Across Cultures And Homelands: An Exploration Of Cultural Identity In Alex Miller's The Ancestor Game

The Ancestor Game, a masterpiece by Australian contemporary writer Alex Miller is hailed as "extraordinary fictional portraits of China and Australia" by New York Times Book Review. Against the background of three important historical periods, i.e., Australian gold rush, Japanese invasions of China and the Australian multicultural process in the 1970s, and by mainly developing the stories of the four-generation family of the Fengs, the novel presents readers cultural clashes and conflicts experienced by the migrant people who were sandwiched between two cultures and endlessly suffered from the trauma of cultural displacement. This thesis is intended to examine the novel from the perspective of cultural identity in a comprehensive way so as to gain a deeper and fresher insight into the spiritual journey of the Chinese diasporas as well as that of other displaced people.The paper consists of five parts with the first chapter giving a general introduction including literature review, objective and methodology of this study. Chapter Two, by giving general notions of identity together with Erikson's notion of identity crisis, and the definitions of cultural identity, especially its theoretical development in the field of postcolonialism, provides a theoretical framework for the following chapters. As the major part of the research, Chapter Three deals with the representation of identity predicament in the major characters, which is examined and analyzed in three aspects, namely, identity and name, identity confusion in language and mirror image, cultural surrender and disidentification. The fourth chapter, by focusing on two protagonists Victoria Feng and Lang Tzu, explores the nostalgic feelings revealed in the cultural symbols and protagonists' recollecting or restructuring their family history so as to establish a sense of continuity with the past and further pursue a bicultural self as Chinese-Australians. Based on the previous chapters, the last chapter draws a conclusion for the whole thesis.