A Postcolonial Study Of The Mystic Masseur

The postcolonial theory is one of the most concerned and rapidly-expanding literary and cultural theory at the turn of the century. Starting to thrive at the end of the1970s’, it has had revolutionary impact upon literary criticism and literary history studies, especially the study of European and American canons. Edward W. Said, Gayatric C. Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabba are the main postcolonial theorists. Although their approaches to the postcolonial heritage are largely different, they all have been intending to deconstruct the classical canon of the western imperial colonialism, to diminish the Euro-American centrism and the binary oppositions, to unmask the "progressiveness" and "universalism" of western modernity, and to reconstruct the subjectivity of the bottom and the "minorities" and help them to find their own voices.VS. Naipaul is an Indian English writer, born in Trinidad and Tobago. He got fine literature edification from his father since childhood, deciding to become a writer. Later he got the scholarship to study in Oxford University and stayed in Britain after graduation. The Mystic Masseur is his first novel. It has an artistic style of strong local characteristics and reappears the family history, the ethnic history and the social history of the Indian immigrants in Trinidad, reconstructs the life and history of the Caribbean people and subverts the historical text of the European colonists. This novel and his earlier Miguel Street, a collection of short stories set the main tone for his early literature writing:"earth, the Native, the new world, colony, history, India and the Muslim world."(Naipaul,2001)The thesis includes the following four parts:The first part:An introduction to Naipaul’s creative achievement, the main content and artistic feature of The Mystic Masseur, which will be focused on in the thesis, the main content of the postcolonial theory and the accomplishment of the three main postcolonial theorists; the second part:the neocolonialism’impact on the ex-colony, that is the relationship between the ex-sovereign Britain and Trinidad, and the Indian descendants in Trinidad, mainly the hero Ganesh’s struggles under multiple contradictory predicaments, including the economic predicament, psychological predicament, racial and cultural predicament; the third part:the way for the postcolonial people to build their identity:to build "the third space" through hybridity and the accumulation of the cultural capital and build their uncertain identity there; the fourth part:it’s a conclusion of the main content of the thesis and it points that Naipaul’s works refer to exile, the cultural conflict, ambivanlence, mimicry, hybridity, identity, the relationship between the ex-colony and the sovereign and the neocolonialism’impact on the ex-colony, etc. He concerns the living condition of the people in the colony and the ex-colony in the Third World and reveals many dark sides of the newly independent nations, so his works have important practical value. Research on Naipaul’s works and the cultural identity’s attribution of the migrant writer in the postcolonial context helps to study on the contemporary English literature, especially the English literature in the postcolonial era.