Performance Without Interiority: Kristevan Strangeness and Bhabha's Third Space in Sahar Khalifeh's The Inheritance

This paper reads Sahar Khalifeh's The Inheritance (al-Mirath, 1997; trans. Aida Bamia, 2005) through two paired theoretical frameworks: Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of the foreigner as a subject constitutively estranged from herself (Strangers to Ourselves, 1991) and Homi K. Bhabha's postcolonial theory of the Third Space as a productive site of hybrid cultural enunciation (The Location of Culture, 1994). The Palestinian-American protagonist Zayna occupies a position of cultural in-betweenness that Bhabha's theory should celebrate as generative, yet her experience is one of emotional anaesthesia and structural incapacity rather than hybrid agency. The paper argues that The Inheritance decouples hybridity from agency: Bhabha's Third Space, the paper contends, requires a self-capable of occupying its own displacement strategically, but Kristeva's foreigner — whose language, affect, and psychic coherence have been dissolved before selfhood can form — has no such capacity. Close readings of Zayna's linguistic dissolution, her rocking-chair hauntings, her emotional unresponsiveness, and her father's street-performance mimicry demonstrate that the novel holds both frameworks simultaneously in tension, using their friction to produce a critique of hybridity theory from within the very scene of hybridity. The inheritance of the title is ultimately neither property nor identity, but a transmitted wound that has become indistinguishable from the self that carries it.