Culture Rootless Immigrant Culture - Naipaul Case Study

Immigration is a striking phenomenon in world history. Since the world stepped into the times of overall communication, the massive immigration has already changed the visage of world history and in reality, has changed the world cultural map. Therefore, immigration and immigrant culture has become a focus in historical and cultural studies. Taking world history as the background, this dissertation intends to analyze the phenomenon of cultural rootlessness, a special type of immigrant culture.This dissertation studies immigrants'cultural problems through studying V.S.Naipaul, who is the Nobel Literary Laureate in 2001. It is due to three reasons. Firstly, V.S.Naipaul's background is special. He is a typical immigrant, who has a complicated connection with Trinidad in Western Indian, India in Asia and Britain in Europe. Secondly, his literary creations are an immigrant's cultural statement and thus have great value in academic studies. Thirdly, immigrants' "cultural rootlessness" revealed by V.S.Naipaul is a special phenomenon in world immigrant culture. In the background of colonization and globalization, it is a most modern and fundamental subject worth our attention.The principles of methodology in this dissertation are integration of theory with practice, problem with method and history with logic. The research will applies the methods of history, culturology, philosophy and sociology, thus has the characteristic of synthesis.The main results in this dissertation are as the follows:l.The change of immigrant culture revealed by V.S.Naipaul can be expressedas a regular process: "cultural suspending"--"cultural displacement"--"cultural estrangement"--"spiritual crisis", the state of "cultural rootlessness"."Cultural rootlessness" means a type of culture that hardly has any orientation in identification.2. The core of immigrant culture research is the problem of identification, which is the key to the recognition of immigrant cultural type. According to the different forms of identification, it can be divided into the immigrant cultures of "uprooting-enclave", "rooting-assimslation", "root-cutting-rootlessness" and "double identification".3. The philosophical foundation of V.S.Naipaul's thought "Existential Skepticism" is "Hindu Existentialism", which is the philosophy of life mixedHiduism and Existentialism.4. It is revealed in this dissertation that the origin of immigrants' mental pain lies in the malposition of identification idea in the 19th century and living condition in the late 20th century. Immigrants cannot but be engaged in "supportless performance" on life-stage, and become a unique view in globalization times.