SOURCE: “Living In-Between: Interstitial Spaces of Possibility in Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet,” in Just Postmodernism, Rodopi, 1997, pp. 107-128.

In the following essay, McLeod examines Mo’s Sour Sweet in terms of the postmodern and postcolonial theories of Homi K. Bhabha.

Exploring the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonialism in the context of literary criticism is almost like being party to a particularly messy divorce. These erstwhile theoretical bedfellows have, in the last ten years, drifted further and further apart. Much of what each might offer the other has been lost beneath a growing volume of accusation, hostility and mutual suspicion. Once, it seems, postcolonial theory appeared entirely compatible with a postmodernist sensibility. Both attacked the tyranny of certainty, the relationship between language and power, and those metanarratives of legitimation that had acted as the philosophical props for such things as one’s identity, the pursuit of reason, and colonial...