The Limits of the Third Space: Postcolonial Dislocation and Linguistic Rupture in Domingo Landicho's "Munting Kayumangging Amerikano"

Abstract

Migration has profoundly shaped Filipino social and cultural life, yet its consequences on identity and cultural continuity remain underexplored in Philippine regional literary scholarship. While postcolonial discussions often interpret Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and the Third Space as productive sites of cultural negotiation and resistance, this study argues that Domingo Landicho’s short story, “Munting Kayumangging Amerikano,” presents hybridity as a lived condition of postcolonial dislocation. Employing a qualitative literary design based on close reading and thematic analysis, the study examines key textual scenes involving linguistic barriers, bodily discomfort, and intergenerational encounters. Guided by postcolonial frameworks, including Bhabha’s hybridity, Fanon’s corporeal alienation, and materialist critiques of the Third Space, the analysis investigates how language, body, and familial relationships reveal the affective costs of postcolonial identity. The findings demonstrate that hybridity in the narrative functions not as a creative synthesis, but as a causally reinforcing feedback chain of estrangement. The child’s over-reliance on English creates a primary linguistic gap; this symbolic rupture manifests somatically as a bodily rejection of the ancestral environment and touch; and this physical withdrawal ultimately causes the failure of intergenerational kinship and cultural memory. Collectively, these findings show that migration extends beyond geographical relocation, producing deep, enduring ruptures in identity and belonging. By bringing an underrepresented Tagalog short story into direct dialogue with canonical postcolonial theory, this study contributes a contextually grounded reading of the Third Space, one that foregrounds the material costs, fractured inheritances, and lived complexities of the Filipino migrant experience.