STUCK BETWEEN COLONIALISM AND NATIONALISM: HYBRIDITY AND TRAUMA IN KIM LEFVRE'S MÉTISSE BLANCHE

Abstract

ISet in the context of French Indochina, Kim Lefevre's Métisse blanche describes political and cultural conflict between France and Vietnam as well as the narrator's continuous attempts in fighting for her own identity and a space to live in the hostile colonial situation. In that struggle, hybridity and trauma emerge as a result of a situation in which the protagonist gets stuck between colonialism and nationalism. Living in that situation, the narrator's struggle for her own happiness is her own struggle for her own self: a self of both hybridity and trauma. That self is not stable; rather, it is always in the status of becoming and incompletion.