Nation, migrancy, and identity: The negotiation of a third space in Joyce's 'Ulysses,' Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses' and Kingston's 'Tripmaster Monkey'

This dissertation examines the creation of a "third space" out of the rigid binary structure of dominance and subjugation under post-colonial conditions in the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie and Maxine Hong Kingston. Employing the subversive politics of difference, minority discourse and border writing, I attempt to reconceive post-colonial issues such as nation, migrancy, and identity from the perspective of the colonized.;Chapter One establishes the theoretical construction of the third space through Said's "process of empire," Spivak's "negotiated space," Foucault's "discursive formation," Gramsci's "hegemonic process," and Bhabha's "hybridity." The production of a third space not only emphasizes the power of difference, impurity and contamination, but also anticipates syncretism, mongrelization and fusion among different cultures. I postulate the creation of the third space as a means of minority survival and as a locus where new meanings are brought into the world. In Chapter Two, I investigate the politics of imagining an Irish nation as the "New Bloomusalem" in Joyce's Ulysses. As a doubly marginalized Irish Jew in Ireland under British colonization, Bloom looks for a third space of cultural hybridity to debunk the fallacy of the reciprocal exclusivity of Irish Nationalism, and to reformulate the national identity of the Irish from the viewpoint of a minority citizen. Chapter Three addresses the impact of cultural dissemination by the return of post-colonial migrants from the margins to the cosmopolitan centers. Through a critical reading of Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, I illustrate how Rushdie entertains the idea of migrancy and blasphemy, and deconstructs the "oneness" of Islamic fundamentalism. Chapter Four focuses on Kingston's attempt to write the "uncreated conscience" of Chinese-Americans through cross-cultural translation between Chinese and Euro-American contexts. In Tripmaster Monkey, through the exploration of the ethnic hyphen and a careful selection of the book title and the name of its protagonist, Kingston reintroduces Chinese-Americans into the making of America, and reinscribes Chinese-American immigratory experiences into the collective memories of mainstream Americans. In the Conclusion, I review and contextualize the three writers' writing/righting of colonial histories, and conclude with the meditation on my own national identity as a Taiwanese/Chinese.