Hybridity for Survivance: A Postcolonial Reading of Sherman Alexie's Flight

This study looks into the assimilation and hybridization of Natives in Euro-American culture in Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007). The study reveals that the hybridization of Native Americans is the ultimate consequence of innate resistance against abuse and marginalization in the post-contact world. The study endorses survival/endurance proximity, as suggested by Gerald Vizenor. The selected work, a magical realist text, narrates the quest of a Native American teenage boy Zits who, in search of his true identity, ultimately has reached his self-illumination. The study positions hybridity as an antidote to the essentialist position of purity and ethnicity. Zits' Native self is a victim of forced kidnapping and forged an identity in a post-contact multi-cultural society, hence 'mutual and mutable.'Employing Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as a lens, the study magnifies the survivance of the protagonist in the contemporary world and analyzes the text through Greg Sarris' "integrative approach ."The study illustrates that Alexie's text paves the way to a bridging position that helps the native-self rise from trauma and crisis of lacking intrinsicality in the contemporary western world.