Cultural Antagonism And Hybridity

Louise Erdrich (1954- ), one of the most prominent Native Americanwriters, is enormously acclaimed for her“North Dakota”tetralogy, ofwhich Love Medicine (1984) is the opening one. Love Medicine isErdrich’s magnum opus, and it has won a number of awards including theNational Book Critics Circle Award for best work of fiction. It is also thefirst Native American novel that has been translated into Chinese and hascome into the spotlight of Chinese readers. The main content of the novelis about the stories of two American Indian families.By describing the living conditions of a Native AmericanReservation under the impact of Dawes Act, Erderich wrote down theIndian’s failure in the returning to tradition and struggling with whiteculture. Based on the exploration of their spiritual state and homeland fortheir souls, the novel provides an in-depth depiction of the crisis existingin the Indian culture because of the white culture’s invasion, and alsoproposes the way out of such a crisis.The publication of Orientalism in 1978 by Edward W. Said who isacclaimed as one of“the Holy Trinity”, symbolized the systemaltizationand theorization of Postcolonialism. Mainly centering on ethnics,imperialism and ethnicity, Postcolonialism explores the culturalcolonization hidden under the global context by describing ideological genes of the cultural colonization handed down from one generation toanother, to reveal all means of distorting the orient by using variouslanguage symbols. All these provide a new and strong theoretical basisfor the orient or the third world countries when they attempt tounderstand“the other”and“self”to construct their subjectivity andculture identity.Postcolonialism emphasizes the indirect oppression of the West onthe East in the light of economy, politics, and the right of speech, whichmight be considered as an interpretation of one culture do all it can todominate even enslave another. This outstanding phenomenon reveals thepresent world’s new trend of the implement of“Cultural Hegemony”. Thewestern countries, especially America, have strengthened the use ofculture to influence and impact international together with interior affairs.Therefore, it is impossible to create a new discourse totally independentof Western colonialism. In the postcolonial era, Hybridity is becoming anew feature of literature.This thesis tries to apply the theory of hybridity together with otherpost-colonial literary theories to study the complicated situation of bothIndian culture and white culture in Love Medicine. This thesisconcentrates on the perplexity characters, such as June, Lulu, Marie,Albertine, Lyman, Gerry, Nector and their tireless pursuit of cultureidentiy in the cultural antagonism and hybridity. As to cultural antagonism, different characters involved in the noveladopt different tactics. June felt a strong antagonism towards Ameircanmainstream culture in search of identity, Gerry decided to live as fugitivethrough the antagonism between Indian and American social system interms of existence, and Henry committed suicide for pursuit of spirit inthe antagonism between Indian and American policy. The root causes ofthese revealed in Love Medicine are American cultural hegemony,cultural imperialism and internal cultural colonization. They arepresented as colonists’plundering of Indian lands, racial discriminationon American Indians, the boarding school English education system,Christian missionization, and the suppression of Indian ancestraltraditions. Consequently, it leads to the identity crisis that modern Indiansare now suffering and the embarrassing situation after their land was lostand the spiritual anxiety caused by long time colonial extermination.As for cultural hybridity, through the affirmation of June’s failure inthe journey of homecoming, Lulu and Marie’s failure in the protection ofhomeland, Lipsha’s failure in the inheriting of old and magical tradition,the successful of the Tomahawk factory and Albertine and Lulu’sembracing of American mainstream culture. The thesis holds the idea thatthe proper way of cultural construction recognized by Erdrich is notsimply to resist the mainstream white culture, and instead it is appropriateto take the way to launch proper resistance against the invasion of the white culture. For in Love Medicine, firstly, the narration of twojuxtapositional but closely related narratives of the novel means thatErdrich challenges the colonizer/colonized dichotomy and attempts toreconstruct American Indian cultures by embracing of hybridity.Secondly, the Chippewa, represented by Albertine, are graduallyapproaching to the whites now. Thirdly, Lipsha’s forgetting how topractice the old medicine implied that the sacred hoop of their tribalheritages was destroyed, and the Chippewa people doomed to fail in theprotection of their old traditional culture and treasure in the contemporaryera. Therefore, definitely, by this means, Erdrich stresses the importanceof hybridity to contemporary society---only when heterogeneous cultureswhich have been marginalized by colonial conquest and domination areallowed to incorporate and co-exist with white cultures can their Indianculture survive.