Quest For Cultural Identity In The Border-Crossing Survival

Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini(1965--) is one of the most popular writers in the contemporary American literature. His latest masterpiece, And the Mountains Echoed became the All American’s best-selling 2013 novel. It reveals that his writing techniques have surpassed his previous two novels and proves that Hosseini has become a powerful writer. And the Mountains Echoed describes a group of the repressing Afghan people’s living conditions. They stepped out a route of their own in a foreign country after experiencing the ravages of war and exile. This work exposes Afghan immigrants’ identity anxiety when facing the cultural differences. In the process of pursuing the identity, they often feel confused and suffering due to the lack of identity. And the Mountains Echoed focuses on the ethnic minorities and marginal groups living in Western society, which is of high literary, sociality as well as profoundly realistic significance. This paper tries to delve into the main characters’ identity dilemmas and the causes of it when facing the cultural cracks from the perspective of Homi Bhabha’s Hybridized Identity Theory, trying to solve the contemporary minority immigrants’ problem of identity ownership. The Afghan immigrants’ identity anxiety in the work And the Mountains Echoed is mainly reflected in the lack of cultural identity under the two cultures’ collision. The main causes of it are that the ethnic minorities’ culture and marginal culture meet the exclusion of mainstream culture. By analyzing the main characters’ identity anxiety in the work, it reveals that Afghan immigrant groups have the intense desire to rewrite cultural identity in the face of cultural differences, and through the negotiation and translation, the purpose of reconstructing the cultural identity can be achieved. This paper aims to expose common problems encountered by immigrant groups through interpreting the main characters’ identity dilemmas in the work, so that cultural rights and more rights of speech can be gained for the increasing immigrant groups and eventually, their own cultural identity can be found.