Marginality and Liminality in Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy

Abstract

In Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy, the protagonist Habo is a young adult with albinism who struggles and eventually succeeds in navigating his multiple marginal spaces before eventually finding his position in society. Employing Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, I adopt a postcolonial lens to scrutinize in greater depth than literary critics have so far revealed the positive aspects of the marginal space occupied by Habo in virtue of the layered complexity of his social geography. Because his whole society is located in the global South, this disabled young adult faces a variety of marginalisations. Rather than an end point, the multiple margins traversed by Habo become for him a liminal space. Margins serve as a threshold for this teenager to discover and establish his position in his society. I deviate from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theorising about disability as a social construct, since her analysis overlooks the brute fact that Habo’s albinism is a disability which constitutes a constant life threat. The disambiguation of marginality and liminality argued here is particularly important to maintain when critiquing narratives that depict the life experience of protagonists overcoming the very real-world challenges encountered at the margins of the global economic order.