Post-colonial Identity in Waciny Laredj's The Kingdom of the Butterfly: Based on Homi Bhabha's Theories

One of the major areas of postcolonial criticism is the examination of new religious, national, racial and social identities in the post-colonial period and comparing them with pre-colonial period. Waciny Laredj, an Al-Jazeera's contemporary novelist, in his The Kingdom of the Butterfly, uses the literary form of the novel to portray issues such as identity crises, immigration, cultural, social, and religious conflicts during post-colonial times. The present article studies the post-colonial identity of the characters of this novel from the perspective of post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha, based on components such as identity and terminology such as the third space and bonding.The results of this descriptive-analytic study indicate that, in the novel, Waciny Laredj illustrates the identity of the person joining in such matters as religion, cover, language, nationality, race, name and art, and the identity crisis of immigrant characters depicted. All of these matters affect, signify the negative consequences of the 132 years of Algeria colonized by France.