| The subject of this dissertation originated from a question posed during my research on parody and pastiche in postmodern literary theory. As a native of Taiwan, I am keenly aware of the burdens that exist in once colonized cultures to reconcile foreign cultural influences with the need to struggle for an authentic cultural identity. Any forms of imitation and appropriation of foreign cultures not only always require vindication for legitimacy, they are also clear reminders of such a country's often colonial past and its subsequent continuous neocolonial present. Seeing how Western-based postmodern theory legitimizes the copy as the authentic, and comparing it with my own country's cultural identity predicament, I was prompted to question the contrasting valuations of imitation and appropriation.; While imitation and appropriation are regarded in contemporary European and American cultures of criticism, what have been called “postmodernism,” as valid contests to Romantic or Post-Enlightenment idea of individuality and originality, the same practices are viewed paradoxically as symptoms of cultural subordination and inferiority in postcolonial societies, prompting in these power-peripheral countries concerns of authenticity and originality, and ultimately, crisis of legitimation. In other words, in postmodernism, imitation and appropriation discredit the modernist ideology of originality and authenticity, while, in postcolonialism, they suggest quite a different valuation: the lack of originality and authenticity.; These phenomena seem to be two sides of the same coin, but, what is this “same” coin? Or, what is the nature of this “sameness”? To put it plainly, as literary works' treatments of these very issues prompt the power-center countries characterization “postmodern” and the power-periphery countries valuation “colonial,” what can this nonetheless similar preoccupation with imitation and appropriation suggest to us? What inter- and multicultural implications does it contain? In this dissertation, I analyze the dynamics hidden in these questions, taking contemporary Chinese, Taiwan, Chinese American, and American fiction as models representing different locales, and examine the politics of constructing new cultural identities in their respective inter- and multicultural societies. |
