Deconstruction And Reconstruction Through Interpolation: A Postcolonial Reading Of Chinese American Literature

The present dissertation is a study of the so called "emergent literature" in thehistory of American literature-Chinese American literature (1940's-1990's)-from the perspective of postcolonial theory. It makes use of the advantages of the new critical way of close reading the literary text and the broad contextual reading of cultural studies. The purpose of doing so is to borrow the light of postcolonial theory and shed it on the study of Chinese American literature. In doing so, the reading of the literary text will benefit from the predictiveness, perspicacity and penetrativeness of the theory, and in turn, the exhaustive reading of the literary text will also help enrich and deepen literary theory. This is what the author has learned from the "contrapuntal reading" method advocated by Edward Said and the "symptomatic reading" instead of "sympathetic reading" preferred by Louis Althusser.This dissertation unfolds itself along two main lines. The first line is a proposition which holds that the United States is a country that has experienced both colonialism and postcolonialism. Its domestic racial oppression against the ethic groups, characterized by Orientalism and the stereotypical portrait of them, shares many similarities with the European colonialism in the ex-colonies. In the racial stage of the American society, the oppression was operated in the combination of the external form of laws, national policies and the internal "othering" of them in cultural discourses. In the ethnic stage, however, racism is operated more in the covert form of cultural colonization under the disguise of multiculturalism, which advocates the concepts of "cultural mosaic" or the "salad bowl". However, as one can find from the discussion in this dissertation, colonialism or racism, whether in the overt or covert form, is by no means just a one-way operation of power between the mainstream culture and the marginal; the oppressed also has various alternative ways to resist against the cultural hegemony, such as the counter-narrative strategy (borrowed from Foucault's concept of "counter-history") , silence, "the politics of appetite", "mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity", going beyond binary oppositions to look for the third space, etc. This is what has been found in the study of Asian American literary texts from the postcolonialist approach.The second main line of the dissertation is to integrate the material ways of reading literature, such as the social, historical, legal and the immaterial ways, such as the philosophical, psychological and psychoanalytical, by borrowing theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. This way of reading Chinese American literature helps locate the spiritual and psychological wounds brought about by the American Orientalist racism, and reveal a series of strategies of resistance againstthe mainstream domination. These strategies are only evident in the close reading of the literary texts in the light of relevant concepts of postcolonial theory.The main argument of the present dissertation is that although what ethnic groups face in today's American society is not blatant racism any more, yet they still cannot free themselves from the domination of the invisible neo-colonialism, which is as hard to distinguish as the "glass ceiling" they often face. "Cultural diversity", just as Homi Bhabha succinctly puts it, is only there in most cases for decorating the "cultural mosaic" and for performative purposes. It is by no means real advocation of and respect to the "cultural differences". To step out of this impasse, ethnic groups should keep in mind three things: first, they have to deal with the situation objectively and rationally instead of emotionally; second, they do not need to be unnecessarily pessimistic about the future, for colonial or racist power is never a one-way operation of power, as it is put by Homi Bhabha; and finally, people cannot just depend on the poststructuralist discourse offered by postcolonial theory, which is often accused by critics of being impractical...