Identity Crisis And Reconstruction: Reading Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s Novels

Jan Lowe Shinebourne(1947-),a British Chinese writer from Guyana,is the first woman to be awarded with the Guyana Prize for Literature.Her four short novels Timepiece(1986),The Last English Plantation(1988),Chinese Women(2010),and The Last Ship(2015)all grapple with identity crisis encountered by characters as Guyana was experiencing tumultuous social and political changes.This thesis draws on the theories of diaspora to outline the reasons why the characters are subjected to identity crisis-they all suffer from a sense of anxiety caused by their complex diaspora experiences.Furthermore,their sense of uncertainty resulting from the colonial dislocation urges these characters to seek for the reconstruction of their identity.This thesis uncovers several strategies that Shinebourne’s characters adopt to reconstruct their identities.Firstly,creolization and cultural enclaves are employed by the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean to preserve their collective memory that are not pure recollections but identity reconstructions.Secondly,integration and marginalization are two other significant strategies for the diaspora to better acculturate to the main society and achieve identity reconstruction respectively.