Abstract

The term ‘Hybridity’ has become one of the most persistent conceptual leitmotifs in postcolonial discourse and theory. It is intended to exclude the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. The concept is so recurrent and has not a unified meaning because its definition differs from a context to another, from a theorist to another, and can take political, cultural, and linguistic forms. Our paper approaches the concept of cultural and linguistic hybridity in the context of a comparison between the Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart and the Algerian author, Feraoun’s second fiction; La terre et le sang. To explore this contention, we shall try to show how both authors ingested and digested the coloniser’s language, selecting new ideas and reshaping them to construct their cultural identities. In so doing, they created something different, a kind of “third space”, to paraphrase Homi Bhabha. But, before dealing with the content analysis, it may be useful to explain what is meant by ‘linguistic and cultural hybridity’.