The Identity Construction And Novel Creation Of Contemporary Minority Writers

In most of the dominant interpretation of ethnic literature, the contrast of pre-Liberation and post-Liberation is prominent. The New China is considered to be the re-born of the minorities and therefore marks a new era of ethnic minority literature. This periodization has an important implication:The writing of ethnic minority writers in contemporary China has experienced major transformation. Compared to mainstream Han writing, the transformation of ethnic minority writing engendered a starting point of a new system of literary discourse and a new genealogy of knowledge of ethnic minority literature. This change determinates the difference of ethnic minority writers and the mainstream/Han writers while sharing similarities with them. The transformation at the same time determinates that ethnic minority writing has its own rules and values, while it shares characteristics of the times with the mainstream/Han literature as a part of contemporary Chinese literature,The dissertation departs from an archeologically examination of concepts such as "ethnos," "minority ethnos," "ethnic minority literature." "Minority ethnos" is a typical Chinese concept. It was created in the course of constructing "an imagined political community" in order to create the modern nation state. "Minority ethnos" together with the Hans constitute a greater community called "China." "Minority writers" and "ethnic minority literature" are two concepts that come into existence along with the identification of fifty five minority ethnic groups. In other word, these concepts are the products of the new China. The dissertation then analyses how the ideological state apparatus created the first group of ethnic minority writers through the mechanism of "interpellation."The dissertation then analyses the difference and similarities of ethnic minority literature and contemporary Chinese literature. As a part of contemporary Chinese literature, ethnic minority literature has the characteristics of contemporary Chinese literature, which sets modernity and ethnicity as its central themes. However, due to the historical mission ethnic minority writers have to take as well as the complicity and contractedness of their identity, there is a double theme in contemporary ethnic literature. This is the essential difference of ethnic minority literature and mainstream/Han literature.How would we understand the uniqueness of ethnic literature, then? Citing Lacan's theory on the Subject and the theory of Ethnic Cultural Identity, this study focuses different fashions of ethnic writers'construction of ethnic cultural identity. According to four different fashion of narrating ethnic cultural identity, i.e. misidentification, search, identification, and construction, this dissertation divides ethnic minority literature of the past sixty years into four stages. This dissertation also attempts to delineate the trajectory of the evolvement of ethnic minority literature and its merits in contemporary Chinese literature.The next chapter chooses writers and works that represent different fashions of narrating ethnic minority cultural identity to conduct close reading and compare them with the mainstream/Han novels. By this way, this dissertation attempts to summarize the characteristics and trajectory of evolvement of ethnic minority novels. This chapter also hopes to set up a special criticism mode that is capable of not only consistently analyzing and evaluating, but also depicting the trajectory of ethnic literature of the past sixty year. The last section of the dissertation further elaborates the trends and meanings of ethnic minority novel.