THE SPACE OF TRANSCULTURATION IN THOMAS KING’S GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER

Abstract

This paper uses Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water (1994) to examine the contact between two cultures in Canada; the culture of the Indigenous people and the culture of the white settlers. Taking postcolonial studies as its framework, this paper relies on works written by critics such as Stephen Slemon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others, in its analysis of the transcultural space which Thomas King creates in his novel. The four mythical stories in the novel offer a fruitful ground upon which contact between the two cultural, social and political spaces can be analyzed. We hope that the research conducted in this paper can serve as an explanation of the nature of transculturation, and in the words of Bhabha (1994, 25), offer a textual “space of hybridity”.