Revisiting Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s Jim from a Postcolonial Lens

Abstract

The postcolonial theory conflicts with the essentialism of individuality, identity, and nation. Within its scope, related concepts such as hybridity are advocated and adopted as a systematic approach for resisting the colonialism’s and colonization’s discourse. Appropriating and adapting a postcolonial textual analysis of Jim’s problem of slavery in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this paper expounds that even though racism and slavery, offshoots of cultural traditions and social systems, have created Jim’s identity as a slave; he dynamically uses the hybrid approach to hit back the racist system in his life. Besides the fact that identity pursuit is a complaint and a scorn against the racial system, it is a confirmation of identity confusion among people in contemporary societies.