A Postcolonial Feminist Reading Of Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking

Abstract

This paper aims to represent how female Jamaican immigrants of the second generation are placed in two different cultures leading them to have confused identities. This idea is conveyed through the analysis of Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking (1988) from the lens of postcolonial feminist theory. Pinnock focuses on the Jamaican female character in diasporic space in the play under study. She assures the necessity to identify cultural, historical, and social circumstances that contribute to the development of her female characters. Understanding herself as a postcolonial subject enables her to portray her female character fitting well in western society and assimilating the fractured parts of her being at the end of the play. The analysis depends on the theories of Homi Bhabha such as ‘hybridity’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘third space’ to examine the conflict of fractured selves in their identities.