Postcolonial Borges: “Colonized Intellectual” and“Double Consciousness” in “The Nothingness of Personality”

Using Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” and Fanon’s “Colonized Intellectual”, we contend that Borges’s essay “The Nothingness of Personality” can be deemed postcolonial. Our study turns to the postcolonial world of Latin America, with a special focus on Buenos Aires, addressing the alienation, hybridity, “two-ness”, and the othered state of Borges as an immigrant to Latin America after the World War I. “Double Consciousness” is arguably central to the analysis of Borges’s sense of duality in a newly adapted culture with the dilemma whether to behave in accordance with his previously adopted cultural identity, or with a new self in a new culture. Many studies have signified Borges’s attempt to establish the foundation of true Argentinean literature and a revival of cultural heritageك however, there ceases to be a significant study to encompass that Borges is like a “colonized intellectual” who talked back to the center through using the colonizer’s ideology.