Ethnic Experience And Cultural Imagination

A survey of the thematic concerns of Chinese American novels shows that "Chinatown", "Mother-Daughter" and "Father-Son" motifs have been repeatedly portrayed by Chinese American writers in their artistic imagination. These motifs are under the mutual influence of Chinese and American cultures and contain Chinese Americans' special ethnic experience of migrating and dispersing. They have a stable and peculiar cultural and anthropological significance and are the foundation of the Chinese American literature discipline. With reference to Chinese American history, culture and ethnic psychology, this dissertation analyzes the above three motifs through the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, postcolonial, cultural criticism and the traditional Chinese morality and philosophy. It focuses on the Chinese American writers' expressions of their ethnic experience, the mixed cultural imagination, and the dynamic development and transformations of the literary motifs. By doing so, we can go beyond the controversy of the definitions of Chinese American literature and set up a boundary of it. Meanwhile, owing to the differences of the writers' gender, social status and personal experience, presentations of these motifs are also diverse. With the change of social and historical context and the unequal "power discourse" between China and America, the presentation of these motifs keeps on forever transforming, which is very helpful for us to realize the internal colonization in America and can guide us to take the appropriate cultural position and adopt a suitable cultural strategy to survive in nowadays context of "globalization".