Intergenerational Negotiations of In-Betweenness, Mimicry and Ambivalence in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing  

This paper examines the construction of postcolonial subjectivities in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing through Homi K. Bhabha's concepts of mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity. Focusing on the intergenerational trajectories of the descendants of Effia in Ghana and Esi in America, the study investigates how colonialism, slavery, and diaspora shape complex modes of identification that resist fixed notions of identity and belonging. Employing a qualitative textual analysis, the paper explores the way acts of mimicry generate ambivalent forms of identification, creating liminal spaces in which inherited cultural values, colonial legacies, and diasporic experiences intersect and are renegotiated across generations. Within these in-between spaces, hybrid subjectivities emerge not as mere combinations of cultures but as dynamic processes of cultural translation and negotiation that unsettle stable categories of selfhood. The analysis demonstrates that Homegoing destabilizes binary oppositions such as colonizer and colonized, African and American, and tradition and modernity by portraying identity as historically contingent, relational, and continually reconfigured. Ultimately, the paper argues that Gyasi's novel reveals how colonial encounters and their enduring aftermath produce intergenerational forms of hybridity and ambivalence that simultaneously expose the instability of colonial authority and open new possibilities for cultural identification and belonging.

Ambivalence; hybridity; mimicry; postcolonial subjectivity; unbelonging

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