The Interpretation Of Ruth Ozeki’s My Year Of Meats From The Perspective Of Postcolonial Ecocriticism

My Year of Meats is an outstanding representative work of Japanese American writer Ruth Ozeki.Known for her storytelling skills,Ruth Ozeki’s novels reflect the realities of society,politics,technology,environment and globalization.My Year of Meats tells the story of two Japanese women from different backgrounds in a year and the process of their friendship formed by making and watching food programs,“My American Wife!”.This process is placed in the complex background of globalization,interwoven with various conflicts of race,gender,east-west cultural gap and so on.This paper mainly reflects on the relationship between man and nature,man and animal,man and man in the postcolonial era from the perspectives of natural,social and cultural elements of postcolonial ecocriticism.Ruth Ozeki criticizes the selfishness and narrowness of anthropocentrism,deconstructs the imperialist discourse hegemony on race and species,highlighting the importance of non-western regions to strive for environmental justice and social justice.This paper is composed of three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction includes a brief introduction to Ruth Ozeki and the main contents of My Year of Meats,and then introduces the research status at home and abroad.This part introduces the theoretical foundation,the connotation and core theory of postcolonial ecocriticism and also introduces the purposes of the study.The main body consists of four parts.The first part shows the destruction of nature after the imperial invasion,the specific performance of natural environment and animals in the perspective of postcolonial ecocriticism.The natural environment has been destroyed,animals have suffered a lot of pain,lost their subjectivity,and become the object of arbitrary slaughter.The second part,rooted in the human relations,introduces the plight of women under imperialist colonization and the performance of women in a lower position in the social hierarchy.The identity crisis suffered by Asian Americans,blacks and other ethnic minorities in marginal status.The third part is the imperialist intervention in culture,including the intervention of media communication and the influence of science and technology on culture.The ultimate goal of postcolonial ecocriticism is to eliminate all forms of neo-colonial hegemony on a global scale and pursue environmental justice and social justice under developmental justice,so the fourth part is the construction of developmental justice.The conclusion summarizes the full text and describes a debate about environment,society and culture between human and non-human,demonstrates and reveals the silent and subconscious colonization under the postcolonial ecocriticism embodied in My Year of Meats.At the same time,this thesis also hopes to arouse people’s thinking on how developed countries can get along with developing countries or less developed countries in the context of globalization in order to achieve sustainable and harmonious development.From the perspective of postcolonial ecocriticism,this paper studies the ecological thought embodied in My Year of Meats under the framework of man,nature and society,explores the harmful impact of hegemonic consciousness.Arouse readers to rethink the development issues in the postcolonial context and realize environmental justice and social justice.Hope to provide beneficial enlightenment for harmonious coexistence,and provide certain reference for Ruth Ozeki’s research on postcolonial ecocriticism at home and abroad.