Otherness and Alienation in Postcolonial Literature: Rhys, Adichie, and Phillips Jennifer Davies College

Otherness and alienation are significant features throughout Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Adichie’s “Checking Out” and Phillips’ “Growing Pains”, particularly regarding the race and social class of the characters featured within these texts. In this sense, the texts appear versimilitudinous, reflecting the realities of struggling with race and class division during both the 1800s (in Wide Sargasso sea) and the early twenty first century (“Checking Out” and “Growing Pains”), tied together by the same postcolonial, modernist perspectives of the authors. It is significant to note that each of these authors write from their own experiences with immigration, allowing them to find inspiration from their families’ experiences, history and culture, giving readers important insight into what it means to be deemed ‘other’ in postcolonial Britain.

In Adiche’s “Checking Out” (2013), race and class appear as prominent contributors to the social alienation of Obinze as he begins his life in England, unable to reach the USA due to his race and gender. “The figure of the migrant has become a paradigmatic representative of globalised postcoloniality” (Toivanen, 2), an idea which is embodied by Obinze’s struggles with his nationality and upbringing...