Constructing Teacher Identity in Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love: A Bhabhaian Postcolonial Study

Abstract

1. R. Braithwaite's To Sir, With Love (1959) narrates a Black teacher's experience in a working-class school in London's East End. Previous research on the novel has focused mainly on racial prejudice and postcolonial integration, and few studies have examined how teacher identity is constructed through the novel's own narrative apparatus. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative descriptive-analytical design. Structuralism organizes the analysis, accounting for the sequence in which the novel's oppositions dissolve, while Homi K. Bhabha's (1994) postcolonial theory supplies the interpretive vocabulary for what that dissolution produces. Fifteen extracts were purposively selected through close reading of the novel's first edition (Braithwaite, 1959). Findings show that teacher identity is constructed through four categories: mimicry (4 extracts, 26.7%), ambivalence (6, 40.0%), third space (3, 20.0%), and hybridity (2, 13.3%). Ambivalence is the most frequent, reflecting the tension between institutional recognition and relational exclusion produced by racial othering, while hybridity marks the point at which teacher and students jointly author a classroom practice belonging to neither side beforehand. The study's contribution is methodological: professional identity in postcolonial texts can be read as a product of narrative structure and characterization, relevant to teaching postcolonial literature.