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This research is the analysis of the contact zone and the tensions in western women’s travelogues. Travel writing as a genre has always been marginalized within the domain of literary researches, but travelogues by women have been doubly marginalized due to gender. In patriarchal societies, the literature produced by women has never been received as seriously as that by men. Western women, who were colonizers by race and colonized by gender, cannot use the omniscient point of view revealed in men’s travelogues, nor can they assume the objective pose that man travel writers usually boast of. Women, who had an unsure position between the discourses of colonialism and that of femininity, reveal such tensions in their writing that are mostly absent from men’s travelogues. These tensions and the role they play in the self-fashioning of British women can be traced in the images that they offer of the orient in the 19th century.

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The present paper examines Elif Shafak’s 2011 novel Honour based on Bhabhaian concepts of hybridity and unhomeliness. Bhabha broached the idea of hybridity in order to address the social dimensions of postcolonial analyses.⁴ Hybridity occurs when the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized blurs various boundaries. Bhabha explores the possibility of a hybrid space to elucidate the recollections of migrants and their unhomeliness. He defines hybrid identity as one constructed through relocation and separation in the contact zone. In fact, it is in a third space of enunciation in which every thought by both the colonizer and the colonized finds a means of expression or exchange. Using concepts of hybridity and unhomeliness to delve into Shafak's Honour, this research concludes that within the social and cultural structures and discourse of their ‘new’ country, diasporic characters feel unhomed and struggle to fill gaps and redefine their identities. The paper argues that characters in the novel seek refuge in diasporic communities to counter stereotypes. Their attempts, however, result in new experiences and feelings of isolation, nostalgia, insecurity, split self, and a sense of being out of place.