In this article I will explore the relationship between space, language and
objects and interrogate the role of language as a signifier for the
transformation of space through cultural difference. My work is informed by the
context and the methods of postcolonialism and specifically the notion of
hybridity. If the hybridity of a postcolonial identity is acknowledged, then the
space where these identities are negotiated could also be seen as sharing
qualities of overlap and mixing. Influenced by psychoanalytic theories of the
self and its relation to others, postcolonial theory has used strategies of
‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’ as motifs
to provide a vocabulary that shifts colonial relations out of the dialectic of
oppressor and oppressed. But following Lefebvre's idea that all space
is social space, and Foucault's spatialisation of power, the move
from the historic preoccupation with time to a spatialisation of the processes
of knowledge production, allows postcolonial thinking to go beyond the
complicities of identity politics, which has been one of the major criticisms of
this mode of thought. As an architect, this opens up certain possibilities of
interrogating postcolonial subjectivity through the spaces that are occupied and
used by those who are implicated within it. This paper will focus on one such
space: a park in East London.