. 502.

8. Dabashi, Hamid. Shi’sm: A Religion of Protest, Belknap Press, 2011.

9. Dabashi, Hamid. Brown Skin, White Masks, Pluton Press, 2011.

10. Said, Edward. Orientalism, Pantheon Books: Vintage Books, 1978.

11. Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine, London: Routledge, 1980, pp. 47.

12. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000, pp. 178.

13. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, USA: Grove Press, 1952.