Estrella and Lola Basyon: An Open-Ended Construct of ‘Self and Other’

Abstract

This paper attempts to reconstruct the stereotype subjects. The story of Estrella and Lola Basyon is described as emerging configurations from the experience of colonization, and readings of the texts explore the recurrent themes of hybridity and ambivalence, which foreground the tension between colonizer and colonized stereotypes. This is Homi Bhabha’s concept of the interweaving of metaphors and metonymy, which symptomizes cultural identity - the hybrid self or the so-called counter-archetype. The writer’s use of metonymy creatively reconstructs the identity of both the colonizer and the colonized. The content-thematic and symptomatic readings reveal different postcolonial themes that appear in different guises throughout the selected short stories. As a postcolonial tool for writing back to the center, thereby understanding the notion of the open-ended construct of “self and other.”