A Foucaultian Reading Of Brian Castro's The Garden Book

Brian Castro is one of the most prominent and prolific writers in Chinese Australian literature. His works are original, unique and powerful. His road to fame is marked by the publication of Birds of Passage. Since the book was published, Castro has received attention and popularity from both professional critics and ordinary readers. Moreover, it is a milestone marking that Chinese Australian literature is on the rise. The Garden Book is another successful novel written by Castro, which explores the racial repression in Australia in the 20th century. With his excellent taste and superb narrative skills, Castro depicts the painful experience of three generations of Chinese Australians in a moving manner.This thesis is a tentative attempt at an analysis of the racial repression on the Chinese Australians in The Garden Book from the perspective of Michel Foucault's power theory. It conducts a detailed analysis of how Chinese Australians are repressed from the following three dimensions: power is repressive, power is productive, and power and subjectivity. As a whole, the thesis is composed of three major parts, including introduction, main frame and conclusion. Introduction consists of four parts. It begins with a short review of Chinese Australian literature, and goes on with a brief of Brian Castro's life and his work The Garden Book, and next with reviews and comments on the book from both domestic and overseas academic spheres, and it ends with an exposition of feasibility and significance of the employment of the power theory in interpreting the text.The main frame interprets the text from the following three perspectives:Chapter One devotes to the repression of power. It first runs back over the history of Chinese migration to Australia. Then in the light of the repressive power theory, the Chapter analyzes the oppression on Chinese men and women. Chapter Two, on the basis of the productive power theory, analyzes the knowledge, docile body and madness produced by power. Under such circumstances,knowledge serves power; individuals are disciplined to be docile bodies and even be declared to be the mad. Power governs all and Swan's docility and madness is the best example. On the grounds of Foucault's early and late subject theory, Chapter Three centers on Chinese Australian's subjectivity. First Chinese immigrants resisted to power to maintain their subjectivity. Then after great changes in Australia's racial policy, a new generation of Chinese immigrants experience their loss and recovery of subjectivity. Life under power does not submerge Chinese Australians'subjectivity and they finally begin their endeavor to recover it.Based on the previous chapters, the last part comes to a conclusion for the entire thesis. Having adopted Foucault's concepts of power and subjectivity, the thesis reveals that not only power is itself repressive to the powerless, knowledge, docile body and madness produced by it are its extension and infiltration. Power also produces subject. Subject and subjectivity which is closely linked with the former are under the sway of power. Chinese immigrants'subjectivity construction in The Garden Book, represented by Dr Hay, Swan and Norman Shih, involves different strategies and aspects, yet the result is limited. It is no exaggeration to argue that it is a complex journey, both psychologically and historically.