Cultural Conflicts And Synergies In Postcolonial Context:the Case Of Sherman Alexie

The interest in the postcolonial studies has become prominent since the late 1970's with the publication of Orientalism by Said. It is generally held that postcolonial literature emerges from the experience of colonization and the history covers from the moment of colonization to the present day. Postcolonial literature develops from the early postcolonial writing, through the imaginary recreation of the cultural past, to the final stage of border-crossing hybridity. In recent decades, though many American Indian writers still follow the pattern of returning to traditions in their writing, they are not simply advocating the recovery of the past heritages of Indian people. Instead, they try to explore how American Indians can find their place and thereby survive in mainstream America through the affirmation of their cultural and spiritual traditions as well as the integration of their traditions into mainstream culture.Sherman Alexie is such a Native American writer to emerge in the 1990's and is considered to be the "pioneer representative among young native writers". All his works are labeled with postcoloniality. In his works, he tries to depict the extremely isolation and confusing state faced by the Indians and endeavors to seek a remedy for redemption. Alexie conveys to her readers that the American Indians are not ferocious or inferior. Cultures should not be judged as superior or inferior, though there are differences. Like other native writers, Alexie is dedicated to keeping alive and invigorating the cultural heritage, to rewriting the tribal history, which in turn empower him to establish cultural identities for himself as well as for his people. In this thesis, I locate one of Alexie's story-collections The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and one novel Reservation Blues on the postcolonial theoretical framework and find that the works fall in with the postcolonial features defined by postcolonial criticism. Therefore, in this thesis, efforts have been made to approach this novel from a postcolonial perspective, particularly the theory of hybridity.At first, the thesis introduces research background and purpose and gives a general view of the development of contemporary American Indian literature. Besides, I summarize the literary review of the studies on Sherman Alexie and his works. Chapter Two Three and Four are the body part of the thesis. It analyzes the novels from many different aspects combined with the postcolonial theory. In the conclusion part, we can know that Alexie shows us that only by hybridizing the traditional Indian culture and mainstream white culture together, rebuilding the traditional Indian survival pattern, can the traditional Indian culture develop, and can American Indians'status and power to speak in the multi-coexistence of American society be guaranteed.The thesis further implies that other ethnic literatures in U.S. share with Indian literature the similarity of postcoloniality, hereby this research will be illuminating for the study of all of the minority literatures. This thesis's purpose is to call people's attention to the theme that both nativism and assimilationism are limited. Return to the purity of culture traditions is gradually replaced by reconstructing the past heritages on cultural hybridity.